Professionally Confused – Egor Shokurov’s blog

Once started crossposting, I’ve been always having problems redoing my blogging job twice.

I was loking for a better solution for few things:

• Cross-posting to the several blogs
• Automatic image upload
• Writing records offline
• Easy to use

I am writing this message in Zoundry Raven. And I can say this is a best solution so far.

The alternative has been Scribefire, but it is lacking support for Unicode in livejournal.com, so it was cancelled on the second post, which I tried to write in Russian.

If you were working in Computer Human Interaction for a while, you probably thought, why this area is being developed and getting supporters all over computer industry, while other areas of human interaction do not get so much fuzz? I was also curious about it, but lazy enough to discover this area.

And now here come news from Service Design Conference, gathered in Amsterdam this November. Since 2004 Service Design Network joins experts working on Business Human Interaction. I definitely believe this field has great future. People often pay much more for service than for any goods, so why would services be designed as a matter of art, not as precise science?

Videos and presentations are available for download:

Read more…

Usability

This week I got sick with flu and found nothing enlightening but developing a Mozilla/Chrome plugin to open Word documents online from any WebDAV server. The project is published under Mozilla License. The project is available here:

• http://code.google.com/p/npapi-msdocs/

OK, I spent a day, but why on Earthe would you need this?

If you, like me, often use Sharepoint and Confluence sites and still like Mozilla Firefox to be a default browser, you probably find it inconvenient, that when you click Word or Excel documents, they are being downloaded and opened locally, rather than start straight from WebDAV folder. So did I. I tried using IETab for all Sharepoint sites, but hey, why do I need Firefox then?

Then I tried to set up Flashgot to start Word or Excel with the document URL. I found that I not only needed to recode URL from URL-ENCODE and then from UTF-8, but also Excel did no accept URLs longer than 256 characters.

And, finally, new great browser has been released – Google Chrome. It supports NPAPI plugins, just like Firefox and Opera.

So the idea came to develop an NPAPI plugin which would find system association for a particular URL (not just Word or Excel, but pretty much anything, that has a moniker registered in Windows Registry) and start what is appropriate.

In this version the plugin only understands .doc, .xls, .docx and .xlsx files, but there is nothing to prevent it from handling other files, it is just a matter of changing .rc file and recompiling!

So if you like the idea, just download it, copy to your Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins folder and enjoy!

Or if you have anything to add, check out SVN, modify and commit it back.

Development

Here is the great test for awareness. Please watch and notice 21 changes. How easy is it to miss something you are not looking for.

Upon first watch I noticed 2 changes

I came acroos a great GUI prototyping tool, called http://rapidrabb.it, if you are curious, just give it a try with a single click http://rapidrabb.it/en/preview

It is amasingly simple to start, and it makes not just design, but collaboration on prototypes easy as well.

gui design, prototyping

I just redesigned this site with Wordpress. The process turned to be quite easy. Special fun was importing blog records from Blogger.com.

Please, let me know if anything is missing from the site.

And thanks to Blogger.com for long time support!

site

I was looking for a solution for my technical department analysts and PM’s to track software requirements.
I did not look in this area since maybe 2003 and was expecting some breathtaking advances in their usability and, of course, everything now is expected to be free and Web-based.

Surprisingly my research shown not much improvement since 2003:
In addition to good old IBM Rational RequisitePro now Borland’s CaliberRM solution is quite popular, however I did not even take time to look at it, expecting some heavy weight, enterprise grade, robust (more words to come which should not be said to my mom).

The new RTM apps seemingly from the new world of Agile development, which I decided worth looking at, were:

• iRise manager
• SpeeDev
• OSRMT (Open Source Requirements Management Tool)

I also spent some time reiewing tools, which can be adopted for requirements management, namely:

• Good old Mantis
• Trac
• Jira

On my way I came across a notable thing: a set of templates for SRS and other project documents (and a very good one!): ReadySET and its commercial colleague ReadySET Pro. I will recommend those any time, since at least their requirements templates are great.

Ah, and I did not look at Basecamp, because I hate it for its simplicity

So here are my findings:
From all packages specialized on Requirements Management I would still favor RequisitePro. OSRMT would be a simple alternative, however it requires too much of pre-tuning to set up good templates and is not very stable. iRise looks great on Flash demos, it would be unbeatable, if it worked as shown, however the reality is it took me 30 minutes to create a project and I could not even add a requirement to it. SpeeDev remains untested, Web site information was enough to decide that I better switch to some issue tracking system, which will be just a little bit poorer in functions, though easier to understand. An additional benefit would be combined bug and requirements tracking.

Among issue trackers Trac takes “A” grade for its combination of Wiki, SCM and issue tracking. Jira has best usability. Mantis has just enough functions to work with.

The final decision for today was:
Given the fact we are already working with Mantis for bug tracking, I’ll probably set up proper forms and reports for guys to work on Requirements with Mantis (it has SOAP interface

If anybody out there has a tool to recommend, I would appreciate any advises.

The requirements are:

• (must have) Able to work on multiple projects with multiple components
• (must have) Able to track hierarchical requirement structure
• (must have) Web based
• (must have) Allow customizable workflow
• (must have) Assign requirements to versions, track execution
• (must have) Generate SRS documents
• (nice to have) Word import
• (nice to have) Changelog generation combining bugs fixed and enhancements in a particular version.

rational, requirements, testlink

Just gave a first try to Google Chrome
First impressions:
+ Fast
+ Good rendering, haven’t found any problems after 1 hour
+ Slick UI
+ Easy to move from Firefox (imported everything from it in one minute)
+ Relatively small memory footprint, despite the fact all tabs are running in separate processes
- Non-standard UI, no toolbars, non-standard window frame

- Does not support AI Roboform

Very, very, unexpectedly good for first beta!

UPDATE:

+ Nice feature: every text area is resizeable
- Picture upload to blogger.com does not work. First thing that does not work actually.

google chrome

This is worth watching for anyone from IT industry.
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

microsoft, photosynth

Last week I’ve been to Italy with my family. As usual we traveled a lot on a rental car, throughout all the Northern Italy. 1500 km and about 10 cities in a week…

Right few weeks before I had changed my HTC 3300 (with GPS receiver and TomTom software preinstalled) to smaller HTC s710, which does not have GPS, but has keyboard. I really needed keyboard and GPS looked like a good tradeoff: living and spending most of the time in one city, even as large as Moscow, it makes nearly no sence to always bring GPS in your pocket. I decided that any time I need GPS, I can connect external Bluetooth GPS receiver and use any software supported on the smartphone.

My first surprise was that there is literally no GPS software for smartphone – TomTom, iGo, russian PocketGPS and all other software utilizes touchscreen and either does not run or cannot be managed without touchscreen. What a bad luck! But I did not need GPS for everyday use, so I decided its not that bad loss anyway.

After about a week, searching Google from my phone I saw an announcement of Google Maps for Windows Mobile. I downloaded and installed the App. I was amazed by its usabilty and the concept of using server-side maps, no need to download anything all the world is in your pocket as long as you have GPRS connection!

Later on, when Italy trip plans appeared, I decided to take PocketPC handheld and Bluetooth GPS with me. I borrowed both from a friend, installed TomTom and tested everything. All worked fine, I downloaded and installed Europe map and felt almost ready for a week of discoveries in southern Europe. One bad thing was that PocketPC (I had one year old Acer) runs out of battery in about four hours and did not have a car charger! So I tried to combine what I had (Bluetooth GPS, Acer PocketPC and HTC s710 Smartphone) to make a backup configuration.

I tried a couple of free GPS softwares on HTC s710, but none of them had maps of acceptable quality. Then I tried to dig deeper in Google Maps. To my delight I figured out that Google Maps mobile can also track current location with GPS receiver if one is connected. OK! That seemed to solve all my problems, so I packed all the stuff and prepared for sun, old cities, beautiful nature and all things that people usually expect from a vacation in Italy.

In the airport I figured out first problem with having such a load of electronics in a backpack (I also had laptop in case any urgency happens at work or just for my daughter to watch cartoons). Security check in Moscow took about 10 minutes with unpacking everything by quite concerned officers, checking laptop for traces of explosives and packing everything back.

During next week I cursed my decision to abandon HTC 3300 many times. Major problems we faced were:
1. PocketPC runs out of charge quickly and I could not charge it in the car, so it worked till about 12am
2. Google Maps tracking works very unreliably: after start it does not refresh current position in 90% of cases.
3. Google Maps turned to be bad navigation tool, since it does not coordinate route directions with current GPS location and thus does not tell you where to turn next, which all other GPS software does perfectly
4. Google Maps does not work in areas with no GSM coverage. Yes, there are such places! “No GSM coverage” now sounds like a synonym to “in the middle of nowhere”, but we’ve been in such places driving through mountains from Pisa to Modena.
5. GPS receiver is not convenient to put it in the pocket and walk out in the city. By the way, Google Maps in pedestrian walks beats TomTom all ways: maps are more detailed, directions make more sense and finally you can entertain yourself with satellite view of the place you are in!

So my recommendations:
1. Any GPS MUST HAVE a car charger!
2. Pocket PC is a bad choice for GPS anyway due to short battery life
3. Integrated device is much better than separate devices
4. Google Maps is a perfect companion to any other GPS software, but it is not enough on its own.

Does anybody know a good GPS device?
Requirements:
1. Light
2. Designed for a car, but must be carriable in a pocket
3. Uploadable maps
4. Would be great to be able to run Google Maps on it.

Gadgets, GPS, navigation