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We used Google Wave in a conference call…

December 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

… and were mildly impressed.

We set up an agenda before the call started, and used that as our base document. It was then filled out as we discussed the various points, and comments were posted to capture remarks, questions and clarifications.

A couple of observations:

  • If your participants don’t have a Google account, you can’t add them with their regular Email address (even though that is somehow linked to their googlewave.com account), but you have to use their googlewave.com address.
  • The Ribbit plugin didn’t work.
  • There is a reluctance to edit other people’s blips. It seems to be more “polite” to comment on the blip and say that something isn’t correct than to go in and just edit the blip to correct it. Cultural thing – I’m sure it will change once more people have used Google Wave or even a Wiki.
  • It’s hard to make a comment in the conference call, and record it in the wave at the same time. However, a conference call is far superior in hammering out a discussion quickly. Maybe a designated typer would be an idea in a conference call?

We didn’t run into any software problems. There were 5 people on the call and the wave, and we never saw a slow-down or a crash. The only disappointment was the Reddit plugin, but that was easily overcome.

I think Wave is still looking for a good application. Minutes and collaborative documents seem the most obvious application, but I have the feeling there are more exciting applications for the Wave technique in the future.

Filed Under: Network, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Kanban in software development

December 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The last year or so I’ve been increasingly involved in Continuous Improvement events, “leaning” the organization and removing non-value added steps from processes.

Most of these processes were manufacturing-oriented. However, some of the same principles can be applied to office processes. While we were discussing that, I kept wondering how to use some of these Lean principles in software development. It turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there are several ways to apply Lean in development.

I moved in about a year from project-driven to-do lists, through Agile/Scrum development, towards something similar to Kanban in the factory process. The principle of Kanban development is fairly simple: limit the amount of Work In Progress (WIP), allowing for more flexible assignment of development tasks, more visibility, and a clearer flow of tasks through the different stages (analysis, development, acceptance, deployment).

In the process of learning about these techniques I came across a variety of websites and blog posts that may be of interest:

I think in the next several weeks we’ll look into Kanban software development closer, and see if we can apply it in our small development department.

    Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

    Recovering from a hacked GMail and Google Apps account

    December 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

    Amit Agarwal was recently the victim of a hacked Gmail account. He describes how he found out it was hacked, the steps he took to recover it, and advice on how to prepare (not prevent!) for when your account gets hacked.

    Filed Under: Network Tagged With: , , ,

    Vint Cerf’s visit to Virginia Tech

    December 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

    I haven’t written anything specific to the blog in about a month. That doesn’t mean nothing interesting happened – far from it.

    One of the interesting things was a speech by Vinton Cerf at Virginia Tech. Apart from being an entertaining speaker, you may also know him as one of the inventors of TCP/IP (together with Bob Khan). He touched on a large variety of subjects, some of which I’d like to highlight here:

    There are 4 billion mobile phones, and 1 million PCs

    Of all these devices, about 25% are internet connected. And the mobile phone market is still growing. Basically, if you don’t take mobile phones into account when developing software, you’re missing out on a large portion of the internet connected public.

    Growing Internet penetration will radically change the landscape

    Internet penetration is the percentage of a country’s population that can use the internet. The current top users of the internet are:

    CountryInternet UsersPenetrationUsers at 90% penetration
    China338.026.9%1,130.9
    United States248.274.1%301.5
    Japan94.075.5%112.1
    India81.07.0%1,041.4
    Germany54.265.9%74.0
    Brazil50.034.0%132.4
    United Kingdom46.776.4%55.0
    Russia45.332.3%126.2
    France43.169.3%56.0
    South Korea37.577.3%43.7

    (All user totals are in millions. Data as of Q2 2009. Source: Internet World Stats)

    So, currently China has the most users, followed closely by the US. If we’d get a 90% penetration rate in every country (and combine that with mobile phones – not all users have to use PCs!), we get a completely different picture: 1.1 billion Chinese, 1 billion Indians, followed by about 300 million Americans…

    Even if you include all of Western Europe, you won’t get half of the users that China has by itself. It would be wise to account for non-Western alphabets in any new products.

    IPv4 will run out of address space

    IPv4 will run out of available addresses somewhere in 2011, by the latest estimates. So it would be wise to adopt IPv6 in any new deployments.

    Inter-cloud communication is the new frontier

    Computing is moving more and more towards the “Cloud”. However, we currently have several different clouds: Amazon, Google, IBM, etc. None of the clouds are interchangeable, and can’t communicate with each other.

    The next big step in computing would be to develop a method to let information from one cloud move to another, to reach its destination. Vinton Cerf likened the current situation to the computer networks before the invention of TCP/IP and the Internet: several different islands, that required conversion stations or gateways to communicate.

    Various info

    • Mr. Cerf has wired his house with numerous sensors, measuring light, temperature, etc. He can use this data to optimize energy usage – turn heating off in certain areas before they reach their target temperature, etc.
    • He raised the question of persistance of information. Currently we’re able to examine papyrus scrolls thousands of years old. However, it has become very difficult to read electronic data more than 20-30 years old. Humanity needs to find a way to preserve data in a format that is readable longer than half a generation.
    • His latest work concerns an Interplanetary Internet. This addresses the enormous lag times involved in communications between the planets. As to why we would need this, he describes how the Mars Rovers were sending data to Earth initially: through a slow, overheating long-range radio. By switching to a shorter range radio the Rovers were able to increase throughput, however, they couldn’t communicate with Earth directly. The solution was to use the Mars Orbiters as relays, using a store-and-forward model. This resulted in a new Bundle Protocol, described in RFC 5050.

    The speech was scheduled for about 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions. The speech lasted much longer… but there was still time for a few questions. It was really interesting to see how Mr. Cerf, 66 years old, still keeps up with the latest developments, and can think on his feet faster than a lot of people I know.

    Filed Under: Network Tagged With: , , , ,

    Google Wave: Now What?

    November 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

    It’s been a couple of weeks now that I’ve had access to Google Wave, and sent out my invites. So, now what?Google_Wave_logo

    Well, it’s still fairly quiet. A lot of the people I sent invites to have the “What the hell is this?” reaction. A lot of the conversations that are going on are of the “hey, I’m on Google Wave – Wow, so am I!” variety. To be honest, I sometimes felt like I was using a preview of a chat client – until I was on the This Week in Google 15 wave (open your Google Wave client and search for twig or twig15).

    In this wave a discussion developed on the Novell Pulse product that was announced. After seeing it mentioned, I googled around for a bit and found a demo video. During the video, the collaborative editing was demonstrated, and I remarked that it was missing the little balloons that show up when someone types within Google Wave. One of the other participants asked me for the link to the demon, I posted it, and he proceeded to incorporate all that into my original message. That was a really powerful moment to see what collaborative editing can look like.

    Apart from that, there hasn’t been a whole lot of collaboration going on. I made some notes during a presentation where two colleagues had Wave invites, but they never collaborated on the notes. I guess the whole form is still a little foreign to most people; if you have edited a Wiki entry, you may have an advantage, but otherwise, you really have to have a good use case.

    The big step for Wave will probably be the Federation server. I can see several applications of publicizing a wave within our company, but I don’t want to make that wave public to the whole world. I’m hoping Federation will give us that capability.

    Another improvement (without criticizing the Google wave client) would be different types of clients to the Wave protocol. Novell’s Pulse is/could be one, but I think it would be beneficial if multiple clients appear (look what happened to the web browsers when Internet Explorer got competition from Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome)).

    The next couple of months will be interesting for Wave’s development. I think a lot of people forget that we’re still looking at a Preview (not a Beta!). Once the Wave splashes down on more people, it will be more stable and mature. Until then it’s a test environment, with only occasional glimpses of its potential.

    Filed Under: Network, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,
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