Steve's Seaside Life

Daily Archive: July 25, 2004

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My Home Office

In another post I am going to talk a bit about why I think multiple monitors are really important, but first I want to introduce you to my home office, so you can see my personal working practice in its full context.  First things first:

  1. Everything I need is within arms reach

  2. I try to scan all my paper, and its all there in PaperPort, see below

  3. I have two desks, a computer desk where I have my three monitors, and drive all my clients and servers from one keyboard and mouse and a layout, reading etc desk where I have space to organise.  The kids use this desk at night if I am happy to be disrupted a bit.

  4. I have a web cam on top of my primary display, again more on that later

So what does it all look like.  First the nerve centre:

One large desk with three monitors and one keyboard and mouse

The Main display, a 19″ flat screen running @ 1280*1024.  This is where I do all of my reading and writing.  Its a fab display very bright and crystal clear.  Its DVI connected to my main server, which runs Windows 2003 …

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Some background on NewsGator and Syndication

Some background on NewsGator and Syndication. 

This post by Brad Feld, a Venture Capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator is useful if you too have invested in a copy and want to understand a bit about where the tool is going.  But its also interesting if like me you want to understand a bit about syndication in general and the market opportunity as investors see it.  I recently posted on how I see the market from a technical perspective for behind the firewall corporate environments, in discussion with NewsGator this market is certainly in their plans.

Greg adds a bit more detail in his blog

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Yet More on PowerPoint

More PowerPoint posts continue to catch my eye.  The first is from Brad Fled, a venture capitalist who has recently invested in NewsGator,  Brad writes:

I’ve looked at thousands (tens of thousands?) presentations pitching new businesses since the mid 1990’s. The vast majority of them suck. Unfortunately, it’s not Powerpoint’s fault (no – it wouldn’t be better if Freelance has become the standard).

Brad points us to:

 Edward Tufte – a master of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, thinks Powerpoint is evil and corrupts absolutely

He also gives us a good outline presentation for pitching to a VC, which is definately worth checking out if you ever have the need.  In fact its a good start if you need to make a pitch for any kind of investment.

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The experience trap

David Chappell, a professional speaker, who often works for Microsoft has written a very interesting little article on the subject of the experience trap.  In essence, as you get more experienced, especially in IT, that experience can cause you problems as well as give you an advantage.  He recalls discussions with computer science professors who are debating which programming language a person should be taught.  Here is an extract in his own words:

The difficulties faced by teachers of computer science provide one example of the problems experience can cause. But the challenge certainly isn’t limited to professors—we’re all in danger. And since the experience trap isn’t much of a problem at the beginning of a career, it can sneak up on you. When you’re twenty five, you don’t rely much on experience because you don’t have any. When you’re forty five, however, it’s tempting to rely too much on experience. The truth is that experience is useful only if the future is like the past. In software, what will be important next year is often very, very different from what was important last year. Realizing that a significant part of our hard-won knowledge becomes valueless every year is …

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Extreme Programming.

Extreme Programming. 

The spoke has a short post on extreme programming.  Its been a long time since I have been a real programmer, and was probably never an extreme one by any definition, however I have managed my share of development projects and a few things appealed to me in this report.

 

Developer bids for work: developers in the team bid for tasks. Lowest bid wins and gets the job. 


This is a very cool motivational tool, if you have the right team and culture.

Work in pairs

This is a new one on me, although I have done some of my best work when working in pairs I have never seen it formally laid out like this as part of a methodology.  The overhead cost is considerable at first glance; it would be interesting to see the overall effect on lifecycle cost though.

Work in pairs: but the most experienced one does not drive the keyboard. He/she watches the other one and makes comments

Lies: two developers will be more candid about the prospects for the development. They are also better able to negotiate deadlines and features and less inclined to lie about the situation.

Blame: it …

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More on PowerPoint

Powerpoint seems to be cropping up all over in my blogs at the moment.  I am a big user of PowerPoint.  I recently checked my local machine using X1 and I have 669 PP files at the moment.  Anyway I was pleased to come across this post by Michael Hyatt...

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Update on X1

As I have mentioned before I use X1 for all of my local system searching, a friend of mine asked how I was getting on with it, he is using Blinkx.  So here is an update. I am running X1 on Windows 2003 Server, its not supported but it seems...

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Workspace design

One of my favourite topics just started to get an airing on the web, Work Space design.  It’s been an interest of mine ever since I can remember, it’s the frustrated Architect in me, (I was never good enough at art to take it at University).  Anyway what really bugs me about the topic is my belief that it has a huge impact on individual and team effectiveness, but receives very little focus and even less investment by many companies.  Even companies that reap huge profits from their consultants tend not to invest in their productivity.  I talked about this in a previous post, but mainly from an IT SW perspective. 

Since I have been working from home I have invested quite heavily in my own work environment and I certainly notice a huge improvement in my productivity.  The biggest improvement comes from two large monitors driven from the same desktop PC, supplemented by a management console that I use to monitor my lab and anything else that I need to check frequently.  I also have a dedicated portable that I can just pick up and carry away whenever I need to move around the house, I use a …

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Microsoft: Linux isn’t cheaper

Yet another Linux isn’t cheaper story from Microsoft.  I don’t get the focus on cost all of the time.  To me cost is a small part of the story.  The Linux/Microsoft debate needs to consider the following in this order, (client side):

  1. The application portfolio that needs to be delivered to the client device.  In most enterprises there will be hundreds of client applications, many of these won’t be deliverable on Linux even using emulation.

  2. Whether you believe in Microsoft’s value proposition.  Only Microsoft has the ‘integrated innovation’ value proposition that links client, office tools, infrastructure services and application services.  If you buy into that value proposition then you are probably going to continue to use office and Windows.  My view right now is that MS is doing a pretty poor job of telling us what that value proposition is in their next generation products,  I think because they are still figuring out how to move forward when they are dragging such a legacy behind them

  3. Whether the user-base can be segmented.  Its likely in every enterprise that some users will be best suited to Windows Portables, some Windows Desktops, some Linux and some thin client technologies or one sort …

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It just works!

Great little piece of writing by Scott about the fact that some stuff just does not work easily enough and how people will seek out maybe pretty complex ways of doing things just to be confident that it will work first time every time.  This is right up my street, I really like things that ‘Just work’ and MS and the Linux community need to really focus on that effortless simplicity.  For inspiration I look at the Nokia phone UI, (6310i in my case), and the Blackberry which I think is inspirational from a UI design standpoint and reliability standpoint.  How much of what we use in IT every day from any supplier would pass the test, effortless, reliable, intuitive etc and to what extent are these attributes sacrificed for fancy features, customizability etc.

One of the most impressive things about Scott’s post?  He wrote it all on his Tablet PC using the new input panel in SP2, his experience ‘it just worked’, that was my experience to with the alpha, except in Lotus Notes which kept crashing, so I had to uninstall it!!