It is far too easy to accidentally rip the tab out of the browser when swapping tabs.

To reproduce:

1. Load up a whole load of tabs
2. Click on the tabs in an excited agitated state

After a few clicks you are almost certainly going to accidentally rip a tab out of the browser.

If you didn't try this...

Have two espressos and repeat step 2.

Maybe it is my fault because I drink too much espresso but frankly I think if you conducted a focus group session of your target market you'd find a lot of us like to Drink and Browse.  Dangerous I know!  But common.

I shudder to think how many other anxious shaking wrecks out there are accidentally ripping their Chrome browser to pieces because the tabs come off to easily.

Perhaps you could have a configurable amount of "stickiness" to the tabs?

p.s.  LOVE Chrome overall. Keep up the great work!

Warm (yet hyper-anxious) regards,

Jason Glover

Ever since the rumours began that the good times are over and we should all prepare for a long hard winter of discontent I’ve taken to baking my own bread each day and fixing me some wholesome homemade sandwiches.

It has become something of a weekly tradition to fix an auxiliary sandwich for my dad who comes around on Wednesdays and we spend some time slowly chewing our sandwiches of ludicrous proportions and having a good old yarn.  Fibre and family: two things that many people forget to pencil into their busy schedules.  Not only am I keeping regular; I am saving money, enjoying a much better sandwich experience that Subways could provide, my waist is getting narrower and I'm spending more quality time with my Pa.

It is easy to see why I am rather enjoying this recession people keep talking about.

Anyway, I thought maybe I should share the secret of my abundant contentment and leanness.

Recipe

• 150 gm wholemeal flour
• 150 gm high grade white flour
• 1/4 C pumpkins seeds
• 1/4 C (either rolled oats / cracked wheat / whole spelt)
• 2 T wheat germ
• 2 T linseeds (whole)
• 1 T ground linseed - makes it nice brown colour
• 1 T (rounded is ok) milk powder
• 1 t (flat) salt
• Yeast - Either 1 1/2 teaspoons (exactly) if baking over 4 hours.  If leaving to bake over night (8+ hours) then reduce to 1 teaspoon
• 1 round ball of butter about the size of a walnut (one very round measuring tablespoon)
• 1 big round tablespoon of manuka honey
• 230 ml water

You can't really go wrong with the butter or the honey.

:)

Serving suggestions

Fresh and steaming straight from the oven you should just wallop a layer of butter on and let it melt in.  The loaf is in the prime of its life right at this point to no point ruining it with condiments. (Real butter mind you; not margarine or soya-bean-curd-spread or any BS like that.  Full fat butter, from a cow)

Or with coffee in the morning smack down some blackberry jam.  Preferably organic and home made jam from a farmer's market with lots of seeds still resident.

At lunch time you want to break out the gourmet lunch fillings:  Ham off the bone + Gorgonzola + lettuce from your garden.  Use happy-ham though!  Don't put cage-grown ham in your mouth, you and the pig deserve better.

By day two this bread – devoid of the preservatives you find in bread at the supermarket – will be getting too stale for anything but toast or dunking into soup.

Real bread can stand on it's end.  ;)

When it comes to purchasing music do you buy an album just for that one good track?  How many of the tracks have to be great for you to decide to add it to your collection?

For me it is six.  Five is a tipping point, I really have to stop and think, and 4 is a definite no-go.  But if there are 6 good 'uns then it is straight in the shopping basket; or these days, one-click purchasing on iTunes.

And so it was that I decided to stump up the not-insignificant lump of ca$h to fly to San Francisco in November to this year's Business of Software conference.  How could I not when every single speaker is an "A-side" speaker?   There are a good dozen speakers and I'm looking forward to all of them.  If this conference was an album it would be Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.

A Sample of the A-sides Speakers 

I've been using FogBugz for 6+ years and have enjoyed reading Joel's online rants for much of that time - he's a little controversial, but so am I (in my own little way) - so it'll be interesting to finally put a voice to the words.

Don Norman's insights into design are brilliant and his books are sitting here next to me in my office where I flick through them regularly.

Kathy Sierra is another one of those personalities once so prevalent online that I've had coffee with her countless mornings (or at least with her blog articles :p).

But I think it is Jennifer Aaker's head I am most looking forward to getting inside of (Jennifer if you ever read this and think it's a bit stalker I do apologise). Psychology has always interested me greatly and of all the topics that will be covered over this conference I was least expecting to hear about emotions and psychological health, but now I am looking forward to it the most.

Yep it's going to be a very worthwhile trip indeed, not even consdiering the sight-seeing I'll take in afterwards!

I'm having one of "those" days ... the sort where more productive output would have been achieved had I either:

a) stayed in bed, or

b) spent the day at Borders looking for a new book to read,

c) caught up on some of the domestic chores I've been neglecting lately while working on Team Effect

However, progress is not made by snoozing, browsing bookstores, or doing the dishes - so I have a little trick I like to use to get through dry spells like today ...

"Sooner or later you will win. All I managed to do yesterday is improve the color scheme in FogBUGZ just a little bit. That's OK. It's getting better all the time. Every day our software is better and better and we have more and more customers and that's all that matters. Until we're a company the size of Oracle, we don't have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor."

 Fire and Motion, Joel Spolsky

So now all I need to do is get one-little-thing-done.

THEN I can go to Borders.

;)

Anyone attempting to send legitimate email to their customers these days face the increasing challenge of hitting the Inbox instead of the SPAM folder.

Approaches like SPF and DKIM are helping, but they are long overdue.

Life has been too easy for SPAM senders for too long and the original mail protocols (SMTP and POP) did not really address the issues of authentication ("your passport please?..") and mail tampering.  In defence the authors of those protocols weren't thinking that everyone in the world would one day use their protocols - they were intended for use originally in closed and intra-university networks were the people using the protocols were ... honest.

That's right.  Honesty, trust, and wishful thinking powered the early Internet and remained in power until the rise of SPAM as a plague.

SPF and DKIM to the rescue! 

Fortunately those protocols, while lacking authentication in their original design, allowed for future extensions by allowing extra "headers" to be stuffed into the envelope that delivers the mail message.  SPF and DKIM both take advantage of this extensibility thus allowing their use in ALL your sent mail while the email message still remains backward compatible with servers and email agents which don't adhere to, or aren't aware of, these new authentication standards.

SPF and DKIM are both fairly easy to configure, but that still doesn't get you into your customer's Inbox automatically.

After many hours of struggling I still can't get that initial "welcome and thanks for signing up" email into a Yahoo Inbox first time.  It ALWAYS lands in the Spam folder.  How aggravating!

Telling of how f**ked this SPAM situation is, the DKIM reflector (which post masters should be able to use to verify their DKIM implementation) is not available because of abuse!! 

Source: http://testing.dkim.org/reflector.html

Anyway, seems that Yahoo requires special treatment so I’ll be following the procedure of begging with their postmaster to have my emails white listed. 

I'm really impressed by the design of the "new" www.EventFinder.co.nz site.

Ok, it's not NEW new, it was new in December last year but when you're busy like I am last Decemember feels like it was only a couple of BBQs ago!! 

Anyway, I really like the layout of the home page - it doesn't feel too cluttered despite having a lot of information on it.  Somthing about it is reminiscent of the new www.Stuff.co.nz website ... maybe a little mimicry there, and who can't be unflattered by being mimiced?

Except of course when you're being mimiced by a government department with a $3 million+ budget !!

As a taxpayer i'm disgusted that I my hard earned tax money when towards a event calendar that the market already provided.

As a busy-body vigilante type I'm really impressed with the way Michael Turner and James McGlinn have used the power of the web to expose the ludicrous situation.  Their call to action site at www.whynzlive.com has a lot of people talking about the issue and already there seems to be some afirmative action.

As a software producer I'm glad that govt.nzdon't have their beddy eyes on my lunch!

ps. Is it just me who sees a BeOS resmeblance in the Event Finder site?

This is something practically every web developer does on a daily basis, right?...

Search google for the cause of some rather peculiar HTML/CSS bahaviour that only afflicts Major-Browser version X

Today I was trying to work out why, when you nest 3 SPANs do they suddenly cease to be inline elements (suddenly they have line breaks before and after).

Finding the solution took me to http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/cssbuttons.html

Which brings me to the moral of my story:

I can't believe I was just schooled by such a visually horrendous page.  Mind you, it is 3 years old .... wow!  

It's scary to imagine that page might still exist long after I cease to.

!! This is not a news flash !!

This is not a new development, just a proud beaming exclamation of excitement.

What am I excited about exactly? 

There's a massive global recession taking place; climate change has all-but been ignored this year so we're probably going to hell in a handbag; and it's totally hosing down with rain outside and I left my motorbike pants at home.

But despite all this I am excited because I live in a country full of talented online software producers.

You guys are awesome! 

I've come acorss this query online a few times and I thought I'd take thet time to pitch in with my dime's worth on the subject.

Q. "How much value does modelling offer to software development in an mISV situation?"

This question comes in another variation which is: "Our [small] team of Agile developers don't model our software, we just code it, is that really unprofessional?" but I consider these to be begging for the same answer.

To answer that question one needs to evaluate why we model software.  Three major reasons to model software spring immediately to mind:

1. To capture the system requirements for the purposes of coming to an agreement with the customer as to what will be delivered.
2. To communicate effectively to the developer(s) what the system requirements are of the software project.
3. Because some people really just love to model.

 There may be some other other reasons to model software (e.g. to pass your software engineering degree) but they're not really up there with The Big Three

Customer-facing Specification

I have found that when one uses modelling languages and diagrams to relay back to your customer *their* software requirements, as you understand them, the resulting project will completely miss the mark.

Unless the customer has a degree in software engineering the chances are they won't be able to tell from your specification of their requirements that you're completely off the mark.  Instead, for fear of looking like an idiot in front of you they'll nod and smile and tell you it all looks in order.

Away you go and make them some software that doesn't suit their purpose. They get angry with you and tell everyone what a disappointment you were to work with.

I put a far greater value on writing a clear specification that the customer can actually understand very much in the style of the "painless functional specification"descrbied here - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html

Developer-facing Specifications

In my mISV experiences I have always made sure that I hired developers with enough brains and end-user empathy that I could just give them the Customer-facing Spec.

Any developer who can't read a well written customer-focused spec is probably not going to be able to develop a customer-focused application.

Most developers don't really get modelling languages anyway; and the ones who are good at understanding 'Real People' and their needs seem to have their noggins wired in such a way as to get grumpy when presented with a UML diagram of some classes that they could very easily have deduced if you'd just shown them the customer-spec.

Modelling For Love

Modelling can however be an enjoyable activity (although possibly not as enjoyable as spotting trains).  I'm sure it can be because otherwise people won't write so many books on the subject, would they?

But seriously, there is a use for modelling software when you have a one super developer who comes up with all the good ideas and then gets an army of grunt/junior developers to churn out the details.  

But that's not the situation in a microISV.

One of the things I do on a professional basis, and really enjoy doing, is introducing development teams to the mystical ways of Agile Development.  

In my invoices I describe these sessions as training because that helps get the invoice get paid, but in the flesh it more often feels like an evangelical sermon.  I start off with a parable-like background story that illustrates the evils common in non-Agile methods of development, some pacing up and down in front of a whiteboard, plenty of wild hand gesticulating; and then eventually a magical moment when my audience reaches enlightenment, grabs the whiteboard marker off me, and starts talking about The Principles as though they just got hit by the holy spirit.

Awesome!  I love it when that moment arrives because then I know I am preaching to the converted.

The 11th Commandment: Be ye Agile

Most developers have heard of Agile in some capacity but there are still a great number of development teams that have not embraced Agile because they're not entirely sure which brand of Agile to adopt or where to start.  So in my first sermon about Agile Methodologies I find it necessary to introduce my audience to them all by talking first about Christian denominations.

Within Christianity there are literally hundreds of denominations; each with their own policies on which beliefs are fundamentally important.  Some forbid working on the seventh day of the week; and of those that do some of them hold differing opinions over which day is the 7th day.  Some maintain their members should be baptised at birth, others belief it is meaningless for members to be baptised until they are old enough to understand the value of being baptised, while many denominations don't place any value on baptism at all.

However through observation one can see commonalities across all these denominations and it becomes obvious that if you like the sound of being a Seventh Day Adventist but you would prefer to be free to blog about Agile development during the Sabbath then you can probably find a denomination that will accept you. 

And so it is with Agile methodologies.

Agile has some fundamental practises that you will find across most of the formalised Methodologies;

• Some kind of collective consensus-building planning phase
  
• Iterative releases
  
• Smallish & frequent releases
  
• Automation in the build process
  
• Automation in the testing
  
• Test driven Development (TDD)
  
• Peer design evaluation
  
• Delayed architectural choices
  
• Specification of requirements defined in customer-friendly lingo

And it seems that for every combination or application of practises there is a formalised methodology out there:

• Agile Modelling
• Agile Unified Process (AUP)
• Agile Data Method
• DSDM
• Essential Unified Process (EssUP)
• Extreme programming (XP)
• Feature Driven Development (FDD)
• Getting Real
• Open Unified Process (OpenUP)
• Scrum
• Etc. 

So... 

Which Agile Development Methodology Is Right For You?

A.  Your own methodology.

My personal style of evangelising Being Agile is to teach developers about the common practises that lead to agility and what benefit each practise brings with it.  Once we've explored all those and discussed the pros and cons of different implementations the team is able to formulate their own opinion about which ones will work for them and when to begin introducing them.  After all, maybe your team doesn't want 40 hour weeks; or to work in pairs; or to stay standing in meetings.

There is something pragmatic I like about building your own methodology; being saintly is a process of improvement, not an overnight transformation.  So it makes sense that your adoption of Agile practises is going to be a gradual evolution too.

If you're ready to renounce your evil cowboy-coding ways and convert to Agile I can help you answer the question you should be asking instead...

What Agile practises should we adopt first?