Weird phenomenon how people can become enthusiastic about something so common as the i-pad.

From wikipedia:

"In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, marketing and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward. Impossible-seeming schedules, requirements or specifications are acceded to. Snap judgments about technical merits of approaches are sometimes reversed without acknowledgment. Those who use the term RDF contend that it is not an example of outright deception but more a case of warping the powers of judgment. The term "audience" may refer to an individual whose attitudes Steve is intending to affect."

To me the last big technical breakthrough for me came from Sony as they introduced the PS3.

Today i tried a new exercise for a retrospective. I name it the interview.
Setting: 1 team-member is interviewed by other team-members such that the interviewee wants to explain the sprint, process or something that needs to be discussed.

The point is that emotions and remarks from the interviewee should be captured as that is being used as input for the next exercise. Now in a small group you can assign a few people as a monitor group. while the others are taking the interview.

In this case the team was small so the interviewers also were assigned with the task of monitoring. As input for the interview i used the agile manifesto printed on small cards so each interviewer had to question the interviewee on this specific topic. After 5 minutes i would let the group rotate and thereby enabling everyone to once be the interviewee and interviewer.

The output was written on sticky notes so we could place them on a flap over later on.

The results: the quantity of the output was overwhelming. We had enough material to work on in deciding what to do and categorizing the items. Of course i was interested in the opinion of the team. Their remarks where that the technique for retrieving information was good, but the topics where to general for the sprint and therefor the topics where more suitable for a project retro.

Goals: Besides the obvious goal for this exercise was to retrieve information.
However i also had an hidden agenda.
First of all 1 wanted to make the team more familiar with the agile manifesto and
Secondly i wanted them to work together on their perspective on scrum.

So although i failed to do a retro for this sprint, i do feel the team learned something.

Al geruime tijd was het raammechanisme van 1 van m’n achterdeuren van m’n auto kapot. Nadere inspectie van het mankement wees uit dat de kabel gebroken was waardoor het raam vast gezet moest worden.
Navraag bij de dealer leerde me dat de kosten enorm waren omdat je alleen het gehele binnenwerk kan bestellen (incl electro motor).
Een goed alternatief leek mij om het onderdeel te zoeken op de ‘sloop’. Er zijn echter niet zo heel veel auto-recycle bedrijven die zich in dit segment begeven.
Nu zit er in de buurt van Groningen d-parts en zij zijn gespecialiseerd in BMW onderdelen.
Zij wisten me te vertellen dat dit onderdeel wel vaker kapot ging, en dat het heel moeilijk zou zijn om aan dit onderdeel te komen.
Ik heb ongeveer een half jaar lang om de 2 a 3 weken gebeld om te vragen of zo toevallig dit onderdeel hadden liggen. Helaas zonder resultaat.
Ik ben dus maar op marktplaats gaan kijken en daar kwam ik in contact met bmw parts holland. Volgens de persoon aldaar had hij het onderdeel nog wel liggen. Ik kon mijn geluk niet op en weldra had ik het onderdeel binnen. Helaas…. verkeerde model. Na telefonisch overleg en verdere uitleg van hoe het onderdeel er wel uit moest zien, heeft hij mij kostenloos de vervanging gestuurd.

Inmiddels heb ik het onderdeel vervangen en werkt het weer naar behoren…

++ voor bmw parts holland

We have a sprint workload just enough to complete within the sprint. Now the customer wishes to remove a story, which will result in too less work for the sprint.
The length of the sprint is 2 weeks of which 2 days have gone by so far.
Normally another story on the product backlog could be the replacement. However the product backlog is empty so there is nothing to fill it up with.
So options:
Continue as is and building the story which then needs to be removed afterwards.
Removing the story ending up with idle time.
Removing and shortening the sprint time.

We want to agile, so definitely the first 2 options are a no go. On the other hand we don’t want to cheat on the process….

Met de strenge vorst en de winterse omstandigheden wil het wel eens gebeuren dat het asfalt op de weg los raakt. Hierdoor is de kans groter om steenslag op je auto te krijgen.
Gedurende een trip (kort na de steenslag) naar duitsland werd het sterretje een barst. Zo vlak voor de feestdagen zat ik echter niet te wachten op het vervangen van een voorruit.
Ik ging er gemakshalve maar even van uit dat er een reparatie van minstens 500 euro zou moeten plaats vinden. Aangezien ik niet all-risk verzekerd ben zijn dit directe kosten voor mijzelf.
De meest voor de hand liggende plaats om de reparatie uit te laten voeren zou carclass zijn, aangezien ze stevig adverteren op diverse plaatsen.
Een klein telefoontje waarbij het “doordruk” gehalte om direct een afspraak te maken erg groot was, leerde mij dat mijn inschatting van minstens 500 redelijk was.
570 Euro
Helaas kon de aardige telefoniste niet de juiste gegevens vinden in het systeem wat betreft het type auto: BMW 528i touring.

Echt veel vertrouwen schiep dat niet.

Ik ben toch maar eens gaan rondbellen en bij de eerste concurrent was goedkoper, waren de gegevens wel bekend en kon de vriendelijke meneer aan de telefoon ook uitleg geven over waar het verschil in prijs door kwam.

Het loont om niet voor het meest voor de hand liggende te gaan. Want blijkbaar worden de kosten van een leuke telefoniste en reclamespotjes direct doorberekend naar de klant.

Not all apps run smoothly… one of them is Adobe air (Ubuntu 8.10 64bit)… you’ll only find out after you’ve installed a set of apps…but then how do you get rid of these apps again.. No No lets not include an uninstaller or something else usefull…

http://wanfahmi.com/2008/10/how-to-remove-adobe-air-application/

I haven’t much time on programming lately because i am now more involved in processes and how to optimize software development. Now there are a lot of tools on the market that claim to have the perfect solution for almost anything.. but i was looking more into a tool that could help me with creating a proper backlog for the scrum projects.
On of the reasons most tools are crap, is because they are.. but also it does not leave any space to fill out domain specific information on what might be of some interest to the backlog.. until i ran into explainpmt which is open source, easy to use, just enough functionality and so on..

I could have gone for the good old excel/spreadsheet but was not very appealing to me either.

After reading a small review on explainmpt by Jake Dempsey, i was convinced to start using this tool.

Explainpmt is written in ruby.. so immediately i was enthusiastic.. and once more the install on ubuntu went almost smooth-less and the hickups i did encounter were quickly solved by the excellent user documentation on ubuntu or ruby sites…. just great

Recently I was exposed to the holy grail of mobile smart phones … the i-phone.

At first sight it is too big and does too many things you’re probably not going to use anyway(i use it for professional purposes).
And besides the fact that you really need to have i-tunes, which is not available for any *NIX distro, i ran into another problem.
If you want to use the i-tunes store, you will need a i-apple account. Now i understand that Apple likes to know their customers, but what they are asking is one step to far.
Once you start creating your own i-apple id ^WHOEHEOEHOE you’re presented with a payment option. To be honest I was not looking to buy anything so why would i need to fill in personal data let alone credit data.
Thankfully there are some workarounds for this problem, but that is only if you start looking for it.

The second problem was activating the damn account. Apple will send you a nice email with a link which should take care of the activation…..NOT……
At first i was confused and thought it might have something to do with their servers that had to synchronize but after a day it seemed a bit unlikely that this was the problem.
On the net there were some suggestions about the missing credit details which would result in a low prio for processing the account. Not much i will do to change that.
So i started experimenting with different browsers like chrome, IE, Safari on the iphone. The last one was not able to process the activation, the second just got javascript errors and finally chrome was able to complete the process.
I was wondering what those guys are thinking???..maybe put some feedback if the process failes… duhhhhh..
So activation works on safari?, chrome but not on FF, IE… maybe they need a reality check.

Summary:
-To much details asked (isn’t a name and email enough???)
-Credit details asked (i don’t want to buy anything

Edited your sources.list in ubuntu but after the apt-get update you receive and error that says :
“GPG error: http://uri intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY ”
You might want to try the following:
gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv
gpg –export –armor | sudo apt-key add –
sudo apt-get update

1. Create a php file called “rewrite.php” containing the following code

<h2 align=center>

<?
if($_GET[‘link’]==1){echo"You are not using mod_rewrite";}
elseif($_GET[‘link’]==2){echo"Congratulations!! You are using Apache mod_rewrite";}
else{echo"Linux Apache mod_rewrte Test Tutorial";}
?>
</h2>
<hr>
<head>
<title>How To Test mod_rewrite in Apache Linux Server</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="rewrite.php?link=1">LINK1</a> = rewrite.php?link=1</p>
<p><a href="link2.html">LINK2</a> = link2.html</p>
<p>How this works: both links are for this same page, except they both are different. link one is without the mod_rewrite and link2 is using mod_rewrite. Link1 show the php file, with with mod_rewrite we are mascarading the php file into a html file. you can use whatever type of extension you want, you can change it to .htm or .shtml etc… all you have to do is to make sure you also chang it in the .htaccess file</p>
</body>
</html>

2. Create a .htaccess file with these lines.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^link([^/]*).html$ rewrite.php?link=$1 [L]

3. Place both files in the same directory somewhere in the www root.
4. Open rewrite.php in your browser.
Now click on LINK2 and the same page will display with the a mod_rewrite message. If it doesnt you either did something wrong. Check your steps. If you checked your steps, refresh your browser, and if refreshing doesnt work, then you dont have mod_rewrite enabled.

Note: apache2 on ubuntu also requires you to edit the ‘default’ site as well in order to make rewrite possible (AllowOverride None -> All)