Jonathan Peterson

We use Clients & Profits for client billing and it is unable to backup the database if any users have their client app running.  I was the bad guy last night that forgot to log out and decided that there has to be some easy way to kill an idle app.  I didn’t find any Mac apps that did exactly what I wanted, but I realized that between cron and applescript, I should be able to do what I wanted in a reasonably elegant way.

osascript lets you send Applescript commands to apps from the command line.  A little experimentation shows that:

cleanly exits the app.  a quick crontab -e from the terminal allowed me to:

So now at 11:30 pm nightly, if my machine is running, I’ll cleanly shut down C&P.

I haven’t had much time to play with Google+ today, though I like what I’ve seen.  Need to have some more connections to really wring it out.  My initial thought is that it will be more geek-centric with better privacy and open-sourciness than Facebook.  Exactly the same model as Android to Apple.

But I just found the feedback functionality and it’s just awesome.

Clicking a small lower-right feedback button lets you highlight the problem, black-out personal details and submit a screen-capture of a problem or suggestion.  VERY nice.  They need to package this up for use by other web app developers.

Beyond having a ridiculously nice URL (https://shh.sh) – SecretSocial is pretty nifty.  Anonymous, encrypted, time-limited chat rooms and polls that are removed from the server after use and never hit by search engines.  Connected to twitter for authentication and invitation. I could see this being useful for audience participation – it goes without saying that had it launched sooner, we wouldn’t have had to suffer through a month of Weiner jokes.  

SecretSocial Trailer! from SecretSocial, Inc. on Vimeo.

Tall Chair and OnSwipe – Necessary next steps in epublishing – apps that allow content creators to publish (and receive payments) without having to release their content through the iTunes store.

Active Reader is a revolutionary way for you to get your interactive stories onto the iTunes App Store. Using the Active Reader toolset, you will be able to quickly and easily take your custom art and make it come to life with our animation and events system. The best part of all is that you will be able to create interactive books and magazines for the iPad with absolutely NO CODING needed!

Onswipe enables publishers to provide the best browsing and advertising experience to their readers on tablet and touch devices.

• Get Started In Under 3 Minutes
• Infinitely Customizable
• Anytime. Anywhere. Any device.
• Breathtaking Ads

I spent a little time yesterday putting together some resources for a friend dealing with the difficulties of fixed-price contracts, that I hadn’t pulled together before. So I’m posting my comments to him to prevent having to dig all this stuff back up at some later date:

Fixed fee is fine if you have a good working relationship. But unless your client trusts you absolutely, you can’t avoid the pushing paper problem. Without spending project development dollars on documentation, you will have no good way to to respond to a “why did we do it this way?” or a “what happened to feature X that I wanted” question.

With a high level of trust, it you might be able to answer “don’t you remember, we agreed X when we were in the conference room with Bob” and be done with it. But you’ll be in a lot better shape if you have a waterfall model spec and change orders, or a batch of use cases at various levels of completion sitting in your project backlog along with burndown reports showing what moved where through the project instead of having to rely on email, or worse, partially remembered conversations.

The key is avoiding a mismatch between the amount of paper pushing and the potential need for documentation and that is going to vary by client and by project. Which means you can go in assuming a high level of trust – to maximize value for the client dollar, only to get burned if the client isn’t happy. Or you can go in assuming a lot of CYA – which minimizes your risk, while also minimizing what you deliver. A bad set of compromises.

There is a lot of thinking about how to do this stuff in scrum land as the old rule of thumb was that fixed price bids and agile were like oil and water. Turns out that because of the high level of collaboration and continuous client involvement, some fixed-price-like models can actually work pretty well:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Agile+contracts
http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/10-agile-contracts#MFN-cff

I’m very fond of the “money for nothing and change for free” model (look at page 28 here) :
http://www.slideshare.net/gerrykirk/money-for-nothing-agile-2008-presentation
and here:
http://coactivate.org/projects/agile-contracts/money-for-nothing-change-for-free

Gantthead had a couple good articles about agile contract types as well: (registration required)
http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/261798.cfm

An amazing collection of public art from around the world, everything from high graffiti to fine art trompe l’oeil.  What a great way to decorate a city.

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/05/painted-city-blocks.html

I feel some shame for using The Pet Shop Boys version of Always on My Mind instead of Willy’s or Johhny Cash’s, but Johhny’s Mean-Eyed Cat is such a great song, I figured it made up for it.