Do [x] A Day » Software

Google Chrome – So Shiny and New

Steve Ward — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:52:57 +0000

I installed Chrome last night and have spent a few hours trying it out. I like the simplicity of the Wonderbar and the clean interface. The ability to import my bookmarks from Firefox was helpful and the only thing I would have done differently was to have the Firefox bookmark bar populate the Chrome bookmark bar. I had to drag each one individually over, which was a bit of a pain.

The New Tab page with the 9 most visited pages, recent bookmarks and searches is cool! See the image.

This is just my first impression – so far, so good.

Extreme Planning – Gantthead.com

Steve Ward — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:29:45 +0000

Extreme Planning by Mike Griffiths spells out the common sense idea that project planning for software development is not just a big plan up front that never changes, but more of an iterative process that evolves as the solution is developed. Software development projects are difficult to accurately schedule up front, because there are too many unknowns, and every software development project is different. But, over time, you can iterate to a more detailed plan as more is known. This article gives some good advice for planning a software development project. (Registration with Gantthead.com is required, but free!)

Daily Project Status Updates – Scrum

Steve Ward — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:12:04 +0000

Project managers sometimes wonder about how often they need to check status on their projects. Unfortunately, what ends up driving the status updates is the schedule of status reports. If your communication plan calls for bi-weekly status reports you end up waiting until just before the status report is due to check in with your project team. This is a great way to get into trouble, because if a problem has developed early in your reporting period, you could have been working to get things back on track for weeks and have lost valuable time.

I propose checking on the moving parts of your project daily, as needed. Use common sense with this, and adjust according to the actual needs of the situation, but I would rather be checking status of key tasks more often than not. These updates can simply be a quick “how’s everything going with …” call, or email, or in-person request. Mix it up to keep your team from getting annoyed. Also, if the task is not very important, or has a ton of slack, you can ease up on your status checks.

One software consulting firm I worked with would hold a daily scrum meeting over IM where we asked everyone on the team these three questions:

What did you do yesterday?
What are you doing today?
Is there anything getting in your way?

I don’t think that level of rigor is required on every project, but it does keep everyone moving forward on the important tasks, and if there is ever a problem, you find out as soon as possible.

I also like to encourage my project teams tell me as soon as an issue arises so we can immediately begin to take the appropriate actions to keep the project on track. In some cultures, this approach doesn’t always turn out to be as easy as you would hope.

Toolkit on a Thumb Drive

Steve Ward — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:36:55 +0000

The Daily Cup of Tech site is running a contest of the best possible combinations of freeware software that will fit on a 32MB USB drive. If you have ever used a thumb drive, I’m sure you can see how a collection of tools for various tasks would be cool to keep handy for emergencies.

Here is a notable quote from the Daily Cup of Tech:

The PC Repair System is another winners of the 32 MB USB drive contest. It was submitted by Decoy. Decoy wrote:

I was thinking a PC Repair/Toolkit would be nice. There are a variety of free and/or open-source tools for file recovery, anti-virus, anti-spyware, system info & system maint.

With a wide open description of the system, I was free to put in pretty much whatever I wanted to. There are 37 applications in total! A complete list can be found below.

Check out the original post for all the applications. It looks like a good tool to fix a “toe-up” windows machine. I would keep an eye on his site for additional contest winners under categories like:

Mini Linux bootable browser
Web developer system (how are you going to get a whole system on 32M? would be cool)
Travel companion
Wiki
and several others

Nowdays 1GB or 2GB USB drives are getting pretty cheap. What about an entire Linux Distro on a drive? What would you put on a 2GB drive?