| Executive Dashboard
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25 Sep 04 |
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Thanks to Sven C. Koehler. He pointed out me to Edward Tufte’s
interesting forum.
There are some interesting answeres in the thread, esp. the graphic about
the patient. Isn’t every company a patient? :-)
I'm developing an executive dashboard, and I haven't been satisfied
with the business graphics that are widely available
(e.g. gauges, dials, stoplights). I decided to make a "Zen" version
of a KPI status indicator, using as little color as possible,
and incorporating E.T's innovative "Spark Line" metaphor for display
of trends. The graphic below shows the proposed KPI display across
the top of a browser screen with a descriptive example in the middle.
Any feedback would be wonderful!
Comments: Because of complex KPI names (e.g. This Week versus Last Week
Sales (All Divisions), KPIs were labeled with Roman numerals.
Balloon help could display the KPI name when the cursor brushes the
KPI indicator.
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| .. like Xmas
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25 Sep 04 |
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I came across this nice discussion between Phlip and Juergen Ahthing in the
XP-ML
"Without test-first and refactoring, clients think
they must assemble as many program requirements as
they can afford to have written. This effort snarls
all relative business priorities together, making
Scope Control impossible. It obscures opportunities
for simplification. Designing and implementing many
features all at once is very hard, leading to our
industry's reputation for very large failures. Putting
tests in front of development's inner cycle permits an
outer cycle of incremental feature growth. That
relieves the Customer of the responsibility to predict
the future and guess which complete set of features
will maximize productivity."
.. Juergens answer:
Nice description.
Sometimes I try to explain that to non technical people
with the following picture:
If you have only one chance to get your wishes on a
list, it is like Christmas for a child. You make sure
you get every little wish on that list and hope for the best.
If you are sure that you can get your wishes on the list
at any time. You will just put the most important ones
there which come to your mind easily.
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| Samizdat - 0.5.2 is out
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25 Sep 04 |
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Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and open
publishing Web sites. It will let everyone publish, view, comment, edit,
and aggregate text and multimedia resources, vote on ratings and
classifications, filter resources by flexible sets of criteria, and
cooperate and coordinate on all kinds of activities. It intends to promote
values of freedom, openness, equality, and cooperation.
Samizdat homepage
Slides Dmitry Borodaenko presented about Samizdat ath the Euruko 2003
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| Del.icio.us and Bit Torrent: Google in Reverse
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25 Sep 04 |
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why has put that interesting posting on his blog
Inside my head, I sometimes refer to Del.icio.us as the Google In Reverse.
Google has amassed a solid mound of ranked and twined web sites. The
standings shift about with caution, the behemoths are tough to dethrone.
And if I ask for Ruby, the answers in place may hold through the end of
the year.
...
Del.icio.us is perfect! The activity bred by competitive linking would
be enhanced by the sharing of richer media.
...
Better client software is needed to make this happen.
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| What is XP?
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25 Sep 04 |
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Ron Jeffries posted this well known Kent Beck quote in the XP-mailinglist.
They talk about the 2nd ed. of XP Explained by Kent Beck.
But anyway, when I last asked Kent what XP is, he said
"XP is a community of software development practices based on
values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage".
That was about two or three years ago.
I look forward to seeing the second edition as well.
I'm sure it will be enlightening ...
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| How Org Charts Lie
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25 Sep 04 |
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(source: Harvard Business School) In an excerpt from Harvard Business
School Press Hidden Power of Social Networks, learn how "social
network analysis" reveals problems your org chart ignores. link
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| New Russian bestseller :-)
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25 Sep 04 |
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A big thanks to Leftenant Berezka for the pics :-).
Been coding hard now on SW and CFaR. I would really need some good vodka
now before getting up early tomorrow morning to catch the train.
Hope you all had a good weekend, -A.
This vodka bottle reminds me that I am way behind on Futurometer. We will
kick ass there soonish!
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| Knowledge Management from personal content management tools
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25 Sep 04 |
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I shamelessly copy this blog-entry from here
Below is a quote from Dave Pollard, the former Chief Knowledge Officer from
Ernst & Young. It is a great paragraph because is is truly representive of
why enterprise knowledge managment solutions failed. He is talking about the
fact that knowledge managment systems have to be personal content management systems first.
Quote:
I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because
since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information
has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information
have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing
work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools
that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes',
information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex,
centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have
been foisted on users for the past decade.
End Quote:
It is a great quote because how is it possible that anyone could believe that
a centralied hierarchical tool could work when it was in no way related to how
people did and have done knowledge work since the beginning.
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| How to bypass the version-checker on Linux for Oracle 10g
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25 Sep 04 |
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I found this most useful post by Jonathan Gennick on FreeLists
JR> Yes, those are the "certified" Linux releases, but Oracle versions prior to
JR> 10g could be installed on other distros. The screenshots seem to indicate
JR> that the Installer now checks which Linux you're running, which leads me
JR> back to the original question.
I haven't tried it myself, but Wim Coekaerts once mentioned
an "-ignoreSysPrereqs" installer option that would get you
past that Linux distribution check.
Or suggested by DJ: edit the oraparam.ini file and edit the supported
versions section.
Or: run
runInstaller --help
and actually read it :-)
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| The Real Point of Oracle10g Manageability
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25 Sep 04 |
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Curt Monash has written a very good article about Oracle 10g.
The article argues that the real focus is on manageability, which makes
perfect strategic sense. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is king. And with
hardware getting cheaper, software getting cheaper, and custom programming
being outsourced to cheap countries, administrative costs are an ever
bigger part of TCO. Whats more, manageability is historically a major
competitive challenge for Oracle; 10g is designed to neutralize that issue.
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| Werner's Oracle - Linux page
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25 Sep 04 |
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Jolly good Oracle & Linux page by Werner
Puschitz. There are several instructions on installing Oracle 9 and 10 on a
range of different Linux versions.
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| Open Beagle, V. 2.1.4 |
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25 Sep 04 |
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BEAGLE=Beagle Engine is an Advanced Genetic Learning Environment
Open BEAGLE, a versatile EC framework
Welcome to the Open BEAGLE W3 page. Open BEAGLE is a C++ Evolutionary Computation (EC) framework. It provides an high-level software environment to do any kind of EC, with support for tree-based genetic programming, bit string and real-valued genetic algorithms, and evolution strategy.
The Open BEAGLE architecture follows strong principles of object oriented programming, where abstractions are represented by loosely coupled objects and where it is common and easy to reuse code. Open BEAGLE is designed to provide an EC environment that is generic, user friendly, portable, efficient, robust, elegant and free.
The Open BEAGLE code is compliant with the C++ ANSI/ISO 3 standard. It requires the Standard Template Library (STL). No specific call in the core libraries are made to the operating system nor to the hardware.
link
Make sure you also check out distributed BEAGLE. Distributed BEAGLE was created to distribute the evolutionary process using the EC framework Open BEAGLE. Its key features are robustness, fault tolerance, adaptability for heterogeneous networks, and transparency for the user. Distributed BEAGLE uses the Master-Slave model to distribute data over the network.
When doing an Open BEAGLE EC application, just 3 little modifications to your code are needed to enable Distributed BEAGLE. There's two types of program that can be executed by using different configuration files. The first one evolves the population over one generation by applying Darwinian selection and genetic operators. It usually runs on the same computer as the master. The second one evaluates the individuals's fitness. The slaves can be eventually used as screen savers.
The master is called DAGS for DAGS is an Agile Grid Scheduler. It is not specific for a given evolutionary algorithm. DAGS uses dynamic adjustment of the size of sets of individuals that are sent to the slaves based on the recent history of the evaluation clients. If an evaluation client lags to return results, the data is redistributed to another evaluation client. There's a database in the master that insures data persistency. link
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| XP is fractal.
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Ken Boucher posted this to the xp-mailinglist)
> Surely, you're not calling design documents you built in the middle
> of a project "up-front" design?
Let’s talk about "project" and "up-front" for a
second.
In the old world I came from, a project had a feedback loop. This feedback
loop could be considered to have covered design to unit testing, roughly a
period of 6 months to a year on many projects. In other words, I would get
feedback on my design 6 months after I made it.
Now let’s enter the fractal nature of XP.
My design to unit test feedback loop is the duration of a card in most
cases. In some cases it’s as small as design/refactor/new test/new
code/refactor/ (which may be a scope of minutes). In some cases it may be
as large as an iteration (after all, we didn’t pick the cards in this
iteration at random, we had a plan). It may even have been as large as a
release plan.
The difference is that I get my feedback quickly and the design I do at any
given stage is as small as it needs to be instead of as large as it can be.
But I still do design "up-front". I have a plan before I leave
the release meeting. I have a plan before I leave the iteration meeting. I
have a plan before I even start refactoring before that first unit test. I
have to make the same decisions I would have made in the BDUF, the only
difference is that I make them as late as possible. In short, I make them
just before I do the task that requires that decision to have been made.
XP is fractal. It’s possible to think about an XP project as a large
collection of projects, each small enough to be written on 3*5 cards. And I
do design for every one of those projects up front.
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