Managing Dynamics

Google Chrome OS: A new interesting announcement

2009-07-08T11:01:00.001+03:00

So, now it's official. Google is taking on Microsoft in operating systems. Google announced that it is developing a Google Chrome OS, an open source lightweight operating system aimed for net books and other low end devices.

It is quite simple system. A Google chrome web browser running on top of Linux kernel and a custom windom manager. Applications are basically implemented in web based techniques and work for all standard browsers on any platform. The OS runs both on ARM and x86 based platforms and makes it possible to use it in multiple different embedded devices as well as on net books.

Google emphasizes that Chrome OS and Android are two different products, as it has been rumored that Android will be used on net books too.

As a happy user of Google Android Dev Phone I feel like the new Chrome OS is something that makes me love net books even more. I'm happy with my Eee PC, but not as happy as with Android and I feel like the OS is making the difference. If Google reaches the same level with Chrome OS as it has reached with Android... I hope so as we need better user experiences at low cost to innovate more effectively in future.

This is also good news for companies like IT Mill, that develops a toolkit for web application development. Go guys!

Agile tour 2009

2009-07-07T16:39:00.002+03:00

I just bumped into Agile Tour series of mini conferences. I love the idea of making a series of small free conferences to promote Agile development and the values of agile. Too bad I'm a bit late to propose Turku and Helsinki as possible venues as well as Tampere and Oulu. In Finland I guess these four cities all would benefit from the conference and there would be enough participants in each.

Anyways, next time Agile Tour is going to be organized, I try to notice it soon enough to propose my city/cities and to contribute to Finnish agile and software development community.

In case your interested in participating in this effort, please contact me by leaving e.g. comment to this post.

Rocks Into Gold by Clarke Ching

2009-03-02T10:37:00.001+02:00

Check out this great book by Clarke Ching. It can be read without a cost as a slideshare presentation, but I would recommmend buying this book in order to support Clarke. All in all, lots of great thoughts in simple, little and powerful presentation.

Rocks Into Gold - Helping Programmers THRIVE through the Credit Crunch - by Clarke Ching

View more presentations from cching. (tags: crunch cashflow)

Now anyone can publish a book

2009-02-16T15:39:00.003+02:00

I just found my way to a service that I had nearly forgotten. I've thought of writing a book that gives an easy and simple explanation on what agile development is about and why it is something everyone in software development industry should be familiar with. The easiest way to publish this kind of quite short and simple book is to use Lulu.

Lulu is an online publishing service, that lets you publish your own books and get some income from it too. Idea is simple and powerful: Upload your text, add some information and let Lulu do the publishing and manufacturing. Afterward you can let Lulu also sell your book or acquire a ISBN number for it and sell it e.g. in Amazon. Brilliant idea!

The best thing in this idea is that it really answers some need. People really want to publish their writings. Usually it is hard, and for most people finding a publisher would be a waste of time. Lulu makes it easy, gives a way to bring yourself out in hardcover format. As Time magazine stated: The person of the year is You. And Lulu brings you available to everyone.

New! Link exchange and software dev blog

2008-12-28T16:36:00.005+02:00

Well, the topic tells it all. I've got two new things here...

1. Link exchange
I've added a link exchange item that can be found as the topmost item on the right. If you wish to start link exchange with me, please contact me by adding a comment to this blog post.

2. New software development blog
I've also created a new blog Software Development Dynamics for more technical blog posts and articles. Now I should be able to concentrate only on business, management, projects, processes etc. in this blog.

Anything else new? Well, still don't have enough time to write as much as I would like to. However I've cleared some time for writing during next half a year. I feel optimistic about getting some new blog posts out at least monthly to both blogs. We'll see how it goes in reality... :)

Mobile hype continued

2008-06-27T16:50:00.003+03:00

It's been a busy week in mobile handset world. Latest news is that LiPS forum joins forces with LiMo Foundation. This is a good step in preventing the foreseen problem of Linux in mobile devices: Fragmentation.

These two key players have already before made some work together to unify the platforms, but this certainly is much better. Now from fragmentation point of view, the only problem is Google and Open Handset Alliance.

I personally don't yet view the fragmentation as a major problem as I see that each platforms have their own purposes and they fit those very well. Maybe later on there will be need to align different platforms, but until then. Keep on developing and contributing. I'm waiting for the result eagerly...

iPhone 3G

2008-06-26T12:38:00.003+03:00

Well, it came out and it looks good. iPhone 3G is going to be available in stores at the 11th of July also here in Finland. There will propably be "few" people lining up to get it.

I'm just waiting to see the actual price of that device. The $199 price will of course be connected with some package from operator. The real price for the whole package will be closer to $2000 (or something).

Anyways. Apple did it again. Great phone.

Open source mobile hype

2008-06-26T11:57:00.003+03:00

The hype about open source based mobile phones is increasing all the time.

- Google Android is coming, although might be a bit late
- OpenMoko based Neo Freerunner is ready to be shipped
- Symbian is about to be open sourced
- Nokia bought Trolltech that has implemented a open source mobile platfrom Qtopia as well as the highly popular cross- platform GUI application framework Qt
- LIPS forum, Open Handset Alliance and LiMo foundation are gaining popularity
- Nokia has announced to bring a Linux based device to market that has telephony sutpport

And so on. Don't even get me started on MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PC)... (Well, I have to: Atom, maemo, UME, mobilin etc. :) )

There seems to be a huge hype about these and for a reason. Open source enables smaller companies to step up and enter the markets. It enables users to customize and freely develop applications and the platform to better suit their needs. It makes open innovation possible.

Problem still seems to be that the rules and regulations (both juridical and the community rules) seem to be a bit hard for companies to gasp. Almost everyone know nowadays that open source is good thing and now we are thinking how to gain benefit from it? Someone introduced already that we are moving towards FOSS 2.0 where we really get business benefit from open source.

I'm currently working on "Benefit from open source" course and I'm full of ideas. The problem is that the course is just one day long and there won't be enough time to go through all the exciting stuff. What do you think are the most important things a company should understand when starting to do business with open source?

Summer holiday

2008-06-26T11:44:00.004+03:00

Finally my summer holiday started!

I had to delay the start by one week due to a bit busy situation at work (in fact, I've been working whole morning at home to get things done). Have to say that now it feels really free and relaxed. I even have time to write to blog and to read few books that I've been thinking about reading for few months already.

I also feel like I should develop at least something during the summer holiday. Just to have something to do during rainy days :). The problem is that I have had a huge number of ideas during the winter and spring about tools that should be done, but now my head feels empty. Well, maybe I should just start with open source Scrum tools project that I've been considering for ages. If you have any ideas, please let me know...

Shelfari virtual bookshelf

2008-06-26T11:37:00.002+03:00

I just stumbled upon a quite nice web site called Shelfari. The idea is that you can create your own virtual bookshelf and add your own books, the books you have read and the books you would like to read in it. Shelfari also offers the trendy community features like groups, friends, recommendations, tags and reviews to help you find the best books available.

I have to say that as I like to read and I like to own books, I became right away interested about the service and decided to add my books to the virtual bookshelf. Have to say that the first impression of the service is really good. Everything works smoothly and intuitively. Also a great bonus is the widget that can be added to blogs etc. websites. So I decided to replace my current readings widget with Selfari's Now reading widget. Looks a bit better now.

Hiking...

2007-10-21T14:47:00.001+03:00

I came back from a hiking trip yesterday evening. Very relaxing experience even though my neck is very stiff and it's very painful to turn my head...

All the way when were walking in the woods, I tried to find some kind of an analogy to projects and project management or at least to teamwork, but at the end I just figured out that hiking is an individual effort, even you're hiking with your friends. The only support you get is the pressure from them that keeps you from stopping and keeps you moving those feet, no matter how painful it is.

Some additions to site

2007-10-04T15:59:00.000+03:00

I added some new features to the blog.

1. Now reading... box on the right side. Tells which book(s) I'm currently reading and what I read previously. I have a habit of reading at least three books a month, maybe I even should list these somewhere with a short review...

2. Added Google search

3. Added work related links section, that hopefully will be quite dynamic and changing according to my situations. Now including mainly basic agile sites I use a lot.

4. Added links for the events I'm taking part. Maybe I should use Upcoming for this... Hmm..

End of silent period

2007-10-04T15:30:00.001+03:00

Haven't have time to write anything on this blog for a while. Quite much has been happening since XP2007 and my summer vacation. I have been quite busy at work with promoting our agile trainings and trying to build some kind of network. At the same time I have been giving a large number of different kind VB.NET, Symbian, C, C++ and Java programming courses. Well, at least these keep you in touch with the development.

I'm quite excited about our new agile courses and hopefully people will find their way in them. To help this we have been working with my colleagues to publish articles (few examples at the company website, in Finnish only), create workshops and keep seminar presentations. Latest of these happened during ELKOM 07 fair at Helsinki in last month. It was very nice to see that almost without marketing (from our side at least), we got room full of listeners eager to find out more about agile software development and its suitability to embedded world.

What makes me also enthusiastic is the Agile seminar arranged by Agile finland yesterday evening at Helsinki. Good seminar where all of the speakers gave me something.

Craig Larman presented the Lean ideas and even though these were familiar to me, I at least got a reassurance that there are probably a lot of people who think that Lean has a lot to offer. I feel like Lean thinking plays key role in solving the problems of large-scale offshore projects.

Petri Haapio gave a valuable data how agile development is implemented in Nokia Networks and later in NSN. A lot of few interesting points to share people on courses.

Finally Lasse Koskela guidelines for facilitating change in form of 15 excellent points. Lasse's ideas seem to be a bit aligned to my thoughts about learning through failures and retrospectives. Making better developers by forcing them to think. Very good stuff all in all...

Well, those were the topmost things on my mind today. Hopefully I'll have time to come back with new ones as soon as possible.

XP 2007 in Como, Italy

2007-06-08T19:25:00.000+03:00

I'm quite excited currently. Only a bit over week till the start of XP2007 conference. The program looks great and I'm hoping to hear lots of new ways to adopt agile methodologies in to different kind of organizations.

Also I'm looking forward to meeting new people all over the world and discuss the cultural differences between different countries and how these differences affect the SW engineering. Who knows what kind of new ideas pops into mind when you're with such people like in agile conferences. Lots of professional people with creative and exploratory mindsets.

Scrum and XP together

2007-06-08T19:05:00.000+03:00

A colleague of mine had found a great case study about how Scurm and XP are used in anonymous SW company in Stockholm. This paper called Scrum and XP from the trenches - How we do Scrum by Henrik Kniberg is a good introduction to usage of XP and Scrum and a great example on one way to use these together.

I found it especially useful because the down to earth grip on methodologies, practical insights and taking in to considerations both the technical and the business side. This all in about 100 pages of easy to read and entertaining text. Also Henrik's blog is a blog worth visiting.

Test-driven Java project moving on

2007-05-17T16:14:00.000+03:00

I got a slight push to my own project when I gave a few days advanced course on Java programming. The topics on this course included Swing UI programming, JDBC database connectivity and many other interesting techniques. So during this course I came back to my application adding some user interface and doing this of course test-driven.

The normal JUnit framework wasn't enough for TDDing the UI, so I found JFCUnit that is an extension to JUnit and provides mechanisms for this. Using it is fairly simple and you can get started with quite small amount of effort. The documentation found on the website guides newbies nicely to the world of GUI unit testing.

Well anyways, the first version of the UI has been set up and the application is pretty close to being almost usable. Strange how a nice UI makes the application feel a lot more professional...

Agile way

2007-04-02T18:35:00.000+03:00

I've just started a new project for automatic generation of article reference list website. As I've been reading, studying and teaching agile methods for a while already, I felt that I should try some practices in my own project too. So I started doing this Java application in test-driven way and I also created my own build server for continuous integration. The first impression on TDD is great: The software is building up almost by itself, refactoring is easy, Test & Profiling Tools Platform is smashing and everything works nice.

However the next step on the model is to create some kind of view. UI development in Java is not my strongest side and I guess test-driving that is not so easy. If someone knows how to do this, please drop me with a comment or an e-mail.

Well, I'll report on the progress of the project later on and we'll see if I'm able to get it out with some open source license. But before that, it should have some more functionalities and a clear direction where it should be developed to.

P.S. The Agile forums is a place to be in case you have questions about agility.

Very nice portal for free software

2007-04-01T14:09:00.001+03:00

I just lately found the Wikipedia portal pages and immediately made one as my starting page: Free software portal. Now I'm waiting mainly on the possibility to gather parts from the interesting Wikipedia portals into my own customized portal. This portal would at least contain some RSS feeds on computer, ICT and business related news, some links to agile development pages and few starting pointers for open source software.

Google presently

2007-02-06T11:03:00.000+02:00

As a natural next step for Google online office suite, the rumours of the Google's alternative to Powerpoint are fueling. Few evidences have been presented in Google Operating System blog and its hard to doubt them.

Instead I thought of few things why I feel like this is not the perfect solution. At least the first and most important thing is that the software is online. Presentations are given in all kinds of places, and extremely often without any network available. So will there be a feature to dump the presentation into an executable form that can be used offline?

Another thing, coming from the same reason from previous one, is that I usually use Powerpoint mainly during my work trip in train. I also have a tendency to do things at the last second, so I may sit down in a small cafe and write my few thoughts about the customer down on a slide or two. Does this mean that with this Google Presently tool, I have to get connected to Internet through my mobile phone and after that I can write down the few lines?

Well, I'm not sure but this feels like the most trickiest question around the Presently. I love Docs and Spreadsheet, but I feel that I use these in a bit different way, than I would use Presently.

Apple iPhone introduced

2007-01-10T10:06:00.001+02:00

Yesterday Apple introduced the Apple iPhone and just after few hours from the introduction, the net is full of posts about it. Well, nice UI, nice controls, elegant design: just what was expected from Apple. But in no ways could I say that the iPhone is revolutionary. Impressive yes, but not revolutionary.

We'll see how iPhone manages to face the competition at the mobile phone markets. I'm sure it will cut a decent slice, but will it threaten Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson? It will if we believe this article from Times magazines. I guess it won't...

List of basic open source SW for Windows

2007-01-05T13:19:00.001+02:00

I found a nice little list of Windows open source software. The list contains the most common programs for a common user and each of the software, at least on the "Basics" section, is easy to use and well documented. I even started to make few modifications on one of the note taking software to make it fit my needs better. I'll come back about how that turns out.

iPhone is here... from LinkSys

2006-12-19T08:53:00.000+02:00

Well, iPhone has been introduced as the rumours told, but from wrong manufacturer. LinkSys iPhone is a VoIP phone used with Skype and similiar VoIP clients. Apple has not commented the release of iPhone in any ways. It will be interesting to see what cards Apple has in its sleeve.

The end of the course

2006-12-08T23:59:00.000+02:00

Well that's it. Time's up and its time to leave the managing dynamics part of the blog alone. More pictures would have been nice and a new navigation system. Well, I'll just put the posts in order from the earliest and show them on one page for easier browsing experience. Hopefully I'll have time to come back to this blog soon, maybe in some new thoughts about creative commons and open source. Or maybe related to a J2EE dilemma I'm facing currently at work...

Interesting sites gathered

2006-12-08T23:33:00.000+02:00

I have been gathering some more or less interesting links at my del.icio.us list for the Managing Dynamics: Creative Content Business course. Looking back to the links I've remembered to save shows the way I've been going through the course. At the beginning I've saved some definitions related to the early topics. I felt unease with the new things and didn't yet know what to think about the cases and the whole course.

While the course progressed, I felt that I made some progress too. I started to save things that interested me: Creative commons, open source, mobile phones and even Christo's and Jean-Claude's installations...

Well here's few top picks from the link list in case you don't have time or interest to browse them through:

Creative Commons comic: A Spectrum of Rights
A nice comic explaining the ideas and usage of Creative Commons license.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar
A great book about open source and the differences between commercial "cathedral" way and the open source "Bazaar" way.

Lawrence Lessig
A homepage of a person who has contributed a lot on Creative Commons license.

Website of Christo and Jeanne-Claude
An artist couple that creates temporary environmental installations. Nice looking pieces of art and interesting business model behind it

OpenLife.cc | Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source
An open source book about open source. Extremely interesting!

Individual readings and thoughts about open source

2006-12-08T22:56:00.000+02:00

As two of my individual readings mainly concentrated on open-source, I'll try to reflect on my own ideas of it after reading some of these books. The Creative Economy by John Howkins takes a very traditional view on the creative content business with explaining different viewpoints. On open source Howkins mainly explains the basic licenses behind them and just touches the brilliant business and social models behind the whole thing.

The most interesting book of these three was Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. It consists of many case reports about free culture, copyrights, open source and public domain. Interesting cases, some of them were already familiar to me, some of them were interesting smaller cases. All in all, the practical view and cases was just what I could think people would need to see the benefits of open source and creative commons. Also seeing that even open-source or public domain can make income to you. I must agree on Lessig on the potential of open source, but the time it takes for open source to grow will take long. As Lessig states in his conclusion:

"I’ve told a dark story. The truth is more mixed. A technology has given us a new freedom. Slowly, some begin to understand that this freedom need not mean anarchy.We can carry a free culture into the twenty-first century, without artists losing and without the potential of digital technology being destroyed. It will take some thought, and more importantly, it will take some will to transform the RCAs of our
day into the Causbys.
Common sense must revolt. It must act to free culture. Soon, if this potential is ever to be realized."

Creative commons seemed to be a license of choice for individual writings and open-source for small trivial software. Should I write something down every time I'm learning something? Should I publish software written for my own aid or just as an aid for learning? I can't think a reason why not. So I guess I'll license this blog under creative commons.

Back to the readings: The open life by Henrik Ingo was mainly chosen because I haven't had time to read this through before and this would force me to read it. :) The main point in this book is that it also concentrates on the social aspects of open source. It describes the actions of open source community and tells how the open source software projects are carried. Everything has a person centric start point and the results seem to be promising. The different business models in different cases are also a nice way to tell the reader that this "free open source thing" doesn't mean that you don't ever get paid for your job. The little practices for every day jobs from open source projects could benefit almost any academic worker.

Interesting readings and more thoughts on mind. Open source and creative commons feel natural choices right now. I'll guess I'll change this to Creative Commons right away.