Steve's Seaside Life

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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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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!!

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Tonsillectomy and Open Source.

My youngest daughters, twins, and I have been in hospital for the last two days for their Tonsillectomy and I have taken the opportunity to re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and to start reviewing my past experiences with Open Source with the model it describes.  I have also started to review its progress against Eric Raymond’s predictions and some of the challenges it faces.  As a result I now have an Open Source category in my blog and two daughters without Tonsils.   

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Some memories of Hospital

The operation went very well and the girls recovered very fast and got very bored even faster.  I continue to be somewhat amazed at the lack of organisation in Hospitals, a few examples follow:

 

  1. The welcome letter says to ring the ward before you leave home to check a bed is available,  the letter says you need to arrive at the ward by 7:30, but in fact they don’t staff the ward until about 7:30.  Not many people live that close to the hospital!

  2. When we arrived at the ward the notice above the WHITE phone said use the RED phone to request entry

  3. We arrived at 7:25, bearing in mind the fact that the letter said arrive by 7:30.  However the ward did not open until 7:30

  4. The ward was only half full

  5. In the end they decided to close it and moved us downstairs into another ward

  6. The hospital have out-sourced the TV’s, Phones and Parking.  Most of my interactions with the staff revolved around resolving issues with TV’s, Phones and Parking, and also private medical insurance refunds.

  7. Probably ½ of all nurse and doctor time was spent gathering and/or checking previously …

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More loss of direction around Exchange?

Ed Brill makes a point in one of his posts about the woes of the Exchange Group in Microsoft, here is the guts of it:

It hasn’t been a good few months for the Exchange product team at Microsoft.  First the Outlook team ships an updated connector for Lotus Domino; then they dismantle their own roadmap; and now they are facing internal competition:

“Our first product here is going to be using Outlook that uses the Hotmail e-mail infrastructure. So you don’t need to have an Exchange Server if you’re a small business; you can just use Hotmail and you can have that synchronized experience, as well as the calendaring and everything else with other people who are on Hotmail.”

Sort of confirms the feeling I got when I posted on a simillar topic a while back.  Then I got a bit more encouraged when I posted this.  lets hope for some clarity soon!

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More on the conflict between personal productivity and enterprise IT management.

I wrote about this topic a while back.  Its nice to see some discussion starting up on it for two reasons:

  1. Its really interesting, and a topic that deserves more public debate

  2. I want to do some research on it, and need all the input I can get.  My own blog is sort of work in progress research but I want to spend a month or so giving it some real attention

Check out this post which gets the debate started.  Eric Mack has a real good contribution.

In fact if you are interested in personal productivity in general then the discussions on the Getting Things Done site are of a very high quality.

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WIndows 2003 Server, anywhere access

It’s TechED Europe this week and Microsoft have announced more details of the next release of Windows 2003 Server.  The area of most interest to me is, “anywhere access”, which Neowin reports on. Anywhere access enables users to use terminal services over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC), Outlook over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC) and also file shares from within corporate LANs over port 80 (HTTPs/RPC). 

These are very interesting developments, the WTS capabilities removing one more advantage that Citrix has over Microsoft.  The file share access is interesting, as file share access using WebDAV is already available I can only assume that this is CIFS access tunnelled over HTTPS, this would be a big improvement over WebDAV as it would support more applications, the properties dialog and other features not available today using DAV.  I thought Outlook over HTTPS was already part of Exchange 2003 server, so I am not sure why this is included in a feature list for Windows 2003 server unless its actually provided by the OS or probably IIS rather than Exchange.

These HTTP access mechanisms are useful not just in providing internet access to corporate resources but also for corporates wishing to provide controlled access on their WAN for …