Now I’m writing my own widget, called “Search on search”. If you arrive at this blog from a search engine link you might see a section for it in the sidebar. If, not, and you’re curious you could force it by trying this search:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=hire+the+best+and+set+them+free

And then in the Google results find a link going to this site. (The widget doesn’t appear if it can’t figure out the search engine terms.)

You can find the widget code as a gist on Github, namely here:

• http://gist.github.com/275734

It’s not rocket surgery. The main job is about figuring out what search engine terms, if any, that the user used to find the blog. But I didn’t need to solve that one either. Istanto had already solved it for me. =)

I still have a bug to iron out: The links presented doesn’t get styled like the other lists. I can’t figure out why… Feel invited to help me!

Update 17 January: The plugin is now available in the Wordpress.org plugin directory:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-on-search/

Has anyone else done this? Are there lots of public invite waves out there?

The problem is a bit like a super Kinder Egg. Four (unpleasant) presents in one package; Bailouts, Fake interest rates, government regulations and “Stimulus”. Unlike real presents though, we are paying for them ourselves. This blog post addresses the Bailouts. If I find some more time to write I’ll deal with the other Kinder Egg content in coming posts.

Bailouts

If this is a market economy why is it that banks and insurers that suck at doing business are propped up and bailed out by the governments? In the U.S. the bailout costs so far are approaching $10 trillion. Now, that’s a lot of money!. Check this article out to get an idea on how fast these bailout trillions are burning. In a market economy failing businesses fail and resources are reallocated to good business. Jim Rogers, chairman of Singapore-based Rogers Holdings has understood this and says:

The U.S. is taking assets from competent people and giving them to incompetent people. That’s bad economics.

(From Bloomberg article U.S. Bailouts Add to Risk of Depression.)

Contrast that with what the mainstream opinion holds true:

Banks that fail hurt the society.

(Freely translated from this editorial in Sweden’s largest news paper.)

In our phony economy banks don’t need to care about the long term. In the booms bank managements can reap as much as possible from the speed-blindness of the market, stuff their own pockets full with those insane bonuses and pretend it is a reward for business success. In the busts their business will stand completely unprepared, naked and vulnerable, but these nigh-criminals can just shrug their shoulders and rest assured that our tax money will step in and save their asses.

What this system does is to perpetuate the bad leadership in these institutions. It’s not setup for learning anything good. And, as you may or may not know, I’m crazy about learning. In a market economy the business these lousy managers run would fail. These people would have big ugly FAILs in their CV:s and they would have to find jobs better suited for them (something involving minimum responsibilities of any kind). As it is now they can continue their careers like if they actually knew what they are doing.

There’s also no incentive for these businesses to start competing using arguments like “with us your money is safer than with them”. Remember, in our messed up economy, money we put in the bank is just as safe regardless of what bank we choose. The governments think they own our tax money. They will use it to prop these banks and insurers up and even bail them out if it comes to that. Then they will act surprised and exasperated when the bank managers try to use the tax money to enrich themselves even more. In reality we have these criminals as bank managers because we deserve it.

Some say we should nationalize these bad banks. Like they would be run better by politicians. Like that wouldn’t be an even surer way to burn up our tax money. In Sweden, Bailout nation #1, politicians are trained to find some middle ground. What they try to do is to give the tax money to the banks if the banks sign a contract about how the money can be used. For some reason politicians seem to think of themselves as good business people. They don’t see that all they are doing is playing Monopoly with our tax money. (Or maybe they see that and laugh at the joke.) The really sad part of this story is that lots of the Obamas in the world are impressed with what’s called The Swedish Bailout Model. Sweden is successfully exporting it! The world must of course move in the opposite direction. Away from plan economy and towards market economy.

On Twitter there are more than just a few people who has struggled with downgrading their e-mail designs to be at least readable in Outlook 2007. Which made the news about this fixoutlook.org site quite big on the Twire. And Microsoft saw it. And Microsoft responded. Check it out. In the respons you’ll find:

Word enables Outlook customers to write … visually stunning e-mail messages.

That’s probably why Microsofts own XBox Live Team starts all their e-mail messages with this:

Read this online if you can't see the pictures or if you're using Outlook 2007

Seems like the XBox Live team doesn’t use Outlook? Or maybe they just don’t know how visually stunning their e-mail messages can get using it.

Microsofts response also contains this:

Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs.

It’s of course a bad-taste-joke. But I think that the part about how they understand that e-mail is about interoperability is true. Unfortunately that’s where this decision probably comes from. Microsoft fears broadly-adopted standards. The world is about as stuck with Microsoft Office as it is with Windows. Wherever Microsoft has a near-monopoly they take the opportunity to fuck the world. That’s what they do with Internet Explorer. That’s what they do with Outlook. But what can we do? Maybe we can try get the EU to force Microsoft to quit bundling Outlook with Office?

I have this way of always trying to be on the offense and to own the initiative. Not always succeeding, of course, but I imagine that thinking positive will help. I guess I’m a incurably naïve.

My boss of back then also was one to want to own the initiative. But he, generally, had a different approach. He played it defensively. Covering all bases. To do that you need to be able to think negatively. There’s the source for my annoyance. I just have a hard time following the line of thought when it goes the negative way. When preparing meetings I had to endure my boss when he raised the arguments against our case. What if they say this? What if they argue that? To me it’s “So, what if? Our offer is excellent! Let’s focus on exposing that!” I don’t want to cover all bases. I don’t want to imagine all the shit that can happen.

Yes, I’m biased. But I honestly think that my general approach is better. Go full force with your thing! If you feel it’s not good enough to throw your full support behind it, then chose another thing. Make sure you work with something you really believe in. And hone your blade. But hone it for attack. For defence trust your reflexes. Apply positive thinking. Playing the Devil’s advocate just drains your energy resources. At least it has that effect on me.

Addendum June 11 2009: I wrote this article when I was a bit upset. I’m glad that I did, but still, I think I should have asked Joakim Ohlrogge to write instead. Here’s his take (pasted from the comments):

A thought: I despise DAs more than I like them. But the question is if it is really DAs I despise or if I despise idea-poachers. It’s hard enough the get ideas to fly even without having a sniper shooting them down before they take off. It’s often all too easy to come with a “what if” and I’ve experienced some people who make it their task to figure out every obscure situation that could possibly go wrong. There needs to be some rime and reason. You can always find something that goes wrong, after all, we work with software.

I would not want to be without DAs but I don’t want them to take up more time than daring enthusiasts do. Also, they are not there to prevent disasters, they are there to inspire different though paths. A DA can never replace the ability to respond promptly when “shit happens”.

Of course, sometimes the Twitter Brain is a bit stupid. Often it’s very shallow. And, yes, not seldom it’s really introvert. (Discussions about Twitter itself seems to be what interests the Twitter community the most.) I’m OK with that. I’m not one to throw out the baby with the bath water. The signal vs noise ratio is still really high.

But what happens if the Twitter Brain dies? Do I risk going brain dead if I’m plugged in to a huge Brain when it dies? Yes, obviously I do.

Yesterday the Twitter folks changed a setting used by 2% of their user base. And somehow enough people shut of their brains and started to tweet stuff like “Twitter Failed! Retweet!”, “Twitter is bad. Please Retweet!” “Goodbye Twitter. RT this!” and so on and so forth. Fully and utterly useless crap. Then the brains of the receivers of those tweets went dead and they retweeted. And their followers retweeted. And their followers … You get the picture. It was like a disease. My time line was full of tweets like that. I think four out of ten slots on Twitter trends were related to this too. Check the hashtag #fixreplies out and you start to get the idea. I felt I had to throw something in to the balance and cheered the change. That never showed up on Twitter Trends though.

Please, please you tweeting people. (And all you non-tweeting people too). Keep your brains switched on! I’m plugged in to your brain and I don’t want to go brain dead. Maybe if keeping ones brain switched on at all times is hard, we can train ourselves to sense when it’s off? And then there’s No Tweeting!. Of course the “When retweeting, use common sense” rule apply too.

Yesterdays flat line of the Twitter Brain was scary. I hope it was an exception.

Addendum: I’m also amazed at the official Twitter response to the brainless outcries. They call it “lots of great info”. Totally funny.

The only information I found on deployment on sqlite3 was an excellent deploy script in this blog article. Basically, using sqlite3 you have to make sure the database is in a shared directory across releases. But the sqlite3 parts of that deploy script didn’t work for me as they were. I had to make sure I referenced the shared database path all the way or I risked overwriting my database with a symlink. Below are the sqlite3 parts of the resulting capistrano script.

Setting up the shared database path. NB: Lazy binding. Important if you’re using multistaging from capistrano-ext.

set(:shared_database_path) {"#{shared_path}/databases"}

Sqlite3 tasks.

namespace :sqlite3 do
  desc "Generate a database configuration file"
  task :build_configuration, :roles => :db do
    db_options = {
      "adapter"  => "sqlite3",
      "database" => "#{shared_database_path}/production.sqlite3"
    }
    config_options = {"production" => db_options}.to_yaml
    put config_options, "#{shared_config_path}/sqlite_config.yml"
  end
 
  desc "Links the configuration file"
  task :link_configuration_file, :roles => :db do
    run "ln -nsf #{shared_config_path}/sqlite_config.yml #{release_path}/config/database.yml"
  end
 
  desc "Make a shared database folder"
  task :make_shared_folder, :roles => :db do
    run "mkdir -p #{shared_database_path}"
  end
end

Hooks (or whatever they’re called, I’m new to all this).

after "deploy:setup", "sqlite3:make_shared_folder"
after "deploy:setup", "sqlite3:build_configuration"
 
before "deploy:migrate", "sqlite3:link_configuration_file"

Hope this helps someone. Please don’t hesitate to ask should something need more explaining. And of course suggest improvements. This is all the makings of a capistrano newbie.

Samuel is da man!

• Samuel, who also works at the lab and blogs on this site, started to play with the iPhone SDK some month ago and just yesterday he sent a Projectplace client for the iPhone to AppStore. It should appear there any day soon. Computer Sweden wrote about it today (Swedish).
• A year ago I tried out Sandy3D (awesome 3D engine for Flash written in AS3) and quickly got a prototype up for a Cooliris-inspired photo wall, it was WOW to me so I called it WowAlbum. Not as immediately business applicable as Samuel’s iPhone app, but a fun thing to do.

Projectplace Labs is very much inspired by those big, innovative, forces out there. Mozilla Labs, Microsoft Office Labs, Adobe Labs and, of course, Google Labs. Google is probably our main inspirational source. We’re trying to reverse engineer Google’s innovation machine and apply what we feel fits us (or at least try to convince our managers to let us apply it). We’ve also taken Quincy Jones’ receipt for success to our hearts;

Hire the best and set them free.

We apply it on all levels. Ideas, creativity, people, innovation, inspiration, code, joy, love. Unleash!

Yap - planning made fun

Ummm, I was definately not planning to write about Projectplace Labs in this blog. Got a bit carried away there. I was mainly about to use the Bagonca server to make a development version of Yap available to a guy I’m working with at A-Dato. Then I thought, heck I can blog about it, and then I felt I needed to tell about where I work.

And now I need to tell you something about Yap too, right? You can read a little about it at Projectplace Labs and also at Projectplace Ideas. To cut a long story short:

We, Projectplace, want to be the company who made project planning fun.

That development version of Yap that you can access even before it appears on Projectplace Labs? Don’t worry, I haven’t fogotten, here goes:

• Faster than Excel, easier than MS Project

Now, how cool does this make Bagonca? It even publishes Projectplace Labs stuff before Labs! =)

It all boils down to common sense anyway, doesn’t it? If you are quoting someone’s use of her 140 chars, then a verbatim “RT @source” makes a lot of sense. The Twitter I visit daily is full of interesting people who say important stuff in cool ways. There’s no point in rephrasing their tweets. If your Twitter doesn’t look like mine in this respect I suggest you use that unfollow button and start following interesting people instead. That’s what’s so good about your own timeline, it’s yours!

Passing on links could be a bit different though. Not always, because sometimes interesting people send their messages through both the link and the words they embed them in. (Apply common sense, remember?). But if you really are “just” passing on a link you should, really should:

1. Know what that link is about
2. Know what you think about the content

And then it shouldn’t be hard to craft your own words to follow the link. After all, you still want to reference who “sent” the link to you and the link occupies some space so you don’t have much space to fill anyway.

Maybe it’s this easy: If you care about that link being followed you’ll maximise the chances by letting your audience know why you recommend that link.

Or even simpler: Show respect!