Archive for March, 2007

Mac has won (Vista, last part)

Published on March 14, 2007 in Mac. 1 Comment

Or it is definitely winning.

After my previous posts about the experience that I had with Vista I’ve encountered the most serious problem in it — the network part of Vista was “reworked”, which in Microsoft speak I guess means “fubar“. It just doesn’t work. You know, as in “just works”, but the other way around.

I won’t go into detail here, but I, a reasonably experienced Windows user, was not able to properly setup the damn network at all (the internet connection sharing and all this stuff). And this is not the worst part.

The worst part is that now — after I finally managed to make the network work in some form — I can’t connect to my server from my laptop using a VPN connection (again, not going into much details). This works in XP without problems and not in Vista.

It will be a big pity if Apple won’t get a huge crowd of converts now. I am certainly planning to convert. Just waiting for the Jaguar to be released hopefully along with the update to the Apple’s Macbook Pro line (which are gorgeous already, but are almost a year old).

And while I am waiting, I am back to XP.

PS. And I agree that this might just happen. Microsoft is very close (as probably it has never been before) to losing it’s top position.

Project communication with Factory Nova

Published on March 11, 2007 in Factory Nova. 2 Comments

Created this simple diagram to compare the usual direct project communication (when all people involved in the project talk to each directly) with the project communication based on Factory Nova.

Project communication

Obviously, Factory Nova works as a centralized repository for everything project-related. All people involved in the project, instead of communicating directly with each other now communicate indirectly — that is through Factory Nova. This helps to keep all the information regarding the project in one place and easily accessible.

But there is one more thing.

Factory Nova notifies everyone involved in the project about everything that happens in the project. And it does it via email.

We decided to rely on the email, because we think that an email client is the best personal productivity software that exists today. Modern email clients are so sophisticated that you can do absolutely wonderful things with them — tagging emails as tasks (with stars or flags), create “smart” email folders which would contain only flagged emails-tasks which you have to do as soon as possible, filter and search all emails very quickly.

Factory Nova works as the central mechanism for managing all the information about the project and you can actually use it for everything, including working with your tasks if you are comfortable of using a web browser and a web interface for this. But, you can also just rely on the email notifications that are send to you to manage your own personal workflow.

This works not only for the developers/workers in the project, but for the managers too. For example, I am a manager in the project and I get an email notification from Factory Nova that a certain task was just finished by a developer. I quickly look through the final developer comments which are also available to me in the email notification and I see that something is not right. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to deal with this right now, so I just flag this email in my email client and it becomes my personal task. Later that day, I will look through all the flagged emails, solve each problem and unflag all corresponding emails.

So in our opinion email is far from dead and is ideally suited for a scenario that I’ve described. We will certainly add RSS in this scheme this year, although I am not sure if the RSS reader clients will fit this as good as the email clients. But we will see.

Vista disk activity again

Published on March 11, 2007 in General and Stuffed Tracker. 1 Comment

Apparently, lots of people have trouble with Vista doing something with their hard drive all the time. My previous post about this gets quite a lot of hits from Google.

Here are the top keywords for this week:

vista.keywords.png

Different kinds of Simple

Published on March 4, 2007 in Software Engineering. 1 Comment

I was watching an almost complete collection of Apple keynotes since 1997 (when Steve Jobs returned to Apple) and for some reason I formulated this.

There are different kinds of “simple” in software engineering and actually in any kind of engineering.

  1. Simple, which was made simple without background “domain” knowledge, basically with the only reason that “it is easy to create this thing this way”, just blindly following the mantra that “every solution should be simple”.
  2. Simple, which is a result of a lot of work and background analysis.

The first one is worthless, the second one is genius and is a result of a very hard work. It could be very hard to distinguish between the two. The first one can be easily disguised as the second one.

Another amusing exchange with a potential customer

Published on March 1, 2007 in Software Business. 0 Comments

Continuing on this amusing post.

Mr X: I have no money to buy your software, I can translate it into my language. Will you give me one license for free for that? Or else..

Me: We can give you a 20% discount for the translation, please tell me if you are interested.

Mr X: I told you that I have no money, can you give me a 90% discount? Or else..

Me: No can’t do.

Mr X: I cracked your software. If you will give me a free license I will tell you how I did that.

The End.