Start by setting incremental project development goals and milestones such that they are less than 8 hours of work away. Every day, take 5 minutes with each developer and go over the pending milestones. If they are not making reasonable progress (more than 4 hours of work with nothing to show), then team program with them until the milestone is met. Make sure everyone is using something like CVS. Then do a clean checkout of the project code every night and:
Compile all code with all warnings on. - Email errors to developers.
Run some simple code metric scripts on all code and break it down by author or module.
Let the developers know you are doing this.
The code metrics are intended to show you are paying attention and to generate a bit of friendly compitition rather than to measure programmer productivity. Make an internal project development web page and post the metrics weekly. Answer any complaints about the metrics not measuring anything useful with; "Yes I know, I'm just trying to establish some baseline statistics"
if you don't write a physical letter then you'll be ignored
Note: If you really, really do not want to be ignored, make sure the letter can easily be removed from its envelope. Shake a couple grams of talcum powder into the envelope to prevent sticking.
This will practically guarantee that your letter gets attention.;-)
It seems as if all Bruce has to do is say he is now supplying a Special Anti-DCMA inking service. Perhaps he will distribute marker pens after the talk. Only $10!
I work for a large national weather research center(US). We wanted to replace some 8mm tape based data archiving with optical technology. Since our systems are at unmanned, remote field sites the capacity of DVD's made it worth the higher cost of the drives and media. We are currently running Linux on the remote systems, which are 3-4 years old.
One of the main reasons we chose the +RW drives over the -RW drives, is the fact that the data can be written to the drives on loaded, slow systems, or across a network. A disk image does not need to be created, the data is written directly to the device from a modified mkisofs. The -R/RW drives require the system to burn the DVD in real-time, typically from an ISO image stored on disk. Buffer under-runs are a disticnt possibility if the system isn't up to the task of feeding the higher data rate of DVD drives. Another big plus over -R/RW media was the +R/RW's ability to incrementally add data to the media. I've not tested this. Reports indicate that Linux works transparently with the resultant multi-session file system, but other OS's are not, and only see data in the first session.
I have found that few of our older DVD-ROM drives can read either -RW or +R/RW media, although DVD-ROM drives purchased with our most recent Dell PC's can read both. Of course, YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
The code metrics are intended to show you are paying attention and to generate a bit of friendly compitition rather than to measure programmer productivity. Make an internal project development web page and post the metrics weekly.
Answer any complaints about the metrics not measuring anything useful with; "Yes I know, I'm just trying to establish some baseline statistics"
Note: If you really, really do not want to be ignored, make sure the letter can easily be removed from its envelope. Shake a couple grams of talcum powder into the envelope to prevent sticking.
This will practically guarantee that your letter gets attention. ;-)
It seems as if all Bruce has to do is say he is now supplying a Special Anti-DCMA inking service. Perhaps he will distribute marker pens after the talk. Only $10!
One of the main reasons we chose the +RW drives over the -RW drives, is the fact that the data can be written to the drives on loaded, slow systems, or across a network. A disk image does not need to be created, the data is written directly to the device from a modified mkisofs. The -R/RW drives require the system to burn the DVD in real-time, typically from an ISO image stored on disk. Buffer under-runs are a disticnt possibility if the system isn't up to the task of feeding the higher data rate of DVD drives. Another big plus over -R/RW media was the +R/RW's ability to incrementally add data to the media. I've not tested this. Reports indicate that Linux works transparently with the resultant multi-session file system, but other OS's are not, and only see data in the first session.
We are satisfied users of the HP 200i DVD+RW drives and dvd+rw-format and growisofs utilities found at http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/
I have found that few of our older DVD-ROM drives can read either -RW or +R/RW media, although DVD-ROM drives purchased with our most recent Dell PC's can read both. Of course, YMMV.
How?!
The user saved the attachment on the unix server, ftp'd it to his windows box and ran it!