Gerd’s Blog

I just mentioned that Google Reader got several new features. I was just trying them and mentioned some issues.

1. Notes
   I think this was a feature that had to be added to the reader. Not being able to add content links to your shared items feed that is not available in form of an RSS feed you subscribed was just annoying. On the other hand there was Google Share i just found about 2 weeks ago. You can do the same there just there is an other RSS feed your consumers had to subscribe to. With FriendFeed this wouldn’t be tat big problem but at the moment aggregation services are rarely used.
   On the other hand i read some posts that in my opinion interpreted Notes wrong. Maybe the name is misleading.
2. Adding comments while Sharing
   I like the feature but once again there are several issues. First of all the content is added of the original post. I wonder what useful services like AidRSS are doing with that. On the other hand the GUI for adding messages is far to small. you can just read two lines
3. Change shared item content
   I really think this is going too far. You as creator now can not be sure that the content you publish is shared in the same way. Maybe someone is just changing one word an the whole message get an totally different meaning. You even wouldn’t find the difference if you are not reading the whole message. I suggest most of the user want to get the original content. Now i have to check every shared item if it has the original content because there is no information that it was edited by the persons who shares it.
   I hope they rethink this feature because in my opinion it just brings confusion and distrust.

If you have shared an commented or edited Item there is no relation to the original post in your reader. So you can’t see while you browse the feeds which items had been shared.

I think some of the ideas relate to one of my older postings “Meta RSS Feeds sharing“.

I was playing around with the Java Web services Developer Pack and BPEL nearly the whole evening now and some stuff really drive me crazy. Dealing with all the different Namespaces and the strange handling of the NetBeans IDE. I can’t understand why you close an wizard and just print an error message if there where something wrong with the input. You have to change step to the whole Procedure again and again.
I have not developed much in Java for some time now and most of the stuff was just straight forward but today I found something really interesting. You can put Annotations on parameters of methods. I never saw that in C# but you can do it there too. There are some advantages to use this technique but - is this readable anymore?

I don’t think so. An other thing I really don’t understand is why you have to use the @WebParam Annotation with the name Attribute if you want to see a parameter name different to ( par1, par2, …) in your WSDL. I mean who on earth likes that generic form of information where you have to search an api documentation again or in my case where i develop the services in parallel to the Process switch back to the service implementation to see if the first Parameter is the Address or the Packages? No IDE or program that uses the WSDL will be able to give you this information back. Thanks

I was posting about the JAOO 2007 several time ago and would like to share an other experience i had there. On Monday I had lunch with Wayne Fenton from ebay where he explained their deployment strategy to me.

The concept they use is very easy but if you take a closer look it fits perfect into an agile website world. The whole strategy is based on the concept of trains. Trains are going every two weeks to the website and have only a couple of seats left. Think about seats in the manner of complexity which makes sense to reduce the complexity of the deployment to a oversee able amount. Every team can decide which train they would like to catch. If they have decided to take one, they have to ensure that every required QA is done until departure. If they can’t finish their work - there will be an other train in two weeks. After the train started it’s way to the website there is an other QA done before the deployment goes life to the portal.
Deployment is done in three Phases. First of all the Databases are updated if they need to. The second phase deploys the new version on the application servers. important here is that no new feature is enabled while the deployment. After all servers have the new version the system starts to enable the new features. It is important that for every deployment step there must be the possibility to role back to the old state.
With this strategy one server farm after the other is switched to the new version. Internationalized versions of their platform role out the new versions normally about one to two months later. In the end this results in nearly 24/7 deployment in the production environment. For me this strategy is really impressive and I would like to see such a deployment in real.

Our team is using the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for nearly 2 Years now and I have to admit that its handling still surprises me sometimes. The application we are developing uses the database heavily for some scenarios and last week we had to recognize that some concurrent situations take the Server into an undefined state. At the moment we are developing on an Vista 64-Bit but we had tested it on Windows XP too. The interesting part was that some machines run into some kind of endless locking on the database and some didn’t. We invested hours analyzing the situation, when the locking issue occurred but we couldn’t find the problem. We tried lock hints, optimizing the SQL  statements - all the stuff you can imagine but nothing worked out. In the end after several hours of searching through the web we found some Feedback in the MS Sql Server Connect site. I really like the term Feedback here - it does not speak about Bugs which most of them are. In the end it came out that the KB928365 Security Update for .NET Framework was the initiator of our problem. After de-installing it from the XP ad Windows 2003 Machines everything worked correct just on some Vista Machines we still have the same problems. The Security Update came out about 2 weeks ago so it was hard to find the problem - 2 weeks early everything worked correct.
Don’t get me wrong I like C# and the CLR and all the possibilities you have but in this situation you like self controlled environments where nobody other than you decide which version is used by you product.

Probably most of you know I am currently working for SENACTIVE and we are developing an Complex Event Processing System Called InTime in C#. Yesterday I had a meeting with an potential customer and he was asking what our platform target is. I said it is Windows as we are developed in C# and until now Mono does not support everything we need from the CLR. He was complaining about C# because he gave it a try a few years ago and was not satisfied and all their applications are running on Linux/UNIX. I found an interesting analogy that at least everyone that likes Winter sports can understand.

The opinions of JAVA and .net are similar to them of skiers and snowboarders. If you just try one of them you don’t like the others because they are different and you just see the bad things. If you are trying both of them you know about their advantages and disadvantages find both attractive.

It is really interesting that languages and Runtime environments still matter today or at least people are concerned about it.

In one of Alister Cockburns last posts he was writing about Using RUP to fix Scrum. As i read his small article one sentence attracted my attention. He wrote: The pendulum has swung too far from “too much planning” to “not enough understanding”. I have the same feeling for some time now. The picture on the left shows a typical iterative scrum process where the backlogs on the left side are used to add features to a new iteration. What’s interesting is that more and more people and companies try to hold the Product Backlog as small as possible and push new features directly into sprints. So what is bad with this approach you would ask?

The backlog was intended as a place where ideas can grow. I never have seen Stories/Features that can be developed as they are written in the Backlog. In my Opinion this happens because most of the people involved don’t have or take the the time to think about the feature that should be implemented. A short cycle to develop new features should be aimed but not for every price. There are some other aspects that need to be considered and one of is that people must understand the product they are developing.

The second issue I have seen with short Product Backlogs is that Release Planing suffers. If you do not have enough Stories in your backlog to plan for the next release you will ship everything breaks down. In this moment everybody in the Team looses the goal for the Product. I would compare it with a scene from Forrest Gump where he starts to run without any goal. This is not working in reality.

There are three lessons I have learned in the last three years in reference to the issues I mentioned above:

1. Never start any sprint without a goal
2. Never start a product development without an Release Plan
3. Try to discuss Stories/Features as soon as possible with a bigger group of people

As most of you will know Google Reader finally got a search function. I proposed such function also in an last post about Meta RSS feeds so at least for me it was no surprise. After so long time the feature I waited for was finally available so I started to do some demo queries. Searching for some words delivered really good search results. Then I started to try some of the more complex queries like searching for links or using the “site:” operator. None of the advanced operators worked. I really have not expected that and it looked to me they have done a new search engine just for the reader instead of using the old one that does already search for blog entires.

Today they posted an article in the goolgesystem blog with a few tips how to search for stuff in the reader which really makes me think. Why do we need a How to for a search if all the other different content searches (web, news, blogs) can be done with the same query syntax? Why they have invented the wheel again and done an new search engine just for the reader? Is Google getting to big? I do not know until now but it reminds me about several other big companies that are making this mistake over and over again.

I am still on vacation so i used Thursday to move my blog as described in my last post. As already mentioned i preferred WordPress so i gave it try on www.wordpress.com one of the free hosted site. Already the first impressions where grate i played around a little bit and felt very comfortable with the interface and the functionality that was provided. So I started to search how i can transfer the old posting and comments. At http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpres i found an article how this can be done easily. WordPress supports an importer for several sources and Blogger is one of them. So i tried it an after a few minutes the content was transfered. I was very impressed how easy this part worked.

After i had finished the first import i tried to set up the http://blog.gerd-saurer.com domain to my hosted WordPress log. Unfortunately i could not register a CNAME entry so i decided to install my own WordPress instance on the server. After an hour everything was working and I searched and installed the most important Plugins (FeedBurner, Google Analyticator, …). Then began the most complicated part - finding an template that fits your needs. I found one but as so much of them it was optimized for 800×600 screens. I do not believe anyone is surfing with this solution any more so I changed it to an 1024×768. I hope you like the Theme.

No it was time to change all important tracking tools from the old to the new instance. First i changed my domain settings for blog.gerd-saurer.com at my provider. I created an new FeedBurner feed to track the old Blogger instance feed and changed the URL of the original post and comment feeds to the new WorPress instance. When this was finished i activated the Analytic settings and finally posted on my old blog my last message with an information that this will be the last message that is published on this blog and that everyone that receives this message via an RSS reader should update the feed URL.

Finally I tried to set up a mechanism to redirect people accessing my blog directly to the new one. You can find a nice HowTo at http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress.

It took me nearly one day to switch my whole blog. If it would have been possible to use the WordPress service hosted I think half a day would have bean enough. Everything was easy and straight forward. I hope the decision to move to WordPress was right.

Once again I apologies for the troubles the the moving had cause you but finally as you read this post you have switched successfully. I am looking forward for interesting posting and comments in the future.

I was using blogger since 2 months now and i have to admit that it is far no that usable as i thought. Today i decided to move my blog including the content to an other tool. I think i will shift to WordPress but i have not made the final decision. The domain http://blog.gerd-saurer.com and the RSS Fees for the Blog and the Comments will stay as they are.
I apologies for the troubles this will cause you. Until now i really was very satisfied with the Google Products but Bloggers is far not that i expected.

If you are interested what was the crucial factor for my decision:
A few hours ago i posted my Post Titled “Google Reader Feeds” which was original an older draft version about a month old. As i posted it i did not recognize that the publish date was set to the original date the draft was created. This is not what i expected because it was published today and not about a month ago. I tried to change the date but the only thing i go was an error that i should publish something at the bloggers google group. I searched there and found several entries already more than a year old - no comment when it will be solved.

On one of my last post i was writing about Meta RSS Feeds and that it would be nice if Google Reader would support a possibility to get feeds for special tags. I just step over a post by Niall Kennedy (already posted in December 2005) that describes how you can use the API of Google Reader and subscribe to special tags. Be aware that not all stuff posted there is still working. The API is similar to gdata.

After a short look into my Reader settings i found that you can share special tags also within the readers settings.

I must admit that i have not seen the settings as i was writing my last post.