There are more interesting slides on these topics here at uxebu.com.

Everybody who’s even one second too late for a meeting has to feed it with € 0.50. In comparison to other companies that’s rather cheap, where this rate can get up to about € 5.00 per minute! And as we know, money accumulates over time:

Doing the annual statement of the account we’ve collected about € 62! That’s more than I expected. Much more even. The bright side is: this amount should suffice to have a nice barbecue with steak and sausage, and even some beer. On the downside of this: about 124 times someone was too late for a regular meeting, or didn’t turn up without prior excuse. In a years worth of department meetings, what is about houndred meetings, usually having two regular meetings per week.

I just received a notification that a task assinged to me was closed by a collegue, this was his comment:

G. S. closed DEFECT-0815.

———————————–

Resolution: Fixed

Caused by a version mismatsh.

:-)

The more I’m eager to see what kind of web applications the new guys want to do with their web-banking and -trading applications now they have aquired an internet company. Now with the first wave of integration of the two web sites passed pretty smoothly, and the rebranding and accomodating redesign of the two websites rolled out, we’re ready for furthermore tasks to accomplish. Let’s see what comes next.

Interesting in this context is a article by finextra I stubled over at cometdaily. The article tells about X topics I want to comment A survey by WorkLight which questioned 1000 facebook users,

• whether or not they’d want or use Web 2.0 widgets or applications for their day-to-day online banking in Facebook or other launchpads
• whether they would consider switching to another bank to get such features.

The main message is

New research has found that around half of Facebook users would use Web 2.0 applications for online banking, while a quarter would even consider switching banks to obtain Web 2.0 services.

The switching part is the one my boss would be especially interested in I guess.

The article goes on:

Commenting on the survey findings, David Lavenda, VP, marketing and product strategy, Worklight, says: “To lose a quarter of your customers to competitors who have provided secure Web 2.0 banking would bear a significant impact on existing business. This is particularly true at a time when financial services companies are struggling to retain and acquire customers in a market that saturated with new competitors and countless new offerings.”

That’s true. In my experience numbers of new customer are much more interesting to management than the figures of the current customers’ activity. As you gain new customers, a certain percentage will have a fair amount of activity in trading and other products, another just won’t. These shares, once established, are rather stable. Clearly, the more new ones you get, the more active customers will be there.

Well, despite I like fancy Web 2.0 applications like Google Mail, and I clearly can see the point in gaining a customer base by offering nifty tools, but integrating my account statement and credit card bills into a portal like Facebook… Are they insane? Especially facebook is a nice platform for staying in contact with your friends, and doing froody Web 2.0 community stuff, whatever it is. But sharing financial spendings like that in a community, especially in this one sounds like a red rag, doesn’t it?

But surely there seems to be a market for this. We only have to take a look at Pages like wesabe or mint. Users can sync up somehow their account statements, credit card data and other stuff, get in analyzed, charted and stuff. The feature set sounds really nice, knowing one and for all where all the hard-earned money goes til the end of the month. Tagging spendings at certain locations, getting recommendations where to get this type of commodity cheaper or better elsewhere and discussing financial decisions with peers in the same situation.

Someone should do something like that here in Europe or Germany. It’ll be hard though, as for one, here in the old world it’s not so common to buy your take-away coffee or a pack of chewing gum with your credit card, so it’ll be hard for us to get the kind of complete and detailled listings like shown in the wesabe merry-go-round. On the other hand sharing financial data on this level with people I don’t know … I don’t know if there are a lot people here which will accept that easily. On the other hand we share every kind of information on the net: What music do I listen to? Where did I go party last weekend? What’s the best indian restaurant in town? Why not anticipate where I spend my money from my bills and compare them to the ones of other people?

What do you think?

So I was pretty lucky when, finally, my new workstation arrived:

• Dual Xeon E5420 @ 2.5 GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 150GB HD
• nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 570 (never mind, I’m just interested in the two DVI-exits)
• Gigabit Ethernet
• …

So far, so good. I had already the latest Ubuntu disk to set up the box, when my nice co-worker told me we had to use CentOS as OS, as this one is also running on production.

…

And then we found these quotes on the net (original source lost, unfortunately):

Sloppy Focus

Besides a proper shell interface the most important thing I miss in Windows is a working sloppy focus. I just love it! Someone, I don’t know who, told me there might be some sloppy focus utility in these PowerToys, but they pop the windows selected on top of the stack after a timeout, so I’m hardly gonna like it. So, unfortunately, I had to go somewhere else and found a pretty good working sloppy focus utility named True X-Mouse gizmo which not only offers a sloppy focus as on all *nix/Linux desktops, but also the nice “copy-on-select/paste-on-middle-mouse-button” feature what would have been the next on the list. The licensing terms are funny though:

Usage is free, but only those who have sent a postcard(*) are entitled for support:-) Postcards with a view over your home-town or other local sight signed with encouraging words and your E-mail address are to be sent to<snip>name and address of the author</snip>(*) Employees of Chalmers University of Technology don’t have to send a postcard.    

Multiple Desktops

Having used several of these utilities at the beginning of my former job some six years ago, when I had not switched to Linux there, I tried out the first three I found and ended up with VirtuaWin. It offers a pretty customizable interface so you can hook up the screen switch onto the keys you’re used from your favorite operating system, or you may click on the tray icon next to the clock. It’s even pluggable so you can add features like the cool desktop name which fades out you might know from WindowMaker.Licensing is GPLv2.

Shell/Terminal

 As mentioned above there also is no proper terminal on Windows. Sure, there’s this “cmd.exe” or whatever it’s called these days, but It doesn’t work for me: rudimentary tab completion, slow rendering of outputs, and this ugly windows command syntax. So the next logical step is to get Cygwin for Windows, which by default offers a ported native bash environment inside such a “cmd” terminal. This leaves the ugly handling of this window, including cranky buffer configuration, resize issues and the IMO very slow renderning of text output, e.g. when tailing a logfile which writes hundreds of lines in just a view seconds. How nice a simple xterm  would be…So just install it. Cygwin offers you to install a X server, namely XFree86, out of the box. The only issue here is it’s not pretty straight-forward to configure, I had a hard time to get it up and running as such, as the Cygwin guys have done lot’s of customizing here.Maybe take a look at the X live cd, they package the Cygwin X environment onto an autorun-cd for Windows: push in, click “start x” and you have a full-fledged X server running on windows with native xterm and all the basic utilities you need (at least I need) in my day-to-day work. It also offers an “install to hard drive” option, but this doesn’t work pretty well either. Unfortunately I haven’t taken notes for a walk-through, maybe in the future…WHEN you have it, finally, up and running, you basically have two options how to configure your X-Server: 

1.  Start the X server as a “window” with a window manager of your choice (blackbox included).
2. Start the X server with a special window manager which integrates your X windows into the windows environment, so all X windows are just decorated as usual Windows windows and integrated into your desktop seamlessly.

I decided for the latter option, for the sake to only have one environment, even if I don’t like it. Works pretty neat, having finally a xterm running screen running nice utilities I never wanna miss like tail, grep, ssh or find. OK, it’s not perfect, but hey, it’s usable… 

[INFO] [war:war]
[INFO] Packaging webapp
[INFO] Assembling webapp[commodities.view] in [C:\code\commodities.view\target\commodities.view-0.1-SNAPSHOT]
[INFO] Processing war project

Whom is this maven thingy going to attack???

© derlanders

The FAD Manifesto

I. Front Ahead Design
The essence of FAD is conveyed directly in its name: design your front-end/user-interface first, ahead of everything else. The customer could care less what’s behind the scenes, so long as it looks good and does what it’s supposed to. Deliver a working front-end first and then Do What It Takes to fill in the functionality gaps.

II. Do What It Takes
Other methodologies are great at delivering excuses. How many times have you heard (or have been told) “we can’t do that here because it could throw off the whole design?” In FAD, you just do it (that would have been the bullet point, but Nike has it trademarked). To get it done, you Do What It Takes. Your customer will love you.

III. Code Light, Not “Right”
A traditional methodology calls a complex framework with layer after layer of objects. In those ways, adding a simple value to a form can be a monumental task, requiring it to be added to every single layer. Does that sound right? Proponents of the other methodologies will tell you it is, but what about your customer? With FAD, you just Do What It Takes to add the functionality to your interface. No more.

IV. “Throw Away” Diagrams
Think of all the Visio diagrams you’ve drawn over the years. Sequence diagrams, context diagrams, flow charts, and so on. Was that really productive? Did your customer ever see any of those? Were those diagrams even relevant after the system was finally developed? Didn’t think so.

In FAD, all diagrams are made on a disposable medium. Whiteboards, napkins, even your forearms work. And there is no formal modeling language to battle with: just Do What It Takes to draw and explain your design to other developers.

V. Life Is Short (a.k.a. Patchwork)
The average software system has a life expectancy of seven years. No matter how “properly” the system is designed from the start, within the first year of its life, maintenance programmers unfamiliar with the complex architecture (and having no help from out-of-date documentation) will turn the system into a complete mess with bug fixes and change requests.

In FAD, this isn’t even a concern. We know the short life span of a system and develop every feature (from the interface) as a patch. Maintenance programmers can come in and Do What It Takes to add their patches. In FAD, we don’t even try to stop the aging process. We encourage it.

VI. Learn To Deal
Many other methodologies focus on delivering “quality” (as in “bug free”) software. And guess what: they fail. Miserably. No matter how hard you try, software will have bugs. In FAD, we just learn to deal with it, and we encourage the client to do the same. So what if the application crashes when you click that button that way? Don’t click the button that way, and learn to deal!

VII. Be Environmentally Conservative
In the real world, there’s only one environment: it’s called The Real World. So why do some methodologies invent these counter-intuitive, bizarro environments called “QA” and “UAT”? Do architecture firms construct an entire house before building an addition on yours, just so they can “test” their building skills? Of course not, and neither should software developers. In FAD, there’s only one software environment: Production. Anything else is pollution.

FAD Application Design

NOTE: First and foremost, understand that the FADAD is merely the preferred method of building applications. Because in FAD, we do what it takes, a lesser or more in depth approach can be used as needed.

Many of the tenets of Front Ahead Design are based on the failings of other methodologies. FADAD is no different, and draws some of its key facets from the archaic Model-View-Controller architecture. In MVC, there are three different components: the Model (the data), the View (the UI), and the Control (everything else).

If you think about it, two of MVC’s components are nothing but dead weight. All anyone – including the client – really cares about when all things are said and done is the View. Therefore, in FADAD, our guiding architecture model is simply called “V”:

The H/YPE Framework: The FAD Developer’s Best Friend

If there’s one thing that’s frustrated just about every developer out there, it’s “untouchable” library code that almost does what you need it to, but not quite. For FAD developers who chose to use the H/YPE framework, this is not a problem.

Unlike the stodgy libraries of yesteryear, H/YPE is not a “compiled” library. It’s a set of cross-language codefiles that can be copied to any application, and is designed to “live” with that application for life. Don’t like that 48 plus 92 is not 4892? No problem! Just edit MathHelper. Here’s a small subset of what comes in H/YPE:

• HYPE.StringHelper – all sorts of functions like IsEqual, AreEqual, Add, Subtract, Join, DoubleJoin, Encrypt, and Decrypt
• HYPE.VHelper.HTML – the ultimate HTML library including functions like WrapInCENTER, UnHTML, ToHTML, and ScriptBlock
• HYPE.Audio – everything you’d ever want to add audio, including Beep and BeepMore

But Wait, There’s More: Certification!

No, I don’t mean to sound like our good friend Ron Popeil, but before wrapping things up here, I wanted to tell you about the latest excitement in the world of Front-Ahead Design: certification!

Just last week at the International FAD Conference in Azerbaijan, I joined several other FAD leaders to formally announce the first official Front-Ahead Design certification program: the Fadstronaut certificate. Why Fadstronaut? Because we felt that the astronaut was the best analogy for the challenges and difficulties that FAD software developers face each day.

Becoming a Certified Fadstronaut is easy, but not too easy. All you need is one year (1,000 hours) of verifiable FAD development experience, and you’ll be eligible to sit for the Fadstronaut certification exam. Score in the 50th percentile, and you’ve earned the designation Certified Fadstronaut!

I hope that gives you all a good idea of what FAD is all about. Believe me, there’s a whole world more of FAD out there. That said, I hope to see some of you soon at the Worldwide FAD Meeting in Buenos Aires next month!

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/FrontAhead-Design.aspx