We Are Team Rubber

We’re very proud of our latest seeding project, ‘Creature Discomforts’ because:

1) We’re working with great people; MCM Net, Leonard Cheshire Disability and Aardman.

2) The games are ace!

3) It’s all part of a great cause.

4) We like animals.

Seeding kicked off this week, and we’re expecting a great response. Check out the first game in the four part series, ‘Flyzzz’ - featuring Callum The Chameleon…and the Rubber Republic blog for a more detailed blurb about this campaign.

We at Team Rubber are very proud of our latest effort, an online consultation for the BBC Trust, deployed with our new, custom-built online consultation software, part of Opinion Suite. Expect a lot more Opinion Suite Shipping News in the next few months!

The BBC Your Say consultation lives at http://www.bbcyoursay.co.uk. Feel free to participate if you have views on the BBC’s radio, tv and web content for younger audiences.

There is a more detailed post on the Delib blog. We were also amused to hear Chris Moyles fill in the survey on his radio show.

Well done to everyone involved: Alex, Alan, Andy, Ant, Ben, Heather, Gez, Jess, Laura, Michaela, Owen, Wilkes and myself!

Interesting: survey results suggest 85% of US adults think companies should interact with customers through social media sites.

This makes good sense to me. We try to cut through web 2.0 hype to find what works for our clients and end users, and we think social media works well.

Our opinion research unit has developed tools like Opinion Tracker to find out what people say in the places where conversations happen online.

Meanwhile our advertising campaigns are all designed to work brilliantly with social media, using widgets sharing and bookmarking tools.

If you’re looking for more background, we’re finding that books like the Cluetrain Manifesto are increasingly relevant (despite Cluetrain being nearly ten years old). In fact, we’ve found it so useful on conversations that we’ve sent copies to lots of friends in our twice-yearly ‘book club’ mailing. If you got a copy, hope you enjoyed it (and passed it on!).

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More survey coverage here

Hey all!

JessG here - n00b blogger for the TeamRubber blog. Just thought I’d put up a little note about the TeamRubber Korean Lazer Ball experience from last Sunday @ Igfest. Lovely Helen told us all about this a few weeks back and we all wanted to join in with gusto. And join in we did!

Alex: Yeah!

After much planning (not!) we decided that uniforms might be a good idea, as there was a prize for the best costumes for the KLB tournament. So we spent some time on Thursday/Friday coming up with some concepts and I got to work on ‘em over the weekend - if you ask me, I think they look rather spiffy:

The team was made up of myself, Matt Wilkes, Ant George, Alex Pitkin and Heather Craggs (who has been on maternity leave recently, so good on her for joining in, even with the little one in tow!) and we rocked peoples socks - there was even a cheering section for “TeamRubber” which spurred us on, we thought, towards victory.

But it wasn’t meant to be; unfortunately, we didn’t win :(. We were beaten 22-26 - the “winning” team came up from behind in the last like 10 seconds. But we did win the award for best costume XD! Check it out:

How pretty :D.

Well, I don’t have much more to say for now, so I’ll leave you with some more shots from the day:

Yeah! Well done team ^_^

I’d like to say, it’s good to be back as a Rubber office regular, rather than a sporadic part-timer. As a musical bunch - with music tastes and itunes playlists as slick as crows ankles - I duly dedicate this tasty number to you all.

If one were to delete data and wanted to bring it back to prevent impending
catastrophe. Follow the method below to mount an older version of the database and copy changes to the current.


$ ./bin/zopectl debug # enter debug mode

>>> import ZODB.DB

>>> import ZODB.FileStorage

>>> from ZODB.TimeStamp import TimeStamp

>>> import cPickle

>>> date_tuple = (2008,9,23,14,10) # date when data was safe

>>> special_date = TimeStamp(*date_tuple) # make date into special format

>>> filename = ‘/home/zope/prod1/zeo/var/Data.fs’ # system path to Data.fs

>>> storage = ZODB.FileStorage.FileStorage(filename, read_only=1, stop=`special_date`)

>>> DB = ZODB.DB(storage) # mount database

>>> conn = DB.open() # open database

>>> root = conn.root()['Application']

>>> old_data = root.path.to.zope_object # old data 

>>> new_data = app.path.to.zope_object # new data

>>> new_data.attribute_name = cPickle.loads(cPickle.dumps(old_data.attribute_name)) # copy old data into new 

>>> ZODB.Transaction.get_transaction().commit()



This is for Zope 2.7, be aware the imports are in slightly different in 2.8+

A whole load of maps, diagrams and pointless images depicting social media and the nature of the internet do crop up nowadays (in the hunt of being the next del.icio.us bookmarking phenomena)  –  but this is my favourite by far:

Source: Information Architects

Well, what a weekend! I spent Friday chasing people over the city dressed in what can only be described as an eclectic combination of clothing, however, my sports shoes let me down - I tried to catch a group of people and as I ran to catch one of them I went hurtling across the shiny concrete floor by the amphitheater, but ever the professional I told the people I was chasing to carry on regardless leaving me to pick myself up, with only a slightly bruised ego as testament to my accident.

Saturday was non-stop for all the volunteers who came down to help. Katrina came down and helped out at the iglounge where all games started from, here she got chatting to the authors of a game a few of us are playing in the office which is called Call and Return, she also helped out at funfed and managed to blag a place on a team for the ‘Rainbow Rain’ a massive paint fight that happened on Castle Park….I think her team might have won…….

I played the last game of Saturday night and yet again I found myself being a ‘baddie’ (I was a catcher the night before and a catcher again on Saturday) The game Sneaks and Blaggers is held in a multistory carpark, roughly based on snakes and ladders, all the sneaks have to find a complete set of coloured cards without being caught by the two blaggers who have bells around their ankles to warn the sneaks of their wear abouts. The game was voted as the audience’s favourite at the Igawards and was lots of fun to play as a sneak or a blagger.

Sunday was a wonderful end to a great weekend, a lot of the volunteers (including myself and Kat) went out and burnt the candle at both ends on Saturday night but it didn’t affect our enthusiasm on Sunday, a lot of the games on Sunday were family orientated and so where heaps of fun and we were all about to muck in and get involved. The most notable of the day was Korean Lazer Ball, which I unfortunately missed due to other commitments but I am assured will be blogged about by one of the Team Rubber Team members.

My mind is still buzzing from the weekend, the chance to be involved in such an interesting festival has given me insight into alternative ways in which to use our environment and ways to have fun that are away from a screen, keyboard or mouse. It has also taught me how kind and enthusiastic people can be when they are involved in a project that they feel positive about and how this energy is transfered to people who attend the event……Thanks you to everyone who was involved in any capasity at all.

Happy Gaming

x

Another of my ideas successfully realised using 2 packets of biscuits. It just goes to show - if ideas don’t include biscuits they need a rethink. If anyone has been inspired to do their own, be careful in the planning stage as in hindsight covering my bedsheets with crumbs late at night was not ideal.

So to provoke the age old debate - ‘Which is better Custard Creams or Bourbons?’

I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s got fed right up with having a functional plone test that doesn’t quite work right.  PDB to the rescue, you’d think, but you end up with errors like

(Pdb) admin.open("http://nohost/plone/@@")
*** HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error

Well, thanks Python.  That’s grand.  I used to have lots of fun with a testbrowser visiting http://nohost/plone/error_log/manage_main and poring through HTML.  Not ideal.

So I’ve automated it, introducing teamrubber.pdberrorlog

The above example would then become:

(Pdb) import teamrubber.pdberrorlog
(Pdb) admin.open("http://nohost/plone/@@")
*** HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error
(Pdb) errorlog
Error: 1221836644.810.255510740468 (TypeError : 'unicode' object is not callable)
(Pdb) errorlog 1221836644.810.255510740468
Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 106, in publish
Module ZPublisher.BaseRequest, line 327, in traverse
Module Products.Five.traversable, line 118, in __bobo_traverse__
Module zope.app.traversing.adapters, line 124, in traverse
Module zope.app.traversing.adapters, line 163, in traversePathElement
Module zope.app.traversing.namespace, line 121, in namespaceLookup
Module zope.app.traversing.namespace, line 363, in traverse
Module zope.component, line 165, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.component.site, line 75, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.interface.adapter, line 475, in queryMultiAdapter
TypeError: 'unicode' object is not callable

It’s quite crude, but hopefully it will be useful to people.