Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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This is just so cool!

Microsoft research have come up with some really cool tools for capturing and manipulating whiteboard contents captured using low quality web cams.  My whiteboard is right behind me, (so my web cam points right at it, so it would work just great, but the downloads are MS only.  The best trick is it removes the person writing on the board from the image.  Here are some of the key points:

Other systems use expensive cameras or dedicated electronic whiteboards. The Live Whiteboard system, developed at Microsoft Research by Zhengyou Zhang and Li-wei He, uses whatever whiteboard you already have. It only needs an inexpensive Web cam and some clever software.

Live Whiteboard doesn’t just deliver a video stream of the whiteboard. The software takes out all the shadows and uneven surfaces that come through on a Web cam, and turns the whiteboard into an image that allows viewers to see the whiteboard notes. Through a series of image processing procedures, the originally captured image is first transformed into a rectangular bitmap to correct perspective distortion, and then color-enhanced to increase contrast, saturation, and to provide a clean uniform white background.

In addition, if the remote viewer wants to focus his …

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Office news

Office news. 

A new version of open office is available.  The main improvements are:

Enhancements to the open-source productivity suite include support for PDF and XHTML exports and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to the OpenOffice Web site. The new release, for example, will support forms conversion within Word documents and import text document layouts with more fidelity. OpenOffice 1.1 also boasts enhanced support for mobile device formats such as Palm’s AportisDoc, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

IBM has ideas of its own, taking a thinner approach with its WorkPlace products

A wild card in the Office wars is IBM, which plans to offer server-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality to buyers of its WebSphere portal. At the very least, that could allow large customers to negotiate better Microsoft Office pricing/licensing, observers said. (See IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office.)

The MS Office team are majoring on quality for their next release, does this imply major changes, requiring major testing, or just good practice?

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.

“We’re trying to reduce the iteration of …

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Getting things done

Atlantic published an article about the tools and techniques promoted by David Allen the author of the book Getting things done, which I read a few months back.  I liked the book and gave it a quick review here.  However for a better introduction its a good idea to read the article.  I have repeated a small snipit of it here to get you started.

The doctrine that inspires this devotion starts with the idea that the difference between done and undone tasks is more stress-inducing than most people recognize. In earlier times, Allen says, work was more physically exhausting than it is today. But it produced less anxiety; because people could easily tell what they had to do and whether it had been completed. Either the wood was chopped or it was not. The typical modern day, he says, is a fog of constantly accumulating open-ended obligations, with little barrier between the personal and the professional and few dear signals that you are actually “done.” E-mail pours in. Hallway conversations end with ‘I’ll get back to you.” The cell phone rings. The newspaper tells you about movies you’d like to see, recipes you’d like to try, places …

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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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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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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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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 …