In case the name of this website hasn’t given it away, I’m a geek. I love to make technology work for me (and others) and I love to leverage technology to save myself (and other people) headaches. Now, I’m also a frugal geek, which means I try to find the cheapest — and most likely free & open-source — solution available to solve any given problem.
There are times that I’ll compromise my frugality, however, if it means less headache to maintain it. For example, Apple’s MobileMe (nee dot-Mac) service… $100 a year for an email address and 20GB of online space? Pricey, in this day and age. But so many applications integrate with it for easy backup and web publishing that the tradeoff is worth it: non-geeks can easily publish vacation photos and backup their data without worrying about what FTP means, and if they need to connect via active or passive protocol, and so on and so forth. Another good example is OS X Server.
Now, let’s look at the tasks required of a small business server: filesharing, internal IM server, backup, email & web serving, maybe a print spooler, and a wiki. The frugal person in me says “You can do all that for free with open source!” And, the frugal person in me is right: I have my own server at home. It’s serving up files and iTunes; it has a Jabber IM server (Openfire); it has a project management server (Redmine) with built-in and integrated Subversion server for version control that was seamlessly installed and configured using a Bitnami stack; I have a RAID 1 that all important files are backed up to using a custom AppleScript that I wrote; it shares our printer and scanner with all the Macs in the house using the built-in device sharing features of OS X; and I can develop web sites and test them out on MAMP. Could I deploy this same solution at the office? Sure. But would it be easy to administer? Hell no.
There’s the rub. Administration is time, and time is money. If I’m busy administering something, I can’t work on other things like billable work. If I’m fixing things, I’m not making money. And that’s where OS X Server comes in. It makes administration of most things — filesharing, user accounts and permissions, IM server — really simple. (Some other things, like the VPN, were a bit tricky, but I’ll save that for another post.) And it offers something that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, commercially or open-source:
A wiki.
A good wiki.
The wiki that comes with OS X Server is so good, Apple could shrink-wrap it and sell it as a stand-alone product. I wish like hell that I could find something similar to run at home, but I can’t. Lord knows, there’s so much information that I could dump in there I’d spend the better part of a month entering it all in. But after it’s all in, finding information becomes easy. A keystroke or three. And I don’t have to remember which file in which folder inside which containing folder on which drive on which machine has that little nugget of information I’m looking for. It’s all right there. The problem with most current wikis is their interface is awful. Painful.
And that’s why I love the one that comes with OS X Server. It’s gorgeous. It’s simple. And it works wonderfully.
So I spent (and spend) a lot of time making wiki entries at work. I document everything. And I do mean everything. Troubleshooting flow-charts. Device manuals. Hardware specs. How-to’s. If I had to do it once, I (or someone else) is likely have to do it again, so I document it. Keyword-tag it. Photograph and label it.
And no one uses it.
I still get the same questions, and I still give them the same answers: it’s in the wiki.
Not that anyone cares. It’s so much easier to come and ask me, right? And when I tell them it’s in the wiki, more often than not they still want me to come and hand-hold them through all the information that I spent (and spend) so much time putting in there. Never mind the fact that it’s all right there, in plain English, and when they say “can you come show me?” I walk over to their machine, pull up the wiki page, and read it to them.
I don’t think I’m asking for too much: search the wiki, then read and follow the directions. And if you have a nugget of info, post it so other people can find it too. (After all, it takes as much time to make a wiki entry as it does to type an email to everyone.)
But instead of people embracing something that can make all our work-lives better, I get the same ”oh, here he goes again” roll of the eyes every time I mention the wiki; the same “I couldn’t care less” attitude whenever I casually mention that they should add some nugget of info into it. Fully 1/3 of my time is spent helping people who — if they would use the wiki — could easily help themselves, a fact conveniently forgotten when the subject of my billable time comes up.
But the wiki isn’t just about me. It’s about everyone. It’s about people sharing what they know. It’s about eliminating “silos of information” so that the company isn’t dependent upon any one person for that important piece of knowledge, whether it’s how to reboot the phone system, where to find cool free fonts, or what time the last FedEx pickup is at the drop box down the street. It’s about the office running smoothly when someone is sick or on vacation or in a meeting with a client; about being able to put your headphones on and get into a smooth flow of productive work without being interrupted every two minutes; about spending five minutes now to add some info to a wiki page to save 45 minutes down the line as you jump through the 18 hoops involved in retrieving the lost password to a stock photo website, where one person set the account up but everyone in the office shares it.
Wikis are about contributing to the whole, about making other people’s lives a little bit easier, about selflessly taking a few minutes of your time to write down some information to save someone else a few minutes trying to find that information later.
Wikis can make your work life a lot less demanding and a lot more productive. But they only work if everyone uses them. Otherwise, it’s just one person’s vain attempt to make things a little bit better.
– geek out
I had this great post typed up explaining why I removed the link from my LinkedIn page to this site. And trust me… There’s a great reason why.
But I pulled it, for reasons that I will make clear at a future date.
Till then, let me just say: I check my server stats. I know who visits this website.
Till that future date…
–geek out
Two months since I’ve last blogged. Seems like longer, actually.
For those who give a damn, The Designer Geek has been exceedingly busy. Things have been hopping at my day job, both design work and admin stuff keeping me more than busy enough. I did get a chance to do some stuff in AppleScript Studio… it’s neat, but the performance is a dog. I would release what I wrote for free, like I normally do, but the performance is so bad I’d prefer not to. Instead, I’m eventually going to re-write it using Cocoa and Scripting Bridge, and sell the sucker.
I’m nearing completion of my first commercial programming project (thanks, Corey!), and I’m in the finishing stages now, just last-minute bug-hunting and feature-adding. Nothing major. Except this one regression bug which is driving me nuts.
After that’s over, I have one Cocoa app that my wife and I are hoping to release ourselves. It’s currently about 75% done, but I had to put it on the back burner till the contract job is done. I have a list of about 20 people who are interested in beta testing it, I just have to 1) go feature-complete, 2) set up the main website, and 3) set up the beta test website. Simple! I should have it done in a weekend, right?
I wish.
After that’s done, there are a few other programming projects in the pipeline:
- A friend asked me if I can write apps for the iPhone, and proceeded to tell me about an idea for an app that he has. It sounds pretty good, and seems relatively simple (don’t they all start off that way?) and I should be able to knock it out in a few weeks.
- Another app that my wife came up with the idea for that’s *perfect* for a Core Data document application. More involved, but wickedly smart and cool.
- The Windows version of the app we have 75% done. I’d prefer to use one codebase, and something like Cocotron, but I doubt that’s even remotely possible since we’re leveraging quite a few native frameworks and libraries. Between hardware integration and PDFs and database stuff…. at best we’d only be able to share the SQLite DB under the hood and that’s it. And that would mean spending time re-writing the existing code in the Mac version (and debugging it) just so we can share the same ANSI C-based DB engine? Not bloody likely.
- Re-writing that AppleScript Studio app in Cocoa + Scripting Bridge.
As should readily be apparent, I’m getting really excited about code. Design has become such a chore. The main reason is because I find myself doing either 1) production-monkey work, which is a waste of my skills, or 2) design work for clients who want to do the design work. The ones in this latter group bug me the most.
If I’m doing production-monkey work, I can at least just kick back with some tunes or talk radio or whatever and just crank through the work.
But when clients try to do the design work…. that’s the worst. One client actually has their own set of Pantone swatch books, and will hover over my shoulder, telling me which ones to use for this and that, and tell me where to put things on the page. So, what is it that you’re paying me for, exactly?
Look. I know, everyone wants to be creative. But this is my job. This is what I get paid for. This is what I’ve spent the past 12+ years doing. I know that you know your customers and your market. But it is in my best interest if I understand them too. I also will take pains to understand your business, your competition, your product/service, and everything else about you and your company. Why? Because if I know all that, I come up with more effective advertising. The better my work is, the better your sales. And the better your sales, the more work you have for me. It is in my best interest to get inside your customers’ heads and figure out what appeals to them. That’s what I do. That’s part of my job.
So when you come to me for design & advertising work, trust that I’m not just going to hack something out that’s pretty for the sake of being pretty. Understand that I want to know about your business, and I put everything that I learn into developing the concept and the look. Your customers come to you because you make the best product or have the best service. Certainly you take pride in that. And certainly your customers trust you to do your job the best way you know how. So when you come to me wanting the best advertising, tell me what you want to achieve and then step away. Trust me to do my job the way your customers trust you.
Or else get your own damn computer and do it yourself.
If you’re like me, you have more web sites to read than you have time to read them. News, tips, press releases, product reviews, “hey look at this story” stuff sent by friends and family…. ugh. Keeping up is impossible because there’s just so damn many!
Tabs are great, because you can just open tabs of all the stuff you want to read, and get to them when you get a chance. But currently, I have over 50 tabs open of articles I’ll probably never get to. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just read, y’know, like a summary of each article to get the gist? Fortunately this ability exists, but unfortunately it’s buried in the powerful (but hardly used) “Services” menu.
The Services menu is full of all sorts of power tools that give you access to time-and-headache-saving features built into applications. One such thing is Apple’s SummaryService, which runs from within the feature-rich guts of OS X. Select the article’s text, then pull up “Summaraize” from the Services menu, and that 6-page article on Madagascar fruit bats is dynamically shortened into a new window. A slider controls how much of the article shows, using some behind-the-scenes magic ju-ju algorithm that works surprisingly well in separating the wheat from the chaff.
But isn’t it a pain to have to navigate through those menus every time you want to summarize a story? Wouldn’t a button — or better yet a keyboard shortcut — be better? Have no fear… the intrepid coders at Mothership Apple have concocted a solution.
- Open System Preferences and click on Keyboard & Mouse. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
- Click the “+” button at the lower-left of the column to add a new keyboard shortcut, and configure it like this:
- Now, you can assign whatever shortcut you want, but I thought Command-Control-S was handy, since I already use Command-Control-D to look up dictionary definitions.
- Click “Add” and close System Prefs.
This video sums it up nicely:
