Is Christmas a time for blog posting?

Certainly a chance to review the year, and catch up on things that have been missed. I’ve been lax in not keeping up with progress in mobile content delivery for instance, but it’s not out of choice.

Scanning some emails and posts just now I came across a summary of what’s been hapenning over at the mobiForge (ex dev.mobi) and I feel unbearable guilt that I haven’t tried their DeviceAtlas yet. But I do note with some satisafction that in one article they’re plugging the use of a lightwieght device detection function from  Andy Moore that seems to do a similar thing (but no doubt much better) to what I was playing with a couple of years back.

New Years resolution - make the time to keep up with this stuff, ‘cos it interests me and I’ll need it one day!  (see Perl xkcd strip!)

Sorry to post another xkcd strip, but they just keep hitting home:

http://xkcd.com/519/

I just had to look it up on wikipedia ‘cos it was bugging me - the British equivalent of 11th Grade in ‘my’ terms is Lower Sixth, or in ‘new money’ Year 12.

I’m trying to remember what I was doing that enhanced my life in the Lower Sixth - certainly not Perl which I didn’t discover until much later - I was probably doing good old BASIC and Pascal on an Apple II at that time, and perhaps some 6502 machine code on my Acorn Atom. Now that dates me!

I had an email today from Google saying that one of my Google Analytics accounts now had an Event Tracking feature enabled - unfortunately it’s not an account that has much use so I’m going to have to do something tricky to have a play.

I’m keen to have a go - I use GA quite a bit for a few sites and I really like what I see - it might not be as powerful as some of the big expensive tools, but for most purposes it’s quite good enough.

Having to abuse it a bit to track things like banner clicks, JavaScript events, Flash actions etc. has always rankled  - you never quite managed to properly track these fake page views, it interrupted the limited view you had of user journey, and it gave an inflated value for number of page views.

I had heard event tracking was in the pipeline, and I’m keen to give it a crack.

You know sometimes how the simplest little issue holds you up for days? Well I’ve just had a doozy!

I’m maintaining an inherited CMS application that I’m still having to trust that some of the inner workings ‘works’ because it’s all a bit involved and I’m not getting paid to rip it all apart for the sake of it.

We’re deploying the app onto new servers - something that I’ve done a few times so I wasn’t scared - but this time I just couldn’t get it to work - calling up pages I was getting “Content Encoding Error” messages from Firefox, and generally not helpful responses from other browsers.

The app was using GZIP to compress output where browsers support it using ob_gzhandler I knew, and if I commented out the gzip bits it was working, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do - and I was determined to find out why the same codebase wasn’t working on this environment with almost identical configuration to others that it did work on.

To cut a long story short - there’s a configuration include called at the start of each page that’s not under version control (for obvious reasons), and on this server it somehow acquired a couple of line breaks at the end after the closing php tag, so it started the html output early.  Nothing to do with double encoding or other potential issues I found when Googling.

According to alistapart:

 Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start.

I can see exactly where they’re coming from, but it still scares the sh*t out of me - Agile makes sense, but it can still lead to chaos. But then I’ve seen traditional projects run amok too.

The fundamental principles of Agile ring true - get stuck in early, prototype, little iterative cycles, get everyone involved and commenting - but I fear the discipline required for ’someone’ to keep an eye on the big picture and finally manage to complete the last iterations to ‘finish’ is a rare commodity.

But I do agree that the future is (probably) Agile.