Oct 31

Law Office Computing Lojack articleI recently wrote an article for Law Office Computing magazine on a piece of technology that functions as a “Lojack” for your laptop. The article is not linked on their web site but thanks to Jamie Tyo from the magazine for permission to republish the article here. The highlights of the technology are:

  • A very small program gets installed that dials in once each day to a secure data center to report the location of your computer.
  • In the event that you flag your computer as stolen, the next time it calls in, it bumps up the call frequency to every fifteen minutes and notifies their recovery team.
  • THEY handle the legal process of working with local law enforcement to retrieve your computer and will insure each unrecoverable machine up to $1000.
  • If it’s a lost cause and your computer went to Colombia with sensitive data on it, you can remotely delete the contents of the hard drive.
  • There are other reporting features in the administrative interface that can offer useful data for large enterprises like software compliance, hardware changes and hard drive usage.

I ran an actual field test for the article and it worked as advertised. I fired quite a few questions at their recovery officer and he had impressive responses to all. Check out the article and if you have any questions about the test or the technology itself, feel free to post them here.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oct 17

I recently finished a solid book called “The Innovator’s Solution ” co-authored by Harvard PhD Clayton Christiensen and Michael E. Raynor. It was a sequel to a previous book “The Innovator’s Dilemna” which I never read, but this one was self-contained enough to where I could appreciate its lessons without having read the prequel. Lemme first say that Clayton Christiensen is a _brilliant_ thinker and a persuasive public speaker and that (not having studied for an MBA myself) some of the ideas presented in this book sailed over my head. I like to think that “bidness” can ultimately be understood in terms of common sense once all relevant perspectives are identified though, and this book definitely appeals to that concept. The gist of the book was to examine different businesses across multiple industries and identify recurring “design patterns” or common tendencies with the hopes of offering strategies to up & coming startups for usurping an entrenched, incumbent competitor. Although it was dense reading material, the real-life case studies and examples helped to make the material more digestible and memorable. I’ll try and summarize the salient points that I took from the book and draw parallels to the web development industry:

  1. How to pick the right fights – In business (or in any situation for that matter) consider your opponent’s perspective and don’t pick fights where it’s in his/her best interest to stay and go head-to-head with you, but rather pick the fights where it makes more sense for your opponent to flee. The examples referenced in the book showed the tendency of corporations to move “up market” tackling products and services which yield higher returns and leaving the “low hanging fruit” to be commoditized and gobbled up by the newcommers.
    My TakeawayMy Takeaway
    In thinking more about this natural tendency and applying it to the field of software development, I realized he’s right- coding (to some extent) is the “brick-laying” of our industry. While the architecture of an application will always demand skillful consideration and experience, blueprints and prototypes can be created and handed over to a lesser-skilled worker to implement, provided they have suffiicient skills to implement the code according to the plan. To me this was a revolutionary breakthrough because, as an indy developer I had always seen myself as a “one man show” handling the process from initial requirements gathering through the architecture and planning all the way to “hanging the drywall” and code implementation. Borrowing validation from Christiensen’s book, I’ve already looked into farming out the actual coding of applications to a third-party to allow me to focus more on the business development and architecture portions (which I enjoy more anyways).
  2. “Hiring” a product to do a job – there was a really cool example early in the book that talked about this recurring tendency of managers in corporations to inappropriately conduct what he termed “attribute-based assesment” when attempting to improve an existing product or service. These assesments often led to perplexingly little or no measured improvement in sales or perceived value by the target market. With all the extensive research, how couldn’t this empirically-determined prescription for success given to us from our customers result in better sales The more effective paradigm for conducting the analysis he proposes is a “situational assesment” in which you think of the product or service as being “hired” by the customer to do a specific “job.” The example he used was the purchase of a milkshake at a fastfood restaurant. The attribute-based studies did things like taste tests to determine the most desirable viscosity of the shake, the optimum sugar content and the most popular flavors. But when all was said and done, the sales of the supposed “perfect milkshake” were not significantly better than the previous one (btw, this type of failure due to the aggregation of massive user feedback reminds me of Kathy Sierra’s “Keep the sharp edges” advice). When they conducted a situational-type study of their consumers to elicit buying trends they learned that there were two major segments that purchased milkshakes, the morning commuters and the evening parents. Both “hired” their milkshakes for completely different reasons though – the morning people wanted a quick breakfast that would give them energy, be relatively easy to consume in the car and give them something to keep them busy on the way to work. The evening parents just wanted a treat to give their kids so they wouldn’t feel guilty about having not bought them the toy they wanted or not letting them play as long as they wanted- the milkshake was a guilt-negating compromise. Attributes of the shakes were adjusted situationally according to the job for which they were being hired to do (ie, fruit chunks were added for the morning commuters to give them some interesting surprises on the way to work, smaller kid-sizes were created for the evening parents) and sales greatly improved.
    My TakeawayMy takeaway – how many times have you been tasked with a one-size-fits-all redesign of a web site and are given an”attribute-based” assesment on how it should look without having a full “situational-based” understanding of what the user is truly trying to achieve when they “hire” the site? This shift in thinking to me is HUGE because all the great CSS and Flash and aesthetic enhancements you make are useless if you don’t align everything with the intended “job” the site is being hired to do. We web application developers are in a unique realm in that we can dynamically change our “product” realtime to suit the role for which it is hired by the visitor using personalization techniques as they interact with the site – that’s powerful and often under-utilized. We can essentially serve the milkshake plain vanilla initially and once it’s in hand being consumed, switch to chocolate and add strawberries or even change the shape of the container to better fit the visitor’s intended use. I will be making an attempt to incorporate this type of strategy in my apps from now on.
  3. The concept of “The Law of Conservation of Modularity” – Basically, go after under-served markets or un-served markets and compete against non-consumption. All throughout the book he talks about this predictable cycle all businesses experience in which at first, the customers in a market are under-served. One example he used that sticks in mind (perhaps because I had the first one) is the Sony Walkman – when it came out it was a bulky, crappy-sounding portable radio and yet kids had never had the ability to listen to their own music in their parents’ house yet OUT OF EARSHOT of their parents. This feature was mind-blowingly cool because it offered an experience previously out of reach and kids were happy to put up with a crappy product because it was competeing with non-consumption- they’d never had this capability before. I can remember getting my teeth pulled and getting the Walkman as a present and forgetting all about the miserable pain being engrossed in this musical experience with these things called “headphones.” Eventually though, enough competitors will arrive onscene and drive the quality of a product up to the point where the customer base becomes “over-served.” Basically this means that they are being delivered a product with more functionality, more performance or more ***fill-in-the-blank*** than they need. It’s not that the customer doesn’t appreciate the better product, but just that they would be perfectly happy with less. At this point, the law of Conservation of Modularity kicks in and this magical threshold is crossed in which the game flips 180deg: whereas the initial climate of under-served-ness rewarded proprietary architectures and was entirely focused on eeking out maximum performance, the new charge is for open standards, modular architectures, interoperability and convenience, speed of delivery and customizability of the product. The classic example of the shift was in Apple’s early dominance of the PC market with their proprietary systems and then the subsequent coup by makers of the PC’s. The key is when the “low-hanging fruit” gets commoditized, profits do not evaporate into some black hole like people might think (–gasp– outsourcing, sending all our profits overseas?! no.) but rather gets flipped to a different layer. Christiensen repeatedly brings up ex-hockey player Wayne Gretzky and his intuitive ability to skate not to where the puck is but where it will be- businesses must learn to do the same and it takes a confident CEO to assess the current market and go against the grain striking out in a different direction than the pack is headed towards a niche where he/she knows the money will be.
    My TakeawayMy takeawaythe parallel here can be easily drawn to any of the big players like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon- they began with proprietary systems competing against others on the axis of performance but eventually it all shifted and now they are comitted to open API’s and using agreed-upon standards for getting more and more stuff dependent on using their systems and consequently entrenching their position. It’s like a well-digger’s mad dash to first burrow deep vertically to the best water source and then immediately shift the focus to extending his/her pipelines horizontally in every direction to maximize distribution and entrenchment in the marketplace.
  4. Business units with disruptive goals must be separated from traditional ones and motivations of your distribution channels must be aligned with your own – this idea made a great deal of sense for me: ask a salesperson to sell a product with 1/3rd the profit potential of a product they currently sell and realistically, they’ll tell you to f*** off. “Market disruption” is the term Christiensen gives to a new product or service that wildly upsets an existing landscape by shattering some kind of preconceived barrier. Think of the angioplasty procedure coming onto the medical scene in an environment where the incumbent technology was expensive bypass procedures performed only by heart surgeons. Originally, the proprietors of the angioplasty procedure tried to sell surgeons on the benefits of performing this procedure over traditional bypass surgery. After all, it was safer, had a quicker recovery time for the patient and was an order of magnitude cheaper- do you think the heart surgeon’s embraced it though? Hellz no- it would have taken the place of their lucrative surgeries they had trained all their lives to perform and shrank a valuable stream of revenue for them. Angioplasty sellers were bummed by the surgeon’s failure to embrace this radically-better technology but after rethinking the situations with respect to the motivations of the intended distributors, they found that they could market their procedure to the smaller clinics that didn’t have high-dollar heart surgeons on staff and therefore had never had the capability to serve this market. By choosing a channel that was filled with motivated distributors, the makers of the angioplasty procedure were able to work with folks whose interests were aligned with their own and secured a foothold in the industry and eventually disrupted the incumbent bypass procedure, but ONLY after they had failed first by trying to recruit the wrong salespeople to replace an existing lucrative service with a less lucrative one.
    My TakeawayMy takeawayThis lesson has great relevance to a project I’m currently setting up called Grid7. I’m creating a network of application developers to help execute some business ideas I’ve been tinkering with that now need coding muscle to bring them to fruition. Each project will need to be segmented into a separate business unit because each will have different revenue potential and motivational factors such that if we were to lump them all under one cross-functional umbrella development company, “all the weight would slide to one end of the boat” and development would occur very assymetrically (sales efforts would be even be more skewed). By isolating the business units and structuring the incentives in such a way that motivations are appropriately aligned within each unit, everyone is happy and we can still leverage certain services/assets across all units to best capitalize on what we have.

There are plenty more valuable lessons in this book, but these are the main points that really resonated with me- all highly-relevant to the web development industry and specifically to startup ventures. I’m looking forward to establishing the Grid7 incubator in the coming months- if you are an application developer and have interest in being involved, be sure to get in touch with me so I know who you are and where your skills/interests lie.

-sean

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oct 16

It’s a fact that we humans can remember a catchy phrase better than we can remember a sequence of random numbers. There is actually a magical limit that was discovered as to how many discrete pieces of information we can hold in short-term memory at any given time and it’s 7+-2. There have been tons of studies in the field of Information Processing Theory that show how we naturally use “chunking” techniques to combine bits of info so we can store more stuff in memory. The effectiveness of these mnemonic devices are the reason why companies advertise with vanity toll-free numbers like 1-800-BuyOurCrap. Lately, I’ve been tinkering with the idea for a pet project of creating a little free web app that would allow the user to enter a phone number and view the possible permutations of english words and phrases that it could spell. I started thinking through what would be involved in constructing such an application making calls to the Google API and using their dictionary but then I realized someone may have already built this app so I checked around and sure enough, PhoneSpell.org does this very thing. It also has the additional feature of supporting wildcards so you can enter a partial number and have it suggest the missing digit to spell a memorable word.

So you ask,”beyond being a nifty party trick, how does this app help me and my business?” Well, when you sign up for phone service, depending on the carrier you use you are generally presented with a bank of available numbers in your area from which to choose. The tendency is for people to pick a number that _looks_ memorable by sight having few, repetitive digits. But mnemonic studies indicate that if our goal is easy recall of our phone number by our clients, we would be wiser to use an app like PhoneSpell and pick a number that spells a catchy phrase instead. The service is freely available – give it a shot on your own number.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oct 13

I just got back to Phoenix having spent the past week down in Cabo Mexico and though I generally try to limit posts here to condensed, useful technology-related info, I gotta write about the adventures of the week and some life-changing realizations. It was an epic vacation on so many levels (my apologies to any fullasagoog.com readers- i’ve tried to get them to just syndicate my CF-specific posts). The things I learned this week:

  1. I’ve decided I’m going to sell all my stuff and travel the world working remotely.
  2. I really miss being immersed in a spanish-speaking culture
  3. Phoenix is getting HUGE
  4. Sammy Hagar has it all figured out and might be one of the coolest people alive.
  5. Sudoku puzzles are da bomb

Realization #1 has been brewing for awhile but was crystalized this weekend. Whether it was the collective vibe of the people in Cabo or the realization from talking to a realtor that I could cash out of my house and bank a crapload of money, I realize now that the moons are finally in alignment for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to happen and I will kick myself if I fail to do it.
Realization #2 came within a day of being down there. I was raised by bi-lingual parents that met each other in the Peace Corps in Venezuela so I’ve spoken Spanish all my life as naturally as English. I don’t know what it is about chatting with natives, but it’s so great to see the expressions when you are able to step into a conversation with locals and fluidly exchange ideas in their native tongue. I really miss this experience.
Realization #3
came while flying back into PHX and seeing how much concrete there really is in this town compared to a place like Cabo. I’ve lived in Phoenix all my life and have apparently just become habituated to how monsterous this place has gotten- I can remember when you could see the perimeter of the Valley when flying in and now coming into Sky Harbor, I realize the city extends in all directions to the horizon beyond what the eye can see. Kathy Sierra talks about how we must continually strive to put ourselves in situations that purposefully blow our minds in order to stay sharp, creative and passionate. This weekend made it clear to me that I’ve been living on and off in the same city forever and really haven’t done anything to blow my own mind culturally since living down in Ecuador ten years ago and it’s long overdue to make that to happen again.
Realization #4 came as a surprise because I’ve always thought of Sammy as the weaker of the two Van Halen singers. Not so however- he put on some of the best shows I’ve seen this past week and beyond being a talented musician, he’s a really cool guy. I was unaware until now, but there is this enormous subculture of dedicated Hagar fans that visit Cabo every year at this time of year for his birthday bash at the Cabo Wabo. I had the good fortune of traveling with my friend Jeff who owns VanHalenStore.com and knows all the right people at Cabo Wabo and was able to get us in VIP four nights in a row.Sammy’s band plays every other night down here this week leading up to his birthday on October 14th and lemme tell you I have a new respect for him.- Sammy just might be my newest hero having built what I think could be the coolest bar, created one of the best-tasting tequilas anywhere and living the lifestyle he has created for himself in Cabo raising a family and rockin’ out at his bar whenever he feels like it putting on free shows for his fans. Literally hundreds of people slept in the streets to get tickets each night and then waited hours in line again the next night to get into the show. I met some of the most genuine people that had trekked thousands of miles to see Sammy play (one guy with a foot-long goatee had ridden his motorcycle all the way from Texas). I plan to try and make this trip a yearly tradition from now on.
Realization #5
I got hooked on Sudoku puzzles down there printing them out each day and taking one to the beach. WARNING: these things are _highly_ addictive. They’re not number puzzles at all really, they could just as easily be shapes, colors or characters. It’s more logic than anything. I scanned the one I did on Lover’s beach along w/ the contents of my pockets from the plane ride home today:

We pulled 750 lbs of Blue Marlin out of the Pacific yesterday. It was myself and my friend David and these five girls we met on the beach and the captain of the Edith II said in his thirty years of fishing he’s seen people come down five years in a row and fish all week and never even get one- we hooked TWO within 30secs of each other and one of them was 450lbs!! "Nunca he visto tan suerte!" he said. It took us about 40minutes to real them in and we ended up setting the big one free, unfortunately the smaller one we were unable to release because it had been hooked badly and died of stress. Other cool stuff we did- water taxi to Lover’s Beach at Land’s End, jamming on these Mariachi’s guitars at a little hidden tiki bar we found with some other americans we met, days spent on the beach at an outdoor bar called "The Office," dinner at this insanely-beautiful restaurant called "Da Giorgio" up on a cliff and hours of salsa dancing in various clubs. It was the ideal vacation in every respect.

This summer was an emotional roller coaster for me. I came out of a year-and-a-half-long serious relationship with Kristy and then immediately met another incredible girl named Tracy and had a brief but intensely-cool time with her. Aside from being supermodel-gorgeous, this girl was classy, funny and just an all around cool person to be around. Apparently I didn’t have quite the same impact on her and got scrambled in an unfortunate string of events that left me all mentally-twisted up. This Cabo trip was precisely what I needed to straighten my head out and re-prioritize things. I’ll be busting ass the next few months to get my house ready to sell and get the Grid7 infrastructure in place to support the remote collaboration of different developers on the projects I plan to seed the co-op with.

So back on realization #1 though… this is just a stream-of-consciousness ramble here but in thinking about what will be involved in plotting this international "working roadtrip," I’ve decided the goals are simple:

  1. Re-establish communication with old friends and international acquaintances and meet up with as many people as possible
  2. Travel for first within the US and then around the globe in one direction with no set plans beyond more than a few weeks
  3. Document the entire journey online and make it easy for my friends to get in touch and check where I’m at
  4. Never let the camera lense or the journaling obscure the experience itself – when in doubt, opt for soaking in the moment instead
  5. Establish Grid7 and manage development projects from the road
  6. Do the whole trip on one pair of flip-flops and come back in a year or whenever the money runs out

Things that come to mind that will need to be resolved-

  1. "Roving" offsite backups – I will definitely need to have a way to deal with the worst case scenario of my laptop being either stolen or broken on the road. In talking it over with my friend Benny we came up with the concept of running mobile offsite backups by doing an incremental to 2 firewire drives and rotating FedEx’ing one of them ahead to the next destination so at any given point there’s always an "offsite" backup traveling with you not too far away and it’s relatively easy to get back in business in the event of a theft or other data catastrophe. Code will already be stored remotely on the server in source control so it’s really more for ensuring that I can get a pristine development environment back in place quickly. Unfortunately I think services like LiveVault would be too slow and bandwidth-intensive to be useful.
  2. Making myself traceable – you want to hope for the best but plan for the worst. In the event that I were to turn up missing in some obscure foreign town, I would want to have an Onstar (or a "SeanStar" as the case may be). The method I’ve come up with is to use the Absolute.com laptop tracking software which dials in daily and give my family instructions on how they can find the last IP address it called in from in the event that something happens. I recently wrote an article for Law Office Computing on this software and it works really well. At least that would provide a physical address from which to commence a search in the event that something bad were to happen.
  3. Locating hotspots – I just got my Canary Wireless Hotspot Detector in the mail and sadly, it just does not work as reported in all the great reviews. Hotspots are so prevalent now that it probably won’t be that big of an issue to find one but I like the idea of being able to stroll down the street and casually scan for one. Internet Cafes are very prevalent in most European and Asian and South American towns and I had no trouble getting a good connection down in Mexico. The one I used each day was a freebie to get people to eat at this restaurant and it definitely kept me coming back. There are other methods like WifiMaps and Wigle so I’m not that worried. Benny says his PSP makes a great wifi detector so that’s an option (not to mention it would be a write-off too at that point).
  4. Phone connectivity – my Treo has the removable SIM card so I’m assuming I can swap out with one that works on the European cell network. I have no idea on the other locations but for areas where phone connectivity is non-existent I’ll probably use the Skype-forwarding method as it seemed to work pretty well this past week.
  5. Health Insurance- I already buy my own that covers major medical but I don’t know whether it works abroad. Will need to figure something out.
  6. Plotting location by date and overlaying locations of friends- I will probably need to develop a little web app that makes an easy way to plan all the waypoints. Yahoo just bought Upcoming.org and it seems these type of calendar/geographic mash-up apps are all the rage right now so maybe the tool I develop will even have some value beyond being helpful to me. Oddly enough I just checked on getting the domain WhereIsSean.com and unbelievably some other Sean is already doing exactly the same thing!! He’s even in Ecuador right now…how random is that?

Anyways, what a week it was. I wanna end this rambling post with a cool moment I had in my mad-dash to the airport in Cabo. I missed the first shuttle (which is about an hour from town), the next one was going to put me there within 10min of when my flight left but the attitude of the shuttle ticket-taker was "ehh, tranquilo amigo- you’ll make it and if you don’t, no worries." So I forced myself to let go and be cool with the idea of missing my plane. On the way to the airport I chatted a bit with the shuttle driver and told him of my time crunch – indeed we arrived at the airport 15min before my plane was leaving (and I managed to just make it). But in exiting the taxi, the driver looked at me with a big grin and said "muy buen tiempo, si?" Now I don’t know whether he chose this ambiguous phrase purposefully or not but in Spanish this can be interpreted in three ways: a) "we made good time just now, didn’t we?" b)"did you have a good time this trip?" c)"nice weather we’re having today, eh?" I just smiled back high-fived him and said, "Si."

If you live in an interesting city somewhere and would be interested in putting up a world-traveler for a few days in the coming months, hit me back on email- legaltech at gmail.com or post a comment here.

sean

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oct 07

So on my never-ending quest for total mobility and agility as an independent consultant, I’ve figured out how to cut the phone tether for working down in Mexico. Thanks to Skype’s phone bridge service, I’m in Cabo San Lucas right now conducting business as usual, taking phone calls and checking voicemail over a wifi connection on my laptop. The connection here is surprisingly quick and reliable (75kb/sec). Basically, I had some frequent flyer miles saved up and an offer from a buddy to stay at his hotel for $20/night. My laptop has a fully self-contained development environment via Virtual PC and I’ve got all the materials I need to build the extranet for AZ Behavioral Health and all the physical meetings archived as voicememos on my iPod. For a total cost of $50 a day to be able to work from a palapa, I figured I’d be an idiot not to go.

The phone setup is pretty sweet- Skype is voice chat service recently acquired by ebay and it let’s you talk to other people free over the internet. They have a service you can pay for that bridges their system to the public switched telephone network and let’s you handle inbound and outbound phonecalls. I purchased 600min of the skypein/skypeout service for $13 and I now have my Cingular Treo 650 forwarding all my calls to my skype number (a very simple thing to change yourself if you happen to have cingular). If I’m online, the phone rings through skype, I answer it and (other than a minor latency which you’d probably experience anyways on an international call) the caller has no idea I’m talking via my laptop. The call quality is excellent and what’s nice is voicemails show up as timestamped events in skype and you listen to them and can even save them as mp3’s. I did hear a rumor that it’s illegal in Mexico to circumvent their telecommunications system for voice traffic – I have no idea if there’s any truth to that and I’m sure as heck not going to ask a Federale. I could see this phone forwarding technique affording one the ability to backpack around Europe and work just as effectively from the road. Hrmm….

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oct 03

For anyone who uses a software lifecycle process like FLiP to make clickable prototypes and hash out web applications with their clients, I ran into an interesting and frustrating problem today that you might be interested in. I have been using FLiP and specifically Adalon to generate a wireframe and ultimately a clickable prototype of a monsterous extranet application I’m building for Arizona Behavioral Health Corporation. FLiP involves more work up front but it’s really paying dividends in terms of helping us to unearth requirements that we missed in the brainstorm and wireframe phases. I made a mock application that consisted of static HTML pages that will look exactly how the screens appear in the app itself, only all the form controls are dummy controls simply linked to other static pages and don’t actually send any dyamic data. I did this by just href’ing the buttons to the target result pages and it worked great in both IE and Firefox when browsing the files on my laptop’s filesystem (not on a webserver), however when I posted the mock to my production server to demo to the client, I failed to retest the prototype in both IE and FF and only checked FF. Since it had already worked in both on my laptop it seemed like a fair assumption that just checking in one was adequate on the webserver. Apparently IIS 6.0 has this great ummmm error checking feature (ahem, annoyance) that disallows sending form data to staic pages and instead throws the following error:

HTTP Error 405 – The HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed

The confusing thing is that it only throws this error for IE. I would think an error generated on the server-side would display regardless of the browser and I have no idea why Firefox works fine and IE doesn’t. If it were a real live application I would welcome this type of error since obviously it does no good to send form data to a static page. But for the purposes of my prototype this caused major pain today. It would be nice if there were a setting I could choose in IIS to the effect of “thanks for your concern IIS, but really, just serve my pages and don’t tell me how to write them” but alas, IIS insists on enforcing this error checking. I do know that this is the workaround that finally solved the problem: I had to manually go through each page that had a form on it and do two things:

  1. Change all method=”post” tags to method=”get”
  2. Specify the desired linked page under the form action tag as action=”blahBlahResults.htm”

Unfortunately I had arrived today at ABC to meet with the entire staff and get feedback on the prototype. After I went through it in FF with the CEO, he sent out a staff email and told everyone to check it out. Of course everyone else was on IE and the phone started ringing off the hook with people who couldn’t get in and it took me an hour battling this issue along with learning how to rollback revisions in the Subversion repository using the “reverse merge” technique. Once I wiped the egg off my face though, we made some great progress today and got a lot of good feedback from the actual people that will be using the app. I definitely see the advantage now of using a software lifecycle process like FLiP to uncover features and usability issues before ever writing a line of application code or modeling a database.

© 2005 Lights Out Production – All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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