Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Article – A clear inventory

February 19, 2007

I will slowly take the articles that I have published to the wickedfire gay forum onto this blog.

Don’t worry, they will also stay up on wickedfire.

I chose the first one, “A clear inventory“, because again I just stumbled across the issue that prompted me to write it.

Being a webmaster often consists of a myriad of little tasks that have to be done for every domain. It is easy to loose sight of issues surrounding the development.

Read more here

powered by performancing firefox

Quadzilla inspires once again.

February 13, 2007

Ending a post titled “Do it fucking now” with a quote from a Shakespearian play must be a sign of class.

Anyway, hop on over and read it.

::emp::

powered by performancing firefox

Process overkill – How to have 6 people do the job of two.

February 13, 2007

My 9 to 5?
I work as an IT project manager in a huge international company.
As with any IT in any company, we are heavily into project and process management.

The countless hours spent in meetings, teams formed just to define processes, Quality Managers looking at projects, crueling process audits,…
Does this all work out? Does the effort pay out in the end?

Here is one example of what is happening. (Names changed to protect the guilty.)

dev: “I need to deploy this program to the test server. I’ll call Harry, he knows what he’s got to do.”
<phone call><done>

<Project Management falls from the sky>

PM: “This can’t go on, we need to document what is being done.”
dev:”Fair deal, this will make my work easier and save my butt from time to time. Done.”
PM:”You also need to write this document and fill out that form and report to this person and write to the Change Management team and enter the schedule in the scheduler control and….”
dev: “$#@% !! Alright, I’ll just write a program to do all that.”

(Actually, not a bad idea. No one says the docs have to be written by hand. And programs make it less tedious and are less error prone. Automation FTW!)

The situation now (this actually happened to me just yesterday)

me:”We need to deploy to the test server”
dev:”Sure, I’ll just call Harry, he knows what to do.”
me:”Err, the scheduling program won’t let us, until we have the docs. And there are new components, after all.”
dev:”$#@% !! Well, I can’t generate all of it, I’ll just fake it.”

<fakes it, enters some additional content by hand>

me:”Err… that might work, but what if that ain’t good enough at inspection?”
dev:”That’s 180 pages of automatically generated documentation, the stuff I entered is sloppy, but not wrong. Let them read the fucker and try to find any error.”
me:”OK, this is urgent so what do we do now?”
dev:”I’ll call Harry, he knows what to do.”
<phone call><done>

So this company basically moved from:

“I’ll call [personX], he knows what to do.”

to:

“I’ll call [personX], he knows what to do.”

In between we are now feeding an additional project manager, a quality management initiative with X teams (I really do not know, but it the head count is in the hundreds, in this city alone), wrote a documentation generator, killed a few thousand trees and annoyed countless developers and added hours to every little step along the way.

Somehow, I fail to be convinced.

powered by performancing firefox

being owned by Ubuntu

December 31, 2006

I wanted to change to Linux for ages now and the Vista DRM is the last straw.

Just feeling stupid as I can not get Edgy Eft to recognize my wireless network.

So… still online with XP.

::emp::

Entering stage 2

December 30, 2006

For all who have not yet read Deliguy’s great article on idea and money generation, step to it!
And don’t forget to check out his blog – Blue Hat SEO – always a good read.

I’ve spent the last few weeks generating two hundred ideas and am now entering the implementation stage.

I will keep you updated.

::emp::

Starting out.

December 28, 2006

If you’re from WF you already know me, so now I’ll pour my stuff into here as well.

Check back infrequently.

::emp::