For an upcoming project at TOPP, we’re talking about setting up an optional scope contract [PDF] — where we specify the time, cost and quality, but leave the actual scope of work open.  This approach has many advantages, which I’ll just quote from Beck & Cleal’s document: Customers can change their ...

For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player.   I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls.  So, I just traced the default sprites in Il...

Today, Theo took his first ever bite of solid food.  I get all welled up looking at pictures of him while I’m at work. Continue reading

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning. A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and… Cont...

I can’t say enough about ScribeFire.  It’s a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client.  Here are just a few reasons why it’s awesome: You’re blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open.  This comes in really handy w...

Today’s post on Infrastructurist about the D-Train Murder had a line that caught my eye: Cramming the population of a city like New York into a maze of underground cars creates a forced melting pot that’s a perfect breeding ground for class and race divisions. There’s no question that the NYC subway...

During Theo’s morning nap today, I updated this blog’s theme.   I’m going to attempt to start using the blog more regulalry, as sort of an “open lab notebook,” and (in the true spirit of procrastination) figured I’d start by updating the theme. So here it is; I’ve ditched by previous Undesign for mo...

If you use Melkjug as a Fluid app, like I do, then you’ll love this: (Melkjug fluid icon) Continue reading

I’ve been attending a lot of events lately, and one thing that keeps coming up for me is that the multi-day conference / workshop format is a bit broken. My main beef: by day two (or god forbid, day three) the audience has petered out and whatever energy was there on day one has been… Continue readi...

Today, I got my first dose of Twitter smack down, as my account was suspended along with a bunch of others following yesterday’s Gov 2.0 Expo.  Ouch!  Well, at least I’m in good company. As one of the commenters on the Tech Crunch article noted, a situation like this is definitely a bit of a… Contin...

When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I started mocking up a zippy drag-n-drop front end for Trac, based on the snappy UI of tools like Things (working title is FasTrac).  Then, bam! Bitten by a weird, seems-like-a-bug w/ jQuery UI drag and drop.  It appears that droppables aren’t discoverable by d...

Introducing the newest member of the clan: Theo.  It’s now been nearly two weeks since Theo joined us, and it’s been pretty amazing (and tiring) thus far.  I’ve been intentionally keeping him off of the public intertubes, but figured one cute “hello, world” shot was safe enough.  I am enjoying every...

A few weeks ago, I created a small web app for scheduling project teams at TOPP Labs.  At any given time, we’ve got anywhere between 10 and 20 active projects, so keeping track of it all is difficult, and planning ahead requires a good clear overview of everything that’s happening. Why create someth...

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re… Cont...

At work today, we are exploring the process of drawing routes on a map, thinking ahead to a few upcoming projects involving bike planning.  So Sonali set up a Google MyMap and asked a few of us to mark our routes to work.  In a nutshell, it was basically a flop, with two out of… Continue reading

Hot off the presses: Backpack TOC Greasemonkey script. Continue reading

I spent most of this morning looking back through old posts about the Chandler Project and OSAF.  I’ve thought about this a lot, due to the many parallels with my work at The Open Planning Project.  For newcomers, those parallels are: Massive funding from a visionary with a dream (in OSAF’s case, Mi...

For a recent personal project (I won’t say which since that would defeat the purpose), I was in need of a new kind of authentication. My wife and I wanted to create a website where we could post photos and news for our family and friends, while keeping that information off of the broader intertubes....

Even though I shouldn’t own a car, I do, and as every car owner in NYC knows, dealing with alternate-side parking is a hassle. That, combined with my recent itch to write a small mobile app, has lead me to the following idea:  the “Dude, Where’s My Car?” app for mobile.   Here’s what it will… Contin...