Apple, Apps, Management, Misc

This is a nice one: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2370861/Scrum-Cheat-Sheet

Many thanks to the author, this will be displayed in my office!

Sharing documents among different people spread around the world is indeed a compex topic. Even more when you are either a small company with very limited IT, or a big company with drastic rules. 

When I started using SCRUM with my team in Ukraine, it was difficult to have a shared and up to date sprint backlog. We used excel maintained in subversion, wiki page, but none of this worked. We ended up with a spreadsheet in google docs. I will not claim this is perfect (not as good as being all in the same room), but it does the job! The team can see what the others are doing, the burndown chart is visible, the list of tasks is clear AND FLEXIBLE. Both in terms of "who does what" and "when".

I have create a template for you to see. There's some others things we could discuss based on this spreadsheet (why is there less hours of work planned than actual development time, where is testing, ...). Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rluhZCnnOt37wjmwjmqlKJQ

Labels: agile, management, scrum

I will blog about SCRUM... later. For now, I just wanted to say that SCRUM actually works, and that it makes people happy on both sides (your upper management, and people working on the project).

If you are a project manager, or have any interest in project management, you should at least read the wikipedia article. Then, head to InfoQ and get the free pdf "scrum from the trenches".

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Labels: agile, management, scrum

OK, so the problem is: an application on PC has created a disk image made of and MDF file, and some files with extension I00, I01, I02 (...). It took me some time to find how to deal with these. Here is the simple solution:
- Download a small & simple utility called MISO-J. It is currently available here: http://penguintool.blogspot.com/2006/11/miso-j-dealing-with-multi-segment-iso.html
- Launch MISO-J, and select the MDF file. Then press "join" and select the output folder
- You will get a nice ISO. This can be burned by "disk utility", or the famous application "Burn"

Note that if you try to join files, and that the remaining ISO is bigger than 4 GB, you must use a file system that actually does support files which size is 4GB and more. This is NOT Fat32...

My corporate computer runs on windows. There is no real match for the mac only quicksilver, but the closest is Launchy.

Launchy will allow you to choose and start an application faster than you could by using shortcuts. The proces is extermaly fast and simple:

• Press the shortcut key to pop up the launchy box
• Enter a few letters
• Select the application you want to launch

Extremely useful as well: the built in command line calculator. Instead of letters, type in the expression you want to evaluate. For example ((56+23)*12+23)*10/100

As extra super bonus, launchy is supporting a set of plug ins. Once you are familiar with the basic features, check them and what you may like.

Head to http://www.launchy.net/ now and check it out!

I travel a lot, and I have emails on my phone. It's not blackberry, it's push email on Nokia E61e. I found that I can use the apple bluetooth keyboard on my phone. After 5 months of this setup, believe me, it's a great improvement over the phone-sized keyboard. I use it especially in the train, and in places with limited connectivity.

The setup goes as follows:

1. Download and install Nokia HID software (bluetooth keyboard drivers): http://europe.nokia.com/A4144291
2. Start the keyboard application on your phone. Turn on the keyboard. Select search devices on the phone
3. I could never figure out exactly how the pairing should happen, so you may need to execute this step several times. Press now the pairing code on the keyboard (I usually choose 1111). Then set he same password on the phone. Then press again 1111 on the keyboard.
4. Can you now see message "apple wireless keyboard connected"? you did it!

I learned this procedure from http://www.sics.se/node/2593

Later, I found key mapping on this page: http://windforwings.blogspot.com/2007/05/bluetooth-hid-keyboard-for-nokia-e61.html. Above all, you will need to know that the "middle button" is mapped to ctrl+enter!

Just a few days ago I had a meeting using webex screen sharing. To my surprise, the isight camera of my macbook was active during the whole conference. I searched in the settings of webex, but could not find anything to fix this misbehavior!

Googling for this problem showed that this is a known issue, but that it won't get fixed. See here a popular example: http://www.madanalogy.com/2008/08/webex-is-watching-you-and-cant-turn-it.html

I found my workaround. Before launching webex, I load photobooth! It reserves the the video stream, and I can confirm that webex, coming second, will just display a black screen. You can even quit photo booth, and see that the camera remains disabled.