How wonderful, I'm not alone in despising these modern interfaces targeted towards tiny, touch screens, with an aim to suck a user into staring at a screen all day with eternal sliding, etc. Amazing how the site, "Web Pages That Suck" is still relevant, with things like mystery meat navigation, contrast, figuring out the site in less than 4 seconds. Apparently it got so bad he had to take a break, but the author is now back. I would like to see his site as required reading for the graphic designers pushing this stuff out.
Over the last 30 years, about once a decade, there is an article about how software code can be generated and that software developers aren't needed. In the late 80's my husband worked as a subcontractor on a project for IBM where the software architects had designed the system and written out the design in pseudo code. A lowly developer like him only needed to type in the perfect code they had designed and it would work. My husband kept telling the management team that no, the code wouldn't work, the logic was flawed and it would be buggy. He fixed things on his module and did testing, in spite of direction to implement the code exactly as designed and not test it or integrate it with other modules.
This perfect code also wasn't supposed to require any integration, so they went directly from development to acceptance testing. That worked about as well as you'd expect, they had to stop testing within an hour after starting. My husband's code was one exception, it mostly worked and actually ran when the tested the system. There were a few bugs but it performed better than other modules i the system. However, they had to delay the schedule so they could get everything integrated. He left that job and went to a small company where lowly developers only worked on coding. That system had few bugs and worked pretty well. Sadly, right before he left the company, they were partnering with IBM and starting to buy into the perfect code design idea. I worked on a similar project for the DoD, I was supposed to code the design exactly as written. Even if it didn't work when it was executed, I wasn't allowed to fix the software unless I had gotten a approved bug report that stated it was priority one and the software would not run at all unless I fixed the bug. Amazingly enough, the customer killed the project before delivery.
Saw the same thing in the 90's, Java and X-Windows were going to eliminate detailed coding and allow the use of low cost, low experience developers. I still remember explaining a memory overflow bug to a Java developer and that the string was probably longer than 1024 or 2048. He told me it couldn't happen, sure enough, I counted up the string to where it overflowed, the first 1023 characters were fine, it was the 1024 where it overflowed, sigh. In the 00's, it continued, the continuing trend was to use MS Office with Visual Basic, no need to code those back office applications and waste all that time designing, implementing, integrating, beta testing and gradually rolling out into production. Excel and MS Access with Visual Basic are examples of this type of thinking and I've seen how well that has worked out for database development.
Guess it's time for business types to roll out this idea, consultants to sell it to businesses on how they can cut costs, for software development and then another batch of software consultants will come in and clean up after them from the mess left behind on these systems. Would be nice to be proved wrong, but I haven't seen that much change in the state of the art for the majority of software development. I feel a major breakthrough is required for this to happen that will completely break from previous programming practices and from what I can tell only incremental changes are occurring.
Oh, and you kids get off my lawn, dang, I feel old after writing this.:-)
Dr. Grandin, thank you for taking time to answer questions. I have been familiar with your work in the autism field for many years. I first found your book, "Thinking in Pictures" when my son was a toddler and my husband and I were attempting to figure out if we could avoid an institution as a long term choice for him. Your book describing your thought process provided myself with a key and I was able to help him start communicating with us by drawing, by hand and then on the computer. He is in his 20's now, and he continues to grow and become more independent.
Based on observations of my son and myself, I have noticed that difficulties we have had in processing behavioral information has changed and in some cases, improved as we've gotten older. This has made it somewhat easier to interface with regular people, although it is also frustrating in my case because I have a higher awareness of how much social communication I still miss. I am in my early 50's and I still notice changes in how I process data and figure out how to interact with others. Have you noticed such changes within yourself or heard of these changes within others?
About seven years ago I was part of a star tup of technical writers for military manuals. I had worked with this group at our previous company and the group had many of the same problems, lost files, changes occurring that 'just happened', incorrect versions for delivery. The files were in SGML/XML, with supporting graphics, so a little different but the users were not software types who are used to digging in and figuring out tools.
When the company was setup, I was designated as the software support/IT person and I put my foot down, we were going to use version control. I selected SVN, using the TortoiseSVN client and I set up the first repository. We also had to share data with another company so I had to do some training and also provide support for this company long distance.
The first few months were a never ending set of complaints of how hard it was to use SVN, why is there is an error message when I try to commit, this is painful, we should go back to using a shared server drive, etc. I stood my ground and waited.
Then, it happened, one of the authors had accidentally overwritten a file that he had spent 2-3 days working on. In addition, the tech writers were learning a new way of tagging so there had been a lot of restarts and do overs and no one wanted to start from scratch. I came over, asked him when he had last committed and if he was okay with over writing the current file. He said yes, so I pulled out that last good version. After the tech writers looked over the file, he reached over and kissed me, a first for me. There were some more incidents of changes, someone overwriting another files, but most of the writers had some benefit after several months of use. After that, the complaints went down and we continued using the system I had setup.
Later on we used SVN to share files with the other company, including Excel documents used for tracking, a Word document for the style guide and other things. Now, 7 years later, the tech writers ask me to set up an SVN project when we start something new because it has saved them a lot of grief over the years.
In addition, the other company is now slowly implementing throughout their company because they have seen the difference it makes. I talked to the manager we had worked with a few years ago, she asked how difficult it was to setup. She wanted to set it up for other projects because she had noticed they never lost files, they always had the right version for deliveries unlike other projects. I was amazed to hear that entire directories had disappeared on other projects and they had no way of telling who had caused the problem
I have looked at other document management solutions over the years and I have been interested in possible solutions but SVN has always won out because of 1) No licensing costs required and 2) Low maintenance for myself and training time for the tech writers. I hate to spend a lot of extra time tweaking things, just because and the other company doesn't really have a lot of resources for that either so SVN works for our situation.
If our projects grew to a larger size, I could see looking at other options, but that would also mean that we would have more money for software licenses, help, etc. If it's a small business, without a lot of budget or expertise for version management or document management, there are worse things to use than SVN with the TortoiseSVN interface.
I would recommend searching for ghost hunting groups on the web, they usually list equipment that they use. Search for ghost hunters or paranormal societies, there may be one in your area. I would also recommend taking along a voice recorder. There are two ways you can use this, one is to turn the recorder on, ask questions, pause and then talk more. Supposedly if there is a ghost or some other presence there, when you play back the tape you can hear something answering your question or talking to you.
The other option is using a voice activated recorder and placing it in a room, shutting the door and leaving it until the next morning. The next day, pick up the recorder, rewind the tape and see if you hear anything. I did this once in a room that was supposed to be haunted, there was something on the tape. However, in looking back I didn't take enough precautions to secure the room and ensure that nothing else was picked up so I don't accept this recording as enough evidence of the room being haunted, just indicating that the room should be investigated more for anomalies.
I appreciate your skepticism and willingness to investigate further. Myself, I think there are instances where there may be hauntings and such but I am also skeptical and try to question what happened, is there another explanation, it can be too easy to just accept some slight happening as a haunting when there is another more down to earth explanation.
When my son was around 2 or so he was very interested in using the computer. There was a great piece of software, Mickey Mouse and the alphabet. While the program ran it locked out everything else and would only respond to letters of the alphabet being pressed. When a key was pressed, say A, Mickey would perform some action, say the letter and the word. For A, he would go to the refrigerator and get an apple to eat. When using the software my son learned his alphabet and had great fun having Mickey perform different actions. There are some older versions of the software still available, I also noticed some suggestions for other similar software.
Agree with the parent, as a technical person it's very easy to get caught up in finding 'the perfect tool' that will do all of those nasty management tasks for us.
The reality is that management consists of working with the people on the team, coordinating tasks, finding out about problems in time to solve them, work around them or get relief in schedule or budget in performing the problem tasks. A lot of communication, a lot of time with people not necessarily as much time with the technical work as you might prefer.
I currently work with someone who likes managing people, in a positive way, is interested in finding problems and fixing them before the release date and in getting schedule or cost relief before the customer gets ticked. He does this using two things, 1) an spreadsheet for documenting the tasks and tracking how much people work and 2) a lot of communication with the team. For keeping projects running smoothly he was laid off from his last job because his work was obviously 'too simple' since there weren't any crisis to take care of all the time.
If you aren't interested in the people part of the management find someone to buddy up with who does like that part, it is a huge help and keeps the stress level down a bit.
My husband was 36 when he got his Computer Science degree. It was a few months before getting his job but this was also at a time when the job market was in a slide. Once he got his first computer science job and some experience he had no problem getting other positions as follow up. Plus, he met me and have been relatively happy together now for 23 years so his degree helped in other areas as well, at least in my opinion and my husband is smart enough to agree with me. So I would definitely say go for it
While there Open Source Alternatives for groupware may not be as robust, there is Lotus Notes which does run under many different OS's. Not necessarily a solution I would be fond of but there is software out there to support groupware functions.
It would help to have more information on what you want to lock down. If you want to prevent people from running as administrator and being able to install whatever they want, that's built in to Linux with the permissions set. Setup a user template for the different users you need, with different permissions for the directories, create groups and assign them to those directories and things are limited.
And using NIS+ for managing the users, you can setup users one one main server with mirrors, have users space and environment be loadable on various desktops with a common file system and other nice things. The problem with NIS are security holes but I believe later versions have addressed some of those problems, if not, I'm sure someone will comment accordingly.
I've used Eventum and it is a nice package. Here are some of the pros and cons that I found in using the software a couple of versions back.
Pros: Nice interface for management and non-developer types, can segregate by project, allows adding in custom fields, customization for workflow, supports e-mail for communications, upload of attachments, integration with some version management software, command line options for script processing.
Cons: If you don't have managers or non-developer types than probably overkill, doesn't allow viewing bugs across all projects, login has to be associated with e-mail address, doesn't allow viewing bugs unless you are logged in.
I also wanted to get in shape and I didn't want to end up at a gym. I decided to go geocaching,, which gives me a reason to go and walk and it uses a high tech item for the search.
I have slowly lost weight but the biggest difference is increased stamina, i.e. I don't get out of breath going up and down the stairs at work. And I've discovered some nice places to walk in my city. I also walk on a treadmill at home but the outdoor hikes are what has done me the most good.
I got the book and it has been helpful in distilling down the massive amount of information available about Drupal development. I see Drupal's strength as a framework for building your own applications on top, due to the design of the module and add-on system. I've also used Joomla/Mambo and both can provide a strong CMS for your website. The primary difference lies in whether you want an as much out of the box functionality as you can get (Joomla/Mambo) or if you want some out of the box functionality with easier potential to add in your own functionality or tweak existing functionality more easily. (Drupal)
It was interesting to see the one comment about users having an easier time with Drupal than with Joomla, based on my usage of the drupal.org site and my own Joomla site, I could see that scenario very easily. Joomla did take me some time to get my mind wrapped around how content is organized while with Drupal I'm having a slightly easier time organizing the content and manipulating it into my organization instead of a firm Drupal defined structure.
And on the book, I did find it helpful, but I would've like more information on populating the content from PHP code, I'm currently working on a couple of projects where I need to automatically populate content and the book was not helpful on that aspect. However, it was very helpful as I customize my installation and get my modules setup to work with Drupal.
A lot depends on whether you like the company and job that you are doing. If the answer is yes to both, then yes, I would recommend learning this other language and treating it as a foreign language that you need to learn to get the resources you need to get your job done. I started off in a technical path and I vastly prefer to do technical work. However, because I didn't speak the language of management, I found it almost impossible to get money, people and tools to improve how I get my work done. And when presenting status, I would get puzzled stares or annoyance.
By learning some of the terminology and how to translate real progress into management measurements, such as 'earned value', milestones, etc, I find it much easier to get money and work I want to do instead of spending all of my time griping about those PHB's that don't understand me. Seems to work for me, so far, as I am actually getting more time to spend on technical activities and I'm spending less time on 'management' work, because I've learned key things to say and do.
Just my two cents, my advice is worth exactly what you've paid for. (Not including bandwidth and any telecom fees you've spent to access this post)
I worked on a project that didn't take any consideration of performance for a web environment. The project was to build a web interface, using XML, JSP and servlets to connect to various legacy database systems. The company was trying to cash in on the web craze and get everything to use a web interface for all of their products.
On the individual machines and with the small sample databases, the system worked fine. However, I was the first one to connect it a development copy of a live database. On the first query for all of the contacts, which worked fine with the sample database of only 20 contacts, the servlet kept dying. Turned out it was trying to return several thousand records back and there wasn't quite enough memory to handle that. So, a design change was made in how the contacts were brought up and selected.
The other item I remember is the first time our team did testing with more than one person logged into the system at a time, on an 8 CPU system, with tons of RAM, tons of drive space, basically a super top of line server system we were able to grab for testing. There were around 8-10 people trying to login, enter data, check data, etc. Within 5 minutes, at the most, the system would crash, because it couldn't handle that many users. We tried this test for a half hour and couldn't get the system to stay up for longer then 5 minutes at a time. Time for the developer to go back and redesign some more code, when we were supposedly close to releasing. The code was finally released 2-3 months late.
Internally the company had an IT team that did get those versions to work, by using a load handler and some extreme tweaking in the systems but even that system could only handle a maximum of 130 users at a time. The company actually sold copies of those systems to customers, for which I heartily apologize, if you'd asked me, I would've said run away quickly. Perhaps that explains why I'm no longer employed by them.
Finally, for a new version and new marketing name version of the product, the developers were allowed to go in and start from scratch in developing the architecture and testing was done using multiple users on lower end machines instead of depending on single machine/single user and the final system for that version could support a lot more people.
I think a prototype has it's place, which is basically what the first version was and after you get done, throw that one away and then focus on the performance design. Unfortunately, too many managers think that throwing away a prototype is 'wasteful' and it's better to spend twice as much money fixing it and dealing with the bug reports instead of thinking ahead.
Thank you for the information, it is good to know that things have improved. Right now I'm configuring Solaris boxes at work that I inherited and I'm still figuring out all of the little tweaks the previous admin setup. He was a good guy, but liked to keep things on the edge. Hmm, guess I'll have to check out Solaris package as well, perhaps a later version is better than what I previously used a few years ago, the patch update process was actually semi painless, based on previous experiences.
I'd like to see the administration of the configuration information improved and still kept secure. Webmin works along the lines of what I'd like to see, including the standard definition for new modules. Main problem I've found is that you've got to tweak it for your machine if you don't put items in the 'standard' place, for whatever reason. And I've used package managers, don't like them that well because I'm not quite sure what they did with all of the files. Probably my lack of experience with package managers and distrust of non command line based tools.
A configuration language could go along with that. Perhaps what's needed is a standard for a discovery option that makes a package published or not, say like a <shudder>registry</shudder>
(sorry, just thinking of a registry and it's possible pervsersion makes me think of <shudder>windows</shudder>)
I ended up doing project management for the first time a couple of years ago and I've picked up some items that can help.
Study up on your people skills. I know a couple of people who don't have a strong technical background but they have great people skills. They also seem to do the best job. Look for project management classes in your area for more info on this topic.
Don't be afraid to cut scope or features. Sure, the users would like the upper right corner to turn pink when they hover over it on even days and blue on odd days but is it required for the software to function? Or a developer has come up with a great idea to improve the software, it would involve just a simple fix, really, just a complete rewrite of the system, which would break all backwards compatability, no big deal. Don't be afraid to say no, by limiting scope, you can stay witin budget, schedule and quality guidelines, mostly.
Set firm dates for feature completion and code completion in order to meet schedule. Yeah, it would be great to add just one more item in after the feature complete date, but there is almost always some impact in other parts of the system that will push other items out for completion. Don't fall prey to tempation.
To keep on budget, keep any eye on hours spent on solving different parts of the problem. Remember the developer saying it would only take 2 days to finish up that item and it's now 2 weeks later and he still only needs a couple of days? You may still have lots of time left, but those hours could've been spent on getting something else done that would now be complete.
These are just some highlights. Check out some good Project Management books, like Project Planning, Scheduling & Control, by James P. Lewis, very good, practical book that does a good walkthrough of project management concepts.
Good luck, you'll need it!
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How wonderful, I'm not alone in despising these modern interfaces targeted towards tiny, touch screens, with an aim to suck a user into staring at a screen all day with eternal sliding, etc. Amazing how the site, "Web Pages That Suck" is still relevant, with things like mystery meat navigation, contrast, figuring out the site in less than 4 seconds. Apparently it got so bad he had to take a break, but the author is now back. I would like to see his site as required reading for the graphic designers pushing this stuff out.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.co...
"You'll get my clunky desktop interface when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands."
Over the last 30 years, about once a decade, there is an article about how software code can be generated and that software developers aren't needed. In the late 80's my husband worked as a subcontractor on a project for IBM where the software architects had designed the system and written out the design in pseudo code. A lowly developer like him only needed to type in the perfect code they had designed and it would work. My husband kept telling the management team that no, the code wouldn't work, the logic was flawed and it would be buggy. He fixed things on his module and did testing, in spite of direction to implement the code exactly as designed and not test it or integrate it with other modules.
This perfect code also wasn't supposed to require any integration, so they went directly from development to acceptance testing. That worked about as well as you'd expect, they had to stop testing within an hour after starting. My husband's code was one exception, it mostly worked and actually ran when the tested the system. There were a few bugs but it performed better than other modules i the system. However, they had to delay the schedule so they could get everything integrated. He left that job and went to a small company where lowly developers only worked on coding. That system had few bugs and worked pretty well. Sadly, right before he left the company, they were partnering with IBM and starting to buy into the perfect code design idea. I worked on a similar project for the DoD, I was supposed to code the design exactly as written. Even if it didn't work when it was executed, I wasn't allowed to fix the software unless I had gotten a approved bug report that stated it was priority one and the software would not run at all unless I fixed the bug. Amazingly enough, the customer killed the project before delivery.
Saw the same thing in the 90's, Java and X-Windows were going to eliminate detailed coding and allow the use of low cost, low experience developers. I still remember explaining a memory overflow bug to a Java developer and that the string was probably longer than 1024 or 2048. He told me it couldn't happen, sure enough, I counted up the string to where it overflowed, the first 1023 characters were fine, it was the 1024 where it overflowed, sigh. In the 00's, it continued, the continuing trend was to use MS Office with Visual Basic, no need to code those back office applications and waste all that time designing, implementing, integrating, beta testing and gradually rolling out into production. Excel and MS Access with Visual Basic are examples of this type of thinking and I've seen how well that has worked out for database development.
Guess it's time for business types to roll out this idea, consultants to sell it to businesses on how they can cut costs, for software development and then another batch of software consultants will come in and clean up after them from the mess left behind on these systems. Would be nice to be proved wrong, but I haven't seen that much change in the state of the art for the majority of software development. I feel a major breakthrough is required for this to happen that will completely break from previous programming practices and from what I can tell only incremental changes are occurring.
Oh, and you kids get off my lawn, dang, I feel old after writing this. :-)
Dr. Grandin, thank you for taking time to answer questions. I have been familiar with your work in the autism field for many years. I first found your book, "Thinking in Pictures" when my son was a toddler and my husband and I were attempting to figure out if we could avoid an institution as a long term choice for him. Your book describing your thought process provided myself with a key and I was able to help him start communicating with us by drawing, by hand and then on the computer. He is in his 20's now, and he continues to grow and become more independent.
Based on observations of my son and myself, I have noticed that difficulties we have had in processing behavioral information has changed and in some cases, improved as we've gotten older. This has made it somewhat easier to interface with regular people, although it is also frustrating in my case because I have a higher awareness of how much social communication I still miss. I am in my early 50's and I still notice changes in how I process data and figure out how to interact with others. Have you noticed such changes within yourself or heard of these changes within others?
About seven years ago I was part of a star tup of technical writers for military manuals. I had worked with this group at our previous company and the group had many of the same problems, lost files, changes occurring that 'just happened', incorrect versions for delivery. The files were in SGML/XML, with supporting graphics, so a little different but the users were not software types who are used to digging in and figuring out tools.
When the company was setup, I was designated as the software support/IT person and I put my foot down, we were going to use version control. I selected SVN, using the TortoiseSVN client and I set up the first repository. We also had to share data with another company so I had to do some training and also provide support for this company long distance.
The first few months were a never ending set of complaints of how hard it was to use SVN, why is there is an error message when I try to commit, this is painful, we should go back to using a shared server drive, etc. I stood my ground and waited.
Then, it happened, one of the authors had accidentally overwritten a file that he had spent 2-3 days working on. In addition, the tech writers were learning a new way of tagging so there had been a lot of restarts and do overs and no one wanted to start from scratch. I came over, asked him when he had last committed and if he was okay with over writing the current file. He said yes, so I pulled out that last good version. After the tech writers looked over the file, he reached over and kissed me, a first for me. There were some more incidents of changes, someone overwriting another files, but most of the writers had some benefit after several months of use. After that, the complaints went down and we continued using the system I had setup.
Later on we used SVN to share files with the other company, including Excel documents used for tracking, a Word document for the style guide and other things. Now, 7 years later, the tech writers ask me to set up an SVN project when we start something new because it has saved them a lot of grief over the years.
In addition, the other company is now slowly implementing throughout their company because they have seen the difference it makes. I talked to the manager we had worked with a few years ago, she asked how difficult it was to setup. She wanted to set it up for other projects because she had noticed they never lost files, they always had the right version for deliveries unlike other projects. I was amazed to hear that entire directories had disappeared on other projects and they had no way of telling who had caused the problem
I have looked at other document management solutions over the years and I have been interested in possible solutions but SVN has always won out because of 1) No licensing costs required and 2) Low maintenance for myself and training time for the tech writers. I hate to spend a lot of extra time tweaking things, just because and the other company doesn't really have a lot of resources for that either so SVN works for our situation.
If our projects grew to a larger size, I could see looking at other options, but that would also mean that we would have more money for software licenses, help, etc. If it's a small business, without a lot of budget or expertise for version management or document management, there are worse things to use than SVN with the TortoiseSVN interface.
I would recommend searching for ghost hunting groups on the web, they usually list equipment that they use. Search for ghost hunters or paranormal societies, there may be one in your area. I would also recommend taking along a voice recorder. There are two ways you can use this, one is to turn the recorder on, ask questions, pause and then talk more. Supposedly if there is a ghost or some other presence there, when you play back the tape you can hear something answering your question or talking to you.
The other option is using a voice activated recorder and placing it in a room, shutting the door and leaving it until the next morning. The next day, pick up the recorder, rewind the tape and see if you hear anything. I did this once in a room that was supposed to be haunted, there was something on the tape. However, in looking back I didn't take enough precautions to secure the room and ensure that nothing else was picked up so I don't accept this recording as enough evidence of the room being haunted, just indicating that the room should be investigated more for anomalies.
I appreciate your skepticism and willingness to investigate further. Myself, I think there are instances where there may be hauntings and such but I am also skeptical and try to question what happened, is there another explanation, it can be too easy to just accept some slight happening as a haunting when there is another more down to earth explanation.
When my son was around 2 or so he was very interested in using the computer. There was a great piece of software, Mickey Mouse and the alphabet. While the program ran it locked out everything else and would only respond to letters of the alphabet being pressed. When a key was pressed, say A, Mickey would perform some action, say the letter and the word. For A, he would go to the refrigerator and get an apple to eat. When using the software my son learned his alphabet and had great fun having Mickey perform different actions. There are some older versions of the software still available, I also noticed some suggestions for other similar software.
Agree with the parent, as a technical person it's very easy to get caught up in finding 'the perfect tool' that will do all of those nasty management tasks for us.
The reality is that management consists of working with the people on the team, coordinating tasks, finding out about problems in time to solve them, work around them or get relief in schedule or budget in performing the problem tasks. A lot of communication, a lot of time with people not necessarily as much time with the technical work as you might prefer.
I currently work with someone who likes managing people, in a positive way, is interested in finding problems and fixing them before the release date and in getting schedule or cost relief before the customer gets ticked. He does this using two things, 1) an spreadsheet for documenting the tasks and tracking how much people work and 2) a lot of communication with the team. For keeping projects running smoothly he was laid off from his last job because his work was obviously 'too simple' since there weren't any crisis to take care of all the time.
If you aren't interested in the people part of the management find someone to buddy up with who does like that part, it is a huge help and keeps the stress level down a bit.
My husband was 36 when he got his Computer Science degree. It was a few months before getting his job but this was also at a time when the job market was in a slide. Once he got his first computer science job and some experience he had no problem getting other positions as follow up. Plus, he met me and have been relatively happy together now for 23 years so his degree helped in other areas as well, at least in my opinion and my husband is smart enough to agree with me. So I would definitely say go for it
While there Open Source Alternatives for groupware may not be as robust, there is Lotus Notes which does run under many different OS's. Not necessarily a solution I would be fond of but there is software out there to support groupware functions.
It would help to have more information on what you want to lock down. If you want to prevent people from running as administrator and being able to install whatever they want, that's built in to Linux with the permissions set. Setup a user template for the different users you need, with different permissions for the directories, create groups and assign them to those directories and things are limited.
And using NIS+ for managing the users, you can setup users one one main server with mirrors, have users space and environment be loadable on various desktops with a common file system and other nice things. The problem with NIS are security holes but I believe later versions have addressed some of those problems, if not, I'm sure someone will comment accordingly.
I've used Eventum and it is a nice package. Here are some of the pros and cons that I found in using the software a couple of versions back.
Pros: Nice interface for management and non-developer types, can segregate by project, allows adding in custom fields, customization for workflow, supports e-mail for communications, upload of attachments, integration with some version management software, command line options for script processing.
Cons: If you don't have managers or non-developer types than probably overkill, doesn't allow viewing bugs across all projects, login has to be associated with e-mail address, doesn't allow viewing bugs unless you are logged in.
I also wanted to get in shape and I didn't want to end up at a gym. I decided to go geocaching,, which gives me a reason to go and walk and it uses a high tech item for the search.
I have slowly lost weight but the biggest difference is increased stamina, i.e. I don't get out of breath going up and down the stairs at work. And I've discovered some nice places to walk in my city. I also walk on a treadmill at home but the outdoor hikes are what has done me the most good.
I got the book and it has been helpful in distilling down the massive amount of information available about Drupal development. I see Drupal's strength as a framework for building your own applications on top, due to the design of the module and add-on system. I've also used Joomla/Mambo and both can provide a strong CMS for your website. The primary difference lies in whether you want an as much out of the box functionality as you can get (Joomla/Mambo) or if you want some out of the box functionality with easier potential to add in your own functionality or tweak existing functionality more easily. (Drupal)
It was interesting to see the one comment about users having an easier time with Drupal than with Joomla, based on my usage of the drupal.org site and my own Joomla site, I could see that scenario very easily. Joomla did take me some time to get my mind wrapped around how content is organized while with Drupal I'm having a slightly easier time organizing the content and manipulating it into my organization instead of a firm Drupal defined structure.
And on the book, I did find it helpful, but I would've like more information on populating the content from PHP code, I'm currently working on a couple of projects where I need to automatically populate content and the book was not helpful on that aspect. However, it was very helpful as I customize my installation and get my modules setup to work with Drupal.
By learning some of the terminology and how to translate real progress into management measurements, such as 'earned value', milestones, etc, I find it much easier to get money and work I want to do instead of spending all of my time griping about those PHB's that don't understand me. Seems to work for me, so far, as I am actually getting more time to spend on technical activities and I'm spending less time on 'management' work, because I've learned key things to say and do.
Just my two cents, my advice is worth exactly what you've paid for. (Not including bandwidth and any telecom fees you've spent to access this post)
On the individual machines and with the small sample databases, the system worked fine. However, I was the first one to connect it a development copy of a live database. On the first query for all of the contacts, which worked fine with the sample database of only 20 contacts, the servlet kept dying. Turned out it was trying to return several thousand records back and there wasn't quite enough memory to handle that. So, a design change was made in how the contacts were brought up and selected.
The other item I remember is the first time our team did testing with more than one person logged into the system at a time, on an 8 CPU system, with tons of RAM, tons of drive space, basically a super top of line server system we were able to grab for testing. There were around 8-10 people trying to login, enter data, check data, etc. Within 5 minutes, at the most, the system would crash, because it couldn't handle that many users. We tried this test for a half hour and couldn't get the system to stay up for longer then 5 minutes at a time. Time for the developer to go back and redesign some more code, when we were supposedly close to releasing. The code was finally released 2-3 months late.
Internally the company had an IT team that did get those versions to work, by using a load handler and some extreme tweaking in the systems but even that system could only handle a maximum of 130 users at a time. The company actually sold copies of those systems to customers, for which I heartily apologize, if you'd asked me, I would've said run away quickly. Perhaps that explains why I'm no longer employed by them.
Finally, for a new version and new marketing name version of the product, the developers were allowed to go in and start from scratch in developing the architecture and testing was done using multiple users on lower end machines instead of depending on single machine/single user and the final system for that version could support a lot more people.
I think a prototype has it's place, which is basically what the first version was and after you get done, throw that one away and then focus on the performance design. Unfortunately, too many managers think that throwing away a prototype is 'wasteful' and it's better to spend twice as much money fixing it and dealing with the bug reports instead of thinking ahead.
Thank you for the information, it is good to know that things have improved. Right now I'm configuring Solaris boxes at work that I inherited and I'm still figuring out all of the little tweaks the previous admin setup. He was a good guy, but liked to keep things on the edge. Hmm, guess I'll have to check out Solaris package as well, perhaps a later version is better than what I previously used a few years ago, the patch update process was actually semi painless, based on previous experiences.
A configuration language could go along with that. Perhaps what's needed is a standard for a discovery option that makes a package published or not, say like a <shudder>registry</shudder>
(sorry, just thinking of a registry and it's possible pervsersion makes me think of <shudder>windows</shudder>)
- Study up on your people skills. I know a couple of people who don't have a strong technical background but they have great people skills. They also seem to do the best job. Look for project management classes in your area for more info on this topic.
- Don't be afraid to cut scope or features. Sure, the users would like the upper right corner to turn pink when they hover over it on even days and blue on odd days but is it required for the software to function? Or a developer has come up with a great idea to improve the software, it would involve just a simple fix, really, just a complete rewrite of the system, which would break all backwards compatability, no big deal. Don't be afraid to say no, by limiting scope, you can stay witin budget, schedule and quality guidelines, mostly.
- Set firm dates for feature completion and code completion in order to meet schedule. Yeah, it would be great to add just one more item in after the feature complete date, but there is almost always some impact in other parts of the system that will push other items out for completion. Don't fall prey to tempation.
- To keep on budget, keep any eye on hours spent on solving different parts of the problem. Remember the developer saying it would only take 2 days to finish up that item and it's now 2 weeks later and he still only needs a couple of days? You may still have lots of time left, but those hours could've been spent on getting something else done that would now be complete.
These are just some highlights. Check out some good Project Management books, like Project Planning, Scheduling & Control, by James P. Lewis, very good, practical book that does a good walkthrough of project management concepts. Good luck, you'll need it!