Over the falls

The guys at Surity , who are running our week long PM workshop have some excellent skills and resources when it comes to project mangement. (don't let their appalling website fool you. It's true - the blink tag lives!) I've learned a whole bunch of really valuable stuff, and it's made me re-consider what I think the really important elements in project management are. So, I'm going to blat them out here. Incoming! Build a Great Team I still think that there is more to be gained from optimizing the team rather than the process. That idea intrigues me - maybe because you can't fill in a template for a great team...most of the focus at this workshop has been around contractors and software deployment management - where you don't get to pick the team, and you have to deal with whoever the customer sends. In an ISV software project , you can choose the team that you want to run a project. It sounds totally obvious, but If you want great software, this is the si...

Stilly is having trouble keeping up with his blog feeds. I was having the same problem, but now I've got it down to under half an hour. (Around 300 posts a day) My suggestion - use onfolio and create a newspaper with all your feeds, skim through them and click the reading tray icon for stuff that looks vaguely interesting, and mark the rest as read. Then browse the reading tray at your leisure. Oh, and if you want to read some real death by blog posts, subscribe to the blog of death. Unfortunately, it tends to be somewhat depressing...

Spent the day in a project mangement workshop with the aim of refining and improving our PM methodologies. I've never been in a room with so many project mangers before - Admittedly I was the only one with a software development background - the rest of the guys are all your more standard IT deployment/change mangement folk. Some idle thoughts: Maybe this PM stuff is one great big marketing beanie that you pull over the head of prospective customers and yell "Look How Professional I am!" Project Managers by their very nature tend to be control freaks. Just a few weeks ago I was making a joke about old school managment, where you make a plan and nobody believes it except for you, and then everybody lies to you so you can tick boxes on a schedule that became irrelevant as soon as you wrote it. I think most waterfall development methodologies suffer from this problem. But, the agile methodologies suffer from a fuzzy level of schedule that means you can't plan very far ...

The friendly folk over at Apple developer relations lent us a G5 for our project. (Our code looks like it will run on pretty much any platform, and now we know it will run on OSX...) Really, the amount of developer drool in my cubicle is obscene. And it's not at all unfounded. It sure is a fancy machine. And the 20" cinema display is simply the best one I've ever seen. If I had 7,000 spare dollars I'd buy one... At work we use TRIM for tracking bugs - It's super extensible, and has all the features available in any bug tracker(plus a gazillion more) . But, the amount of legacy theory and added complexity made me investigate what other alternatives are available. BugTracker.NET is a great, open source variant that looks to me to be heavily inspired by FogBugz. If you need a quick free windows bug tracker - or even if you're considering FogBugz - you should check it out. Given that Joel Spolsky seems to be building some kind of developer nirvana over there ...

Had to post this picture of me and my brother clowning around on the headland: Ruby's caption was better: "Gordon and Graeme Practice for the K-Mart Catalogue"

If you were wondering what's on TV in California, check out Google video . Apparently they're indexing the supetext captions that are transmitted in the black bits of our TV channels. Man - those guys are developing a finely tuned indexing radar. If there's content anywhere, (even flying through the atmosphere!) -seems they'll find a way to index it. This makes me speculate on the future of companies that have profited for years by providing structured storage (FileNET,Documentum, OpenText, TOWER Software) etc. I mean, when you can triumphantly return with exactly what you wanted from a big pile of random stuff, do you really need to structure it properly? Let's use the following half-baked analogy: My study is full of vaguely important pieces of paper. Becuase deep down I hate all of them, I tend to treat them fairly carelessly. This means I generally just chuck them through the study door in order to minimize the amount of time I have to spend thinking about them....

In an effort to replace our previously massacred chickens, I built a new chook house on the weekend. I bought a new angle grinder for the princely sum of 19 dollars, and got a little carried away... Seriously, who would make an angle grinder for 19 dollars? (If I made one, I'd charge you a fortune for it...) anyway, lots of loud sparky fun. My god you get dirty when you brush five years of crusted on chook poo into a fine dust haze... I thought I had a great tan until I started to sweat.. and my nose cleared.... As yet no word from Stilly -I'm afeared that Microsoft may indeed have lured him to his doom. Simon has some interesting Newspaper Clippings that may shed some light on his blogging silence.

EW! My mouse is covered in tomato sauce. Wireless mouses are a bad, bad thing. If this mouse had a cable, nobody would've put it on a plate of tomato sauce. It does explain it's slow, gooey movement however. That's one problem solved. Rory wants to visit. I wonder if I can convince TOWER to bring him out for our next conference? A lunatic in a bunny suit can only be good for business. My good friend Stilly (Stillbert as he's affectionately known) is off to Seattle to see if he can get "a job" at Microsoft. (My other friend, Simon thinks that it's really part of a grand plan to collect all the linux hackers and detonate them . ) For some strange reason I had this vision of a giant penguin dancing down Microsoft Way playing a pan pipe, with a crowd of pasty linux nerds in a conga line bhind him... "Yeah - we saw this cool Tux , and like we followed him coz he was dancing down the road in front of the campus at Microsoft." And then ...

I really really really want one of these . And isn't that just the greatest bit of flash marketing you've seen for a while? Or am I just such a nintendo fanboy that I think it's all good regardless...

Thinking about this previous post led me to question how easy it is to fool people. Following the architecture astronaut mentality this led me to abstract all human behaviour thus: Seems to my potty head that everything that people work on can be summed up in these two things - Policy and Marketing. Policy is what people do, what they will do and so on - Marketing is how they will percieve what gets done. Now, we all know that perception is easier to manipulate than reality - it's much easier for me to convince you that I had a wee on the top of Mount Kocsziusco than to actually do it. Add to this the generalisation that all people are fundamentally lazy. So they often tend to work more on perception than reality. Which is why it's occasionally easy to fool people. In my line of work, I work with a bunch of engineers. I like engineers. One of the things I like about them is that they don't do bullshit. They only care about what really gets done. (Often this ma...

Miles Davis had an album called MilesTones . I always thought that was pretty cool. We finally hit our first major milestone at work yesterday - the M1 milestone was based around getting an established codebase and tools completed - test and communications plans and a production environment along with processes for promotion. Here's me thinking that the development methodology we're using is all fancy pants and unique, (and that maybe one day I could write a book about it and retire to Barbados), when some irritating JoS Poster mentioned something called SCRUM . SCRUM is pretty much the development methodology we're following on Project Tremble. We've got all the good bits of XP, the good bits from MSF, and none of the silliness. We're having daily 10 minute meetings instead of a weekly breifing. We're pretty much answering the three SCRUM questions daily (although not so formally). The thing that really doesn't sit quite well with me about these ag...

What a rotten few days. First my car's rear window was smashed. Apparently some complete prick ( and I use those words with all the venom and vitriol with which they were designed) backed into my car at about 2 AM, smashed my window and then drove away. At least , that's the best theory I can come up with. The car had one of those ugly rear window louvres, so I'm assuming it was an accident and not an act of mindless vandalism (there was no rock or other projectile in the car) . That's not the dodgey bit though (although it is pretty lame in itself) The dodgey bit is that the complete prick then decided to move my bin (it was bin night) and place it next to my car to frame the bin man for the crime! When I first came out in the morning I assumed that the giant clumsy bin robot atached to the garbage truck had broken my car. Careful inspection showed me that the bin hadn't been collected yet, and was also far too short to reach my window. So thanks fellah,(or...

I made a resolution today. One that I plan to keep for the rest of my life. Ready? Here Goes.... I will never, ever again watch the Channel Ten News as long as I live. I know that's bold, but there you go. I can not believe the level of stoopid "News-Tainment" total , utter toilet clippings they pass off as journalism. And it dawned on me the other night as I was watching something really important about Brad and Jennifer, that I don't actually have to watch this crap! I can turn it off! so now, everytime I hear their serious news theme, I'm going to turn the TV off, or walk out. Save money on all that spat out beer. And cleaning. I was thinking of writing some software that did speech recognition on the newsreader, and then everytime there was an adjective blowout , automatically e-mailed a complaint to the station - you know stuff like " A Heart-Breaking Decision for a Lonely Panda", "A Horrifying , Barbaric Act of Cruelty to handbags...

You know those days when you should really stay in bed? Well, yesterday was one of those days. I came in to work, made a task list, failed to fulfill any of the things on the list, and then inadvertently managed to configure our dev server so that nobody could check anything in or out. After working back until I finally figured out the stupid Joy of File Permissions, I managed to restore things to the previous level of functionality and went home - not having made anything better, but having made utterly no difference. I broke something, spent the rest of the day making it unbroken and then left. Amazing! Remember that just because somebody is busy doesn't mean that they are actually adding any value! Reminds me of my first job as an APS1 in the defence department. I was a finance clerk. I really, really didn't want to be a finance clerk. I thought that was really dull. The reason I had decided that was because it was really dull. Anyway, I discovered that Office 97 had Visu...

Had a moderate amount of fun playing with Parasoft's.Test today - it generates N-Unit tests from your .NET code. The tests it generates aren't super clever - it won't be able to tell what your functions actually supposed to do (as Simon said - "If it can do that why doesn't it just write the code for you already!") - but it does do a huge amount of testing of types and looking for null exceptions etc. I fed it a pretty small project (12 Classes) and it produced about 1630 various tests - 400 of which failed... I figure that if we fix them, we've got better code right? It also provides stubs for you to fill in based around your business function. I think it's worth spending some more time with it. Ooh - Picasa V2 is out! Go and get it now . If you have a digital camera and a Windows PC - you really, really need this program. It's wonderfully designed with just the right functions to manage all your digital photographs, without confusing you w...

Noodling away at Jack Johnson's Posters trying to figure out how he plays the intro. Jack reminds me of Jimi sometimes. In that they both string a beautiful melodic selection of notes that get together underneath a lyric. You know Jimi's Angel? - like those pretty notes after he sings "Came down from heaven yesterday.. ". Anyways - enough musical wankery. My arms are still aching from surfing all weekend with Alex and Ian. Got a few nice waves on the Saturday Evening - Sunday was a bit lame. Still, lots of paddling makes your arms sore - regardless of the waves. I can't believe the number of people at the South Coast these days. One guy joked that if you got a decent run-up on the headland, you could get all the way to the other end of the beach just by jumping on surfers... I gotta work on my top turns more - I can make the bottom turn nearly every time, but I almost always fall off trying to turn off the top of the wave. Something to practice in my head. P...

Man, the templating system that we're building for Project Tremble is really cool. Building on some of the ideas available in Gmail - (namely returning JavaScript elements back to the DOM from XMLHTTP Requests), The solution is so clever, that we spent considerable time debating whether or not it was ground-breaking innovation or complete lunacy. You know those feelings of disbelief- often there's a really really good reason why somebody hasn't done something yet - because it's actually retarded. Occam's Razor would say that this is usually the case. But, after much deliberation, Big-Headed Simon (not an ironic Australian insult, but a fact - we measured developers heads one drunken Friday, and Simon's is the biggest) and I decided that we really had something here. I'm utterly blown away by the approach. When V1 of Tremble ships in July, you'll be able to see what I mean... I love this photo of paddling out in Teahupoo, Tahiti. Apparently Napoleon alw...

Me and my nephew Tom went shopping for surfboards today (well a surfboard - he'd been saving for some time.) After consulting many a surfer dude, and visiting all the surf shops in Canberra (not hard, seeing as Canberra doesn't actually have a beach anywhere nearby - believe me, I've looked) Tom settled on a 6'10 Fish board - not probably the best choice for a big guy who's never really surfed much, but damn it will look sexy on the beach. Which is really quite important when you're seventeen. I remember being seventeen. It seemed like the hugest, most dramatic and revelatory time in my life. Back then, there were REALLY SERIOUS things that happened to me and my friends. Man - this one time My Aunt Chris got really mad at me and wouldn't let me back in the house, and me and my friends had to sit on a mountain in the dark and smoke bongs and talk for hours about how serious the situation was. I mean - man it was really REALLY HEAVY. Listening to Tom te...

This weekend, I had some minor revelations. Revelation 1: Watching the fractocumulus clouds roll in over the lake, and talking to Cam about software development, it dawned on me that the default state for software teams is to not produce software. This seems a bit strange, but having worked on various teams in both public and private sectors, I'm convinced it's true. People assume that you can just leave the project in the hands of nerdy software geniuses, and that the final result will be the software solution of their dreams. This is really, really, really not true most of the time. If you do that, you end up with developers who "Go Dark" and end up doing something that nobody understands. And by then there's nothing you can do about it...You've spent heaps of cash and you end up throwing good money after bad. This happens all the time. I often get calls from recruitment agencies that go something like: BodyShopChicky: "Hi Gordon, I've got ...

Stilly wonders If I would break his fingers in this post. Ha! Not meaning to piss in anyone's pocket (where did that expression come from? Anyway, like most of us who aren't a little twisted I don't want to) - but as a long time reader of Mikal's blog, it was Stilly who prompted me to start blogging in the first place. And as usual he's absolutely right - TOWER is an excellent place to work, and my job is hard! I upgraded my mobile phone to the Sony Ericsson K500i today. It's a very nice thing, that is really quite a lot of overkill considering I primarily use it to talk to people who are in a remote location. Mind you if I end up lost in the desert, and find I need to take a VGA photo of a coconut and e-mail it to my Mom, while playing 3D Splinter Cell and MPEG4 streaming videos out of a speaker phone, I can do that too. Mp3 ring tones! Now I get Jack Johnson's Inaudible melodies intro when people ring me up. So If I sound mellow and distant, it's ca...