Thursday, 8 August 2002

Project Management with JIRA Tufte Envisions Projects.. Is the generic GANTT chart useful? Edward Tufte explores visualization of the project diagram. One challenge is the medium. Computer screens don't have the resolution to see both the macro and the micro.  Printers spread the project over dozens or hundreds of pages. HP DesignJet plotters are in my project toolbox, they work. In the comment thread, Robert Towry said: Placing the plan on the wall is a big help and changes the nature of the discussion. Instead of sitting around the table and talking about what each person is doing, people are more inclined to get up, walk to the plan on the wall, point to a task and say "This is what I'm working on, but I cannot finish until Mary finishes, and I can see that Jim is waiting on me, and he has to complete his task by - good grief, by Friday!". The other people gather around and people are actually talking about their tasks, interdependencies, milestone dates. The stuff you want them to be talking about. This works great for projects where people work in the same building. What about the distributed team? You can't really see through a monitor and there no tools that compensate enough. The visualization challenge: Help project members visualize: the body of work, relationships among many tasks and roles, tradeoffs among potential project designs and risks, your place, responsibilities, workload Envisioning projects a la klog? How can weblogs contribute to project visualization? Annotation. Associate each project post with one or more tasks, issues, milestones, and deliverables on a given project. Enable a few extra attributes for a post: Red/Yellow/Green Priority (U.S. cultural bias).  Create a view into a team's weblog posts organized by the work breakdown structure, another by priority   PM is about the conversation more than formal modeling. It is how we come to appreciate project dreams and know project reality. We discover our colleagues' capabilities and limits. We negotiate commitments. We make the thousand mid-course corrections to the project plan. My project communication templates help you script some of those conversations. But conversation is narrative and auditory. How do we get the best characteristics of project conversation into visual media? Into electronic visual media? Thanks to experience designer Diego Lafuento for the Tufte pointer.  [aka design] [a klog apart] As I am being forced to do project management for my project manager (due mainly to a lack of technical understanding on his part), I must say - MS Project is seriously painful. I can also see where bug/enhancement tracking software needs to be extended to allow serious project management to happen. The only question in my mind is which bug tracker to hack this into. Mike, want me to have a go at JIRA? *grin* 9:47:06 PM

Java concurrency library JSR-166 - Concurrency Utilities. Doug Lea provides information and implementations related to JSR-166. The design is similar (surprise surprise) to the library discussed in Lea's book. It is interesting to compare these 'concurrency utilities' with facilities found in other languages (e.g., Ada). Seeing as I am interested in collection libraries, I wanted to see how collections are handled. Compare the initial aims and scope of JSR-166 with the implementations found in Lea's original library. [Lambda the Ultimate] I meant to post this before. (Or maybe I did, and Radio forgot? I dunno.) 9:34:58 PM

Barrel Pond How To Build A Simple, Inexpensive Pond in a Barrel. If you've always wanted a pond, but didn't want to (or couldn't) dig a big hole, a container pond may be just the thing. In this article, I show how a simple container pond can be put together for a minimal investment (about US$30), and provide hours of relaxing entertainment. Container ponds can be sited anwhere - patio, deck, balcony, or anywhere that gets the required amount of sunlight. [kuro5hin.org] I wonder if my better half would from on letting me do this? :) 9:30:37 PM

Yet another Open Source CMS At first glance, OpenCMS would appear to be a fully open source java CMS, with an ActiveX WYSIWYG editor thingey. Definately more heavyweight than JPublish. Looks like it requires a database + ejb container. Anyone maintaining a list of Java OpenSource CMS systems? [Later...] Jemisa sent me a useful URL of open source CMS's: http://www.la-grange.net/cms. I notice that JPublish isn't on the list yet ... ;) 5:27:24 PM

UI Patterns UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction. A set of UI design patterns that shows promise. [ideas] Looks like a good wrap-up of web ui design patterns. I'll probably go back there and have another go at it when I'm not so busy. ;) (Like, when is that exactly? I have no idea.) 3:27:04 PM

EJB 2.1 Draft Review Monso-Haefel's Guide to EJBs Nice column about EJB 2.1 and WebServices. [Gerhard Froehlich] Doing web services from inside an EJB server. I wonder when commercial ejb containers are going to get this far? 1:46:03 PM

Half.com Used by Amazon. [P]retend that "Buy used" button on Amazon doesn't even exist. [markpasc.blog] I was wondering where to dump my excess sci-fi collection. Not Amazon, by looks. Half.com looks interesting tho... 1:23:30 PM

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002) Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002). A smart man passed away. Edsger Dijkstra was one of the true pioneers of computer science, with ground breaking contributions ranging over the entire field. Dijkstra is justly famous for work on algorithms (especially graph algorithms), concurrency and synchronization (including distributed algorithms), and operating systems. I want to concentrate on some of his contributions to the field of programming language research. Dijkstra was not interested only in algorithms in the abstract, and gave a lot of attention to the construction of working software. He was one of the proponents of Structured Programming, and penned the highly influential Go To Statement Considered Harmful letter to the editor of the CACM (1968). Dijkstra's interest in program correctness led him to study proof techniques and methodologies. Among his contributions is the theory of predicate transformer semantics and the weakest precondition calculus (cf. LtU discussion). Dijkstra's approach was essentially based a form of axiomatic semantics. Dijkstra expressed strong views on many issues related to programming and programming languages. Among them was his distrust of the notion of natural language programming, and his belief the programming languages influence our thinking habits. Dijkstra's work touched on other problems related to programming languages, including formal techniques, program transformation, and program translation and error detection. His clear voice and vision will be missed. The University of Texas at Austin CS Department obituary The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra A symposium in his honor was held on Dijkstra's birthday in May 2000. Its program contains many quotes and some photographs. The Humble Programmer, Dijkstra's Turing Award lecture, gives a personal view of the progress of computer science. [Lambda the Ultimate] A very great man who will be remembered for many things, including picking on goto and Basic. Rightly so. 1:19:59 PM

Der Guru Das Guru. Pardon "der Guru". Guru is male, therefore you need the article "der" :-).  Ohhhmmmm :-) [Gerhard Froehlich] Ooooops. My german is in serious need of remedial study. :) 11:23:37 AM

It broke There is something nasty in my news page that is automatically redirecting my browser to udell's new rss feed. I wonder where I configure mozilla to ignore redirects. It's annoying. Very annoying. 11:07:30 AM

Anthony Eden It's Alive!. Well slap me silly and call me "mama", I finally got Roller working. Now that I have roller running I will start blogging here as opposed to through blogger.com. Fun, fun. [All Things Java] It would appear the author of JPublish has gotten roller up and running. And I only noticed a day late! ;) 10:38:39 AM

Templated Haskell Template metaprogramming for Haskell. Template metaprogramming for Haskell. Tim Sheard and Simon Peyton Jones. 16 pages, May 2002. Submitted to the Haskell Workshop 2002. [Lambda the Ultimate] Haskell gets templates. I think this is probably a good thing - haskell can get quite verbose at times. It will be interesting to see if templatized haskell can produce more understandable errors than, say c++ template errors... ;) 9:42:48 AM

Aspect Orientation Atomic File Transactions in Java. Atomic File Transactions in Java: Nifty - might be useful one day: "Databases provide atomicity for data stored within them, but filesystems are not atomic with respect to their files. This two part article series explains how to achieve atomicity for standard filesystem actions. ... It's not hard to find programs that could benefit from atomic filesystem operations. Installers are a prime example: they do a lot of filesystem manipulation, and if there is an error or they crash, one would like the filesystem back the way it was." [rebelutionary] While a useful pattern, the problem here is that you have to somehow verify that every file system call goes through this new thunk. Not easy in a large project. One option may be to use Aspect Oriented Java to apply the required wrappering. 9:37:18 AM

Creativity Environment Business 2.0: Nokia's Hit Factory. Neuvo is the humble, if eccentric, technologist who heads research and development at Nokia, arguably the best product-driven R&D organization in the world. Nokia's R&D apparatus is unlike anything in multinational corporate history. [Tomalak's Realm] [design notes] I hope this is a glimpse of the future. Most of the future's wealth creation is going to come from people being creative, as anything repeditive is going to be automated one way or another. 9:31:25 AM

A useful idea Distributed computing moving from search for aliens to searching the Internet. Grub is a cool new project that relies on you and me taking part in keeping the search engines updated. [jdb cyberspace] If you ever want to write a program that chews lots of resources, what is the easiest way to know you aren't making a win32 box unusable? Do it in a screen saver. I am having some interesting thoughts about how to apply AI to sorting email. It will be CPU unfriendly tho. ;) 9:26:51 AM

Tuple Spaces == Blackboard Systems Doing some reading last night in AI, and I noticed that the AI guys have come up with a system structure very similar to Tuple Spaces (e.g. JavaSpaces). In the AI world, the pattern is known as "Blackboard System". Apparently the design was inspired by watching students work concurrently on reasoning out a logic problem on a blackboard. Funny how patterns of usage get rediscovered all over the place. Another funny thing in the book is the various optimisations for A* path searching. One optimisation put forward optimises the open list (IIRC a list of graph nodes to visit in looking for a path to the target node). The optimsation involves not keeping the entire open list sorted, but only the best 15. The problem with this optimisation is that once the small sorted cache is exhausted, they do a full sort of the remaining items in the open list to generate the next group of 15 - leading to unpredictable cpu usage spikes. I seriously want to know why they don't use priority queues? They only ever pop the lowest scoring node, so priority queues would be perfect. Hmmmm. 9:16:43 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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