Power to the Edge is a fascinating manifesto from the US Department of Defence on how the structure of their organisation needs to change in the coming years to better meet the challenges of a dynamic, politically loaded and loosely coupled world.

Power to the edge is about changing the way individuals, organizations, and systems relate to one another and work. Power to the edge involves the empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organization (where the organization interacts with its operating environment to have an impact or effect on that environment) or, in the case of systems, edge devices. Empowerment involves expanding access to information and the elimination of unnecessary constraints. For example, empowerment involves providing access to available information and expertise and the elimination of procedural constraints previously needed to deconflict elements of the force in the absence of quality information.

Empowering people at the edge to make decisions is great, but (as they explain) the boundaries on appropriate decision making need to be set. These boundaries are social and self-inflicted rather than technically or structurally constrained. The organisation structure may have checks & balances on decision making, but it is usually too late when these take effect.

During my Organisational Behaviour MBA course I found that Vroom and Jago have done some interesting work to help managers decide how a particular decision should be made within their organisation. Changing their flowchart language slightly yields a useful starting point for decision boundaries at the edge of the high performance teams.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 23, 2004.

I first craved a DVD player in 1999 after my flatmate moved out with his. From memory, back then a decent one was $1,200AU. This seemed just a bit too expensive, so I waited and made do with videos and a new flatmate's good Sony 68cm TV.

Then, in late 2002 the flatmate & TV moved out again. Bianca and I just ended up using her little old 34cm TV with videos.

By early 2004 it was getting harder to hire videos so we decided to spend $60 on a cheap DVD player. Unfortunately her TV was so old that it didn't support the input cables and it would cost another $75 in adapters to make it work (since Macrovision prevented us routing the signal through the video).

Of course, at this point a new TV was justified, but we just couldn't help wanting a flat panel, which were way too expensive. So, just like the DVD player decision above, we waited.

Suddenly it's 2005, and I can't believe that we still don't have a DVD player!

This was a classic case of technology paralysis. I decided the only cure was to jump the DVD cycle completely and starting building a HTPC.

It was incredibly eerie with our massive apartment fire alarm ringing out through the darkness of West Chatswood. As is typical of these "emergency" situations, after I was unable to get back to sleep through the noise I finally went out to investigate.

This video reflects my sleepy state during filming at 1:30am. I knew it was dark but thought you'd at least be able to see reflections of the flashing fire engine lights.

Video: False alarm.wmv (0.4MB) | False alarm (small).wmv (0.3MB)

Before feed subscriptions, our world was filled with time-intensive manual monitoring and pull based operations (e.g. web browsing). Push based operations were normally based on giving up access to attention management tools like email, making them risky and outside our control.

Feed subscriptions give us a pull mechanism for having information pushed to us. This is a sublime combination of push convenience using the safety and control of a pull mechanism.

But, it's important to realize that feed subscriptions do not solve the information overload problem (contrary to popular opinion). In fact, for many people they will make the problem worse.

Feed subscriptions dramatically increase our control, signal to noise ratio and ability to stay in the loop. They also remind us daily of the continuous information flow, forward march of ideas and compel us to stay connected.

Using RSS and feed subscriptions we can fine tune our reading to the weblogs and sources that best match our interests. Compared to the previous time-saving method of checking key hub / aggregator sites only, this results in a much higher average level of interest in the items discovered.

We are better informed, but far more overloaded with information that we feel compelled to consume for integration into our mental map.

RSS provides time advantages for consuming individual items of interest. This is through reduction of discovery overhead, removed lookup and download time, a consistent interface and reduction of the need to troll through large amounts of irrelevant information.

The problem arises because feed subscriptions are so effective at helping us to find relevant information. Interesting information and sources obviously take longer to consume that irrelevant ones (which don't need to be read in detail). So, subscriptions increase relevance which also increases processing time. Thus, if we discover the same number of items each day as before using subscriptions the process will take us much longer (since those items are generally more interesting to us).

Without feed subscriptions	With feed subscriptions
Monitoring is expensive	Monitoring is cheap
Overloaded with noise	Overloaded with signal
Information is hard to find	Information is hard to prioritise

The next major challenge we face is developing tools, techniques and acceptable behaviours to help us deal with this growing amount of high-value information. I suspect that the solutions will grow increasingly less technically driven and more socially driven.

As information consumers we need to learn to balance the cost of not knowing (lost opportunities, etc) with the cost of knowing (time).

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 20, 2004.

I don't have a car, so walking to the video store twice (pickup & return) takes about 50 mins total. With a high throughput server and my 8Mbs internet connection I could download a 1GB DVD rip in about 20 mins. The time for video on demand is now.

Video: DVD run.wmv (4.4MB) | DVD run (small).wmv (1.2MB)

Just a quick glimpse at some of the impressive infrastructure work going on around Chatswood station at the moment.

Confession: While I don't plan to make it a habit, this video has two camera shots and is about 1 second longer than normal.

Video: Killboy Powerhead.wmv (5.2MB) | Killboy Powerhead (small).wmv (1.2MB)

In a moment of stupidity during late 2003 I signed up to do a part-time MBA. I've just completed the exam for Marketing Management, my first subject. Below are the tidbits, comments, theories and anecdotes I found particularly interesting or thought provoking. Many of these are distilled from Marketing Management by Philip Kotler, a valuable text that I'm sure will be referred to often.

Customer satisfaction

• The challenge, according to Jeffrey Gitomer, is not to produce satisfied customers; several competitors can do this. The challenge is to produce delighted and loyal customers.
• 96% of dissatisfied customers don’t complain, they just stop buying.
• Of the customers who register a complaint, between 54 and 70% will do business again with the organisation if their complaint is resolved. The figure goes up to a staggering 95% if the customer feels that the complaint was resolved quickly. Customers who have complained to an organisation and had their complaints satisfactorily resolved tell an average of five people about the good treatment they received.
• According to Jeff Bezos, if you make a customer unhappy he will tell five friends; if you disappoint a customer on the Internet, he is capable of telling 5,000 or 50,000 people.
• What is a customer?
  • A customer is the most important person ever in this office … in person or by mail.
  • A customer is not dependent on us … we are dependent on him.
  • A customer is not an interruption of our work … he is the purpose of it. We are not doing a favour by serving him … he is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.
  • A customer is not someone to argue or match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.
  • A customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle the profitably to him and to ourselves.
• Herzberg’s theory distinguishes dissatisfiers (factors that cause dissatisfaction) and satisfiers (factors that cause satisfaction). The absensce of dissatisfiers is not enough, satisfiers must be actively present to motivate a purchase.
• Product layers:
  1. Core benefit: the basic benefit that meets a customer need or want.
  2. Basic product: realisation of the core benefit.
  3. Expected product: normal customer expectation.
  4. Augmented product: exceeds customer expectations and includes all facets like delivery.
  5. Potential product: all potential product augmentations.
• Tony O'Reilly, former CEO of H.J.Heinz, proposed this test of brand loyalty: “My acid test ... is whether a housewife, intending to buy Heinz tomato ketchup in a store, finding it to be out of stock, will walk out of the store to buy it elsewhere.”

Strategy

• Peter Drucker’s classic questions:
  • What is our business?
  • Who is the customer?
  • What is of value to the customer?
  • What will our business be?
  • What should our business be?
• Most companies believe they can win by performing the same activities more effectively than their competitors, but competitors can quickly copy the operationally effective company using benchmarking and other tools, thus diminishing the advantage of operational effectiveness. Porter defines strategy as “the creation of a unique and valuable position involving a different set of activities.” A company can claim that it has a strategy when it “performs different activities from rivals or performs similar activities in different ways”. Porter’s generic strategies:
  • Overall cost leadership: The business works hard to achieve the lowest production and distribution costs so that it can price lower than its competitors and win a large market share.
  • Differentiation: The business concentrates on achieving superior performance in an important customer benefit area valued by a large part of the market.
  • Focus: The business focuses on one or more narrow market segments.
• Value disciplines states that within its industry, a firm can aspire to be (Treacy/Wiersema):
  1. The product leader;
  2. The operationally excellent firm; or
  3. The customer intimate firm.
  Four rules for success:
  1. Become best at one of the three value disciplines.
  2. Achieve an adequate performance level in the other two disciplines.
  3. Keep improving one’s superior position in the chosen discipline so as not to lose out to a competitor.
  4. Keep becoming more adequate in the other two disciplines, because competitors keep raising customers’ expectations.
• Tomina Edmark, inventor of the plastic hairstyling piece called Topsy-Tail, grew her company's sales to $80 million in 1993 with only two employees. Instead of hiring 50 or more employees, Edmark and her two employees set up a network of 20 vendors who chandled everything from product manufacturing to serving the retail accounts. Yet Edmark has been careful to follow the first rule of effective outsourcing: She keeps control of new product development and marketing strategy, the core competencies that make up the heart of her company.
• As Jim Kelly, CEO of UPS, which has a number of global alliances puts it “The old adage 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em'“ is being replaced by “Join 'em and you can't be beat'“.

Marketing

• SWOT:
  • Strengths (internal)
  • Weaknesses (internal)
  • Opportunities (external): An area of buyer need or potential interest in which a company can perform profitably.
  • Threats (external): a challenge posed by an unfavourable trend or development that would lead, in the absence of defensive marketing action, to deterioration in sales or profit.
• Positioning statement: To (target group and need) our (Brand) is (concept) that (point of difference).
• Taco Bell estimates its customer lifetime value at up to $11,000.
• At Volvo, engineers think safety in every design decision (matching their desired market position). When they decided to add a GPS to the dashboard of a recent model, they wanted to be sure that the screen would be easy to read and close to the driver's viewing point so it would not act as a distraction; and when some customers asked volvo to make a convertible car, the company decided against it because “convertible cars aren't safe“.
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (people try to move up from 1 to 6):
  1. Physiological needs: food, water, shelter.
  2. Safety needs: security, protection.
  3. Social need: sense of belonging, love.
  4. Esteem needs: self-esteem, recognition, status.
  5. Self-actualisation needs: self-development, realisation.

Miscillaneous

• Viagra works for 80% of people, but for 25% of those it's a placebo.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 16, 2004.

Yesterday (March 9, 2004) I received around 160 spam messages. SpamBayes does a great job, catching about 140 of them, and flagging about 20 as suspect. It only missed one or two "spam" that are content newsletters highly related to my field which I was subscribed to without permission or no longer read.

I now trust SpamBayes decision that a message is definitely spam and completely ignore those. I skim the suspects everyday and use those for training.

Trends in spamming techniques are very clear when you receive this much junk. While I consider these interesting (e.g. mixing up word letters, adding junk words to fool the filters) a couple of recent messages have annoyed me more than most.

Last week I received my first piece of spam art / poetry. A simple poem that the author felt compelled to send to millions of readers. I could appreciate the idea when done through Google Ads, but was not so excited about having it thrust into my Inbox.

Today, I received my first religious spam encouraging me to find Jesus. This felt even lower...

It raises the interesting idea however that spam is a very effective propaganda technique. If you have a cause and want to get the message out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, why not use spam? This could be used for both constructive (Go Wildcats!) or destructive (XXX is guilty - here's proof) ideas. It's like a modern day equivalent of dropping leaflets only cheaper, faster and bigger.

Imagine if someone decided to start a SPAM onslaught threatening a terrorist attack? Hard to track, quick to spread and must be taken seriously.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on March 10, 2004.

Update August 20, 2005: While I peaked around 400 spam per day, by moving to Gmail and removing the catch all for Synop email addresses I've cut back to about 39 with only 1 or 2 actually reaching my inbox each day.

I think the Creative Commons system of licenses is great. They are simple, clear and direct. Unfortunately, I've struggled to find a license that I feel is suitable for the e-gineer site.

I encourage people to link to this site. I encourage people to build on my ideas and work. But, I don't want people distributing complete copies of my work on e-gineer, commercial or otherwise.

I'm surprised that Creative Commons haven't created a license format to represent the standard / implicit copyright case. I understand it's implied and may even be against the spirit of CC, but surely it would make sense to provide it with all the machine and human readable capabilities they've managed to bring to the more sharing friendly licenses? If anything, it would encourage the use and awareness of the CC license format and ability software tools to use it more widely?

Anyway, as best I can tell, the Sampling license is the most appropriate for my needs.

My understanding of clause 6a in the license is that once used on a work that work can be used subject to those terms perpetually, regardless of whether you change the license. I'm certainly not expecting a flood of users, but I guess that means it's important to choose carefully before using a license. So, for now, everything here remains under the implicit (no need to even © it) copyright license.

Until last night, I had no idea how widely read my PHP: Hackers Paradise articles had spread. Turns out, you can read copies of the article in full (or close to full) on these sites:

• http://www.devnewz dot com/2001/0809.html (particularly clever innuendo that Peter Thiruselvam is the author while actually stating that I am).
• http://www.biblioteca dot co dot cr/html/php-hackers-paradise-php.shtml or in PDF http://www.biblioteca dot co dot cr/pdf/PHP_Hackers_paradise_ebook.pdf
• http://triviasecurity dot net/library.php?F=619

But, on this sites you have to pay to get access to a full copy of the article:

• http://www.aneas dot net/ebookstore/inventory3.asp ($5 to download, but seems to have been removed, via google cache)
• http://www.learnessays dot com/show_essay/138954.html ($9.99 / month)
• http://www.radigan dot net/page.php?page=books (special client area)

This guy (http://www.joshuaz dot com/community/Downloads/48.aspx) added the RTF file to his site, but then suspected it may contain a virus (it doesn't). I'm even in his most popular downloads list!

There are RTF and PDF versions floating around in lots of places, but it was amusing to see that I'd made it onto Astalavista (http://www.astalavista dot com/?section=directory&cmd=detail&id=1905) and the eDonkey network (http://www.poptopic dot net/file.php?hash1=98B77F35FDC1E338&hash2=133840719A7A5D4A&size=135895).

All the above is pretty low, but there is one guy who takes the cake. Greg Tampa decided to simply change the author name and post it to this site (www.hackercity dot com/read.html?postid=3438&replies=2&page=1). Classy.

Skimming through to the bottom of that page I noticed that Greg had decided to add a comment on his own post: "note this is copyrighted by me so u cant copy it!".

eBay's origins as a site built by Pierre Omidyar so his fiance could trade Pez dispensers is well known. It's old news, but I learned last night that this is actually a brilliant PR myth created by Mary Lou Song.

Myths, stories and legends are vital for company culture and to create a mystic that attracts outsiders. The eBay myth is an inspiring example of how a good story (true or false) can connect a company with its customers in a very real way.

eBay is an expert at understanding the importance of customer relationships on their business, they embody the bottom-up economy:

In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for "co-creation of value": The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly -- company and customer working hand in hand.

To Pierre Omidyar all that sounds very familiar. As the founder of eBay, he is the Adam Smith of the Bottom-Up Economy. From the beginning, eBay set out to level the playing field between big and small.

Says he: "At eBay the managers don't control the brand or the customer experience -- our customers themselves do."

Scary. But then, eBay's $42 billion market cap suggests that the benefits of working bottom-up make it worth the risks.

Note: Originally published to my Synop blog on March 8, 2004.

A fascinating article about Wal-Mart from FastCompany:

There is no question that Wal-Mart's relentless drive to squeeze out costs has benefited consumers. The giant retailer is at least partly responsible for the low rate of U.S. inflation, and a McKinsey & Co. study concluded that about 12% of the economy's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s could be traced to Wal-Mart alone.

via Dave Pollard.

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on January 30, 2004.

While there is plenty of information around on creating a favicon for your website, unfortunately most of it is fairly incomplete. Here's my summary:

1. While newer browsers support a gif or png image, IE still needs an ico file. There are a few online tools for creating these, but personally I use Microangelo.
2. I was surprised that IE only uses a favicon (any context) after the site has been bookmarked. Firefox uses it all the time.
3. Icon files can contain multiple images. I included 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 pixel images in Windows XP colour (24-bit with 8-bit alpha). At the very least, you need one 16x16 pixel image. There are many more formats you can provide depending on your desired level of support. I wanted it to look good in the browser or in Windows as a shortcut.
4. There are a few ways to inform the browser about a favicon:
   • Horrible way: Save a favicon.ico file in your web server root directory.
   • Standards compatible way: <link href="/my/icon.ico" type="image/ico" rel="icon"/>
   • Tradeoff for IE & standards (my choice): <link href="/my/icon.ico" type="image/ico" rel="shortcut icon"/>
5. The favicon validator is a great little online service.

It's relatively well known that founder CEO's will probably be replaced, but this HBS article covers the issue well:

My research shows that in small companies, it's still true that when founder-CEOs do badly, they are replaced. But the interesting paradox is that when founder-CEOs do really well, that also increases the chances that they're going to be replaced.

For me, the main factor would be the skills of the replacement. I'd want what's best for the company. Financials are important, but the main driver for me would be to see my baby fulfill its potential.

Are you ready to be replaced? Can you pass the "Rich vs King" test?

Having decided that I should have grown out of server administration by now, I needed to come up with a simple solution for running a personal web site. For me, the criteria are:

• Quick and easy to update, which in 2005 means a weblog.
• Minimal effort to maintain and improve.
• A site that can grow with my many ventures and changing circumstances.
• Minimal cost.
• Easy to backup.
• URLs and content that can last a lifetime.

All of the above is easy, once you decide that the site will be completely static. Static files:

• Never break.
• Can be easily copied or moved.
• Don't need to be upgraded or maintained. Just because you like weblogs in 2005 doesn't mean you'll want to be maintaining some crazy weblog CMS written in the coolest language of today in 5 years time.
• Are incredibly cheap and fast for website hosting (e.g. Jodohost or PowWeb).
• Can be maintained or edited using your favourite tool of the time (e.g. FrontPage).

The only remaining problem is easy updates to a weblog. Enter another free Google service, Blogger, with a customised template and publishing via FTP to my preferred location. We can publish as many weblogs to the site as desired, while the infrastructure is maintained and improved for free.

So, the entire infrastructure for e-gineer is now the cheapest possible web hosting and a Blogger account. I'm haven't looked back once.

I started Synop in September 1998 as a uni student working from my bedroom with about $8,000 to my name. Luckily, starting a business didn't seem like a big deal because I could always get a job and I didn't really even think of it as starting a business, let alone understand what that meant.

Initially, Synop traded as a NSW business called Synop Software.

Caught up in the Internet gold rush, I wanted to build an online version of Quicken so I could enter my expenses remotely. Typical of Synop, this turned into a full fledged electronic organiser with sophisticated item sharing between members. elec.org was the working name and the site was built using AOLServer, TCL and the Solid database server. Having no experience with Internet sites or databases, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing was my bible at this time.

In March 1999, Dave Thomas became involved as a mentor and guide on my business building journey. His probing questions led me to understand more about the business realities of running a large scale web site funded by advertising, particularly since disk space was relatively expensive. Around this time sites like When.com launched the first online electronic organisers.

During 1999, Dave found me various small paid consulting projects for his network. Only later did I realise that this was a gentle form of testing, funding and keeping me afloat while I learnt the basics of a business (i.e. one needs customers).

Around this time I shifted from AOLServer to using a PHP in a LAMP stack (although it wasn't called that yet). The primary driver was that I could host a public web site with scripting and a database for $25US / month. Demonstrating elec.org was horrendously difficult and expensive as AOLserver was not commonly used and required a dedicated server.

Inspired by software that ArsDigita was building, I built a PHP equivalent called Synphony. This powered e-gineer.com, to which I was adding many articles and instruction sets and which hosted the PHP Knowledge Base (later FAQTs).

In August 1999 I made my first visit to the US. Reading extensively online, I kept hearing about the internet revolution and how the web was everywhere. In Australia, the occaisional URL was making its way onto the bottom of TV advertisements and I thought "Yeah, it's happening". Then I arrived in San Francisco. Every billboard I saw during my visit was for an Internet company. I could literally overhear people talking about new business ideas across cafes. I learnt two things: the significant divide between Australia and the US, despite the Internet; and just how huge the Internet was becoming.

I did a number of job interviews in the US on this trip, and decided to turn down jobs with ArsDigita, CNet and others. It's at this point that Synop really became more than a hobby.

Towards the end of that trip (October), I ended up in Sarasota, Florida upgrading WorldFinanceNet.com from FrontPage and static HTML to run the first version of Synphony. This top 1000 web site with massive morning traffic spikes was Synop's first real customer and user of Synphony.

WFN was a classic Internet boom company. Two decisions stand out in particular. The first was deciding not to spend $5,000 US to get the wfn.com domain name for their top 1000 web site (apparently, WorldFinanceNet.com really isn't that long or confusing). The second was when senior management came in and told me with much excitement that we need to add another advertisement to the home page. It was a barter deal in exchange for cheap access to their own private jet for getting to meetings...

At this point, the realities of web server support became very real to me with many late night calls. Being woken up to cries of "the server's down!" is not conducive to a good nights sleep. One night, I logged in and saw 300+ httpd processes thrashing on the server. Restarting Apache, I couldn't believe my eyes as the traffic built up to 200+ again within a minute. Turns out that a hacker at WFN had changed numerous includes on the home page to pull in smaller pieces on the site using URLs rather than PHP file includes. The result, was a morning traffic spike with every home page visit spawning 5 PHP script requests to Apache.

Unfortunately, the WFN relationship didn't end happily (Apr 2000). Business lessons: bill customers early and often; it's hard to be persistent and insistent by phone; and the US legal system is too expensive to bother pursuing $50k US ($100k AU) in unpaid bills.

There was one alternative I didn't pursue however. On a US domestic flight I ended up next to a crazy old duck from NY. Turns out she was a bookmaker in her spare time and was more than happy to give me the number of some guys who could be quite persuasive when retrieving funds.

During the summer of 99/00, Jad and I built FAQTs.com and really took Synphony to the next level. The highlight was probably teaching Jad how to kick a football in my living room over many intense design discussions. At this point Synop had it's own room in our apartment for an office.

Apachecon 2000 was held in Orlando during March, at the absolute peak of the bubble. Everyone was running around offering everyone else a job. This was the first of a number of conferences where I was lucky enough to present.

July 2000 was a dark time for Synop, with its survival limited to my credit cards after the WFN payment default. Through Randy Best, a great friend to Synop, we entered a contract with First Light Communications in New York to build and maintain a content management system that they would resell. "Feast or famine" was an email subject from Randy at the time, and certainly securing this contract took Synop back into the fast lane.

Synop Software incorporated to become Synop Pty Ltd at this time. Luckily another company with the name Synop had dropped it between 1998 and 2000, so we could get the originally preferred name.

Over the coming months I built and delivered Synphony v2 products to First Light. The real crunch was just prior to the Sydney olympics when I did three 20-hour days in a row, shipping the first product on the day of the opening ceremony. I remember working to 3am and getting up at 6:30am for a chance to watch the torch run by on the Pacific Hwy. Synphony obtained role based security, membership models, affiliate tracking and an incredible raft of features at this time.

In October 2000, my good friend Matt joined as Synop's first employee. He quickly established our Artarmon office, which we used until closing and generally built all of Synop's administration facilities and systems that I'd completely ignored since starting. John and Dean joined Synop quickly afterwards, ramping up our scale to support Synphony and continue development.

Hopes and expectations for the future of Synop were high, unrealistically high on my part, around this time. In anticipation of a bright future, the Synphony products were rebranded to Sytadel and a suite of E-gineers (communication, community, construction, content, knowledge, surveillance, sytadel).

These hopes came crashing back to earth when we held a booth at ApacheCon 2001. This was a different world to just a year before, with few attendees and everyone there looking for a job rather than offering them. The bubble had truly burst.

Over the coming months all of Synop's significant clients went out of business, and Synop was forced to shrink back down to me working alone. At this stage I was experimenting with tools to help with Agile project management (code name Agilation), including an add-in for Microsoft project that provided a card playing UI for task allocation.

Peter Bailey had joined as a part time consultant in May 2001 and agreed to join permanently after helping to win our first government contract (the IP Access portal) in Oct 2001. Thus began the next phase in Synop's life, and a great journey for us together.

Sytadel v3 was built and shipped as part of the IP Access project. This saw version control, workflow and many other advanced features come to Sytadel. At this point, Sytadel owners could use the Construction E-gineer to develop new content types that were automatically version controlled, subject to workflow, had complete editing and viewing screens. All the generated code was completely documented and extensively commented for ease of editing.

I completed the final stages of this project working from Internet cafes while chasing Bianca around Central America. Actually, the fastest Internet connection I've ever used was in Guatemala.

In April 2002, Synop organised Agile Australia 2002, the first series of talks on Agile Methods in Oz. I also presented two Synop papers at XP 2002 in Italy. To reflect this change and our project development methods, Synop's tagline became "take the agile approach".

Mid-2002 saw Synop win the ACCC Internet and Intranet portal redevelopment project in partnership with SecureNet. This was a huge project with more than 750 pages in the project specification. Many project problems, including massive scope creep, performance bottlenecks and my decision to rewrite Sytadel from scratch into v4 based on XML saw this project blow out into 2004. As a fixed price concern, this project became a huge millstone around Synop's neck.

Although I did have my car written off while parked outside the ACCC late one night, the darkest days of this project were spent working for a week at the James Court Serviced Apartments in Canberra. After months of furious code development and sleepless nights, we felt Sytadel had reached a turning point in solidity and features. This week was going to put on the final touches and really begin roll out of the myriad of ACCC customisations. But, PHP and Sablotron had other plans for us. At this point, the system literally imploded and everything just stopped working. Days of installs, work arounds, bug fixes and rollbacks could not get things working again. Sytadel is an incredibly complex piece of engineering that pushes PHP, MySQL and XML libraries to their limit. Or beyond it, as we found out that week. After returning to Sydney (broken shadows of our former selves), we did some C hacking to replace the XSLT engine and Sytadel magically restored to working order. I still get shivers every time I pass the James Court, but only Richard who joined Synop and toiled with me through every inch of the Sytadel v4 rewrite would probably understand that.

Buried in the ACCC debacle, Synop struggled through early 2003 to deliver on a range of new customer projects (e.g. UNJLC, MDBC) we'd won with the promise of Sytadel v4 features and hard business development work throughout 2002. Working on site at the ACCC and in Peter's Canberra home office, Matt Sheppard joined us in late 2002 to help.

Through 2003, Synop succesfully added hosting, support and consulting revenue streams to smooth out our traditionally lumpy revenue.

Contemplating life after this project onslaught, in April 2003 we started thinking about an AusIndustry R&D START grant application for what eventually became the Sauce project. Work on Sauce began in September 2003, at which point Victor Hadianto also joined Synop.

The Sauce project had 3 components: an aggregation server (TrustedSauce.com), aggregation client (Sauce Reader) and a content server (Sauce Studio). We built the aggregation server using .NET in late 2003 but it was never made public due to lack of resources to support a large search infrastructure and compete with now well-funded players like Technorati. TrustedSauce contained unique features for FOAF discovery, tracing weblog conversations and more.

Sauce Reader was released as a free for personal use product, to support RSS reading and weblog posting. Many 1.x versions were released through 2004, using the .NET platform. To address significant performance concerns, and for better integration with Sauce Studio, Sauce Reader 2.x was built using Delphi and released in May 2005. While technically advanced, Sauce Reader struggled as the RSS reader market exploded through 2004 with hundreds of competitors, free open source versions and increasing integration into web browsers.

Sauce Studio was built to concept stage in house and provided a file system based, XML content management system. It was a lightweight, flexible solution that could be combined with third party security, version control and other tools. Although we had strong belief in this technology, unfortunately we could not identify an appropriate market niche to commercialise the product.

While this aggressive R&D took place we continued growing the Sytadel and consulting aspects to Synop's business. We opened our Canberra office in January, and by late 2004, Synop had grown into a company that could estimate and deliver increasingly complex projects reliably and profitably (e.g. METeOR, AER). During this busy time, Synop doubled in size to 10 people, adding more developers and our first full time business development manager. We finally had a good mix of experience and skill-sets.

Come 2005, Synop was faced with a difficult situation. Despite growing our business development resources and stringing together successful projects, our pipeline of new Sytadel business was running out. Our projects were typically the more high risk and complex customisation jobs requiring a flexible CMS. But, hypercompetition was driving prices lower and making jobs increasingly difficult for Synop to win.

After recognising the inherent conflict of being a small company building large enterprise CMS systems back in 2003, the Sauce project was intended to provide the next phase of Synop's product line and consulting services. However, delays due to hangover projects in 2004 and a failure to identify an immediate and profitable market niche made rapid growth of revenue from this project highly unlikely.

With Synop in a financially healthy, but strategically weak situation we considered a range of alternatives for the future of the business. The only financially viable option appeared to be movement towards a pure consulting services model, building on third party products. Unfortunately, Synop's passion had always been developing new products. So, the sad and difficult decision was made to divest assets and close the business as appropriate.

Every time you add an option to your application, take some advice from Greg Hudson and Joel Spolsky:

1. "Options are expensive", they "increase the required testing load of a program, they increase complexity, they decrease the consistency of the program's behavior, and they intimidate and confuse users."
2. "Pull up the Tools Options dialog box and you will see a history of arguments that the software designers had about the design of the product."
3. "Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision."
4. "It has been said that design is the art of making choices. ... When you are designing, and you try to abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you're probably not doing your job. Someone else will make an easier program that accomplishes the same task with less intrusions, and most users will love it."
5. "The trouble with customizing your environment is that it just doesn't propagate, so it's not even worth the trouble."

Note: Originally posted to my Synop blog on December 18, 2003.

I was blown away late last night by the beauty of the macro images in this June Marie Sobrito gallery.

If only I could take photos like this...

Trawling through thousands of fonts is an important process when creating logos. The right font can make all the difference. I'm still very happy with the Synop logo after all these years, I believe it was timeless.

Found this great, free, Australian utility yesterday for looking through fonts that are in a directory, but not installed. Go get the font thing.

Drinks, pool and a Peking Duck feast. What more could a man want?

Video: 30th birthday.wmv (1.8MB) | 30th birthday (small).wmv (0.8MB)

Lithium ion batteries should be recharged early and often. Running them down to nothing actually decreases their life. For me, this means simply putting my phone on the charger every night.

This is in contrast to the older NiCd batteries, which suffered from the memory effect.

Yesterday was my 30th birthday. Having embraced a mini-crisis a few months back, I was well prepared for the big day and things were drifting along in a fairly normal way.

But it turns out that Bianca had arranged a surprise dinner for me with my parents and close friends. Talk about transforming my birthday into a memorable event! I was shocked, touched and amazed at their ability to lie through my normally fairly inquisitive questions.

The night took another massive lift when I received the O₂ Xda II mini PDA phone that I've been coveting for a couple of months. I have a habit of wanting the latest, most expensive gadgetry but permanently delaying the high price purchase decision. It's for this reason that I've been living off hand-me-down mobile phones since 2001 and still don't own a DVD player (although I'm currently building a HTPC). I think the joy for me of owning a new gadget was clear to everyone. It's a truly beautiful device that will take me months of tinkering to optimise.

This dinner was the second unexpected uplift for me in the last week. After speaking at Open Publish last Thursday, I got a call from Peter who was stuck in Sydney waiting for a delayed flight. After an afternoon at the pub I had a strong sense of closure on Synop, which I'd been unable to achieve through the series of farewells and goodbyes we'd had for other staff. There was something poetic about Synop finishing the way it's current (and longest) phase had started, with Peter and I dreaming up ideas over beers...

Last week was my last official week of Synop employment. After 7 years of blood, sweat and tears it's a significant milestone for me personally. As part of the windup, we've had a set of farewell lunches and parties that were helpful for everyone else but for some reason had never given me a personal sense of closure.

Then, last Thursday, Peter was delayed in Sydney while flying out to Bhutan. Turns out that an impromptu afternoon in the pub together both reminiscing and contemplating the future was exactly what I needed.

As a mental state of mind, shutting down Synop has been weird. We had to actively avoid opportunities and ignore the internal cries to continue doing everything possible to survive. Every past decision is called into question and mumurings of what if are mixed with constant self-reassurance that this was the right decision.

Gradually, I'm getting excited about new ideas again. My creative, ambitious side is waking up and things are starting to look like opportunities rather than overwhelming odds.