On Twitter So Far!

After some ambivalence I set up my Twitter account as I mentioned on a previous post.

What I would do different? Research a little bit more before taking the plunge. Paying attention to the settings a little more would have saved me some grief. Let me explain.

A couple of things seemed to re-enforce what my feelings of uncertainty. One was my fault. I was not paying attention, yes I was a little exited (Im really worried now, too much of a geek excitement). When I setup my blog integration with Twitter I put what I thought was my user name. Some places my user name is a combination of first name last name (there are quite a few I can come up with).

I put in one of those username combinations and all of a sudden I have ten followers. How did that happen so fast? Especially since one of the followers was this woman’s photo who represented the NaughtyGirl account that we dont really want to have in our profiles for professional reasons. After rechecking I realized that in Twitter the name I used was for someone else who had the same name combination. Ok, I fixed that and putt my real Twitter name which is @ottonote.

The other day, I mentioned to a couple of my colleagues about my foray into Twitter and they seemed visible upset. All about how it was a big waste of time. Lesson learned, ask what people’s opinion is about Twitter before you tell them your handle, the perception that your just tinkering wasting time is really strong out there.

Ok, so there is a third thing. Once I was setup and ‘twitting’ I felt pretty good. Simple to use, nothing to it! Now I’m exploring how to best use it. Lo and behold, I get a text message at 1:45 AM, yes I said AM! It was from one of the conference trainers. Now I have to explain to my wife why I’m getting texted at such an ungodly hour by a woman at that! Lesson learned, direct Twitter messages go to your text messaging service and e-mail if you allow it. And yes I did click that option.

Controlling when you get messages from your Twitter account is easy, if you pay attention to the settings. Ive now set mine up so I dont get anything past 10:00 PM and before 7:00 AM. My beauty rest is very important to me.

Another thing I did, after the fact, was research Twitter Etiquette. It is known as Twittequete, yep a new word is born! Googling Twitter Etiquette gives you many results which I think are worth reading. Here are a few of them (the list will grow I’m sure):

Ten Twitter Rules

Twitter Etiquette

Ten Commandments

Additionally I’ve found more ways to use Twitter professionally, the following are very good posts on the subject. I’m only a couple of years behind!

Ways You Can Use Twitter

Twitter Toolset

So as you may eventually conclude, Twitter is very simple to use, which makes it simple to abuse and do dumb things with it. Already my mistakes when up to four!

I’ve now created lists to group tweets by subject and I feel a little more in control. Like spices in your food, I’ll be using it sparingly so as not to overwhelm myself or others.

There are many soft rules, but one that is really solid and set in stone and you should never violate is this one: never, never, ever say anything that will embarrass you, your family, something about your boss. Remember everything put on the Net is there for ever. And anyone can read it! And some one will and they’ll call you on it! This goes for e-mail, blogs and whatever else we can think of.

Twittering

I attended the Southern California Code Camp event this past Saturday (November 21, 2009). I came away with new understanding of Agile methods, Domain Designs, Refactoring and Twitter.

I’ve joined Twitter as an experiment, we’ll see how this works out.

Posting by email

I’ve set up my blog posting via e-mail, another convenient way of posting on the fly.

Visual Thinking

When you think about something, do you see words, sentences, paragraphs? Do your see vivid images, actions, color or black and white?

I had never really thought about it. And I guess it’s a combination of words and images. For example I can’t help but to see a person’s face when I think of the name which is a word. Or a place if I think of the name. I can think of images without knowing the name of the place but some words come to mind anyway.

When you tell a story based on just words, the imagination of the ones listening takes over. Images for the most part is what I see when hearing the words.

I saw an interesting comic drawing.

What is the end result?

Illustrating what happens to project from beginning to end. Words are used, mountains of words. And yet many projects after completion end up being something else than the customer originally needed or wanted.

Perhaps in addition to all the rules we strive to follow in project life cycles we also need to incorporate some ‘Visual Thinking’.  How do we achieve that?  I’m glad the question popped up. The following link has some very constructive examples on how to achieve visual thinking: Visual Thinking’s Value

Windows 7 discomfiture!

I have been running Windows 7 for quite a while. Beta, RC, RTM and all these months went very smoothly.

For the first time, frustration and Windows 7 came to the fore. I lost my virtual machine. Specifically Windows 7 crashed and was never able to recover. I had antivirus software installed so I do not suspect any electronic skulduggery.

The antivirus software installed on this particular box was McAfee’s Beta 4.0. I did notice that I had some trouble updating the software and Windows would lock up often when trying to update the virus definitions.

Being the I have the OS running on a virtual box may have something to do with it but I chose to quickly re-install as all recovery attempts failed. I have a new install now and everything is back to normal.

I’ll keep track of how many times this happens in the environment I’m working.

Almost 100…

That is 97 things a project manager should know.

I recently participated in a webinar that dealt with the subject of what I project manager should know, or at least consider to insure success of his/her projects.

It was quite a lot of information and yet useful. There is a book of the same title: 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.  While the presentation in the eyes of some was lackluster, I did my best to try to get the most out of it.

I’m an application developer, but definitely take the role of Project Manager often enough to warrant exploring this subject in depth. Every project has it successes and failures and sometimes the entire project bombs.  Following most tips if not all will most assuredly make our lives easier.

Some things just stand out. The question was asked: Where are the users? In typical fashion we plan, design, code and when we’re ready to unveil our wonderful creation, it surprises everyone. Is not what they expected!  Along the way users should be included and know fully what’s going on. It’s amazing how many times, at least part of the user groups, by circumstance or happenstance are excluded from the design process.

Egos are bruised, folks are upset, and the project needs to be rescued. An application may finally go into production, but at what cost? How much work after going live is devoted to fixing or changing things? That measure is a tell tale sign of what was left out in the design process.

So off to explore those 97 things I go!

Tinkering…

It’s been a while since I did this kind of thing.

My sister’s PC failed and I was recruited to fix it. While I was doing this I decided to upgrade my Laptop and Desktop to Windows 7.

Thursday night around 10:00PM is when I started. The upgrade on the laptop ran unattended from about 11:00PM till next morning. Once I did that after a break on Friday, on Saturday I tackled my sister’s PC and my desktop upgrade.

The whole affair took about 7 hours and my sister’s PC is still not working.

My desktop and laptop are working wonderfully.  My old desktop is running smoothly.

I watched a movie or two in between upgrades. I did find that I had re-install some programs as they stopped working. My old desktop does not support hardware virtualization so if I want that feature bad enough I may have to upgrade the motherboard and/or chip.

A technological dalliance, a portent of things to come.

Windows 7 happily running on an old HP Desktop.

Virtual Computing for the Developer

One of the many facets of development involves testing you applications, programs, games. Whatever grand program you have created to improve the world (at least your company’s bottom line), needs testing.

Development machines are somewhat different than what users at large may have. In a corporate environment, regular desktops will probably be locked down and many restrictions will be placed on users ability to install, download and many other things.

Having more than one desktop on hand is costly and cumbersome (space wise).

Virtual Computing to the rescue.  I really like using virtual machines. My latest Virtual Machine is running Windows 7. I’m using the Sun Virtual Box. I can use all my peripherals and it’s very stable. I can test my web apps on this machine with different broswers, settings and such. This prevent my development machine from getting ‘corrupted’, so it can do what it does best.

Virtual Box Settings

Windows 7 running on a Sun Virtual Box

Your Bookmarks or Favorites from anywhere!

I’ve discovered a neat add on to my broswers.  Xmarks!  It allows you to have your bookmarks and favorites synchronized between browsers and locations as well.

Bookmarks are now available on the road, at home, at the office.

Xmarks was known as FoxMarks, you can visit the site and read more about it here,

http://www.xmarks.com/

As long as their servers are up, I don’t have to worry about loosing my favorites. There is always the method of backing up your favorites but this sure is more convenient.

What’s for lunch?

While the question above may seem unrelated to good programming techniques, there is a world to be explored here. Programming or for that matter, any of the engineering disciplines together with project management require a lot of though processes.

It has been variously recommended that if you have a sitting job (sedentary), a standing break should be taken at appropriate times; five minutes to ten minutes every hour or so. Sitting for long periods of times, promotes atrophy, especially of your hips joint areas. A state of being that does not promote proper breathing (slouching on the desktop), which impedes clear thinking.

So besides taking breaks, go to lunch, get out of the office, do not eat at your desk, answers to your programming questions and issues will come just because you are not tense any more. Yes, emergencies do occur and sometimes leaving the office for even half an hour will not happen. But, do they happen every day? If that’s the case, there is some serious program management techniques that need to be discussed.

Lunch could be a walk outside the building we work in, it does not have to involve food. A chat with a friend at work counts. Your body will thank you for it, your brain will get that much needed oxygen which in turn will help you get your project on course.

There are other things we should do, which I’ll be posting soon.

So what’s for lunch?