Alexei@Nitobi

I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book - let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.

The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management - probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).

Topics covered include:

• How to make things happen
• How to make good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Where ideas come from
• How to manage ideas
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• Midgame / endgame strategy
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong
• Power and politics
• Team communication & relationships
• Visions and plans

These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:

• What to do when there are no winning choices
• How to use research as ammunition
• What to do if there is no time for project planning
• How to come up with new ideas
• Managing the chaos of idea generation
• How to know when specs are ‘complete’
• Why projects run long
• Managing difficult team members
• How to write diplomatic emails!
• Run meetings that don’t annoy people
• What to do when everything goes to hell
• How pressure affects the project and productivity
• All about the ‘Hero Complex’ (this is a good one)
• Basic tools for getting things done (prioritized lists and such)
• All about the politics of teams and projects

He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.

Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))

I recently became aware of a beta version of a new SVN client for MacOS called Versions. I downloaded the beta to try it out.

Let me say this is probably the new de-facto SVN client for Mac users. Not only is it a powerful and full-featured client (along the lines of TortoiseSVN but with more features), but its intuitive and easy to use. I love the TRAC integration (although I havent got into it yet). I highly recommend giving it a try. Here are some screenshots:

It’s odd there is no global Clear() method on the HttpContext cache. Anyway, this is how you do it:

private static void DeleteAllCacheItems()
{
HttpContext ctx = HttpContext.Current;
IDictionaryEnumerator d = ctx.Cache.GetEnumerator();
while(d.MoveNext())
{
ctx.Cache.Remove(d.Key.ToString());
}
}

I was excited to get home last night to finally rent a movie on my AppleTV. Apple just recently announced that rentals were now available in Canada. Here are my notes:

The Bad:

There don’t seem to be all that many movies for rent. Also, you cant see which ones are available until you click on it - which is time consuming if you are just browsing. I expect this will improve over time though. One thing that really frustrated me was I could not browse for rentals from my AppleTV initially. I had to go through the process of renting one through iTunes before the menu options would appear in my AppleTV.. and they still didn’t all appear after I did. The system of ‘activating’ an AppleTV for movie rentals and encouraging users to try it out needs to be improved, or people just will not discover the feature.

The Good:

I rented a non-HD quality version of I Am Legend (starring Will Smith) for $4.99. The movie downloaded almost right away (it took about 22 minutes) and I was able to quickly sync it to my AppleTV (with some trouble.. the first time syncing it quit with no error message). Watching it on the AppleTV was simple and the video quality was excellent. All in all I was happy with this. I did not appreciate, however, only having 1 day to watch the movie after I started it.. I would be running really close to the wire if I decided to start watching it after work one day, and then finish it off the next.

All in all, the system worked well enough that I will do it again, but I wish they would improve the experience of actually renting the movie from AppleTV, and that they would tell us if a movie is available for rent without having to select it first.

According to Forbes, Apple “has been quietly positioning millions of units of a mysterious new product–almost certainly the new iPhone–in key markets since March.” Despite this, there has been no public announcement or images released of this new device.

It will almost certainly support 3G - a faster mobile internet system (so you’ll finally be able to actually watch those YouTube flicks while on the bus). Probably the storage capacity of the device will be increased too. If we’re lucky they’ll have done something about battery life too - although that seems doubtful with the demands of the 3G circuitry and any additional storage they intend to cram on there.

Mobile devices from Apple in the future may have the ability to draw power from the sun for longer battery lives. This revelation came to light today as people at Trade the News (a better article is here) noticed that recent patent applications from Apple included technology to harness sunlight.

While it may be a ways off in the future - photovoltaic cells beneath the touch-screen could add hours to battery lives - making devices like the iPhone much more practical for business users - who have been complaining about the limitations of the small battery for users who are constantly on the go. This is one of the major reasons consumers won’t be leaving Blackberry anytime soon for business communication.

Of course the bigger story here is that with solar energy and using other types of micro-energy devices we could one-day take our mobile devices completely off-grid. It has some appeal, if you can get over the idea that you’ll never again have the excuse ’sorry my iPhone battery was dead.. wasnt receiving any calls’.

All you designers out there.. if you ever were looking for a font that was clear even at very small PT’s, this is for you. Over at WebSiteTips.com, I found a list of pixel fonts - many of them free! Check them out:

http://websitetips.com/fonts/pixel/#pixelfonts

I wrote a fairly basic but handy JavaScript Object Inspector and Logger that works across different browsers. I call it “NitobiBug“.

Read all about it’s features here. I did a video tour also, which you can see here (turn down your volume - its loud!).

Check out the live demo here.

Essentially, what it does is provide a logging utility like Firebug’s console.log that properly inspects objects and shows you it’s members. If you log errors it formats them nicely too. If you inspect DOM elements with it, it attempts to show you where on the page they are and calculate their widths and heights and positions on the page. You can resize and drag NitobiBug around the page, and it tries to remember where you put it.

I use it all the time while I’m working on RobotReplay so I figured maybe other people would too. It’s certainly not the only such tool out there but I think it’s decent. Anyway, your comments are welcome!

There was an interesting post today on the Gmail blog about how they got GMAIL to load faster, especially on slow connections.

A couple of the things they did were:

• Spriting - combining all the small graphics into a single image and using CSS background image placement to split out the individual icons.
• Request pooling - Combining together seperate XHR requests into a single large request and then parsing out the results.
• Cacheing - making more of the resource requests cacheable by the browser (JavaScript, CSS etc). That way when the user reloads the page, it doesn’t need to download the same resources over and over.

To help them with this task they used proxy trace tools like Fiddler, WireShark, and HTTPWatch. I think Firebug would have been a good option here too. Other things they could have done (and may have) are:

• GZip compression - compressing all your static resources with ZIP making them much smaller to transmit. This works on all major browsers these days.
• Conbining JS and CSS resources - By concatenating all your JavaScript and CSS resources into one, you reduce the number of requests needed and really speed up your site.

I felt lucky to get on the Viewzi preview invite list. You can too if it hasn’t launched by the time you read this. Viewzi is a search aggregator that tries to present search results in an innovative and user-friendly way. This is achieves quite well, in my opinion, having studied a few other attempts at this over the years (snap.com, nexplore.com). Here is a summary of my experience on Viewzi today.

Launch Page

Nice and simple. I like the invitation to watch the training video. However, then I went to see it in Internet Explorer 8 (running in IE7 mode) and the whole thing went to hell (see screenshot below)

I was also treated to a JavaScript error. Next, I was curious about the footprint of this launch page. I opened up FireBug and watched the download. This page is 113kb, which in my opinion is too much for a search launch page. I recognize that nobody on a dial-up connection would ever use this site to begin with - fair enough, but under high-load conditions this is going to be an expensive page to serve and probably a slow page to download. Certainly when compared to the 12KB of utilitarian sparseness of Google.com. Anyway, the page did in fact come up very quickly for me so I probably shouldnt complain.

Test-Search “U2″

I tried searching for the band “U2″ and was presented with this results-browsing view. First off - it looks great, and the UI is really smooth and intuitive. However, this was not a search-results page. I think I should have been shown search results right away - as a jumping-off point for browsing these other views. Note: If you DO click on a search results view, further searches are immediately presented in this view.

In general I was impressed with the overall speed of everything. Search aggregators have a rep for being sluggish. I didn’t get that impression here.

Next I started exploriing the different views. Since U2 is a band, I was curious what results the MP3 view would produce:

These were all U2 songs and I could play then directly from the viewzi window. Nice! The other day myself and Mike Han were talking about 90’s rock and we wanted to hear some Nirvana. This would have been great.

Next I clicked on the ‘celebrity photos’ view to see if there were any Bono mugshots.

No mugshots, but these were mostly all relevant. The question is what can I actually do with these results? Normally when I’m searching for images I want them to download. for use in some graphic I’m putting together. This isn’t the view for that, but fortunately there IS another photo view:

This is where Viewzi had search-relevance problems. None of these images were of U2. Oh well.

Back to the other results. Viewzi has traditional text-search results that aggregate Google and Yahoo (is that legal?). Anyway, they were spot on of course - and quite snappy. The other view that really caught my attention however was the Video search:

The video search aggregates a bunch of video services in a really cool browser that actually saves you a lot of time. To me this is one of the key strengths of a service like this.

Overall I’m really impressed with Viewzi. I think it had some search relevance issues with the images but I’m sure they’ll continue to work on that as they move towards release. I think what could really help Viewzi is if they in turn opened up their aggregation capabilities in the form of a set of API’s, and Widgets that other people can use on their sites in the way that Snap.com has done. I don’t think I’ll really switch over from google (not until they get their browser search widget to work) - but I’ll definitely be checking back to see how it evolves. In the meantime, I encourage you to check it out: viewzi.com