or Missing in Action – Vonage Customer Service

For the last two days I’ve been trying to cancel our Vonage service. Not because of quality or price issues. Just because we no longer needed a second line in our house. On Tuesday morning (June 12) I called Vonage to cancel. After twenty minutes and two dropped calls I finally reached their call centre over a very crackly line (do they run their call centre over VOIP?). The person I talked to apologised and said they’re computers were down, would I please call back after lunch. I tried again in the mid afternoon. Things had improved it only took five minutes to answer my call (another crackle line). This person said the computers are still down – please call again tomorrow. Which brings to this evening’s conversation (over a good line):

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For the past couple of months a small group of interested Scrum Masters, Practitioners, Trainers and Product Owners have been meeting weekly to try and hammer what a Scrum Coach is. From today’s announcement:

The Certified Scrum Coach Program, or CSC for short, is an experience and skills-based program designed to distinguish individuals who have aided organizations in successfully applying Scrum to improve their effectiveness.

…

The Scrum Alliance recognizes the benefits that organizations have received from dedicated, professional, experienced Scrum practitioners who have aided them in their adoption and transition to Scrum. Having a designation representing proven experience and skills would aid companies that are seeking professional guidance for their Scrum implementations.

…

A Scrum Coach has been trained as a Certified ScrumMaster, is an experienced Scrum practitioner, and has the skills required to transform a client (either as an external consultant or internal employee), helping them to reach their full potential through the use of Scrum.

We’re seeking feedback from the broad community to help. Please read Pete’s announcement and the Draft Proposal (an evil PDF – sorry). Please email comments to: csc-feedback@scrumalliance.org. For all the obvious reasons we’ve asked not to discuss this on the Scrum Development mailing list. However feel free to use the Agile Tangents list instead.

Have you been using Remote Desktop to work on a two monitor machine? Have you ever had a modal dialog from your current application open on that other machine? I have. It happens nearly every time I remote desktop. Now here’s the solution:

1. Make sure the application has focus.
2. Press Alt-Space (displays the windows menu)
3. Press M (for Move)
4. Press an arrow key – to lock in the move mode.
5. Move the mouse until the offending dialog appears
6. Click a mouse button to end the move operation.

Dead simple really. Its amazing how useful keyboard navigation can be. Thanks to Chris Anderson and Craig Andera on the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list for answering my question.

Ken Kozman suggested an alternative: Version 6.0 of the RDP client allows you to have a Remote Desktop session that spans two screens. The only downside the screens have to be the same size – my laptop is 1024 x 768 and the 21″ CRT beside it is 1600 x 1200. Yes its a CRT – very good for photographic editing its tough to get an LCD with blacks as good as CRT. The limitation is the backlight.

Several readers commenting in Mike’s blog The Online Photographer have asked about a comparison between Lightroom, Aperture and Lightzone. I’m up to the challenge with some caveats. First: I have a day job and young family so this won’t be quick. Second my image editing abilities are a bit weak – I really struggle with deciding whether many changes I can make are improvements – especially wrt colour. I only have direct access to Lightroom – since the Mac I expected to buy used wasn’t available for sale in the end. Finally Lightzone appears to be focused on developing the image – not managing your photos, so the comparison will be between Lightroom’s Develop module and Lightzone. If you want to help out leave me a comment or email me (Thanks to Jim and Ed for their offers of help).

How does a blog that has existed for only 5 months have a technorati ranking of over 5000? How does a blogger whose postings include a lot of references to how high his rankings are – do so well on Technorati and Google? The answer Technorati spam. Gary (and many others I won’t link to) use “link trains”. What is a “link train”? (from John Chow): 

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content string. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra linkback.
2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.
3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.
4. Add no more than 5 new TECH, SCIENCE, or CONSUMER ELECTRONICS blogs to the list in the “My Adds” section.

As John goes on to say these will drive Technorati and Google nuts. Sadly they also drive the real users of technorati and google nuts as they are more likely to find this blogs instead of the valuable content they’re looking for. After all Technorati doesn’t exist to boost the ego and readership of (some) bloggers. It exists to help real people find useful content. In their attempts to game the system John, Gary and others will eventually destroy the value of Technorati. 

In his latest game Gary has a run a favorites link train – you favorite everyone else on the list and then Gary will favorite you back – etc.

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I’m struggling to build an GEF application in Eclipse. Unfortunately the documentation for GEF consists of half a dozen tutorials that were written between 2003-4. These tutorials are excellent as far as they go but don’t really shed light in alot of areas. So this is Anti-FAQ – its a batch of questions that should (but don’t currently have answers). I will update this posting with new questions and answers over time.

GEF Tutorials/Documentation

Current list. My favorites so far: A Shape Diagram Editor by Bo Majewski. The source code for this tutorial is included in the GEF Examples download (download missing :-(.

What’s missing no tutorial/sample covers a standalone RCP/GEF application. In particular there is no information on how to integrate into the RCP commands and menu structure.

API Questions

Retarget Actions

1. What is a retarget action? It appears to be a wrapper around the existing SWT actions. Retarget actions Javadocs only tell you that it “tracks the active part in the workbench”. Not why this would be useful.
2. Why do we need an action that is different from IAction?
3. Does retarget action play nicely with 3.3 new handler code?
4. Which actions need retarget actions and which don’t? For example the Copy has one and Print doesn’t. Why?

Integration with a plain RCP application

1. Why use ActionContributor vs. adding Actions in the ActionBarAdvisor?

ActionBarContributor

1. If you’re using the ActionBarContributor how do you contribute to a menu that already exists – perhaps file? In a specific place in that menu?
2. When adding actions via an ActionBarContributor should you add the actions  to a ‘global handler’:
   • pageSite.getActionBars().setGlobalActionHandler() as per the logic editor sample **or** editor handler
   • getEditorSite().getService(IHandlerService.class).
   activateHandler() as per the shapes example?

Drawing

1. When drawing your own figure what method should you override? paint() or paintClientArea() or paintFigure(). Finally one where I have answer (even though none of the methods provide any hints in the docs). From the Logic Designer sample code, I noticed that one that gets paintFigure() gets overridden.
2. Need to turn on antialaising? Just do graphics.setAntialias(SWT.ON); If its inside paintFigure you don’t need to turn it off since paint() does a graphics.restoreState(); immediately after calling paintFigure();
3. Need a linear diagonal gradient fill so that you graphical objects can mimic the correct Windows XP look and feel?Want to mimic the style of the rectangle to your left? Try this code:
   

   protected void paintFigure(Graphics graphics) {	Display display = Display.getCurrent();	Rectangle boundingRect = getBounds();
   
   	Point topLeft = boundingRect.getTopLeft();	Point bottomRight = boundingRect.getBottomRight();
   
   	Pattern pattern = new Pattern(display, topLeft.x, topLeft.y,		bottomRight.x, bottomRight.y,		ColorConstants.lightBlue, ColorConstants.darkBlue);	graphics.setBackgroundPattern(pattern);	graphics.fillRectangle(boundingRect);	graphics.setBackgroundPattern(null);	pattern.dispose();}

4. Which naturally leads us to discover that in Eclipse 3.2, GEF 3.2.2 setBackgroundPattern() is not implemented for Scaled or Printer graphics – so you will get an exception if you try to use it.

Labels underneath Figures?

See:  Narrow Figures – Wide Labels – More GEF discoveries

Misc

Developing Eclipse RCP apps? Want access to Display etc will running your Unit Tests?

So you’ve captured your sprint backlog in Excel and want to print out Index cards for use on your task board. (I know many will tell you not to use Excel in the first place – I won’t). Your in luck its not all that painful.

The trick – don’t try using Excel. Instead use Mail Merge and Word (my menu hints are for Word 2003 – ymmv):

1. On the Tools menu, select Letters and Envelopes, Mail Merge. In Word 2003 the Mail Merge Wizard will appear on the right hand side (same location as the help appears). 
2. Select the Labels radio button. (Click Next) 
3. Click on the Label Options… and choose either a standard label size if one fits your needs or create a custom size (mine are 3" by 4"). (Click Finish) 
4. If your not printing on perforated Index cards – Add Borders this will make it much easier to cut resulting cards. On the Table menu select Table Properties and click on the Borders and Shading… button (on the table tab). Pick your borders. 
5. Click Next: Select recipients 
6. Use Existing list and browse to Excel Sprint Tracker (you could use any other datasource that Word recognizes). 
7. Choose the work Sheet and select the rows to include. 
8. Click Next: Arrange your labels 
9. Under Arrange Labels choose More Items… – this will give you an ugly list (F1, F2, F3 etc) which corresponds to the columns in your spreadsheet. In my case I insert F2 (Task Description) and F3 (Estimated Hours). 
10. Add pretty text and formatting you need to the first label and click Update all Labels button. I suggest that you make the task text big (20 pt perhaps) so its easily readable on the corkboard. (I can make the estimates appear on the right but haven’t found a simple way of forcing to the bottom of the cell). 
11. Click Next: Preview Labels and then if all looks good complete the merge. 
12. Either Print… directly from here or do the Edit Individual labels…

With all the time you save – look me up at Agile 2007 and buy me a pint.

I just finished my Scrum in Nutshell (hmmmmm does O’Reilly have a trademark on Nutshell) presentation for the Ottawa .NET users group. We had over 40 people attend some excellent questions were asked.

If you would like a copy of the presentation please download it. If you would like to book me to speak to your group/team (it’s free) email at: mark at mlevison dot com.

Ever since I bought Lightroom I’ve been trying to figure out how to ‘and’ two keywords together. My collection has over 5000 images of my daughter. To find an image of her reading I need to be able say "name and reading". In Elements this was easy – I just clicked on both tags and I got the and’d list. ‘Or’ wasn’t an explicit option instead a check box appeared at the bottom of screen saying "near/close matches".

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My talk will be: Iterative Development with Agile and Scrum

From the session invite: Do you know what your project will deliver by the release date? Do you know if you’re meeting your customers current goals? Does your team communicate well? Iterative development strategies can help you and satisfy your customer. In this presentation Mark Levison will outline agile strategies to help keep your development on track while dealing with the constantly changing needs of your customer. Mark will show how the practices of Scrum (more than just rugby) can provide transparency to management, handle change from customers and ensure that you only work a 37.5 hour work week.

This talk is a completely rewritten version of "Scrum in a Nutshell". This talk is suitable for anyone – the neophyte – who will gain a basic understanding of Agile methods to the sophisticate who will gain a few new tools for their toolkit. Please register with the Ottawa .NET community (Events@OttawaCommunity.NET) if you intend to come.

Time: 11:45-1:15

Location: Microsoft’s Glacier Room,
    100 Queen Street, Suite 500,
    World Exchange Plaza, Ottawa, Ontario

Thanks to Orest and the Ottawa .NET community for organising this and helping to polish my presentation.