Maura van der Linden – Blog

I have the dubious pleasure of trying to provide documentation for a small application that is basically a helper application for our product. It’s NOT complicated and it shouldn’t be causing nearly the amount of drama that is currently occurring. This has been probably twenty times more frustrating than my big project.

Now, one thing to understand is that the doc team (of which I am a member) is not integrated with the project team officially. We are a separate organizational unit. With the product team of my big project, they use Scrum and I attend their weekly planning meetings and the daily standups if I feel I need to. They are very transparent and I can check the tracking log at any time to update my plans.

This little project (a single program manager, dev and tester) keep telling me they are “agile” but they have no idea what they are doing beyond having a daily meeting which seems to take an hour every day, pestering everyone else and changing schedules and basic assumptions so quickly I swear I am getting whiplash. There is No Clue here.

I’m frustrated – VERY frustrated – at this point. My team does run on a Scrum process and I keep having to defend my prioritization, my schedule and deal with each time they change their minds and (often) never tell me. The following seems to be unclear to them:

1. Changing schedule dates – drastically – at least once every week or ten days does NOT mean you are agile. It means you have no idea what the scope of your task is and you are allowing schedule creep and bad planning to win while you rush to try to get this project out the door.
2. Changing core deliverables and/or concepts without talking to those you depend on to provide you with something you must have before you can ship and which these changes affect does not make you agile. It means you are risking your project, your shipping and your working relationship with these people you are dependent on because you either think you can push them into doing your will or you are incapable of remembering your dependencies.
3. Refusing to provide the requested information so a team you are dependent on can do their job and “rolling your own” version of what you think they need instead does not mean you are agile. It means you are unwilling to work with that other team and can come across as passive-aggressive or ignorant and the other team still needs the information they requested.
4. When given a schedule by another team, pestering for updates constantly when they are meeting their schedule does not mean you are agile. It means you are annoying them and making them less likely to try to get things done early because they are spending that precious time responding to random emails on things that have already been discussed multiple times.
5. Trying to push a release out the day before a three day holiday that backs up on a week when most staff are on vacation does not make you agile. It means you are foolishly focused on the earliest date you might bully people into shipping instead of having contingency plans for when things may go wrong
6. Asking for documentation to be done off a non-finalized UI to “speed things up” does not make you agile. It means you are asking your doc team to write documentation at least twice and hoping they catch any instances of the non-final UI before the docs ship. Skeletons are okay, but you won’t get RTM ready docs.
7. Shooting of wild plans from the hip does not make you agile. Disorganization, lack of ability to plan and think through processes as well as a lack of ability to track issues, decisions and schedules makes you a project from hell and someone that quickly becomes the person no one wants to work with.

That is all. My tongue may bleed soon from biting my tongue at work.

As in most offices, there is a bit of a tradition of pranking at my office. Pranks that cause physical damage, make it impossible for the victim to work or which are mean are discouraged but some fun pranks still take place. It does help lighten the day, I’ll admit. Right now there seems to be an ongoing prank being perpetrated on two program managers who share an office but it’s a mystery as to who is doing it.

Each office in our building at work has what’s called a relight. It’s a floor to ceiling, about 12 inch wide window that runs vertically next to the door to allow light into the hallway and the office. It’s also very useful for seeing if the person you need is busy if the door is shut for quiet. Right now our building is crowded and all non-managers are sharing their office with at least one other person. It’s not ideal but it’s not horrible.

Two members of the product team I work as a writer for share an office. These are two of my absolute favorite team members and they are true rockstars. They have a great sense of humor and it’s a Good Thing that they do.

About 4 months ago, I think, I walked by their office to discover that someone had taken a whiteboard marker and written “Squirrels” on the relight. I asked why but no one seemed to know the reason or who had done it. Guesses were made that it had to do with the movie “Up” but most people just shrugged. The funny thing is, the two PMs are a bit like squirrels. They are industrious, busy, and running about getting things done.

I will confess that I started calling them “The Squirrels”. Hey – don’t glare at me! I did tell them that if it bothered them, I’d try to stop but they said they didn’t mind. I guess that’s a good thing because it spread. Pretty soon my co-workers started calling them The Squirrels, too. Then when we were speaking about just ONE of the two, we had to differentiate — I tended to use “Tall Squirrel” and “Not-So-Tall Squirrel”. They took this with incredibly good graces, I’ll confess. Everyone seems to know who I mean when I say I need to talk to the Squirrels or run by the Squirrels’ office.

(I felt relatively safe with calling them that because they didn’t erase the moniker from their relight for months. I figured they couldn’t be too annoyed if they left it there.)

Then about a month ago, “Squirrels” disppeared from their relight. I inquired when I noticed the deletion because if they had gotten sick of it, I wanted to TRY to not call them that anymore. But they said they hadn’t erased it – they’d just come in and it was gone. It seemed to be the end of the prank. I was sad. A little humor goes a long way sometimes.

Two days later, I walked by and a new word had been written on the relight – “Hamsters”! They asked me if I wrote it and when I asked why they thought I did, they said it looked like female writing. (There’s female writing??) For some reason they seemed more eager to figure out who had dubbed them hamsters than squirrels – did they consider it a step back? Hamsters are cute too but I couldn’t see them so much as hamsters – most hamsters I knew were only energetic at night and slept a lot of the time. I continued to call them the Squirrels, in defiance of their new moniker.

I’m not sure they ever followed through on their idea of gathering writing samples from various suspects’ whiteboards, though. Last I heard they’d narrowed in on a couple of people and were asking questions.

But, again, they let the writing stay.

Yesterday I stopped by to ask a few questions and “hamsters” had been replaced by a new moniker – “Capybara”. I’m afraid I DID crack up at this one. Plus someone had written “Python food” and drawn an arrow pointing to “capybara”. They just shook their head when I managed to point at the relight and shrugged. One of them did admit they had to look up what it was. (It’s actually a giant South American rodent. Think 140lbs or so giant.)

I wasn’t paying a lot of attention but I think the three different names were each in different handwriting. I’m not sure who is responsible or what group of people might be but it’s truly hilarious and I can’t wait to see what the two PMs are dubbed next. The combination of the escalation (or maybe descent?) of rodent species and the way the two PMs can take a joke makes it a lot of fun and has really livened up what has otherwise been a highly stressful and incredibly busy few months.

Today marked the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News, a print newspaper that has been in business almost 150 years. While I am saddened by its demise, it does make me ponder the ways technology and society have changed how we receive and seek out information.

For myself, I’m a news junkie. I grew up with parents that received multiple newspapers and I still read the news every day. But I don’t subscribe to or purchase a newspaper. My own experience has been that once I’ve read the paper, I have to make time to recycle it and they clutter up my house (more so than before). I don’t need the hard copy and it’s actually a nuisance.

Instead I read my news online in multiple locations.

The advent of being able to access your news at your leisure and for free as well as different delivery mechanisms like electronic subscription, etc., have changed the way many people I know get their information.

But now the newspaper publishers are faced with a bad economy on top of ever dwindling subscription numbers which, in turn, affect advertising revenue. I’m not sure they will survive even the next decade. It’s sad, indeed, but I’m not sure how they can cope with the changes to society and technology without making changes that may mean electronic only.

We’re on cusp of changes and I mourn the past. But I can only look forward to the future.

With all the resources we have at our fingertips, why does it seem that the first instinct of many people is to request help from other people instead of USING the readily available resources? There really seems to be a chasm between having the resources and actually using the resources.

Yes, I realize that people are also considered “resources,” but there’s a cost to using them that you don’t incur from a web search or a reference book. One cost is the potential for wrong or incomplete information. The other is that you will annoy them at some point if you ask for help too often.

But can you teach someone to be resourceful? When I was growing up, if I asked what a word meant or how to spell it, my parents would hand me the dictionary and tell me to look it up. They gave me a resource and made me always use it before they would give me an answer. Anymore I believe this is truly the first sign of my being a “resourceful” person. I actively look for non-people resources, know where and how to find them and how to use them. In these modern days of internet and search engines, a huge amount of information is right at my fingertips!

But what about those people who didn’t grow up this way? Can they be taught to be resourceful before asking questions? How many times do we think “read the manual” or “google it”? Short of being borderline nasty, it seems to be a losing proposition to remind people the information they seek is found more quickly and certainly more reliably by looking toward non-people resources.

Questions about resourcefulness will forever be a part of my interview process…because I’m not sure you can retroactively teach resourcefulness.

So I’m now in possession of a Galaxy Black ASUS eee pc. This is a little baby notebook that’s solid state (no moving hard drive). It really is small enough to fit in my purse. The keys are about 3/4 normal size (as a guess) and we’ll see how well I do typing on them. It’s not a replacement for my laptop or desktop machines but rather something to carry around, make notes on and write quick tidbits on.

The first thing I found was that the WiFi doesn’t like the advanced encryption of my wireless network at home. It had no problem finding it, just could not get an IP. Oh well, I’m not willing to sacrifice my network security (nor reset all the machines) so I just won’t use that at home.

It boots really quickly and is running Xandros Linux. This gives it an almost Windows-like UI and it was easy to find applications like Open Office and such. After a quick tour of pushing buttons, I set is aside to charge while I read the information.

Hmm – I could install Windows XP on it, if so desired. I think for now I’ll stick with Xandros and see what happens.

The first real issues rears its head – I’m a dedicated Dvorak touch-typist. I don’t need the keyboard’s keycaps to be laid out in Dvorak but I want the keys mapped to a Dvorak layout. This is easy in Windows because I’ve done it so many times but it took me a small session with Google to find the command for Xandros. The command works but I’d have to enter it each time I start up the eee and that seems like a pita.

What would really be great is to have a shortcut to execute the command to set the keyboard map to US and one for Dvorak, then set the default to Dvorak.

Easier said than done. Guess I’ll poke at that later tonight and see if I can figure it all out.

When you install Vista on a computer that has a prior version of a Microsoft operating system on it, a lot of the information from the prior installation will be saved in a directory called Windows.old. If you have installed Vista multiple times, you may have more than one Windows.old directory.

Once your Vista install is up and seems stable, you may want to reclaim that space but will find you can’t merely delete the folder, even logged in as an administrator. There is a method provided to remove the directory but I didn’t know it until I stumbled upon it.

To remove the files from these old Windows installations, do the following.

1. Click on your Start button.
2. Click on Computer.
3. Right Click on your main hard disk.
4. Select Properties.
5. Click on the Disk Cleanup button.
6. Click on Files of all users in the popup.
7. Click on Continue.
8. Look through the list of file types and check the box next to Previous Windows Installation(s).
9. Click OK to perform the cleanup.

Hope this is helpful.

In my last post I spoke about how you can free up disk space if your Vista operating system appears to be consuming your hard drive space. As promised, here is some information on how change the disk space used.

One way to prevent that from happening is to turn off the automated creation of system restore points entirely but if you want to still have that fallback without all your drive space disappearing, there is a way to see how much space the system shadow copy is allowed to use and to change that limit.

This is a little more complicated because you have to use an elevated command window to do it. To open the elevated command window, do the following:

1. Click on your Start Button
2. Click on All Programs
3. Click on Accessories
4. Right click on Command Prompt
5. Click on Run As Administrator
6. Click on Continue to confirm

Once you have this command window open, you should check to see what your system is currently set to use for its shadow copy. To do that, you type the following, then press Return:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

This command will display information on each drive for which you have shadowstorage enabled. The last line in each set is the maximum size limit for the shadow storage. It’s typically set to be 10% of the total drive size but, in the case of a laptop I had running Windows Home Premium, it had that dreaded word – UNBOUNDED. Ack. Definitely something to change. If you have a very large drive, 10% of the entire drive may be a vast amount of overkill as well and you may want to reduce the max size.

To reset the size, from the elevated command window, you type the following and then press Return:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=6GB

This sets 6GB as the max size for the shadow copy of my C: drive, stored on my C: drive. If you leave maxsize= blank, then the limit becomes unbounded.

One of my computers is running Vista Home Premium edition and has a 65GB main drive. Since it’s one I only do limited things on (like writing), I saw no need to upgrade the operating system but, earlier this week, I looked at the hard drive space and noticed that it had suddenly gone down from about 30GB free to 1.5GB free. All this without my installing much in the way of new software or storing huge archives of documents.

Like any other person, my response was “What the heck?!?” Well, my response might have been a little more colorful, but you get the idea. After the surprise wore off and the usual suspects had been cleared, I proceeded to hunt around for an answer.

It turns out that one of the ways Vista protects your data and system is to create system restore points – to be able to restore your system to a previously stable state. It also keeps shadowcopies of your documents, in case they become corrupted. Usually Vista installs with a maximum space set (default is 10% of the total disk space, I believe). When this space is exceeded, Vista will begin deleting the oldest restore points and shadow copies to make room for the new ones.

For some reason, on the system this was happening on, the maximum size was set to unbounded. It could use ALL the space.

To clean up the files (but keep the last system restore point), you can perform the following:

1. Click on your Start Button.
2. Click on Computer.
3. Right Click on your main drive.
4. Select Properties.
5. Click on the Disk Cleanup button.
6. Select Files from all users.
7. Click Continue to authorize.
8. Click the More Options tab.
9. Click the Clean Up button under System Restore and Shadow Copies section.
10. Click Delete to confirm.

There is a way to set the size limit of the Shadow Copies yourself but it’s more complex and easier to mess up than is probably appropriate for this blog. You’re welcome to contact me using the Contact Form if you need me to tell you how to do it.

I finally have Issue #4 of my Newsletter up, talking about Operating Systems.

Something is going on between the popular Yahoo Groups and Gmail.

I began noticing problems on 3/14 where my volume of email went way down very suddenly. Since I’m pretty much an email addict, I went to my Yahoo Groups page and checked my Email Preferences only to find that my gmail account that is used for most of my groups had been bouncing and automatically disabled by Yahoo. It noted over 300 emails were bounced.

I put it down to some odd circumstance, reactivated the account and went about my merry way. So far I’ve been forced to reactivate it at least once per day. This is really no fun.

But apparently I’m not the only one. This has been happening to quite a few people who use GMail to receive individual emails from their Yahoo Groups. The only information I’ve seen from Yahoo is that the issues is on GMail’s side but no details. I’ve not seen anything from Google at all.

So if you use GMail to receive mail from Yahoo Groups, you may want to check your account status.