Hi and welcome.
Infrequently updated, but with my musing in English.
My danish blog and my google+ stream are updated more often.
Featured post
What the Return On Investment (ROI) of Social Media?
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This question is asked all the time. The right answer is another question.
What the ROI on C-level networking?
A CEO level position is, for some, a large part about networking. Conferences, coffee, drinks, golf.
Social media engagement is the same thing. It’s networking on the other levels of the company ladder/Pyramid.
If the C level understands network on their own level – they’ll understand it on the other levels. If not – they never will.
A Better Retrospective
I have – as an experiment – moved this article to medium https://medium.com/@TwomasC/a-better-retrospective-8be9ceac419f
Jira vs Google Doc importXML
If you ever need to import data – live – from Jira to a google spreadsheet, this might help you.
You’ll need:
- The Url of your Jira server (I’ve only tested with ondemand)
- Username and password to an account with rights to export xml
- This list of jira fieldnames (not the same as jql)
Now open a spreadsheet or create a new one.
Now insert something like this.
=ImportXML(“https://yourserver.atlassian.net/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-xml/temp/SearchRequest.xml?
jqlQuery=project+in+%28%22Projectname%22%29+ORDER+BY+Rank+ASC&
tempMax=1000
&field=summary&field=timeoriginalestimate&field=timespent
&os_username=alice&os_password=bob“, “//item”)
You need to change the text in red to something that will work for you. And make it all one line – I just broke it down to make it easier to read.
As you can see I’ve listed the fields I need – you don’t need to do this if you don’t mind getting a lot of data. Remember to use the fieldliste above – not all fieldsnames match their jql names.
The last part of the statement – the xpath – tells google doc, which xml elements to extract. It’s actually a bit to simple her, as the timeoriginalestimate and timespent fields have a “seconds” attribute, that may be easier to work with the the text “2.54h” text returned by the field it self.
Change the xpath to something like “//item | //item/timespent/@seconds | //item/timeoriginalestimate/@seconds” to get the attributes (which is a bit useless for what I want as google places them on separate rows and only does it if there actually is an attribute – which makes it hard to know which value was returned if only one fo them exist in the xml – I’ll note it here what I end up with). The alternativ is something =if(C9<>””, value(left(C9,LEN(C9)-1)), “”) on the hour columns.
Have fun!
Native boot
I’ve been running my development enviroment in a Virtual Box for a while. Ubuntu in a box on top of Windows 7 (on dual 2.2GHz, 3Gb ram).
Best of both worlds right?
Well it isn’t exactly fast. Here’s a few rough timings:
Windows boot cold to online: 170 seconds
Boot virtuel ubuntu maskine to login: 53 seconds
Start Aptana (in virtual machine): 54 seconds
Start rails (in virtual machine): 35 seconds
So I found my old desktop, which I though had died, but fortunetly it hadden’t, cleaned it up and installed ubuntu(a bit old and slower CPU (dual 1.8GHz, 3Gb Ram)).
Boot ubuntu maskine to login: 50 seconds (about 15 of those are bios)
Start Aptana: 20 seconds
Start rails: 15 seconds
Quite a bit faster – and best of all, it doesn’t seem to lock up all the time, like the Virtual machine did..
CrashPlan local and online backup
I was really excited when I found CrashPlan – The idea of being able to backup to both a local server, a friends server and to the cloud with the same tool, sounded to good to be true.
Visual Impact Priority (VIP)
My job includes the weekly iteration kick off for a development team. We look at the tasks for the week and prioritize them. Some tasks are front-end and some are back-end. Some are look’n’feel and some are more technical. And the end of the week, we demo it for everybody in the company.
I’ve long had a feeling that, at the end of the week, the more visual aspects of the tasks at hand had had less “love” then they warrant. Lets say we add a new page – all the new fields will be there, the new needed functionality will be implemented, but the visual glue, that’s supposed to pull it all together is somehow missing. It gets pushed to next week, where the same thing happens.
Stop saying that: Everybody is a sales guy
I’ve heard this quite a few times in my twenty+ years in business. I’ve had different thought about it depending on time and place – but I think it’s safe to say that most of my thought weren’t that nice.
It’s mostly a question of missing context and having the wrong audience. Allow me to explain.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
Long awaited prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. The stories are taking place in the same universe, but are otherwise not connected. I don’t think that it matter what order you read them in – the important thing is that you read them.
Continue reading
Preparing for recording a screencast
Stuff I do before I start recording a new screen-cast.
- Something physical. 10-20 minutes before I start, I do twenty push-ups or similar. Something to get my blood pumping. Allow enough time for your breathing to become normal again.
- Clear my nose. Make sure breathing is as unhindered as possible. Sometimes I use saltwater spray to help.
- Close down software. Close down Skype, Outlook, etc, anything else that will popup and especially the ones making notifications sounds.
- Mute phone, and put it away, so that it wont make speakers go woop-woop, when there’s an incoming call. Turn of your speakers if you can.
- Prepare story. Make sure every step is planned. Make sure every stop works.
- Drink a bit of water. Yeah, coffee is King, but water removes clears the mouth better.
That’s it. The last one is of cause a bit more involved, but that’s a topic for another post.
I’m not a non-believer
Sorry about the strange title – a explanation will follow.
As my more vocal Atheist friends haven’t neglected to make absolutely clear to me, the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention is this week-end. I’m a big fan of James Randi and would really like to see him. But I’m not going, because I’m not an atheist. And I’m frankly beginning to be a bit tired with them – paying a small fortune for a week-end with a couple of hundred of them, isn’t my idea of fun.
But lets first take a look at what Atheist means (Wikipedia):
Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
So Atheism, is the negated form of “the belief that at least one deity exists”. I don’t think I want to define my self with a negative, if I can avoid it. The only place for such a definition is when, there’s a conflict with the positive form. But as I don’t have a problem with theists, I don’t need to define my self against them.