Symphonious

When an engineer can reproduce a bug they get excited because it means they can be sure to fix it.

When a manager can reproduce a bug they get annoyed because it means they keep running into it.

This is currently the most frustrating part of the transition from engineer to manager. I have in fact submitted a patch on one occasion - it was rejected because it didn't have tests. Sigh.

One of the challenging practices in XP is daily deployment - it requires your development team to have a very low defect rate and completely automated build and deployment tools. In an off the shelf software scenario it has the additional challenge that you can't actually get your customers to upgrade every day.

At Ephox we've adhered to this practice pretty well in the past by automatically deploying builds to all our internal systems, including our corporate wiki, website CMS and even this blog. Of course, that's still just a small subset of the kind of environments that we're actually used in and it's not actually getting out to real customers. To take the next logical step, we need to make those builds available to any customers who feel like checking out what's new - maybe not every day, but between all our customers hopefully regularly enough to give us good feedback.

So that's what we've done with the EditLive! Early Access program on LiveWorks! If everything is going well and the engineers are actually working on EditLive! (they do like to go home on weekends) a new build should be automatically deployed to LiveWorks! twice a day ready for people to try out. We also include the current change log on the page (again, automatically updated) but at this stage we're only listing changes from the last released version rather than every little change we make in the change log so it doesn't necessarily show changes in every build. We might need to look into publishing commit logs as well in the future to work around that.

Personally, I think this is pretty exciting - there's a lot of cool stuff that gets developed early in the release process that previously hasn't seen the light of day until months later. Now it's up on LiveWorks! within 12 hours.

As always, if you have any problems, suggestions random doodlings on the matter, comments are below, my contact details are just over there on the right and there's also the LiveWorks! mailing list.

It turns out the root cause of the problems I was seeing with Safari on Windows is that it simply doesn't support signed applets. That's pretty sad really. Apple seem to have implemented their own Java plugin instead of using the one that Sun provides (they're using the Sun JRE via their plugin) and of course it's missing most of the features you'd want from a Java plugin.

I'll report it to Apple officially just as soon as someone fixes the bug reporter - it's currently down. Perhaps there are too many people logging bugs against the new Safari and Leopard builds….

So Apple have released Safari for Windows - really no idea why, but they have. Sadly, just like on Mac it has terrible JavaScript and Java debugging support. In fact, it's worse on Windows than on Mac - anyone know how to turn the debug menu on? Anyone know how to get a Java console to appear?

I'd really, really like to make things work with it but all I can do at the moment is randomly guess at the source of problems.

UPDATE: You can open the JavaScript console with the keyboard shortcut control-shift-J. So JavaScript is now usable, but sadly Java still seems very broken and undebuggable.

The antileech plugin so far has done nothing towards actually blocking content and frankly doesn't really show a lot of promise that it ever will, however it has been interesting seeing where my content pops up. One that looks rather odd to me is dcomments.com. Frankly it looks just like a splog but it doesn't have any ads or links out to other sites. It does however republish all my content without any extra comments and has the absolute minimum of linkage back to symphonious.net. In fact, regularly through the site the term "Symphonious" is used but linked to their version of the content - the only link back is labelled "Original article here", right about an Add Comment button.

What the site claims to add is the ability to view RSS feeds in a news reader (the old type, not NetNewsWire) - essentially an NNTP gateway. The add comment function seems to be in debugging at the moment because it just displays some JavaScript popups with "Check 1" type messages and the comment never actually appears.

There are a few things that really count against dcomments.com and make it look even more like a splog:

• It claims to be publisher opt-in based, but I didn't opt-in and they still republish every entry on this blog. Most likely they don't have any verification mechanism.
• They don't provide a simple way for authors to have their blog removed. The contact page lists a few mailing lists, but no simple email address to send complaints to.
• Every page, including pages where essentially the only content is taken from my blog, is labelled "© 2006 -2007 dcomments.com" and they never mention what license my content is under.

Overall I don't really mind dcomments.com reusing my content, but they also aren't putting any real effort in to benefit blog owners by driving traffic back to them and appropriately acknowledging them. It also shows just how fine a line it is between being a value adding service and a splog. With some minor tweaks to make the author of content clearer and drive move traffic their way instead of locking users in, dcomments.com could move well away from that line and be a useful, if exceptionally niche, service. Right now though, it takes a lot of faith in the good-will of mankind to not label them a splog.