One of the perks of working for SynthaSite is great equipment - everyone in the office has a MacBook Pro (15" or 17", depending on your preference.  Or an iMac, if you prefer).  I went for a 15" MBP, since I don't feel like lugging anything bigger around.

There's one downside to the 15" MBP - the 1440x900 screen on it combined with its screen size just doesn't play nice next to the 22" wide-screen monitors we have.  I can't swap between the two in my brain nicely.  Then again, I don't think the 17"'s bigger screen would cut it either - another 22" monitor is probably needed.

So, off to look for what I imagine is a common need that should have an affordable, decent solution.  But doesn't.

There seem to be four options:

• A Matrox DualHead2Go or TripleHead2Go style device - you plug it into your computer, and plug your monitors into it.  It pretends that you've got an extra-wide-screen monitor to your computer.  It's relatively inexpensive, but you can't treat each monitor separately in your OS - at least not in OS X.
• A Villagetronic VTBook style device using PC Card or ExpressCard.  Except that the VTBook device doesn't support hot plug and play of the device on OS X (it works on Windows and OS 9) and it is only available with PC Card and my MBP only has ExpressCard, so some sort of adapter between them would be necessary as well.
• A Magma ExpressBox¹ style device - an ExpressCard to PCI Express convertor.  Add any PCI Express graphics card and you're away (well, any supported by your OS).  Would work for me - except it's ludicrously expensive.
• A USB to DVI device, such as those manufactured by DisplayLink for various companies, or put into docking stations made by various companies.  None of those support OS X yet.

Since I was talking about Phil Barrett and User Experience - Phil mentioned at StarCamp that DIS2008 (Designing Interactive Systems, part of the Computer-Human Interaction interest group of the ACM) was happening in Cape Town and that he was excited about attending it.  It seems it has arrived already, and he's posting about it (well, the first day so far).

One of the StarCamp heroes was Stefano Rivera, who set up and ran the video capture of the presentations from StarCamp.  He has encoded the 12 presentations captured from the two days of StarCamp and they're now now available from archive.org.

I haven't watched the videos yet, but the best picks from memory will probably be:

• David Robinson's presentation on some on some of the deficiencies (as well as mitigating factors and benefits) of eVoting.  How cool to have one of the foremost experts in the world talking about a topic, and Associate Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University to boot;
• Phil Barrett's presentation on User Experience - even though Phil's based here now, he also brought years of international experience at the forefront of his domain to our humble get-together

For the third time in a row, I'm working at a company where I've worked with at least two of my co-workers before.  Jenni and Michael at Jam Warehouse working on KnowledgeTree, Bryn and Shayan at CareerJunction, and Lisa and Tracy now at SynthaSite.

I've mentioned before how each job (with one exception) has brought with it a new addition to my "Dream Team" of people I'd love to work with again - with whom I imagine any challenge is surmountable.

But there are other side effects of working with people again - they act as catalysts to memories of the past (at least, to someone whose memory is as shredded as mine).

The team at SynthaSite is taking a few days to get everyone aligned on what it is we're doing and building and how we expect to work together with each other.  Which, I imagine, can seem a lot like team-building.  It's happening at a small conference centre at the Waterfront in Cape Town.

Before Lisa and I even started working together, we were in the same conference centre doing "actual" "team-building" exercises.  You know, the ones that involve holding hands and silly games like squeezing the next person's hand when your hand is squeezed.  And silly facilitators losing all credibility when they try to suggest that you may have set a world record.

Which then reminded us of other team-building exercises at that company, which then brought on memories of the air-conditioner fights at our offices, and then, at least for me, a lot of thinking of the great and not-so-great times with some great and not-so-great people.

And, then, Tracy mentioned a few things about how great it was at the company where we worked together - at least through my innocent and politically-shielded first-time-job eyes - and the great and not-so-great times and people there.

The great times and people mostly come to mind the quickest and remain the longest (as fortune cookies and self-help books have asserted) - but I suspect that's only after you've been allowed to process the experience in a background process while seemingly having forgot about it all.

I guess that doesn't help if you're actively disliking your current employ, but at least you're likely to look back fondly if you're working with great people - which I guess means you need to look for great people while interviewing potential employers as much as they need to do so when interviewing potential employees.

One of the interesting upcoming challenges at SynthaSite is the migration of parts of the company to San Francisco, while leaving what is currently the bulk of (and, interestingly, the newest additions to) the company behind.

But most of those challenges are around "soft" issues like effective communication and retention of culture, and while I hope to be able to figure out important lessons around that in future, now I mostly want to express my surprise at how little the technology - hardware, software, and network - stands in the way of this move.

When the move was first discussed (admittedly only days after I arrived), I was told I'd probably need to go over to San Francisco for a few weeks to help the rest of the team set up.  And, well, that sounded about right.  As a company that develops software as one of its main functions, and as a company that needs accurate business information for business development, "customers" (ie, people who sign up for free to create their own web sites), and "sales leads" (ie, people who we want to sign up for free to create their own web sites), and as a company that has particular needs in terms of informing and satisfying investors, we need a lot of tools.

Tools for project management, issue management, support, team collaboration, revision control, building, testing, deploying, scheduling, mail, company information and documentation, and plain old file sharing.  And that's just the stuff I use on a daily basis.  Business also has and needs tools.

However, it seems that that estimate of a few weeks was way off.  Being able to work effectively from an office in San Francisco and being able to work effectively from your home in Cape Town and being able to work effectively from wherever you find yourself aren't particularly different. 

Because we've had people who've had to travel a lot, and because we have people who would rather work from home and actually see their kids (whether human or canine) every once in a while, we're almost entirely ready for this change - almost all of our tools are already not in our Cape Town office.

So, while I might like a chance to see the new offices and catch a conference (The Python community conference, PyCon, is in Chicago roughly around the time we'll be setting up offices, after all), there's not much I need beyond a IP-over-KVM system and one (or, at a stretch, two) servers for things that need to be in the office (like a file and backup server), and I can do the whole thing from Cape Town.

This situation is just a fortuitous coincidence - the attitude towards tools at SynthaSite has always seemed refreshing and enlightened.  If it's needed, get it.  If it can be externally managed, do that.  I get the sense that the few tools that aren't externally managed are being eyed carefully every once in a while for potential replacement or a move to a managed solution (much like what we did with our support system).

(Of course, to those from outside South Africa, this may come across as absurd or just obvious.  Having been stuck with poor connectivity in the past, it's never seemed reasonable to rely on external, especially international, services.  And still being stuck with pretty poor connectivity, we can't reasonably host tools in South Africa for our international team mates.)

Working with a passionate team and being on a journey of incremental and occasional radical improvement on a relevant product is a Big Thing in the list of reasons why I love working at SynthaSite.

While I'm not (yet?) a developer on anything visible to the end-user, I am the first people outside of the development group to see what's been developed.

My responsibilities kick off directly after they've committed the code to the repository - I babysit the process of making clean builds and shepherding them onto local and remote staging servers, and finally onto live.  I obviously need to kick the tires on the build after deploying to make sure everything is fine before passing it on to QA and while doing that I get to see the new features.

Of course, there's little by way of surprise - everyone in the company hears about what the rest of the company is doing for the three weeks that make up our iterations.  But there's a difference between hearing about how cool it would be if we had widget toolbars and seeing how it makes the whole process much easier.

There's been some very exciting stuff happening in informal and formal meetings once or twice a week for the past month or so that I think will make the whole process of using SynthaSite more intuitive and effective.  We've just had a formal meeting where some mockups were debuted to most of the company, and it will head off to the design people, then the front-end developers, and then I'll be the first person outside that team to see it again, as we deploy it to staging for further comment.

One problem we're trying to solve is making this process more open - being able to tell people outside of the team - the whole company, our close friends, our business partners, and the general public - what we're working on, and get feedback.  There are obviously a number of factors to be considered when you do this.

One huge advantage of an agile development process is that one can be pretty ruthless about dropping things that can't be done well in time, or that turned out to be a lot more problematic than it is worth.  Saying we're doing X and then not ending up doing X is likely to be worse than never saying you're going to do X.  And it's really not worth losing the gains of the agile development process - nobody wants to be forced to do work rushed and after hours because someone announced something that can't reasonably be achieved.

On the other hand, talking about X has the potential for comments from the userbase and from opinionated other people, which may mean the difference between a somewhat nice feature and a great one.  It may spark interest from third parties via blog posts or getting on a social aggregator.

It's not a simple problem to solve, but hopefully we can find a way to mitigate most of the risk of being open.  Suggestions are, of course, very welcome.

The first Africa Source was in Namibia in early 2004.  The second was in early 2006.  Both experiences really got me excited about open source all over again, and introduced me to people I remain in contact with today.

I guess the regular fix has created an expectation.  After becoming a bit jaded about the state of progress in open source (with a few exceptions, of course) in the country, it seems I need a pick-me-up of the sort of Africa Source.  (The only primarily-open source related event on my calendar in 2007 was UWC's Digital Freedom Exposition, which didn't evoke much excitement from me.  But there was also the iCommons Bring and Braai, which did.)

GeekDinner has been filling some of the gap, and StarCamp helped a little more.  One thing the Source events did was teach me that the surest way to make something happen is to make it happen - do something about it.  So, after StarCamp, I've been thinking of a few events for the coming two years.  Some are probably more likely than others, of course.

Most likely is StarCamp in July-or-so 2008 in Cape Town.  The group that attended StarCamp in December seemed to really enjoy it, and just coming together again for a day or two again will be worth it.  But I think it'll be bigger and better next time round, and I'll be starting preparations for it soon.

Next up is a South African web technology conference.  I want to get the guys who make IOL, Mail and Guardian (including Amatomu), CareerJunction, KnowledgeTree, SynthaSite, Tank, Afrigator, and more together in a room for one to three days (they can leave the room for a few hours to sleep, if they're good).  I want to see them sharing lessons learned and ideas and generally improving the state of the art in the country.  Oh, and there's obviousy the chance and hope that we'll have people from outside SA coming down to attend.

And then there's the possibility of getting international speakers on technologies to come for the conference,  give some public talks in collaboration with GeekDinner, and hopefully to give training before or after the conference.

Although I might not be there, I'm very interested in helping anyone wanting to try replicate the GeekDinner and StarCamp formula to other regions in Africa.  I'll probably be speaking about how to replicate the success we've had with these and transmit some lessons we've learned at a conference in Dakar next month, so there may actually be a good chance... 

The farthest out there is another national, regional, or continent-wide Source event like Africa Source.  Certainly the geographically larger the scope, the larger the requirement for experience with both event organisation and navigating the world of international non-profit funding.

It's too easy to overcompensate to the hyping of a technology by dismissing it entirely.  I wasn't nearly that far along, but I was getting a bit jaded.  Thankfully Lisa (linked to pressure her into posting...) passed along Demystifying Clouds, which is a pretty hype-free discussion of these early stages.

At SynthaSite, we had a good call with Rightscale to hear more about their latest updates, which look pretty useful.  There are a few things we'd need to change to be in a position to use them in particular, but when that's no longer a factor, it will be quite a compelling offer.  I've got a few projects rattling around my head that lend themselves to this sort of thing, so I imagine I'll be trying them out in a personal capacity soon anyway.

I was happy to hear that Translate.org.za has, very deservedly, won an award given by the Pan South African Language Board - for their contribution to multilingualism.

It's too easy for people - especially developers - to judge the state of South Africa's contribution to the Free Software movement in terms of code - projects such as OpenLab, Chisimba, and KnowledgeTree made primarily by South African (and African) developers.  However, Translate.org.za is probably better known than all of these.

Not that Translate.org.za hasn't delivered code - Pootle is one of the two main translation tools used for Free Software projects, and is the one that itself is Free Sofware.  (I keep on meaning to download the latest code and see what I can help out on.  I'm useless, I know.)

I first heard about Translate.org.za from its founder, Dwayne Bailey, while he was first starting work on it while managing the Cape Town office of South African Linux go-to guys Obsidian.  Since then, I've been bumping into Dwayne every few months around South Africa and other bits of Africa (at least Uganda and Namibia, and possibly Kenya too) when he's been doing advocacy and education around localisation, translation, and related topics.  Of course, he's been a lot further afield than that.

Anyway, for all my jadedness about the Free Software situation in South African and Africa, this reminded me about Translate.org.za and that good things are still happening.