Archive for the 'Work Life' Category

If you use a video camera, I need your help!

Published
by
Ben Balbo
on September 5, 2008
in Work Life
. 0 Comments

If you’re interested in a new range of camera stabilisation equipment that I’m planning to develop then I need your help. Please complete this survey - it only takes 5 or 10 minutes.

Please fill in the answers as honestly as you can and don’t spare my feelings. It’s more important that I know the truth than hear what I want to hear!

With any luck, the results of this survey will lead to the development of professional camera stabilisation equipment for independent film producers, content and media producers, and training and educational institutes to name a few.

My company, MooBox, wants to make this type of equipment available at a reasonable price in order to allow those companies and organisations that don’t have Hollywood budgets to benefit from these technologies.

Please forward this survey invite to anyone that you feel would be interested in this technology - more responses lead to a better understanding of what the market needs and a better product.

Thank you very much in advance for your assistance!

Never trust your users!

Published
by
Ben Balbo
on August 27, 2008
in Security and Work Life
. 1 Comment

Time and again I see people do stupid stuff on the web. I’m talking about the developers. There’s this big fat rule in the world of web development: never trust your users to do the right thing.

This could mean asking the user if they’re sure that the want to delete an appointment from their calendar, checking a provided email address is valid or prompting them to save changes before moving to another page.

These examples are quite trivial though - hopefully nothing super bad will happen if these checks aren’t performed. When it comes to money, however, you really want to make sure you’re double checking everything.

I had a rather interesting encounter with a stupid system that processes tons of financial transactions every day (I assume). It’s an online payment system for a number of Australian services: you can pay your car registration fees, building permit fees, council rates and parking infringement fines, to name a few.

Here’s the first screen:

And here’s the payment confirmation page:

It seems that changing the contents of the price field in the first page alters the final payment amount!

Why the developers thought this was a good idea is beyond me. When dealing with money, or any information for that matter, you should always check the values match what is expected. In this situation, I expected one of two results:

  1. The payment page recalculated the payment amount and charged that amount, rather than the amount sent from the browser, or
  2. The payment page tells the user that the payment amount does not match the bill amount and prompts the user to start the payment process again.

Update: ZenPsycho just suggested the system might intentionally allow users to pay more or less than the required amount. This is a valid point, and perhaps some of the billing system’s clients might like to offer this. I forgot to mention though that the form element for the amount included “readonly” and “disabled” attributes, so if the client chooses not to allow the user to change the values, the system really should enforce the payment amount. At the very least it should warn me that I’m about to pay less than the current amount and ask me to confirm.

My most memorable job interview

Published
by
Ben Balbo
on February 4, 2008
in Work Life
. 4 Comments

Job interviews can be hard work. I’ve had quite a few in my time, and you need to do at least a little homework before submitting yourself to the scrutiny of others. Most of my interviews have been quite ordinary, with someone asking questions and someone else interjecting occasionally trying to trip me up.

960819-m-2543r-007.jpgMy most memorable interview, though, was for my position at Modem Media in London. I visited their “cosy” office on a rather warm summer’s day, the coolest area was near the system administrators who had a portable air conditioning unit pumping the hot air over Piccadilly Circus, and Glenn White occupied a glass walled room in the centre of the office.

As interviews went, this one started quite normally. What was the best lesson I took from studying at University? How did I go about managing my schedule? What did I do in my spare time?

Glenn had, and possibly still has, this tactic to thrown you off guard though. Or perhaps it’s to test your ability to rapidly adapt to a changing or hostile environment. Or maybe just because he’s got a rather twisted sense of humour and likes to play with people’s minds. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that, and will probably point out that this was indeed the case.

Glenn: Describe how you would break down a project in to tasks after being given a technical requirements specification.

Ben: Well, I’d start off by…

Glenn: What’s your favourite colour?

Ben: Erm, well, black mostly, but I also like purp…

Glenn: A project manager approaches you and wants you to do some urgent work, but you’re scheduled by another PM. What would you do?

Ben: Well I’d tell the…

Glenn: What music do you listen to?

The “sensible” questions are made up - I don’t remember what he asked. The colour/music ones are real though. I remember those!

All in all, it’s my most memorable interview. The rest pale in comparison. I took that job over the others. I’m not sure if it was Glenn’s interview technique, or just because the job looked like more fun than working for over-dressed kiosk development people who wouldn’t even show me their offices. I like to think it’s because of Glenn, and the fact that I remember this almost 9 years later is probably testament to that.

What was your most memorable interview? Perhaps your’s was full of pain and anguish. Perhaps you had to go play paint ball with your boss-to-be. I’d love to hear about it…

[photo source, via]

Installing PHP5.3

Published
by
Ben Balbo
on January 28, 2008
in Hosting, Open Source and Work Life
. 0 Comments

PHP LogoI recently installed PHP 5.3 in order to play with some of the new features and thought I’d share the steps I took with you. While it’s based on a clean installation of Ubuntu 7.10 Server, you might find this useful on existing systems too.

As ever, this guide is for educational purposes only. I offer no warranty of suitability or accuracuracy. Use at your own risk, and if it goes wrong head over to the forums for help…

Read my full article at the Melbourne PHP Users Group web site.

Make someone feel good by blowing their trumpet

Published
by
Ben Balbo
on January 10, 2008
in BarCamp, Conference, Extra Curricula, Open Source and Work Life
. 1 Comment

TrumpetThe new year typically spawns lots of “Best of …” and “What happened in …” articles and blog posts. It’s a time of year to reflect on the past 12 months. It’s time to look at the highlights, sometimes the lowlights, and hopefully lock a few of those nuggets away for future use.

What I wasn’t expecting while rapidly devouring the 1000+ items in my RSS reader was one post that contained my name accrediting the initiation of a number of Australian BarCamps to me.

Now before you accuse me of blowing my own trumpet, I write this not because I want you to bow before me, rather because I wanted to share how that made me feel. It was great! By simply including that one paragraph in her post, Janet spurred me to get of my Christmas pudding and get BarCamp Melbourne 2008 back on track.

The truth is 2007 was a busy year for me. Most years are - I’m the type of person that can’t say no. After having co-authored a book, organised BarCamp Melbourne 1.0, bought and moved in to a new house, changed jobs* and possibly more that I can’t remember (now you can accuse me of blowing my own trumpet!), I was seriously considering postponing, or get someone to take over the organisation for, BarCampMelbourne 2.0.

* Truth be told, the job change was more of a relief than a burden. It’s great to leave a company that wants you to feel lucky for working in a chaotic environment under bad management with an internal IT department that has an agenda so huge you could swear it’s trying to bring the company down from the inside - a sad end to what once was, debatably, one of the best places in Melbourne to score a job!

So, the good news is that my flame has been relit. In order to make my life at least that little bit easier, BarCampMelbourne 2.0 will be a one day event so I have more venues to choose from. It has also tentatively been brought forward one week.

Thanks Janet! Apologies for the post title…