Posts

Why you might not have any feedback for your report

There’s plenty of research to support the critical importance of feedback to the success of professionals, their teams and their leaders. If you’re a manager and you’re actively trying to educate yourself about how to grow and become better at this job, you probably know that the art of giving feedback is both challenging and fundamentally essential to your role. But you might still be struggling to find any meaningful feedback for some of your reports. When you challenge yourself to give them feedback, or when they do the challenging, you find yourself telling them that they’re doing great and they should just keep at it. While reassurance that one is doing well is universally needed, it is no substitute to actionable feedback, and your reports are right not to be content. Something is preventing you from being the boss they wish for: someone who can help them be better aware of their current limitations, and push the envelope. There could be many reasons, but I’d like to sha...
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Debugging a PhoneGap App

At Stix , we've been porting our web client to PhoneGap over the past 4 months. True to the focus principle of the Lean Startup approach, we've been focusing on iOS as the target. While we've had to work at several obstacles, like graphic performance and responsiveness, the biggest challenge by far was debugging. We have gotten used to working with the awesome WebKit Web Inspector (A.K.A Chrome Developer Tools), with conditional breakpoints, DOM and CSS inspection, and the console. Switching to working with an iOS device or simulator, these capabilities were sorely missed. Here is a brief overview of our current debugging approach. Chrome Yes, you can run a PhoneGap app in Chrome. There are few obstacles to overcome, but it's definitely worth it. The first obstacle is that Chrome has a relatively restrictive cross-origin policy. Even the simplest PhoneGap apps will run into problems trying to include js and css files from the file:/// protocol, not to mention trying to...
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Multiple Accounts in a Single Browser

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Most popular web 2.0 services, whether they provide webmail (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo Mail), social networking (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn), microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr), or anything else, use cookies to keep you signed in from visit to visit. This is very convenient, and saves you the trouble of having to log in every time you go to their website. Almost of them fail to support keeping more than one account logged in at time from the same computer. This is somewhat understandable, since they don't want a user to remain logged in while others are using the computer (which is why they have that 'Remember me' checkbox, which you really shouldn't check when logging in from a public computer). However, what about those of us who actually know what we're doing, and want override this behaviour? What if I have more than one Gmail account, or Twitter account, and I want to use them without having to log in again every time I switch accounts? And what if I really do trust my ...
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My Barking Mad Neighbour

An elderly neighbour of ours, recently deceased, used to be very upset with us for keeping a large dog (Daisy's medium, actually). I guess he wasn't very mentally stable, because besides yelling at us how wrong it is to keep such a vicious dog (she never did anything but bark), he would also frequently bark back at her - quite impressively. We were a little concerned at the time that he might do something about it (from complaining to our landlord to trying to hurt Daisy), and somewhat relieved when he moved out (apparently to a home for the elderly). I just now realised that he may have sometime witnessed a dog doing something very vicious, and that it would explain his extreme reaction to being barked at. I suddenly don't dislike him anymore.
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Final (hopefully) Gmail RTL update

I've just received an update from users in Australia that the 'Right-to left editing support' option appears in their settings page. Thank you Google! (finally) I believe this completely and finally resolves the issue, so hopefully I won't be writing about it anymore. I'd just like to say how satisfying it is to see a positive change influenced by the voice of the people . If anyone still has problems with this, drop me a line.
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Gmail RTL update

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I've received several reports from Gmail users that they now have the RTL/LTR buttons in the English interface. So far all reports came from users located in Israel's IP-address space, and I have been unable to see the buttons when using Gmail from the UK (Google Mail as it calls itself there), so my current conclusion is that the visibility of the buttons is dependent on the user's IP address. There is currently no official word from Google on the subject, as far as I can see, so my theory is still to be verified (feel free to share your own experience if it adds to my observations either way). However, if my understanding is correct this should solve the problem for the great majority of relevant users for the great majority of the time (I'm assuming here that IP addresses in Arab/Persian/etc. speaking areas also have access to the buttons). I imagine the limitation stems from the desire not to further complicate Gmail's settings pages. The only thing missing now ...
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Why write a blog?

My CEO has challenged me to explain why I keep a blog. He says he just doesn't get why most people write blogs - where do we get the presumption to think we have something so interesting to say we feel compelled to broadcast it to the world? My first line of defence was that I have no such presumption and I don't mean to 'broadcast' my thoughts to anyone. The blog, I claimed, was just somewhere I can dump text, and then I'm able to refer people to it instead of having to repeat myself. While this is rather true for a couple of posts (writing RTL and my name's spelling), it's a load of bull when it comes to anything else I've written. I've realised long ago that I do have some pretty big presumptions about what I have to say to the world and about how much it would (or should) interest people. I simply want to be heard. To feel that I'm being listened to. I like the attention. It's a very basic human need, so I guess it's no surprise there...
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