Features

Microsoft’s vision of how we will work and live in the future

January 27, 2012 By Ronald Bruintjes Leave a Comment

Microsoft is working on its view of the future. This is a video of how Microsoft envisions Office in the (near?) future, and how it impacts our work and home live. Pay close attention to the recipe the girl selects at the end – it shows the ingredients being displayed on the kitchen counter. What it leaves out is something I’ve seen in another video, where the ingredients are put on the counter, matching the displayed ingredients – and it detects mismatches in the items.

Exciting to see this kind of vision, and I’m really curious how far away this is. We have face to face talk, interactive surfaces, touch screens, etc. Maybe 10 years from now, this will be the norm…

Filed Under: Features, Lifestyle, Productivity Tagged With: automation, future, home, microsoft, office, vision, work

Integrating RequestTracker and flow.io

January 19, 2012 By Ronald Bruintjes Leave a Comment

For a year or 2 we have been using flow.io at the company I work at to track projects. About a year ago, we decided to use RequestTracker (RT) to track incoming helpdesk requests, and started incorporating tasks within projects. RT almost replaced flow.io, but it lacks in the visualization of the Kanban process. Rather than building a completely new Kanban board on top of RT, I decided to use flow.io as the visualization tool, and get some measurements thrown in as a bonus.

flow.io has a nice REST API interface, allowing you to get a lot of information about your boards, and create or update new tasks. Deleting tasks is done by updating a task to a status of Deleted, giving you the opportunity to undelete the task. I’ve worked with REST interfaces before, so I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of problems there.

The challenge was RT. RT is written in Perl, and uses something called Scrips to run little scripts when something changes on an RT ticket. Scrips are pieces of Perl code. And I’ve never done anything in Perl before… except for a few Mister House scripts.

Below are the steps I took to make this work. It is a work in progress, and I’ve put it on github as an Open Source project, so feel free to improve it, fork it, or whatever.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Features, Software Tagged With: agile, flow.io, kanban, Perl, programming, RequestTracker, RT

Hitler’s SOPA and PIPA rant

January 18, 2012 By Ronald Bruintjes Leave a Comment

To end SOPA/PIPA blackout day, this beauty from YouTube.

Remember, when SOPA and PIPA are passed, these videos are completely unlawful. You will not be able to enjoy the irony of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century criticize the worst law proposals (so far) of the 21st century. The website you view those videos on will be blocked. This website will be blocked for linking and even embedding it…

Filed Under: Features, Lifestyle Tagged With: censorship, hitler, pipa, sopa

SOPA/PIPA blackout day January 18th, 2012

January 17, 2012 By Ronald Bruintjes Leave a Comment

We are supporting the January 18th blackout in protest against the SOPA and PIPA acts. On January 18th, from 8AM to 8PM, our site will be replaced by a banner not unlike the one displayed when our site would be subject to a violation as described in the SOPA and PIPA acts.

We believe both the SOPA and PIPA acts are violating the First and Fourth Amendments. On top of that, the provisions in the acts do nothing to prevent malicious websites from distributing the copyrighted software, but affect benevolent sites by way of collateral damage. And finally, the provisions describe ways to try and break the internet structure.

For further information, see the following links:

Normal operations will resume January 18th, 8PM.

Update: we changed plugins at the last minute, since the original plugin would not allow any access to the site at all…