Steve Workman

Whilst at work today, I, like almost everyone else in the office, was being updated in some way/shape/form on the Macworld keynote speech, in which lord Jobs announced a number of products including the Macbook Air. Possibly the most talked-about piece of hardware since the iPhone, the ultra-portable macbook looks mighty pretty (see picture below) and is incredibly small. I’m writing this on a 3rd generation Macbook with the same 13.3″ screen, but the new Air will be almost as thin as the lid of the macbook! Read more »

Greetings!

I’ve given the design of this blog a much-needed update and have finally made a wordpress theme (comments welcome).
The whole site now fits nicely into the design of steel-software.com and I’m pleased to say the process wasn’t too hard! I followed a guide on Deziner Folio (though don’t copy code directly from the website, all the ’s and “s are HTML encoded and dreamweaver doesn’t like it). I’ve even managed to make the site widget-enabled which works rather well.

So, in summary, I’m pleased with myself.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party
Currently Eating: Burgers, 3 in 3 days!
Currently Watching: Blade Runner, not understanding the whole Deckard is a replicant thing
Currently Reading: How to win friends and influence people
Currently Feeling: like a pork pie

Good afternoon everyone,

It’s a whole week since I last posted a teaser for the new Steel-Software.com design, and after a significant shrinking process (the whole design didn’t really work if it didn’t fit on one page without scrolling) the website is now live! Go, go now to www.steel-software.com and have a look! I’m rather proud of it, but I have a feeling that I’ll be tweaking it next week, and hopefully making it load faster too! Read more »

Well, facebook have certainly shaken things up a bit haven’t they. Almost totally opening up the API so developers can write applications that fit inside facebook itself! Utterly unheard of before, but potentially brilliant. Lets have a quick look at what you can do with all this new technology.

From the developer’s pages, developer.facebook.com they’ve created their own markup language, FBML. This allows for quick access to certain functions and their layout styles. Great stuff. You can also add in flash and mp3 files so people can listen to music. You can also add in an <iframe> element to display an off-site page. You can upload pictures from external applications and you can query the database using FQL (Facebook Query Language). This all sounds really great, but lets look at the limitations.

• No Javascript - though not a surprise, some applications and advanced forms rely on it
• No external stylesheets - boo and hiss to this one, all your styles must be in <style> tags
• No AJAX - well, they provide automatic form submission, but that’s it. You can’t perform your own queries though the usual AJAX way
• You can’t edit user details or post stuff to groups - still a bit disappointment as this limits the level of interaction with the user profile.

The big thing really is the ability to put iframes inside the canvas. From there you can do whatever you like inside the frame.

So, it all sounds good. Now it’s whether I can use it. Today I sent out an e-mail to all uni-sport.org members with a link to a survey on it (http://www.tigersurvey.com/survey.php?survey=2815) so I can get some feedback. One of the questions is about facebook and if people would want an extra feature, would it be better pictures, commenting, facebook integrates with profiles or uni-sport integrates with facebook in the way of an app. At the moment, I’m hoping a lot of people don’t go for the last option.

After some thought, I’m not sure if it would be possible to use facebook apps for such a complicated application as uni-sport. For it to work as it does at the moment, if a club asks for a web site, they will have to have their own unique facebook application. This is because of the team selection idea. If a group wanted to do team selection from within an application, only people in that group would be on the list. However, there is no way to make an application private between a group of people and AFAIK, no way to moderate who uses the application. There can’t be a global application as team selection wouldn’t work very well (it’d have to be select from people in network X who are members of group X, but that forces people to be in a group, which isn’t how it should work).

At the moment, Uni-sport is a glorified group page with team selection, match reports and a calendar. With team selection being at the heart of uni-sport, until private applications can be written, Uni-Sport will not be appearing as a facebook application.

Well, I’m glad that that decision has been made, now I can get back to my revision (lol)

Steve

Currently Listening to: David Ford
Currently Eating: Birthday Cake
Currently Reading: CSS Mastery and facebook documentation
Currently Watching: Lost season 3 finale. Amazing
Days left at University: 13

Today I was at PA Consulting in London (Victoria). This was my last interview of my job hunting process as I’ve already been offered a job at HP which I’ve accepted (not signed on the line yet tho). There were 4 of us there, including a guy I met at the HP interview (he’d been offered a job there too). We got on quite well as I knew him and he was nice n chatty. We weren’t actually in PA’s offices as their meeting room floor is being re-furbished, we were on the 27th floor of a building nearby (which had rather spectacular views). Anywho, the day was set out to have three tasks. An interview by a senior consultant, a case study and a group exercise. Firstly, I’ll say that these were the hardest three tasks I’ve had at any assessment day.

The case study was to plan an initial meeting with the CEO of a phone company who somehow had 30% of the marketplace with a very small number of phone handsets. That was hard because you had to prep it all on your own and there wasn’t a huge amount to prepare for, just hope you covered everything. The other candidates said they presented using the flip chart but I just sat with an agenda and talked to him. The case study said it’s a discussion and presenting just wasn’t necessary to be honest.

The interview was just a standard interview, they went over the CV and didn’t ask too many hard questions. That bit was almost relaxing actually.

The group discussion, it wasn’t the solution that was hard, but the fact that the plan we came up with was so tight to budget and time that there was no room for error, which, of course, lets the assessors ask the most awkward questions. I was actually completely stumped by one of their questions, (about the history of the company that we were representing) but the rest of the team pitched in and blagged an answer. Thankfully though, I was the one who took the lead and made good suggestions for the marketing, pointed out mistakes in one of their working and thankfully corrected it because otherwise we’d have made the wrong suggestion.

I’ll find out on Thursday if I have a job with them. Would I take them over HP? Yes. They’re a nice bunch of people and they’ll train me to the highest standard and they’ll pay very well. The route up the tree is good and the bonuses can be great. If I don’t get it, it doesn’t matter. But, in my personal opinion it’ll be me and the other HP guy who get it if we are gonna get it. If I do, I’ll be happy in the knowledge that I’m one of 8-10 people who are the best graduate consultants in the country. That’s a great honor, and the usual ego boost for me

There is a problem though, wherever I go. I will no longer have the time to develop Steel Software and Uni-Sport. It’s a real shame that I can’t carry on with my passion, but it’s the truth and I can’t kid myself that I’ll be able to do it all. So, as far as I see it, I’ve got a few options:
1. Stop all-together, leave it as it is now, get no new clients. Fix bugs as necessary and release the source code to each club
2. Stop, but make the project open-source
3. Keep the code, add in facebook API profiles, fix any problems that have come up and extend fantasy hockey a little bit so it’s manageable.
4. Keep the code, re-write everything so it’s facebook-integrated and modern with rails then attempt to keep a little side-business open with the occasional sale
5. Same as above but sell the code to someone else

I don’t think that option 1 would work. The clubs wouldn’t understand how to work it, but, if I can’t commit to anything then I’d prefer that option over number 2. Open-source community could do some funky things to it and I’m not sure I’d like it.
Option 3 is the most likely, it’s not a major amount of work and I can still sell it around Sheffield uni.
Option 4 would be ideal but the amount of time that would take is basically my entire summer holiday, not to mention that I’ll be learning as I go along which will slow things down immensely. If I found a buyer for this stuff it’d be amazing but I wouldn’t know who to start with. Only facebook would be interested and that takes away the public front-end of sheffieldhockey which is not what the club wants.

I think I choose 3, with the option of doing 4 if I have nothing else on in the summer. Of course, if the hockey club ask for the code, I’ll give it to them. I’ll also need to create a lot more documentation.

So, with that decided I can relax for the rest of my train journey, yay.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze
Currently Reading: Not much
Currently Eating: Less
Currently Watching: Re-runs
Difference in £ between HP and PA annual salary: £5,500