David Anderson in Austin - "Driving a Kaizen Culture Using Regular Operations Reviews"

David Anderson on March 17, 2011 spoke to a joint meeting of Austin SPIN, Lean Software Austin, IEEE CS Austin, and Agile Austin about a missing component of Kaizen culture, the Operations Review - what can your department do, how much of it did you do, and are you any good at it.
(I thought it appropriate since he espouses lean methodologies that he was wearing skinny jeans.)



Now this picture is not creepy because the girl in the cartoon is hugging David.

The Agile-Lean-CS-Spinners:

The main benefit of the standup meetings at a job was the after-meetings that allowed small teams of people, instant quality circles, to discuss and solve problems. This also struck me as a real benefit of this meeting - a chance to catch up with long-lost tech friends in the Austin community.

My random jottings:
Since academic software is seasonal, they share "Classes of Service" with car racing.
At the StandUp meeting only manage exceptions.
Many organizations only have a shallow implementation of Lean.
Real Kaizen is people just doing their jobs.

The meeting was a success - thanks to John Heintz for buying meals for everyone.

Good Idea From Outgoing Chairman of the FDIC

In a recent speech outgoing FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair says,
"I would like to propose to you a radical-sounding notion. And it is that increasing the size and profitability of the financial services industry is not - and should not be - the main goal of our national economic policy."

Pragmatic Programmers' Magazine

If you haven't been over to see the Pragmatic Programmers' magazines lately, I'd highly recommend them. The concepts are usually applicable to many languages and development environments. The tone is upbeat and the articles are easily read in a sitting.

Austin's Microsoft WebMatrix to ASP.NET MVC Web Camp

Last Monday Scott Hanselmann and Jonathan Carter presented a seminar some new Microsoft technologies to a packed, standing-room-only crowd.
I love Scott's podcasting so I was eager to hear him in person and I was not disappointed. Although the technical details were sometimes dry, Scott's personality and the banter with Jonathan were fun. Scott has the rare ability to be very technical and yet sociable.

Especially humorous were the Windows7 popups declaring, "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting."
My jumbled notes:

1. The emerging standard with jQuery is to present metadata about an xml element as attributes prepending "data-" so jQuery can easily pluck it off the element with the "data" function.
   

   ... data-xvalue="30.0" ... $(taget.data('xvalue')
   

2. Modernizr is a package to help simplify writing javascript for older browsers.
   
3. preface fiddler's url with "ipv4.fiddler" to use in a browser.
   
4. elmah is a usefullogging framework supported by nuget. See nuget.org.
   
5. VS2010 now has a Package Manager
   
6. PM>Install-Package AddMVC3ToWebForms
   
7. WebActivator
   
8. PackageMangerConsole has MVC Scaffolding
   
9. PM>Scaffold Controller Post
   
10. Linq to SQL is now complete. No new features planned. The future is Entity Framework.
    
11. Web Platform INstaller
    
12. Razor is a minimalist templating framework. Viewbag is dynamic.
    

Scott and Jonathon made the day fun, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "with all this new technology the .Net community is now only five years behind those cool Ruby-on-Rails kids."

Book Review: "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

This is a great story about the collapse of the sub-prime housing market and how clueless the Wall Street mavens were. Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, makes the story eerily compelling. Three items stood out to me:
1. How the fund managers were paid well to be ignorant of the true details; they were making lots of money with no thought to the future ramifications of their actions other than their annual bonus.
2. Almost all the people responsible for this terrible catastrophe actually came through the debacle making tons of money, which, for the most part, the taxpayers ended up paying.
3. The problem really was OPM - Other People's Money. Once the brokerage firms went from partnerships to publicly owned companies, the risks they were taking were not with their own money, but the stockholders money. Hence the temptation to gamble with Other People's Money in a way they would not have done with their own. If they bet right, they'd make a ton of money, if they bet wrong, well, they will lose their bonus and the stockholders will lose money.

Emacs selection scrolling too fast

Something that annoyed me for a while was selecting a region that spanned multiple pages and emacs scrolling too fast. An easy fix is to slow down the mouse with this in your .emacs file:

(setq mouse-scroll-delay .25)

Viewing Canon RAW files, .cr2 extension, on WindowsXP

Today I started using the RAW format for photos. The normal XP thumbnail viewer didn't know what to make of the .cr2 extension, so I downloaded Google Picasa to edit them and the Microsoft extension to see them in Windows Explorer.