Frequent spill

Just got an email with the excerpt below today.

Your submission for IRMA2006 has been subjected to a double-blind, peer-review process, utilizing 3 or 4 external reviewers. The review process for your manuscript, “132” submitted to the 2006 IRMA International Conference has been completed. Your paper has been accepted for presentation at IRMA2006 and inclusion in the conference proceedings as a full paper.

My paper on iterative development and personas has been accepted at the 2006 Information Resources Management Association conference – a fairly big conference in Washington D.C.. I am speaking on the track called Agile Approaches to Systems Development. Can’t wait!

Only problem with those long review processes is that it’s a while ago I wrote the paper. So I’d rather use the opportunity to talk about something else – something newer. Oh well – that’ll be in 2007?

In the at least 10+ last years, the Danish government has talked about how Denmark should focus on being a knowledge intensive country instead of a production intensive country as most of the unskilled jobs have gone to countries that provide cheap labor. One of knowledge intensive areas that we should especially focus on (according to the government) is IT.

But what is IT? Does the government want to promote software companies, web startups? If so, then it shouldn’t put the money into university research, but more so on bettering the conditions for competing with e.g. US software companies. The conditions for starting an IT company in Denmark needs improvement!

Instead of trying to create projects that aren’t based on market needs and reality in general, the Danish government should let the market forces run it’s own race but in a faster pace than now. Lower the taxes on IT-startups, provide subsidiaries for IT-startups. Do something! Just don’t go down that old bumpy road of letting governmental institutions take the responsibility of Denmark’s IT future… it hasn’t proved effecient in the past and it won’t now.

I gave a talk on combining UCD tools with iterative development methodologies like XP at a HCI conference yesterday. My main focus was that UCD tools needs to be incorporated into software methodologies in order for UCD tools to be more widely used.

Most can agree that we need to bring the user to the center of design, but at present, developers are reluctant to start using UCD tools – primarily because:

• Developers are afraid that using UCD (or HCI) tools means going back to written requirement documentation
• Developers are afraid that the UCD tools will make all design decisions up front and not face the fact that requirements change and so does the scope of the project.
• There are few ready-to-use software development methodologies that has an equal focus on using UCD tools than on developing a product. This means that you need to use time and resources yourself to figure out a practice that works well.

My suggestion was to start make ready-to-use software development methodologies that bundled specific UCD tools in them and showed an example of how to combine Personas (UCD) and eXtreme Programming.

So far so good. Everybody could more or less agree this far.

In an auditorium full of HCI / UCD folks who loved the phase structure of the waterfall model, as it would let them enjoy long secure design jobs, bringing in an agile methodology didn’t land well.
My talk focused on the needs for bundled UCD / software development methodologies and not so much for agile methods. But because I had used an agile method and especially because I had used XP, there was a “that’s just hype” attitude. It didn’t matter how much I tried to explain that XP wasn’t necessarily the holy grail – that the choice of software development methodology depended on the kind of project that was to be developed. The answer was just: “Well XP is always the holy grail”. Argh.

I guess XP and other agile methods have been caught in the hype trap? I wonder how many of the HCI / UCD designers who have actually worked with a methodology for implementing their design suggestions.

On tuesday, I will attend the 5th HCI research symposium, where I will speak on combining personas (HCI) with iterative development methodologies – namely XP. After my presentation, I will participate in a panel debate with CBS professors Lene Nielsen, Torkil Clemmesen and others. If it is of any interest for you, then check out the program for the day.
If you’re interested, then write Vicki Antosz and let her know you’re interested in coming. If you’re a student of CBS, she’ll supposedly give you free access to the conference.

If not can you [...] try to find an existing tool because from what i know there are so many that it would be a waste of time to program one ourselves

What do you reply to a statement like that from a client?
I see two extremes: the component based website, where all functionality (messageboard, calender, blog, etc.) is found in existing open source software, which each work seperately and independent of each other. The other extreme is the customized web application, where everything is customized to fit the exact needs of the entire website.

The main benefit of component based websites is low cost. When just adding “off-the-shelf” components, only few programmer hours are needed – and these don’t come cheap. Another benefit is speed: things are up and running in short time and the component can do many things.

The main flaw of this approach is poor integration between each component. The approach can seem appealing in the short term as the site can get to be up and running fast, but in the long term, the different components needs to be connected to eachother to make reasonable use of the functionality between the components.

If your client chooses to just pick components of software for their site, the result will be a site with no red line, the same elements appearing multiple times but in different components and in different ways. Each component may have a lot of features, but are these features actually needed? Are these features constructed in a way so that they work seamlessly together with the rest of the components on the website?

If not, the features needs to be connected by aftermath programming. The backlash: the components will need to be deconstructed to fit the vision of the finished site.

The client needs to be aware of why he wants the feature he wants and what role the feature has on existing features. How should a feature be implemented and work with other features if it should fit the vision of the finished site?

UPDATE: Found this rather old blog post about the same topic.

Our first public gig is over – it went well. The café was very cosy and had a good, nice, and relaxed feel.
The café was very happy to suddenly receive as many visitors as they did, so they welcomed us back any time. They even kept pushing free beverages on us to make a good impression of themselves.
We talked about recording the concert as soon as a week prior to the show, but of course nobody plugged in the minidisc to the mixer. Nice going. I hope we remember to do it next saturday, where we play our first party gig: At the college dorm: Studentergården. Our set list is somewhat different for this gig, as we are mostly going to play p-funk grooves.

Below are pictures from the concert at Café Retro, October 22nd, 2005. Thanks to Michel van Steenwijk, Christian Toxboe, and Laura Bjergfelt Nielsen for taking the pictures. Also thanks to the many friends who came to see us.

Anders Toxboe (sax), Kim Sune Jepsen (Guitar)

Jasper Jeppesen (Keys), Jay McHenry (Bass)

Kim Sune Jepsen (Guitar), Rune Selsing (Drums), Anders Toxboe (Sax)

Kim Sune Jepsen (Guitar), Jasper Jeppesen (Piano), Anders Toxboe (Sax), Jay McHenry (Bass), Nichlas (Percussion)

Kim Sune Jepsen (Guitar), Jasper Jeppesen (Piano), Jay McHenry (Bass), Anders Toxboe (Sax)

Apple just released their iTunes 6, which now includes the capability of showing video files in iTunes. The new iTunes goes hand in hand with the just released iPod that can now play video files – even on your TV if you have a dock to go with it. The new iTunes have got the same features as the iPod when it comes to watching video – so I’ve been playing around with it for a while. I’ve been saying that I was going to get an iPod as soon as I could watch video files on my TV through it – but it just isn’t good enough yet. The iPod and iTunes still lacks improvement in a number of areas:

• Can’t play all media files – only the few that is playable in quicktime. So unless I can use VLC on the iPod or in iTunes to watch the videos files of my preferred format, I’m still waiting with buying the video iPod.
• iTunes is not a fit name – not necessarily a point to keep me from buying an iPod – but Apple needs to change the name into something more fitting.
• Don’t store my video files under music – why not use the “movies” folder on my mac?
• Loose the dock – If I’m going to put video files on my iPod, the main reason would be to put movies on it that I can watch at friends’ places. So if I’m going somewhere away from home, I won’t have my dock (with the video output) with me. So Apple: put a video-out port on the iPod.

So Apple – hurry up on fulfilling the requests, I want my iPod now!

For a little over a year, I’ve been playing with a funk/jazz band. Until saturday, October 22nd, we haven’t performed live at public events. So if you want to witness the premiere, then show up at Café Retro at 21:00 on saturday.

The exact address is:
Café Retro
Knabrostræde 26
1210 København K
Denmark

My love for my iBook is big – so big that my girlfriend even calls me Smeagol when I oh so gently pad it and says”My precious, my own”.

Even though it has a long history of pleasing my computing needs, it also have a bad track record of breaking down. It’s almost 3 years old now, so the warrenty is long gone. A little over 6 months ago, the LCD cable from the computer to the LCD screen started to work in mysterious ways – showing any other color that what it is supposed to. As the repair costs (2700 DKR for just replacing a cable!) exceeds what I can sell it for, I decided not to repair it.

As the cable got worse, I couldn’t take it anymore: I had to find some solution that allowed me to view the correct colors of the screen. As my brother works at Dell he gets their monitors cheap – and luckily he had a 15” LCD screen at home that he didn’t use for anything. Thank you for lending it to me!
Even though it’s just 15”, it’s bigger than the screen on the 12” iBook, and therefore a step-up. To make the step complete, I went on apple.com and bought an Apple keyboard and the new mighty mouse.

The mighty mouse is so cool! That trackball that scrolls both up/down and left/right is sweeeet! Especially the smooth clicking sound that goes with it. I’ve found a new precious thing: My own mighty mouse! Something that leaves the inner Smeagol in an even more personality splitting mode: Smeagol decide: which is more precious: the iBook or the mighty mouse?

So now I’m sort of back to a desktop setup, but It’s so clean! The iBook is hidden under the table, so I just have my 15” screen, my mac keyboard (nice and slim), my mighty mouse, and my 300 GB firewire harddrive. So clean! Ahhhh!

The iBook just got a notch up on the love scale and a notch down on the hate scale. Hurray! Guess attractive products just work better.

On an out of context note: I wonder where on Kathy Sierra’s Love/hate scale my relationship with my iBook is.

Recently I sweared to myself that I wasn’t going back to PHP ever again, as I have gotten comfortable using Ruby on Rails. I guess I will have to swollow those words, as it seems I’m going back to PHP for a while. A programming job that gives me the chance to contribute to like I have never done before to the inline skating community.

So right now, I’m spending time copying the wonderful has_many, has_one, and belongs_to to my PHP framework. Just can’t make it as elegant and simple as possible in Ruby. Right now it is loading everything up front that is in the has_many, etc. class variables instead of doing lazy loading. Ruby is just so much easier! Argh!

Can’t wait to get back to the Ruby world. May this suffering be as short-lasting as possible.