Rah, it was all white and crispy on the way into work this morning. Twice now the back end of the cinq has swung out at <30mph. In minis, I never lost the back end (not for want of trying!) This morning it was when I was taking a right filter at some lights. I could see the slush on the junction and had a momentary image of having spun out and ended up parked at an inconvenient angle on the junction as the lights changed. Sure enough, first the front wheels slid straight, then they bit as the back lost it. I was only doing about 20mph! Fortunately the cinq’s steering strongly pulls back to straight, as my instinct was to let go of the wheel. Once the front was pointing in the direction I wanted to go, a quick tweak was all that was needed to settle the back.
Once at work I went once round the (deserted) car-park in an attempt to reproduce what had just happened, but I was just getting chronic understeer.
I was supposed to be talking about snow. What did strike me this morning was that the snow meant there was twice as much daylight, a much-needed commodity at this time of year. Rah!
It also hints that there’s a bright side to having been in the office all holiday: when I do finally have my Christmas this year, it will be a white one!
when your colleagues tell your boss that everything’s fine and you’ll get this software out by the end of the year and you’re not convinced but, hey, they’re more experienced than you and if they say it’s fine then it must be fine, even though on the surface of it it looks like there’s actually quite a lot of work to do…
PIPE UP.
Even in my worst case scenario I thought I’d be done by now. Far from it, I’m still diagnosing problems with the tests. Once they’re all done it’s supposedly a full day’s work. But that is predicated on having access to our document control system that doesn’t seem to want to let me in any more.
I find myself dissatisfied with the state of the art of document review. At work we have formal review processes that involve checking boxes, pressing buttons on server applications, receiving change requests, etc; but what none of these procedures enforce is adequate reviewing of the actual document. The only time I’ve seen documents reviewed in a significantly better way than here is when I submitted my final project at University.
Amusingly, http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/consulting/sw_testing/defect/ddr.html has a course on effective document review, in which they will “develope” (sic) effective document rules and checklists. That web page wasn’t very effectively reviewed, then.
I think checklists are dangerous. For someone with expertise and experience, a checklist is a useful way of helping prevent oversights. For someone with less of either, it provides a strong encouragement to perform a superficial covering of the points in the checklist. If a checklist says “check tank” the novice may say to self: “yep, there’s a tank there” whereas what is really meant it “check that there is enough fuel for the journey considering the journey’s length, the traffic and the terrain and whether it will be possible to stop and find more fuel on the way”. In the context of document review, this might mean that the reviewer ends up checking the presence and formatting of paragraphs without thinking about what the target audience will conclude from the content.
I would suggest a better way to review a document is to imagine you are going to explain the subject matter to someone, and try to use the word “because” a lot. This forces you to take a deeper and broader view than if you are simply skimming for factual implausibilities.
“Because” is a really important word, it’s the answer to the question “why?”. If there is no “because” to match a “why” then there is no purpose for doing something and time is being wasted.
A quick braindump so I can get back to work.
I’ve been playing with wikis a little over the last year or so: first, I have a wiki here. What happened here is that I wanted to password-protect parts of the wiki and then forgot the passwords. It would be much better to have a wiki with pukka logins. In fact what would be best would be a wiki engine with user-authentication hooks - that way I would be able to write the shims that mean you can log in to the wordpress engine and you’re automatically signed in to the wiki too.
I also have a wiki at work. I use this to jot down notes about process and problems with tools. We have a formal document management system with our quality procedures in but really it amounts to a change obstruction system - the software is so focussed on preventing unauthorised changes to the process documentation that it’s too expensive to make small changes - like file X no longer goes in folder Y but folder Z instead - so the documents end up little use to the grunt on the ground who is meant to follow the procedure. My wiki is searchable and thus great for the grass-roots guys. What it doesn’t do is have a formal control mechanism whereby certain revisions of the document can be marked as official releases. Nor does it afford printing out in a professional-looking document, not even a semi-professional looking document like Word can manage.
Thirdly, I use the Unreal Wiki, which is interesting as an example of a large over-authored and under-edited wiki. The problems with the unreal wiki are that authors drift off topic and take pages with them, information is replicated, different opinions of what the wiki is FOR shape the wiki, and lack of confidence to change the text mean that lots of accurate information is stored as comments to inaccurate pages rather than the pages being simply correct.
For a wiki to work in a corporate environment, I think you would need to have a nominated owner of every page. Also all changes would need to be under an authenticated name. This is not too hard to achieve under an intranet environment since your IT people should know who every principal on the network is, and are able to enforce the presence of certain software or configuration options.
The page owner would be able to nominate a page editor, by default the owner, who would get email whenever changes were made to the page. It is up to the editor to keep the page coherent and on topic.
The other tricky part about a wiki in the workplace is that some information is sensitive and shouldn’t be shown to external eyes, or even to certain colleagues within the same organisation. Keeping the information purely technical and stating that the entire wiki is company-confidential may address this.
Wiki markup languages are immature and thus of variable quality and all have their own quirks. This is a tricky tradeoff because consistency usually comes at the price of terseness, whereas terseness contributes strongly to the convenience of contributing to a wiki. A light but regular structure-based input language with subject-domain extensibility is ideal. By subject-domain extensibility I mean there may be certain styles that are applicable in certain contexts, e.g. all user manuals should have a NOTE: style associated with them that causes the particular style and branding to be output in the printed edition.
As an online resource, Wikis tend to have a manually-maintained contents (forward index) and are searchable. For printed documents, an index is extremely helpful. How could this be implemented?
There should be the notion of documents that are drawn together out of the wiki. This would provide the ability to gather a group of wiki pages together in a structure, branching the pages at that version and allowing tweaks that will only apply to this document. There are always final touches that are needed to produce a coherent document and it should be possible to make these without negatively impacting the living text that people are updating day-to-day.
Finally, there should be hooks for auto-generated text. Teams should be able to easily lash-up their data to automatically update the wiki. Perhaps the commands to retrieve and insert this information would simply form part of the wiki text so is fixable by all (recall that all changes are seen by the page’s editor and the author identified for the purposes of audit)
For £465 I just got a new car, it’s a Fiat Cinquecento, slightly shabby, with two new tyres, new handbrake cable, recent exhaust, recently skimmed head, newish radiator, new speedo cable, reasonable stereo and really loud horns. I’ve test driven it and am perfectly happy and it has almost a year’s tax and 6 months’ MoT.
Well, alright, it’s the old car back from the garage.
Well, I sat down and did the sums again. Oldskater was right. Having crossed out the blanket “pocket money” allowance and replaced it with clothing, groceries, car fixing, and holiday allowances, I’m now confident I will not starve on getting a mortgage. Also I don’t have to stress about not being able to save, cos out of each month’s mortgage payment, effectively half of it is savings and the other half is rent. And since the mortgage payments are less than double my rent, I’m better off.
So this morning I fired off an email promising a lawyer they could have all my money as long as I ended up with the right to live in that house. Stu asked “what house?” which was fair I guess. I’ve been sitting on the news since it’s at the stage where it’s most likely to miscarry, but it’s a bijou dwelling with two double bedrooms, gas cooker, manageable garden (and of course a shed), recently-done bathroom and spacious lounge, and a slight issue with a right-of-way to the rear. In woodthorpe, which is a way out of york but still inside the ringroad, and where nobody gets their cars torched, which is nice.
It’s still not my house, so don’t tell anyone in case it jinxes it.
This morning I awoke and a cold dread crept over me. If I go ahead and buy this house my outgoings will be £100 a month more than what I’ve calculated as my comfort zone. It will wipe out all the money I currently put in savings each month, all the money I currenty spend on toys, plus some of the money that I’m not sure what I spend it on but it’s usually things like fixing the car or gifts or drinking or take-away.
This morning I thought: this means there is not going to be spare money for frivolities like, say, furniture or petrol, or possibly something to go with my rice. For 25 years. I see no reason to suspect I will get a 5% pay rise in the near future, nor any compelling evidence that mortgate repayments are due to fall.
I think I need to sit down and do some sums.
I’ve been feeling more like a raw material than an employee lately. The parent company has a fetish for process and procedure, and, being German, can’t understand why the British employees don’t receive new directives with great joy and shouting of loyal slogans. Today, I received two things that failed to gladden my heart. First, a glossy 16-pager with chapter titles such as “Vision” and “Mission Statement”, for which this company has been charged internally something like £5 per copy. One to each employee of course (because that will make us feel … integrated). Second, an invitation to a lunchtime company meeting at which it will be revealed whether we are all going to have our work moved to India, and instructions on how glad we should be about the result.
Meantime, I have to deliver this code so we can bill for it this year. It’s looking possible but not without pain. Last year I was sent to Detroit in the weekend I was intending to get my Χmas shopping done. I’m not going to get much done this year either.
In order to claw back a little sanity, this lunchtime I got out of the office and spent nearly an hour at Kate’s allotment sawing up wood. Actually it did me the power of good. I work to live, not the other way round.
What spurred the previous post was actually that I had a cultural epiphany while playing Unreal Tournament 2004 in Onslaught mode.
I realised that I get to fight against, and alongside, Germans, French, Americans, and the rest of the world. It’s fascinating seeing the subtly different ways the different countries view teamworking and leadership.
The Brits say “there’s a tank coming at 2″ and get a reply of “cheers”. If you’re in a vehicle that’s nearly out of health points, someone will stop off to replenish you.
The Americans say “You in the plane, shoot the tank at 2, I’m gonna hit 4″…”I’m on it”. If you’re in a vehicle that’s nearly out of health points, you’ve got to tell someone to heal you.
The Germans say “go! go! go!” and don’t have time to hang around healing weak vehicles.
The French say lots of stuff in French, and when they take strategic position 2 they put down a tablecloth and have a baguette where they can discuss the correct way to heal a vehicle. May not be true.
One of the oldest myths, and one which amazingly persists to this day, about computers is the idea that you buy one “to help the children with their homework”. What utter bunk! It’s like saying “ah, but my child will be a much better poet if she learns to write her poems with one of those trucks they use to paint the lines on the edge of the road and driving it around a REALLY BIG piece of paper”.
Yes, knowing how to drive will be a useful “life skill” but it’s hardly going to improve her marks for her “autumn poem” assignment. The reason computers are able to pull this one off is that the end result, usually at least, has better handwriting.