Year: 2009

The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

November 5, 2009 / / 2 Comments

The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’.

Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day.

According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year.

interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker's time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year Click To Tweet

Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead?

Making non knowledge workers aware

You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (‘give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it.

The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity.

Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as:

It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions.

How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it.

Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done.

Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL

Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way

It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”.

Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived.

Use Do Not Disturb signals

When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though.

Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book.
If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting.

Hide

Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping.

Counter-act interruptions

Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor.

Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing.
This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour.

TDD as a way to minimize recovery time

I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet.

BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’.


Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

Twitter gem – undefined method `stringify_keys’

September 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Have you been getting the following errors when running the Twitter gem lately ?


/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/httparty-0.4.3/lib/httparty/response.rb:15:in `send': undefined method `stringify_keys' for # (NoMethodError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/httparty-0.4.3/lib/httparty/response.rb:15:in `method_missing'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:131:in `deep_update'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:50:in `initialize'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/twitter-0.6.13/lib/twitter/search.rb:101:in `new'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/twitter-0.6.13/lib/twitter/search.rb:101:in `fetch'
from test.rb:26

It’s because Twitter has been sending back plain text errors that are treated as a string instead of json and can’t be properly ‘Mashed’ by the Twitter gem. Also check http://github.com/jnunemaker/twitter/issues#issue/6.

Without diving into the bowels of the Twitter gem or HTTParty, you could ‘begin…rescue’ this error and try again in 5 minutes. I fixed it by overriding the offending code to return nil and checking for a nil response as follows:

[sourcecode language=’ruby’]
module Twitter
class Search
def fetch(force=false)

if @fetch.nil? || force
query = @query.dup
query[:q] = query[:q].join(‘ ‘)
query[:format] = ‘json’ #This line is the hack and whole reason we’re monkey-patching at all.

response = self.class.get(‘http://search.twitter.com/search’, :query => query, :format => :json)

#Our patch: response should be a Hash. If it isnt, return nil.
return nil if response.class != Hash

@fetch = Mash.new(response)
end

@fetch
end

end
end

[/sourcecode]

(adapted from http://github.com/jnunemaker/twitter/issues#issue/9)

If you have a better solution: speak up!

WordPress hack might affect more than your WordPress installation!

September 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Just a quick note…

If you’re managing WordPress installations, and haven’t heard about the recent WordPress hacks (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/307660) yet you probably just got back from holiday.

There’s plenty of advice on fixing a hacked installation if you follow some of the links in the above post, so I’m not going to recite that here.

However! While cleaning a WordPress installation that resides in a subdirectory of a modx cms I found that the modx index.php files were also infected. I searched for infected files using grep as follows:

grep -R 'function gpc_' *

If you’re on a shared hosting environment that doesn’t allow shell access: time to change your hosting provider. (mail me if you need recommendations)

SWFObject and IE6 causing hair-pulling agony

August 17, 2009 / / 9 Comments

I recently used SWFObject to display a flash header on a website. I chose SWFObject because:

  • Instead of displaying an annoying ‘Install flash now’ message, it claims to be able to show alternate content. In this case: the original header image.
  • It claims to be compatible with more or less every browser out there.

Implementation went fine, until someone tested it on IE6 and got the following error:

Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www…..
Operation aborted

Which basically means that the site just can’t be visited with IE6 (still used a lot in business environments), it even seems as if there’s something wrong with your internet connection.

Now, since about 10% of visitors to this site are still using IE6 (why does everyone still use Internet Explorer ???? Do YOU know that these days most people do NOT use Internet Explorer anymore ?)

Now after some googling, I found the suggestion to defer loading of the SWFObject.js as follows:

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.2/swfobject.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">
swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9", "");
</script>

What this does according to W3C: When set, this boolean attribute provides a hint to the user agent that the script is not going to generate any document content (e.g., no “document.write” in javascript) and thus, the user agent can continue parsing and rendering.
I don’t know exactly why, but: HURRAY! It works now!!! Only… IE6 and IE7 (didn’t try IE8) now gave the following error:


Line: 19
Char: 1
Error: ‘swfobject’ is undefined
Code: 0
URL: http://www…

But the flash was still running fine. Still, such an error isn’t clean, especially since almost half of the site’s visitors are using one of these Internet Explorer versions.

Now, wanting a quick fix I decided to do the following:

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">
if (typeof(swfobject) != "undefined")
swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9", "");
</script>

I admit this is a bit of a weird ‘fix’. You’d suspect the flash to stop working on IE6/IE7, which it doesn’t. Not planning on diving into it’s inner bowels, I regard this a ‘mission accomplished’ until someone somewhere posts a better solution (for which I setup some Google alerts).

Do you have a better solution?
What would be the impact on the webdev economy (or your life) if all browsers were compatible?

Addendum

Because the above turned out not to work with the new Firefox 3.5.3 (strangely, was OK with 3.5.2 when I tested it) I decided to cut the crap and use the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way. Ok, so it won’t work for people who have javascript disabled, but who on earth would have flash installed AND javascript disabled?

To avoid the IE6 error with the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way, I call swfobject.embedSWF right after the div that will be replaced with the flash content. Calling swfobject.embedSWF in the <head> would otherwise give me the above error in IE6 again.

Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

August 12, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter?

I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days.

Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is.
It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood.

When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links.

To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors.
This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter.

How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me)

On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ‘shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects.

Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links:

AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com)
Java/1.6.0_13
Java/1.6.0_14
libwww-perl/5.816
MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/)
Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5
OpenCalaisSemanticProxy
PycURL/7.18.2
PycURL/7.19.3
Python-urllib/1.17
Twingly Recon
twitmatic
Twitturly / v0.6
Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)
Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified)

Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there.

Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters.
I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit.

Same experiment with a real, established twitter account

Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ‘status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio.

Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you?
I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am.

On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign.

Reposting the same link over and over again helps

On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals.
I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search.

Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course.

This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to)
Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though.

Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter?
Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

What makes them click ?

July 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The other day (well, actually some weeks ago while relaxing at the beach in Kos) I read ‘Neuro Web Design – What makes them click?’ by Susan Weinschenk. (http://neurowebbook.com)

The book is a fast and easy read (no unnecessary filler) and a good introduction on how your site’s visitors can be steered in the direction you want them to go.

The Obvious

The book handles some of the more known/proven techniques, like for example that ratings/testimonials of other people can help sell your product or service. Another well known technique it talks about is inducing a sense of scarcity/urgency in the visitor. Only 2 seats left! Buy now and get 33% off! It’s not because these are known techniques that they stop working.

Luckily 2/3rd of the book handles less obvious techniques, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth buying.

The Not So Obvious

A less known influencing technique is reciprocity. And then I’m not talking about swapping links with another website, but the fact that someone is more likely to do something for you after you did something for them first. The book cites some studies (I always love the facts and figures) and gives some actual examples of how to implement this in your site’s design, which is less obvious when you think about it. Want to know more ? Buy the book!

Other interesting sources

For a more general introduction to the same principles, I’d suggest ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. ‘Yes!…’ cites some of the same studies (it seems there’s a rather limited pool of studies covering this subject), but of course doesn’t show how to implement these techniques in your site’s design. I read ‘Yes!…’ last year, making ‘Neuro Web Design’ just a little bit less interesting.

!!!Always make sure you’re able to measure your changes. If you haven’t yet, check out the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics (don’t be afraid because it says ‘beta’, it works just fine) and Google Website Optimizer.

Worth Buying?

Can I recommend it ? Sure, why not. I think it can be useful for anyone who ever had to think about the design or content of a site. You don’t have to be a marketing guy to want a site you’re involved with to be successful. The content/filler ratio is excellent too: you don’t need to wade through dozens of pages to filter out the interesting bits. (unlike ‘The Design of Sites’, which contains too much useless info and because it’s in dead-tree format, you can’t google it)

If you like it, you might also check out ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’.

Tip for people living in Europe: check Amazon UK for your book buying needs. Because of the low UK Pound exchange rate, it’s usually considerably cheaper and faster to get a book delivered to your doorstep by Amazon UK compared to having to order it at the local book store or web-shop.

Google Chrome OS

July 8, 2009 / / 1 Comment

It’s about time someone took this initiative: Google Chrome OS

I especially like the following:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

I recently had the ‘pleasure’ witnessing several 60+ yr old friends and family (all respect for everyone in their 2nd or 3rd youth) buying their first pc, taking their first steps using a pc and the net.

Have you ever seen the gazillions of little ‘useful’ tools that are installed on a new standard Vista pc or laptop ? This is like learning to drive a new car and being placed in an airplane cockpit. And all the messages one gets about virus/security checks, fingerprint nog being enrolled, trial period expiring (because half those really useful tools come with a trial period), … If I was in their shoes, being confronted with this as a total newbie, I guess I’d just give up pretty soon. As a matter of fact, I actually gave up on Vista on my work-laptop, it was driving me crazy. Thank god I was allowed to install XP. I’m a Linux user at home, and Vista was such a frustrating experience that Windows XP actually felt like breath of fresh air.

And what are those people using? Email, browsing…. and maybe writing a little letter now and then or storing their photo’s if they have a digital camera. Actually (side note), I get the impression that hearing about facebook is a major motivator for the digital newbies to finally take the plunge, buy a pc and get on-line.

And OK, we’ve seen initiatives like this before, but Google is a brand everyone knows… unlike Ubuntu, Debain or Mandriva. Google = God. If I was Microsoft I’d be wetting my pants knowing Google was about to release their own OS, without a doubt fully optimized to use their own on-line office suit. On the other hand, the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft’ still holds a lot of truth.

I hope I’ll be able to give it a big thumbs up if a would-be pc-user asks me what kind of pc/OS they should go for in the near future.
On the other hand, if I’d do that, I’m pretty sure a couple of weeks later I’d get a call asking how to install this game or photo editing tool they got from one of their Windows using friends… or that nifty photo-printer they just bought. But then, I also get those questions now from newbie Windows users. It takes a couple of years before Newbie pc users understand that some things just don’t work and aren’t worth the time trying to fix them. I’d just wish they’d go back to the shop when something doesn’t work. You also don’t let you mechanic friend try to fix a problem with your brand new car. But that’s another story…

Wait and see…

Twilio – Telephony in the cloud

January 11, 2009 / / 1 Comment

[repost because the original post was lost due to an error from my hosting provider]

Interested in an easy way to hook up your application to the phone system ? Check out
Twilio!

Haven’t used it yet, but it seems easy as pie!

Yes, you can probably do the same with Asterisk but figuring out the web service to Twilio is probably a lot easier/faster than installing and learning Asterisk.

Paypal encrypted button pitfalls

January 11, 2009 / / 3 Comments

[repost because the original post was lost due to an error from my hosting provider]

I recently had to implement a small online payment system using an encrypted paypal button (‘after hours’). All of this in an existing modx cms installation. Modx is an absolutely handy, powerfull and totally undervalued cms system that doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves. So there – my free mention.

I used this article and script from a company called Stellar Web Solutions as a starting point for encrypting the button data. (no need to reinvent the wheel)

Now, to keep others from falling into the same pitfalls as I did…

Bad OpenSSL Version

If you get the error:

The email address for the business is not present in the encrypted blob. Please contact your merchant.

Then you probably have OpenSSL version 0.9.8b which has a known issue with pipes, resulting in a cut-off output. This version unfortunately seems to be quite common on shared hosting solutions, who ofcourse are very reluctant to update their ‘working’ installations.

You could either upgrade your OpenSSL version, or refrain from using pipes. When using the Stellar Web script, you can try the fix posted here, which worked for me.

If you are not using the bad OpenSSL version, I’d suggest that at least something is wrong with the encrypted data.

Use the correct certificate

Don’t mix the sandbox with the live certificate, they are different!

Only use 2 decimals for values

I got the following error:

The link you have used to enter the PayPal system contains an incorrectly formatted item amount.

Turned out my calculated price contained too much decimal places for the value. It should have been only 2. When googling this I also found that it might mean you used a comma instead of a point or vice versa.

For such a widespread system, too bad paypal doesn’t give any clearer error messages, or provide more info on what the above errors could mean. I found lots of posts asking about the above, but had to really dig to find some answers.