supersonic feet

The top-secret project I’ve been working on since moving down to London at the end of October had a still-quite-secret launch late last week and now we’re ready to tell a few more people.

Without further ado, I present Gottabet.com!

Gottabet.com is a social networking site where people exchange challenges and bets on any event they can think of, from “I bet it’ll be a white Christmas this year” to “Nobody can catch a pigeon” (thanks to my brother, Christian for posting those two).
I say a ’still-quite-secret’ launch last week, but only in as much as it was limited to a small number of people. The launch itself was far from secret, held in a pub where we got drunk people to take part in silly bets and dares. The result was a set of photos that I’ve added to flickr under a new Gottabet-specific account. There are some pretty funny pictures (especially the two people racing to fit the most Maltesers in their mouth), so check ‘em out.
On a more techy note of possible interest, the site has been developed entirely in Ruby on Rails by a team of 5 developers (including me, though I’ve worked much more on the HTML/CSS side of things). The site was built in around 6 months, which is even more impressive when you find out that for the first few months there was only one developer (Peter) working on it. The other three (Rich, Ken and Phil) joined within a few weeks of each other around September time and I joined at the very end of October.

The team is completed by (and indeed started with) two Belgians: the founders Wim Vernaeve and Bertrand Bodson. They came up with the idea around a year ago and have gone from simple idea to launched website in that time. There’s a team photo on the ‘about Gottabet.com‘ page. Mini-profiles of each of us will be added soon too.

To get you started, have a look at my latest bet: I bet at least one of the presents I’ve ordered won’t arrive in time. It’s just for peanuts, no money needed

Well, it’s 4:34am and I’m just about to go to bed

Ken and I got back from work quite late (as has been the norm recently, though the still-secret site is very nearly ready to launch now) to find our apartment block’s fire alarm on. Strangely, no-one seemed to have evacuated the building or be taking the slightest interest. There’ve been a couple of false alarms already since we moved in, so we went inside and looked at the alarm (concierge had gone home for the night) - it was the stairway on the 13th floor going off.

There was no fire, but also no sign of anyone coming to turn the alarm off. After watching a bit of TV in our flat, we started looking for a number to call to get the alarm sorted - easier said than done. In the end I called 999 to check it with the fire department who said they’d already been out twice and there wasn’t much to be done without getting in touch with the building management (but no tenants seem to have an emergency number for them).

I told them not to bother coming out again, but shortly after our buzzer went and they had come out - turns out they have to attend every single call no matter what :/

After apologising to the firemen for causing them the hassle and talking to them about an ‘emergency contact number’ that wasn’t being answered, I came back up to the flat. About two minutes later the phone rang - the fire service returning my call to say they’d found a number for the company managing the building. In the silliest turn of events yet, the company wouldn’t send someone out to turn off the alarm unless a resident of the building called them, so I was asked to call. I did and it took seconds for the woman on the phone to agree to send someone out (they just wanted a contact number!).

It was already gone 2am by this point and the phone rang again - the fireman I’d just spoken to down at reception with the 0800 number for the management company. I explained I’d just phoned them and that someone should be coming, so hopefully they wouldn’t have to return tonight.

Luckily (in this instance, but dangerously if there was a real fire), the alarm doesn’t really penetrate into the flat very well at all so as we were about to head for our beds. Oh no you don’t, the phone rings again - management co. calling as I’m now their only resident contact. A contractor’s on the way asap and may call to be let in.

I’ve waited until now and no-one’s shown up. Going on tonight’s luck the buzzer will go shortly after I get into bed, but the one plus point is that while I’ve been waiting I’ve got Parallels running with an openSUSE 10.2 guest OS (i.e. virtualised within Windows XP) on my main desktop PC, with full networking going so I can access the outside world from Linux while being run through Parallels. Ruby on Rails is installed and with that I’m calling it a night (or is it early morning now?).

PS: This post has been written from Linux running within Parallels as a bit of a test. Probably cooler for me doing it than anyone reading

The most useful developer tool for Firefox has just hit it’s first version 1.0 beta and has added some great new features.

Firebug gives you all kinds of javascript and CSS debugging tools that help you track down where errors are coming from. For example, you can inspect a single HTML element and see the CSS that’s being applied to it, as well as where that CSS is coming from (filename and line number). With 1.0 beta it even shows you any CSS that would have been applied, but is getting overridden by other style definitions.

If you develop websites, you need this plugin.