Steve's Seaside Life

Monthly Archive: August 2004

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Daily builds.

Another link to Joel this time on daily builds another of my favorite techniques.  Many people rebel against the idea, especially project managers who like to see release schedules and milestones.  There is nothing in the daily build concept that contradicts good project management process however, its just that the progress towards milestones is tested daily, so that the chance of suprises are reduced and the dependency on key individuals is reduced.  Here is a snipit but please read the whole article if you develop and IT system, and take note that the concept can be applied to all types of development not just software.  I used the daily build concept on one of my projects and I think it was a great success.

Here are some of the many benefits of daily builds:

  1. When a bug is fixed, testers get the new version quickly and can retest to see if the bug was really fixed.

  2. Developers can feel more secure that a change they made isn’t going to break any of the 1024 versions of the system that get produced, without actually having an OS/2 box on their desk to test on.

  3. Developers who check in their changes right …

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AOSD Update.

This is another of my regular updates on how I am progressing/coping with Adult Onset Stills Disease.  The following graph gives you an overview of symptoms:

 

 

Here are the highlights:

 

  1. For most of this period I have been on 20MG of Prednisolone

  2. I have continued to have good and bad days, more bad than good until recently

  3. Then I had a period of 18 good days, the longest period of good health for 7 months, I put this down to the Steroids finally kicking in.  Of course during this time the sleeplessness got worse so I was still pretty tired, but when there is less pain life seems so much better!

  4. I went to see my specialist last week he said given the fact that I am feeling much better I need to cut the Prednisolone to 10MG and then drop it by 1MG per week.  As I have now been on Prednisolone for well over a year I needed a bone scan as well

  5. I had the bone scan and it reveals that there is some cause for concern, but it not too bad at the moment.  I was pretty disappointed by this …

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Blackberry and Personal Productivity.

I have recently given up my Blackberry for economic reasons, and spent the money I saved on an IPAQ which I convinced myself would be more, “life enhancing”,  after a month I think I made the right decision but I do miss my Blackberry a lot and still feel it would add a lot of value to my work/home life if I still had it.  A recent report brings the issue into clear focus:

Research In Motion has today published the results of a survey it commissioned with Ipsos Reid into the benefits of using BlackBerry handhelds. Among the report’s conclusions is the compelling statistic that employers recuperate on average 188 working hours a year, or more than a working month(*1) for every member of staff they provide with a BlackBerry handheld. Employees also benefit from the improved productivity enabled by BlackBerry, salvaging on average more than 108 hours a year in personal time. This is the equivalent to more than thirteen days extra holiday a year (*2).

A 2004 DTI survey highlighted that 87% of employees would like more time to spend with friends and family and that nearly four in ten adults (38%) between the ages of 35 …

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Perfection – or good enough.

Every month or so someone tells me my work is too detailed, or that I am a perfectionist.  Ironically every week or so someone also tells me that I have not covered some topic or other in sufficient detail.  However the, “its too detailed”, or “too complex”, audience tends to be the one that pays the bills so they are more important to listen to.  I came across this nice little post on the subject, and I have extracted a snip from it here:

One important lesson I’ve learned about designing software is that sometimes it pays to smother one’s perfectionist engineer instincts and be less ambitious about the problems one is trying to solve. Put more succintly, a technology doesn’t have to solve every problem just enough problems to be useful. Two examples come to mind which hammered this home to me; Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and collaborative filtering which sites like Amazon use.

However I am not a person who likes to compromise so I am gradually working towards a way of solving this problem, and its pretty simple and obvious.  Stop writing documents and start writing web sites.  This post is an example, (although not a …

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Chocolat

A fine book, not in my view quite as good as Blackberry Wine, but then I read them in the wrong order.  Still a very enjoyable read, very nicely crafted, perhaps a little too short as I would have liked to see the characters developed a little more.  They were very interesting characters and I was left wanting to understand them a bit more.

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Outlook – Domino Connecter.

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

 

  1. I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email

  2. My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)

  3. I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)

  4. Graham said it works fine for him

 

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort.  I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it!  Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

 

  1. Synchronisation is painfully slow

  2. It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like

  3. It affects …

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Inspired by interest in my humble office ….

Inspired by interest in my humble office …. 

There are two discussion threads active on the GTD forum on Offices.  The first is asking people about their home offices and I have replied to this with some links to my blog.  Inspired by the interest people seem to have I have updated some of the pictures and added a couple of new ones.  Of particular note is my new baby spider phone, (brand new and 2/3 off retail price off eBay!):

Then Eric Mack got into the act with this “not so tidy” desk post, and another post that links to his blog:

I cope with this by having a designated untidy area:

My wife and kids also have a desk each, and share this one in my office, which helps keep them away from mine:

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Superb article about the meaning of Open.

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what’s important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards.  he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance.  He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

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Jenny and I go to the Cinema.

I had promised Jenny a “1 to 1” trip to the cinema which is always really difficult to organise as the other kids always want to come along as well.  So I chose a movie that I thought would only appeal to Jen, “13 going on 30”,  I was not really looking forward to the film, but was really looking forward to the time with Jen.  As it turned out we both really enjoyed the film, and not for different reasons.  The film synopsis follows:

Jennifer Garner (Daredevil, TV’s “Alias”) and Mark Ruffalo (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) star in this hilarious flash-forward romance about a pre-teen girl who goes from geek to glamorous. With the help of some magic wishing dust, 13 year-old Jenna Rink (Garner) becomes 30 and gorgeous overnight, with everything she ever wanted, except for her best friend Matt (Ruffalo). Now, this grown woman must create some magic of her own to help the little girl inside find the true love she left behind.

Whilist its true that there was a romantic theme to the film, I think what Jen and I liked most was that the girl re-invented the woman, sort of as follows:…