Hey all you project managers out there. How do you manage your contact information? I am in a kind of a mess. Have about half a dozen places where I store contact info of the people I meet - client, acquaintances in seminars, on a flight...I have a rolodex, a visiting card box, the addressbook in Thunderbird (my mail client), Yahoo mail address book, Netscape Web mail address book, 2 addressbooks - the one you write on with a pen, a Casio digital diary, my cell phone. tried sync'n them today into LinkedIn got into a big mess. Any ideas? leave a note.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Current Projects
Currently involved in 3 professional and 1 acdemic project. Of the 3 prof. projects one of them is humungous. Has about 8 different roll-outs in as many countries. Multi lingual. Started tracking these using GTD. Looking forward to a lot of travel and some interesting project management lessons.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
FireFox 1.0
Been using FireFox for sometime now. Stopped using Netscape 7.2, though I felt bitter doing this I guess that its going to reach "End of Life" sometime soon and so I switched loyalities.
I liked the bookmark manager in FireFox. Its a breeze importing your collection from other browsers. I sync'd three different bookmark files, each having about a 100 or so bookmarks, in a matter of a few seconds.
The search engine box is another cool feature. You can add more than 100 or so search engines. I managed to add about a dozen of the most popular ones - Google, Yahoo, Amazon, CDDB, Creative Commons, Dictionary, Ebay, Google Suggest, Ask Jeeves, Webster, Wikipedia.
You can add a google bar and a host of other extensions like "Blog This", "Wikipedia", "Flash Got", "Quick Note" etc. etc..limited only by your imagination
The search engine box is another cool feature. You can add more than 100 or so search engines. I managed to add about a dozen of the most popular ones - Google, Yahoo, Amazon, CDDB, Creative Commons, Dictionary, Ebay, Google Suggest, Ask Jeeves, Webster, Wikipedia.
You can add a google bar and a host of other extensions like "Blog This", "Wikipedia", "Flash Got", "Quick Note" etc. etc..limited only by your imagination
Monday, January 17, 2005
More UML
When I blogged the other day about the reason for confusion the two students had with UML was because of not having followed a formal process of collecting and analysing requirements. I was right.
It was on Friday evening when I met them at my office. They showed me their use cases, sequence diagrams drawn using MS Word! and a lot of other documents. The use cases were lengthy and often didn't make sense and included system design and ran into several pages. Some of the actors in the document had a limb missing (handicapped!) . Growing tired of it I finally gave these two a crasch course in OOAD and UML in 60 minutes and asked them to come back with the use cases.
Its a pity why people have a notion that UML is complex. Infact its probably one notation that provides syntax to capture most modelling decisions. Its also a wrong notion to expect UML or any of the tools that support UML like IBM Rational Rose or Together J to solve your modelling problems. Just like brush and paint do not create a picture; Rose and UML can't create a model. The artist or modeller should supply the thought. Hope you get the picture! Maybe someday I'll post a few steps on how to model software systems.
It was on Friday evening when I met them at my office. They showed me their use cases, sequence diagrams drawn using MS Word! and a lot of other documents. The use cases were lengthy and often didn't make sense and included system design and ran into several pages. Some of the actors in the document had a limb missing (handicapped!) . Growing tired of it I finally gave these two a crasch course in OOAD and UML in 60 minutes and asked them to come back with the use cases.
Its a pity why people have a notion that UML is complex. Infact its probably one notation that provides syntax to capture most modelling decisions. Its also a wrong notion to expect UML or any of the tools that support UML like IBM Rational Rose or Together J to solve your modelling problems. Just like brush and paint do not create a picture; Rose and UML can't create a model. The artist or modeller should supply the thought. Hope you get the picture! Maybe someday I'll post a few steps on how to model software systems.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Unified Modelling Language
Yesterday I was surprised to receive a mail from a student of engineering asking if I could help clarify some doubts, that she had, about the UML. Well Yes I obliged. She had about 6 questions of which two of them caught my attention.
* From the sequence diagram(drawn to a underlying software but not the GUI) how to synthesis .h &.c files for a frame work?
* Can i have a sequence diagram without a actor?if i can how to represent a external event generating the request?
I couldnt understand the 1st question, but was pretty sure that this dame was using OOAD and UML to design something that was to be implemented in the "C" language. The mention of .h and .c files indicated this. She also went on to explain that she had trouble in maintaing state chart diagrams. What else can you expect when you use OOAD for a non object oriented language like "C"?
Now on to the second question. Well its not possible to have a sequence diagram without an actor but by asking this question she just showed that the procedure of gathering requirements, analysing and decomposing was not followed. Pity that this project is part of her curriculum.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
