SOFTware is HARD

A mindmap review of this book. Flash version can be found here

Innovation Traps Project-related Overspending too soon Prioritising “can we” over “should we” Pursuing unattainable perfection Analysis paralysis Using traditional market-forecasting tools Fixating on core competencies Company-related Unbalanced innovation portfolio (e.g. mostly low-risk, low-hanging) Too many lingering projects that should have been “killed” Negative influence of the core business Use wrong decision-making criteria Time is Scarce for Innovation Core operations take up too much time Not setting up time for innovation guarantees it won’t happen Can we “take some time away from our core operations and it won’t suffer” but “what would happen if we didn’t set aside time for innovation?” Choices 1) should staff dedicate a portion of their time to innovate or 2) should a small group of people focus all their time on innovation? Choice is 2) Principles of Disruptive Innovation Overshooting creates conditions for disruption – “good enough” is great! Disruption com...

I chanced upon an article on agile estimation that I read with interest in InfoQ. Many of the techniques are not new with the exception of the WAG generator. I find such estimation techniques to be very useful even if the subject matter is not software-related. Check out InfoQ: Estimation Toolkit

Software is hard by Honza

Pre-configured Accounts Type Username Password OS super-user jeoser password MySQL administrator root password FTP account joomla password Joomla administrator admin password Basic Unix Commands Command Description apt-get To manage installation, update, upgrade and removal of application packages chown To change the owner of a file or directory chmod To change permission of a file or directory ifconfig To display the network information (e.g. IP address) mount To mount a CD-ROM within the drive for use sudo Allows execution of commands with super-user privileges useradd To add users to the operating system vim My favourite text editor! wget Acts as a faceless browser to retrieve HTML or other files over the network Additional Resources Description URL Give information about installing JeOS as a virtual appliance https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JeOS Gives information about insta...

Have you ever locked a document in SharePoint unknowingly? This happens when one edits a document directly from the site and one of the following happens: Network goes down Office client application crashes SharePoint site goes down When this happens, you will not be able to overwrite the document as the document had been "locked" by you "for editing"! There is no known way of unlocking the document. The solution is to wait-it-out (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899709 ). Wait for 10 minutes for the server to auto unlock the document.

Toolbox for the IIS server net start sc query tasklist /svc netstat –ano wfetch/ wget/ curl procmon/ filemon/ regmon eventvwr mmc.exe (reliability & performance monitoring) process time & % .NET CLR ASP.NET Requests Wait Time Requests Current Requests Queued Requests Rejected Toolbox for the browser machine ping telnet/ portcheck wfetch/ wget/ curl When should application pools be turned into web gardens? Web gardens can only be used if the application doesn’t use in-process session variables but rather out-of-process ones (e.g. session state service or database session state). Drivers to using web gardens are: Application makes long-running synchronous requests Application is low in availability and crashes often Application creates high CPU load on work process Non-IIS Settings & Bottlenecks Optimum paging file size setting: 1.5x the RAM for 32-bit OS system-managed for 64-bit OS Disk queue length should always average les...