I just bought a LG 42PJ350 plasma tv. My previous tv was still the good old tube tele so i thought it was time for a replacement.
After wandering around at Saturn and Mediamarkt looking comparing, looking again etc I soon realised I would not be needing a high end tv.

My considerations:
Full HD or not
I mainly use it for watching movies and series (downloads). Most tv’s are full HD but who cares?. In the netherlands full Hd content is not widely available and my downloads are max 720p. So the 1024×720 works perfect.
Even if I connect it to the old cable antenna the pictures are bright and vivid. I cannot imagine a full HD could have outperformed this.

Plasma, LCD or LED
Plasma is well known for it’s projection of black. However LCD did catch up (at least that is what the salesmen will tell you). Not sure about that so i do prefer the plasma.
LED…well the only few full LED screens are to expensive..all the others are fake?. It seems to me LED is just another marketing word.
Mirroring of the screen is one of the drawbacks of a plasma. But once you go to the store and see for yourself you will notice most screen suffer from reflection… especially LED’s 😉

But what about the power consumption… In several stores i did see the comparison on power consumption between plasma and LCD. Yes LCD is more economical but it is only blip (5% difference or so) and besides i don’t have the tv on whole day. Got other stuff to do as well.

3d..WTF?
Whoepss… it is 2010 and now it is time for 3D. Sure wearing glasses, being able watch a movie with friends.. o hold on they don’t have special 3D glasses…. NO3D

Internet WHY??
I got my tv hooked up to a mediacenter. I really really just need a tv that is … a tv…

Why did i buy the LG 42PJ350: I wanted a non full hd plasma with a nice design. The reviews were greate and it came in cheap.

I will just sit and wait enjoying my new tv.. until the next revolutionary tv becomes main stream.

p.s. bought it at http://www.plattetvdiscounter.nl/

Does the world make sense
Or
Do we make sense of the world

TheNextWeb 2010 was an amazing experience. Coming from a somewhat more nerdy background and visiting several tech conferences, i found TheNextWeb 2010 to be a nice mixture of elements.
First of all the setting was great.
The conference took place at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam which is an old industrial monument giving it a genuine touch.
There was room for fun, hanging out and each day had an evening program which you could attend and thereby talk to some people that might be interesting to you or interested in you.

Last but not least: the program itself had a nice balance as to the amount of speakers, the amount of presentations etc.etc.

Ahh almost forgot: the food and drinks were well taken care of.

So what where my personal highlights of this event
Keynotes:

• Florie Brizel on Mobilology, the effect of usage of mobile devices on our life’s.
• Robert Cailliau (co-developer of the World Wide Web) on World (wide web) as sustainable platform
• Werner Vogels on Amazon cloud solutions

Startups:

• fashiolista.com Social shopping platform
• Prey project Lost and found tracker software, free
• Brainient Video advertising, simple but effective
• Shutl A actual package tracking solution

In general I noticed a lot of the startups evolved around integrating multiple communication lines and social platforms into one service. So it looks like a lot of people are having troubles managing these types of media.
Besides the aggregation of social networks and other internet based communication there were a lot of initiatives for sharing and creating new music.

Improvements for next year:

• more in depth keynotes
• interactive sessions

Would i go again next year: YES

The true beauty of scrum dawned on me again. This is the second time I am in the role of product owner for a relatively small project. The customer is not so much into internet so I have to pull the information out of them.
It also implies that the customer does not clear view on ‘linked’ and related elements that might also be sucked in into the changes.
Again scrum aims to have the specs ready before the team has to work on them. As you try to figure out the complete scope of the project and who your stakeholders are you might not be able to get the job done on time. This is especially the case in short project where your horizon at the start of the project is already on the end of the project. This means you’ll have to find a way to get everything just in time.
What I found was that this mission impossible is well solvable with the help of the team.

How?

Well first of all the need to have enough information to make a correct estimation, as scrum dictates. This is the basic and there is no way of skipping that. However you can play around with the amount detail you provide. How much is enough to get the job done.

During the sprint the team will (especially in this case) start asking questions, questions you couldn’t have possibly imagined. This is where jit requirements kick in.
You cannot foresee all the elements. Even if you try you would still be off a third of the time. This time is better spent when the team actually needs it.

So bottom line:
-Try to get all stakeholders in the picture
-Identify problem areas and make sure everyone is aware of that (start rubbing the painful spots as early a possible and keep them flexible)
-Try to gather information, just enough for the team to make an estimation and start working
-Accept questions as often as needed..

Cannot help it but I never was much of a Flash fan. For a very long time Flash was the only solution to creating very rich websites.
Now with HTML5 supported on most browsers this is history. Many cases are on the internet showing we don’t need Flash any more.

Even big players are moving away from Flash (Apple, Microsoft)

My bet is on:
HTML5

The main problem with flash was (yes past tense) its lack of proper support on all platforms and browsers. How do you ever expect to get sympathy vote’s that way.

I’ve been to Athens, Greece several times but my last visit disturbed me a lot. Although i am from the Netherlands where we tend to over organize a lot of the public services and public areas i’ve never been so shocked about the state the city of Athens is in right now.

First of all I was amazed by the amount of graffiti. Everywhere you see tagging, spraying, paintings etc. etc. It is really horrible. I also sends a signal that people don’t care any more about their cultural heritage. Maybe i don’t know enough about how to deal with these kind of situations, but it seems to me that immediate cleaning of the graffiti will prevent the next graffiti being placed at all.
In combination with regular and strict police surveillance you can overcome this problem and make it a place worth visiting again.

Secondly the amount of immigrants. My expectations toward visiting the small shopping streets of Athens is authentic greek boutiques and some tourist shops. What I did find was zillions of immigrants selling fake replicas of expensive bags, sunglasses and phones.
The funny thing is that it is illegal. A situation sketch:
I am walking on the street seeing all these immigrants trying to sell there properties. Suddenly they pack their stuff as they see a police officer closing in. They do this very quickly because their showroom is nothing more than a blanket which they can quickly pick up and walk away. The officer arrives and the immigrants stay not to far away (10 meters or so) more laughing at the officer for he cannot/will not do anything (they are not actually selling anything at that moment). Walking down the street a little more, where the officer must have passed, and the first immigrants start to unpack their properties again.
This way the presence of the policy is completely useless. Either do something about it or quit your jobs because you are spending public money.
Even worse so: if the immigrants would not sell anything they would not be there. So apparently people do buy their goods, thereby supporting their of downfall.

We could blame the economical crisis or put the blame on anything we can come up with, but I think that more strict policies toward small ‘crime’ could easily solve the problem and make Athens at least a bit more beautiful as it is supposed to be.

13 November 2009 heeft m’n auto weer een grote beurt gehad. Aangezien de prijs bij Kwik-fit aantrekkelijker is dan dezelfde handeling bij de dealer heb ik voor kwik-fit gekozen.
Een van de controlepunten was het oliepeil van de stuurbekrachtiging. Aannemende dat dit ook inderdaad was uitgevoerd, het stond immers netjes afgevinkt op de controlle lijst, verbaaste het me dat bij een controle door mijzelf deze ver beneden pijl was. Om hier zeker van te zijn ben ik naar de dealer gegaan om het nogmaals te laten controleren waarbij mijn bevinding bevestigd werd (en moest 0.25 liter bij).

Verdere inspectie leerde mij dat het vervangen van in de interieur filters slordig was uitgevoerd. De aansluitingen naar de cabine was niet juist bevestigd waarbij er lucht direct vanonder de motorkap de cabine in kon komen. Daarnaast was 1 van de bevestigings-klemmen voor dit onderdeel niet gemonteerd maar lag los onder de motorkap.

Ik vraag me af in hoeverre de andere punten wel correct zijn uitgevoerd…

Update: Na mijn beklag te hebben gedaan bij Kwikfit nederland is contact met mij opgenomen en zijn verontschuldigingen aangeboden. Oorzaak zou communicatie tussen werkplaats en kantoor zijn geweest. Ik zet hier zo mijn vraagtekens bij…

In scrum the ideal world would be a world where a team is homogeneous, fully commited and every team member is multi-disciplinary such that the behaviour of the team becomes more predictable. However in real life, and especially in a setting where waterfall is the fundament you have to work on, this is usually not the case, facing members working part-time, having holidays and getting sick sometimes but most of all having different backgrounds.

Your goal as scrummaster is to optimize the productivity of the team. This means you have to suggest and steer the team in the process where needed in order for them to work as optimal as possible. This suggesting and steering is probably based on intuition, best practices and so on. As scrum is just a set of guidelines and rules there is a lot of open space on how to cope and handle situations like these. One could jump into detail and/or work on a higher level, inspect and adjust, try new methods etc. etc..

The problem is that sooner or later some manager or CEO would like to know what is happening and in which direction the project is going or what can be done to improve the project.
Usually the velocity of the previous sprint will give a good insight on what can be accomplished on product backlog (remember in the ideal scrum world it would be). The uncertainty is that the balance between all disciplines of each story is different. Some are real tech stories and whereas some are design/user interaction stories. This makes it hard to predict the outcome thus increasing the risks involved.

Now what can be done to reduce this risk? The most obvious is knowing what is happening: who is doing what at which velocity such that team velocity becomes more predictable. This implies gathering data, analysing, reporting and so on.

As we start walking down this road i get the creepy feeling something is wrong since we like to keep things simple and cut waste (reports). Focus on being productive is what we want right?
Using this method also reduces the agility in which one assumes it is ok not to know everything right now.

On the other hand:
Knowing the velocity of each team member provides better individual feedback and enables adjustment on the velocity on each member as each team member should/could work on roughly the same velocity, making the team more homogeneous.

Probably the best option would be to apply the statistics when:
– You got the impression the balance between the different fields/disciplines is off
– There is a need to give a more accurate estimate on the product backlog and identify risks.
– More accurate estimates on a single story
– Times off fluctuation in availability (holidays)

If the outcome on the individuals shows big gabs, then perhaps it is time to discuss what the meaning of a storypoint is and what causes these differences.
-are too many disturbances?
-are some members working harder?
-is the concept of a storypoint still clear?
-are the estimates during the sprint planning correct?
-…..

Too be continued…