Earlier in the month I posted about a little app I created to search existing Contacts within Salesforce based on a Lead that your looking at. Well I’ve had interest from people in creating this as a full app. So I’ve packaged up the initial version up so you can install it and take a look:

How to install:

1. Click the following link, this will ask you to login you can either install it into your sandbox or production if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say sandbox just click the production link:
   Production: https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04tC0000000jNAN
   Sandbox: https://test.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04tC0000000jNAN

2. You will be asked to login using either your production or Sandbox user details.
3. Salesforce will then show you a wizard to install the app (you can always un-install the app if you don’t like it), you can mostly click next next next etc on the wizard. But one section to be aware off is the permissions about who can see the application. You can either allow only administrators to view the app, everyone or a sub-set of people.
4. Once you have run through the Salesforce install you need to add the “VisualForce page” to your lead page layout. The easiest way to do this is to view any lead from within Salesforce and click the link ‘Edit Layout’ which can be found on the top right hand corner.
5. Next the best thing to do is create a section on your layout to put the “VisualForce page” click and drag the “Section” box onto the lead layout. This will pop up a box and ask you to fill in some details. Call the Section name “Search Contacts” or something like that. Select the “1-Column” layout and click OK.
6. Select the “Visualforce pages” option and you will see the “searchContacts” visualForce page. Click and drag this down on top of your section that you have just created.
7. Click Save.
8. Bingo your done! You’ll now see the the search box on your Lead

New requested features:

The following is a list of features that people have asked for which I will be developing into the app hopefully over the next couple of weeks:

• Ability to click on the contact name and go to the contact rather than having to go via the account.
• Ability to use the user’s permissions rather than returning contacts that they may not have access too.
• Ability to search leads as well as contacts.
• Show a message “No Contacts found” if no matching records could be found.
• Don’t just search on email address but do a bit of a fuzzy search on company name / persons name etc..

Have fun with it and please let me know on any additional features you would like!

If you want it give me a shout and i’ll send you a link to the package so that you can install it in your org, a “one click” install. But if your feeling adventuous and want to do it manually you can follow the brief instructions below, but you do need to know the basics of how to edit and create apex classes and pages:

Create searchContacts class:

In the page above i’ve just pulled out Name, AccountId, Title & Email fields, but if you have custom fields or other fields you want to pull out just copy one of the apex:column lines and change the field name (!item.xxxxx)

Next all you need to do is add the visualforce page to the Lead page layout, also don’t forget if you have different profiles that you go in to them and give access to the visualforce page otherwise other users won’t be able to see the visualforce page.

Bingo!

Ii’ve setup a uservoice to collate ideas.

This week saw SalesForce launch version 9 of their popular online CRM product. The two things that interested me the most were the workflow visualiser and the free version of the SalesForce platform:

Workflow Visualiser & Process driven CRMs

In the CRM world there are three main types of CRM vendors; interactive, process driven and record centric CRMs:

At the moment the market leader for process driven CRMs is Ciboodle (who I used to work for) and with the Workflow visualiser it really reminds me of Ciboodle and a more process-driven CRM. Ok, you’ve always been able to do workflow in salesforce but they are now allowing you to see visually what your workflow actions are doing and how they flow into each other and with complex workflow actions this is really good news. The only limitation being you can only see your workflow and have to go back to salesforce to continue to edit the workflow.

What is a SalesForce Workflow?

Salesforce Visualiser of a purchase order process

In SalesForce you can setup workflow for a particular process, for example if you create a salesForce application to manage purchase orders you can then setup workflow to trigger manager approval if the purchase order exceeds �10,000. But, for more complex workflow it can be hard to see whats going on so sf have created the workflow visualiser which allows you to visually see the workflow you have created.

This is similar to how process driven CRMs work, where they can excel are in organisations that wish to implement strict processes, for example this could be an outbound call centre were you want to be efficient as possible in making calls. What I would be interesting in knowing is if they have introduced this feature to show SalesForce as being more process driven. In Ciboodle the core of the system is the process tree, linking and editing processes together which looks much like the salesforce visualiser but this only views the process. If you could create apps in this way linking visualforce pages together using workflow and simple create, edit, delete actions SalesForce really could move more into a hybrid system between a record centric and a business process driven system. I doubt they will go any futher than being able to edit your workflow in the visualiser due to the amount of work but always possible. Maybe by including more business process centric tools in SalesForce it could move itself into the Ciboodle area and really have some great features to complete over Microsoft Dynamics, Oralce and SAP.

SalesForce has released a free version of the platform!

Now when I heard SalesForce and free in the same sentence I thought that they may be heading towards a freemium business model, but alas not. I think I need to stress the word platform here, because it doesn’t include Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, Leads, Opportunities, Forecasts, Products, Cases or SalesForce Solutions. So if you want to code up one application with up to 10 objects to be launched to up to 100 people then maybe you could use it… or maybe something else… up to you. If you want to sign up click here.

This month Tony Karrer’s blog asks the questions:

Where is your time spent?

How much time do you spend and how did you find time for all the relatively newer things like reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.?

What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago?

Do you have less of a life with all of these new things?

Where is your time spent?
With the amount of information available at the touch of a button I think the best way to answer this to say how I manage my time on an average day and how it now fits into it.

It takes me an hour door to door to get to work and I spend this time, on the way to work catching up with the latest and greatest information. This usually involves either listing to podcasts and/or catching up on my Google reader feeds on my phone. I’ve found google reader a great asset as I can mark interesting stories for my friends to read and they do the same, I also may send a tweat. When I get off the train it takes about 10 minutes before I’m at work so I use this time to check the days calendar and any outstanding emails from the previous day. I’m usually quite strict about emails and only read them 3 times a day, I find they can be quite distracting if your constantly getting pop-ups about new emails. That actually reminds me of an old boss, one day he came into work and tipped his entire in-tray into the bin and announced if it was urgent someone would tell him eventually.

Once at work its the Daily Scrum. This is key to my team to understand what we have done, what we are going to do and if we’re still on target. We stand up around the sprint board which lists all the tasks for the current sprint and I ask everyone the following three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today? (allowing them to pick up tasks from the board)
• Are there any impediments in your way?

This sets up the rest of the day. Usually spend lunch at the gym, on the way home I’m usually reading, currently I’m reading a brilliant book ‘First Break all the Rules‘. The book takes you inside the minds of some of the greatest managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and they reveal the new truths they have forged in its place, if you haven’t read it, READ IT!  (linked on the right hand side if you want more info).

I’m a bit of a foodie so I usually spend the evenings chilling out with friends or making food but to be honest usually turns getting updates from other consulting work. At the moment I’m about to start working for “Let Loose” a charity aiming to bring disabled and able bodied people together through the arts.

How much time do you spend and how did you find time for all the relatively newer things like reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.?

I think i’ve just become smarter at managing my time. One thing that did help me was speeding up my reading (after reading another great book, sorry I’m a bit of a book worm).

The new “Earning youth of today” grew up with computers, they have learned to sift through large amounts of information and easily pick out the information they want. Some marketing people I know call them “The Teflon Generation” because nothing sticks to them, they are used to being bombarded with information and adverts. So I’ve worked on being better at ‘thin slicing’ information, being able to evaluate snap judgements and first impressions and seeing I this can educated and controlled so instead of merely praising the mysterious process of instinct and intuition I can to see how these instincts can betray, the situations where our powers of rapid cognition can go awry and where you fail to read the signs (another good ‘Blink’).

What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago?

Watching TV, I just don’t have time for it anymore. I’m more comfotable understanding what my strengths and weaknesses are. I think I used to spend too much time trying to focus on improving my weaknesses rather than my strengths. Over the years I’ve decided that really I’ll just hire people who are far better than I will ever be so I can focus on getting even better at my strengths.

Do you have less of a life with all of these new things?

I think a categorical No. If I hadn’t done the work to adapt to the increased information or if I hadn’t have used twitter I would never of known an old friend was at the same gig as me so we could catch up, or been able to learn so much more than I thought possible. Also professionally being able to talk to like minded professionals about things that interest me.

Professor Barry Wellman is a professor based at the University of Toronto (and a very nice campus it is too!) where he directs the NetLab and studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines social support, virtual community, the virtual workplace, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. His pioneering work with networks pre-dates the hype and hysteria that is currently online social networking.

It’s happened before:

October 11th 2007:

The BBC News web-site has been suffering outages today while its hosting location fluctuated between BBC Internet Services and the Akamai web application acceleration and performance management service.

For many users this afternoon, the front page of the BBC News site has been slow to respond, often displaying error messages such as ‘No suitable nodes are available to serve your request and an error occurred while processing this directive’. Other users found that requests to news.bbc.co.uk caused the server to continually redirect their request back to news.bbc.co.uk, causing an infinite redirection loop which would have added to the load on the servers.

Today’s performance problems coincide with apparent moves to and from the Akamai content distribution network. Prior to today, the news.bbc.co.uk site had been self-hosted by BBC Internet Services in Docklands, London.

For some periods today, the BBC News website had resolved to IP addresses belonging to Akamai, while other times it had either been pointed back to BBC Internet Services at Docklands, or did not resolve at all, thus leaving the site completely inaccessible.

Akamai transparently mirrors content stored on web servers and users then access the content from these instead of the origin server. By automatically picking a mirror server that is near to the user, performance is generally increased while decreasing the load on the origin server.

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, has published a blog article about the site problems.

I’m doing some work for Jawbone and they have just released there bluetooth mobile headset in Europe yesterday. But I have so say its quite an amazing bit of kit! The noise suppression on it is something else! They have a demo on their website of what a call is like and it really is like that. I was talking to a mate in my house then walked outside into my car and then down a busy local motorway and I asked him if he could hear my car and he still thought I was in my house! anyway kinda cool, anyway check it out…

Escape have announced a 100% free course funded by SkillSet. Not only that you get paid UK minimum wage through the period of the training, you get 4 weeks work experience at a post production house (oh and you get paid for that as well)! I think you’d be stupid not to apply. The course runs from 11th August for 18 weeks and then the 4 weeks in industry. More info can be found on Escapes website.

They have also just launched a competition to win £10k worth of free 3D/CG VFX training! Its in conjunction with Channel 4 and you can find more information at the 4Talent website. All you have to do is write in 50 words or less why you love 3D animation, what you aspire to do in the future and how the Escape course will help you get there!

More info http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

I copied and pasted this from their site…

“Escape Studios are offering you a chance to win a course.

The winner, who will be announced in one week’s time on Monday 9th July,
will be offered the course of their choice at Escape Studios absolutley free!

That doesn’t leave much time so if you’re interested you’d better get a move on!

To enter the prize draw all you need to do is fill out the questionnaire that can be found on the
following link.”

http://www.escapestudios.com/news_07.php?id=36

Now a competition has been setup by Weird to find the best snapshots. Highlights include a guy taking a leak, the actual Google Van taking the 360-degree photos but my all time favoruite a photo of 524 Haight St San Francisco, and the google van exceeding the speed limit! Classic!

I haven’t found any UK street photos but guessing this may not happen for a while due to tighter controls on privacy.

We received bad news last week. Tom Donnelly, the trainer that taught myself and Mike snowboard instructing died during the week, the day after his fathers funeral. He was the BASI examiner who I was training with most of the season in Wanaka.

I never forget when during heli-boarding in the Harris mountains in south island. The guide (a skier!) said that a ledge was fine to jump off, he ollied off it and found it to be a huge jump. It ended in his puffer jacked de-puffering, the cracking of his mobile and the destruction of an iPod… he always knew where the best hits were at TC, even down runs you’d been down 1000s times before and never even noticed!

He asked not to send flowers but to give money to his favourite charity (Angela Donnelly, 13 Harberton Park, Belfast, BT9 6TW).

You’ll be missed man!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkIj1lyNysU

Off to snow planet tonight for some snowboarding. Its open 365 days a year. I asked them how many people came on christmas day and they said it was totally packed out! Bizzare!

Oh in tech news McAfee FAILED the 100% virus scan at VB. Virus Bulletin tests a load of virus scanners for “100% virus detection”. They failed to detect viruses running on Vista, ironically enough Microsofts’ OneCare also failed.

The first is the actual 60second film and I remember having about 3 hours of other footage which made the thing make sense but we strangly couldn’t fit it into 60secs. The second is a test reel we did to try out a couple of locations and how we were going to do things…

Well you have to start somewhere!

Lost Identity

Lost Identity Test Reel

http://www.google.com/tisp/

Yup we’ve had a Lahar… (lar-har). Yes everyone one was going on about the Lahar involving one of the New Zealand volcanoes… had no idea what on earth they were going on about. As it was involving a volcano I thought it would be a good idea to find out . Quick search on wikipedia sorted everything out. Its basically a lake a the top of a volcano that has burst its banks and a load of mud and water poring down.

The NZ government have set up quite a neat system for alerting everyone so that s cool… no probs BUT I get a call from my parents. They are travelling down to Wellington on the train and the track had been washed away. Luckily they had stopped for lunch (the train stops for an hour or so, so everyone can get off and have lunch!!! how bizarre!) anyway they had to go the rest of the way by coach.

Should be getting the video of me jumping off the SkyTower next week…

More info: NZ Herald

On wednesday morning an email is sent to everyone in the office… “As you are all free this evening we have booked 10 tickets for the skyJump at 5pm, it will be followed by a meal in devonport”. The office goes quiet… you can hear the jaws dropping from all around… For those that do not know the SkyJump is a virtually freefall jump from a tower no just a smallish tower… its the biggest tower in the Southern hemisphere… nice!… ok, you don’t jump from right at the top but at 640ft tall and going 85kph its still very, very high and fast… and i’ve just received an email saying that i’m going to do it… NO WAY!!! … oh and the added pressure being that they have paid for it so you have to do it.. the panic starts the set in. I’ve seen people doing it, hanging in no mans land waiting to fall… I start to go into a strange laughing hysteria which lasts most of the day… unfortunately my window looks out at the sky tower it dominates the Auckland skyline.

At 4.35pm we get in the taxi and leave the office… 4.50pm we get to the sky tower looking directly up the tower… it looks big… very big.

We get our harnesses and jump suits, I ask for another harness but they says its pointless as your only attached to one cable… nice… I ask how long the person has been working for SkyJump… the reply “one week”, right. Confidence high!… not. Were taken up to the lift and we go up the sky tower. The lift is a glass lift, you can look down and see the bottom of the lift shaft and look directly out of the window to the world. I keep my eyes firmly on the back wall of the lift, not looking out. We get to the top and one by one go onto the little ledge. I have this recollection of the guy saying “Are you ready?” to which I reply “Yes” and wonder why on earth I’ve said yes? because agreeing to a stranger to push you off a building at 192 metres just sounds stupid! and well … unwise! Anyway I didn’t have much time to think about it because he shouts out 3 … 2 … 1 … and i’m gone…

Note the clenched fist! the second photo isn’t great because of the strong lights from the base of the building and night fast approaching. You get a better idea from the video on the website.

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/james-blunt-p1.php

Yes, there was an earthquake on wednesday just north of auckland out to sea… and where was I??? just north of auckland snowboarding at snow planet. Did I feel anything?! .. nothing. I was talking to a local who has lived in auckland for 20 years and has never felt an earthquake, and i’m in snow planet falling over and don’t notice a thing. Then at 11pm there was another but smaller and I didn’t feel that either. Oh well… maybe next time.

Generally Auckland isn’t geared up as much as Wellington for earthquakes. While I was down in Wellington a couple of weeks ago I took some photos of equipment etc in the buildings in Wellington.

On the floor of the building I was working there was a civil defence cabinet:

On top were “Readi-safe survival packs for emergency relief and natural disasters”. The packs can sustain Five adults or Two adults and three children for up to three days. I didn’t check to see what was in the cabinet but the “perishables” replacement list on the front had: Batteries (AA Radio) x3, Batteries Torch (D Cell) x8, Readi-safe survival packs x2, Tampons 1box, Light Sticks 12 hour 15, Water purification tablets 1 box of 50. All interesting stuff

And then downstairs on the ground floor was the “Orange Box”, a safe room incase of disaster… basically an empty room from what I can see

Private Importers Custom Charges

Ok books are free… yupiee! but look at the other stuff! Golf balls are free, golf clubs are free yet golf bags are $7? “Linen – table cloths” are $5 yet “Linen – Kitchen Linen” is free?? and what about the lego?! $7 for lego bricks?!!! Bizarre!

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.mp4 – Mpeg4

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.wmv – Windows Media Player

Its only a very rough cut, and it goes on a bit. But you get the general idea. For all those who want to know I ran the footage through a de-interlacer and then colour corrected it to give it a little bit of a filmatic look.

I posted it earlier this year to my blog but definatly needed a bit of work… so here it is:

Peer Reviews

Peer review — an activity in which people other than the author of a software deliverable examine it for defects and improvement opportunities.

Its one of the most powerful software quality tools available. Peer review methods include inspections, walkthroughs, peer desk checks, and other similar activities. After experiencing the benefits of peer reviews for nearly ten years, I would think twice if I had to work in a team that did not perform them. That said peer reviews can really benefit a project especially in this age of “agile programming”. BUT and it’s a big but. If they are not run correctly they can go spectacularly wrong! And really damage a development project.

Why do a peer review?

The projects that I have found peer reviews to be the most valuable have been the projects that have little documentation, no really formalised development process, or are iterative projects where the documentation never keeps up with the actual project or isn’t in depth enough. This is because the peer review acts as:

- Training

- Risk management

- Playing to everyone’s strengths

- Quality Assurance

- …

But if that hasn’t turned you around just take a look at the statistics:

.. software testing alone has limited effectiveness — the average defect detection rate is only 25 percent for unit testing, 35 percent for function testing, and 45 percent for integration testing. In contrast, the average effectiveness of design and code inspections are 55 and 60 percent. Case studies of review results have been impressive:

• In a software-maintenance organization, 55 percent of one-line maintenance changes were in error before code reviews were introduced. After reviews were introduced, only 2 percent of the changes were in error. When all changes were considered, 95 percent were correct the first time after reviews were introduced. Before reviews were introduced, under 20 percent were correct the first time.
• In a group of 11 programs developed by the same group of people, the first 5 were developed without reviews. The remaining 6 were developed with reviews. After all the programs were released to production, the first 5 had an average of 4.5 errors per 100 lines of code. The 6 that had been inspected had an average of only 0.82 errors per 100. Reviews cut the errors by over 80 percent.
• The Aetna Insurance Company found 82 percent of the errors in a program by using inspections and was able to decrease its development resources by 20 percent.
• IBM’s 500,000 line Orbit project used 11 levels of inspections. It was delivered early and had only about 1 percent of the errors that would normally be expected.
• A study of an organization at AT&T with more than 200 people reported a 14 percent increase in productivity and a 90 percent decrease in defects after the organization introduced reviews.
• Jet Propulsion Laboratories estimates that it saves about $25,000 per inspection by finding and fixing defects at an early stage.

Code Complete
By Steve McConnell

[ Steves book Code Complete is HIGHLY recommended to anyone who codes, full over very useful information ]

Training

As you are going through the review the junior developers are learning from the developers with decades of experience. Introducing the junior developers to advanced concepts that they wouldn’t usually have access too, therefore bringing there level of coding up.

Risk Management

Problems and design flaws come up before its too late. And as a manager you get a chance to see how developers who work for you think.

The risk of the key people who wrote the code going on holiday / leaving taking the knowledge of how the system works is reduced because everyone knows about the code and how it works, or at least knows where to start if something goes wrong.

This of course is not as good as a documented system, but I’ve found it useful when management can’t see the reasons for spending time on documentation, especially if its out of date the moment its written.

Playing to everyone’s strengths

There maybe people on the team that have strengths in different areas of development; Security, databases/SQL, OO patterns etc. This then allows to let them have their say in to improve the code and also pass the knowledge to other developers.

Quality Assurance

The obvious quality assurance that will come from developers peer reviewing the code. More manageable code, more readable, less bugs!

But there are many others, giving the developers the chance to talk about their code in front of their peers to build up their “public speaking” experience, empowering the developer by giving them responsibility for identifying specific code issues, the list goes on…

How to run a peer review:

The reviews I’ve had in the past we have given specific roles to people in each review meeting:

Moderator – This really needs to be someone “grownup”. One person with authority who isn’t going to be commenting directly on the code. A referee who has the power and shut someone down if need be. Developers take code personally and it’s important to remember that! The moderators prime role is to keep the review moving fast enough to be productive but slow enough to find the most issues. They would also distribute design or code to be reviewed and an inspection checklist, setting up the meeting, reporting inspection results and following up on any actions.

Author – Quite obvious, the coder of the code

Reviewer – Anyone who has an interest in the code. The reviewers take a look at the code before the meeting and discuss any bugs or questions during the meeting.

Documenter – This could be the role of the moderator if the group is small, but should not be the role of the author or reviewer (as its got a bit of a conflict of interest). The documenters role is to record the bugs/issues and the assignments of any actions during the review meeting.

Management – No way, this is purely a technical review so the focus is technical not political. Managers could receive a review report (list of actions from the review or notes on the checklist) very simple report which can be written during the meeting. But this shouldn’t be used to evaluate developers in any way.

REVIEW RULES:
I’ve followed a number of rules in the past for the review:

- To have checklists which focus the reviewers attention on areas which have been problems in the past.

- The emphasis is on bug/issue detection, not correction.

- Reviewers prepare for the review meeting beforehand and arrive with a list of issues/questions.

- Information is passed on to the next review to improve future reviews (eg: adding/removing questions on the checklist)

- The meeting is for technical people and not management.

- Under no circumstances should the review results be used for performance appraisals, its just like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It doesn’t make sense anyway performance should be based on final products/projects and not work that isn’t finished. Another reason why there is no management. It just means everyone is a lot more free to say what they think.

- The meeting should have a minimum 3 people and maximum of 6 people; any bigger and the review gets too big to manage and ends up becoming a hindrance.

GENERAL PROCEDURE FOR THE REVIEW:

In the past I’ve broken reviews down into 9 possible stages but its really up to you how things work. Have a play at different ways of running the review until it fits in to your organisation:

Planning: The author gives the code/design to the moderator. The moderator then distributes the code to the people they think should review it including the checklist which focuses the attention of the reviewers so they don’t waste too much time looking at the code. Usually the developer has developed using the checklist which highlights the key corporate issues.

Overview (optional): The overview is used only if the reviewers aren’t familiar with the project. The author will spend some time just describing the project. This is generally a dangerous practice because the reviewer could end up glossing over issues. The design or code should speak for itself, the overview shouldn’t speak for it as that’s what the whole exercise is all about.

Preparation: Each reviewer works alone to become familiar with the design or code. The reviewers use the checklist. For every 700 lines of code the reviewer “should” spend about an hour but its really down to what works best in the organisation.

If you provide printouts for the review meeting make sure they have page numbers and line numbers.

One company I worked for we even had an additional step during preparation. That was to check the code with a static code analysis tool (PMD for Java development) to reduce the meeting time down by pre-catching issues. Also the static code checkers tend to catch a lot of important issues that many developers miss.

Review Meeting: To start the review meeting usually the author reads the code/design. They will explain all the logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object etc… while they are talking the documenter records any issues/bugs but all discussion of the issue stops as soon as they have been recognised. The documenter also notes the type and severity of the issue and the review moves on.

As I said above the meeting needs to keep moving otherwise you’ll loose concentration. So, depending on the project this shouldn’t take longer than 30mins/1hr. Everything needs to stay focused, I worked in one place where the group was banned from even discussing weather an issue really was an issue because they assumed that if one person is confused enough to think an issue existed then it was an issue and so the design, code or documentation needs to be clarified.

Another good idea is to do a few peer reviews at the same time as long as people are focused. Sometimes this isn’t always possible but having three or four people go the same day can really take the edge off. If you put your most good natured, thick skinned, or well liked developer first you can set the tone of academic civility that will keep everything smooth and help eliminate passionate discussions between developers.

Developers will find many faults and list them gleefully, they feel they have to but its up to the moderator to keep everything in task. I also find that people fresh out of uni or college are very self confident and ready to argue. They also take things a lot more personally and you can end up in long drawn out discussions.

Inspection report: The moderator creates a review report usually during the meeting that lists each defect including its type and severity. At this point you could just put them straight into a issue tracking system while in the meeting as this will save time, and the report can be a list of these bugs. This therefore helps to ensure all the issues will be corrected and can also be used to develop the checklist which will in time highlight problems in coding etc… it can also give a good indication on the number of issues/bugs found. From the report you can find out the time spent on the issues over time which can be used to prove the usefulness of a review by giving hard data otherwise you are just left with saying reviews are good … because they are! This is also a good guide to see if they are working or not.

Rework: The moderator assigns issues/actions out to someone (usually the author unless its a larger project) for repair and the assignee resolves each defect on the list.

Follow-up: The moderator just checks to see how the issues/actions are being carried out.

Third-hour meeting: The peer review or review is just that… a review so the people in the meeting shouldn’t be discussing solutions, but of course you will, so its better for those who wish to discuss different solutions to do this at another meeting either straight after the review meeting or at another time, this also allows it to be a bit less formal and get more people involved and also doesn’t tie up other peoples time who are not interested.

Fine-tuning the review: Hopefully over time the checklist will become more refined and things will be added and things will be dropped. You should find the same common issues appearing on the checklist and you can work on refining how you work to fix them.

The Checklist:
As mentioned above this is used to track common issues so the developers use this as a guide when developing. It shouldn’t exceed more than one sheet of paper, an example of one is below, based on a PHP project:

Peer Review Checklist
1. Are the standard headers / footers being used?
2. Are functional javaDoc / phpDoc comments being used? And exports are correct
3. Is there enough documentation to work out what the system is doing?
4. Is there enough error handling relating to the importance of the work?
5. Does the code follow naming conventions?
6. Does the code follow formatting conventions (bracketing)?
7. No Magic Numbers/Text
8. Any duplicate code or code which could be marked as reusable in the repository?.
9. Removal of code which is not being used.

An Example of the Review Notes:
This was of a unified login system. A simple system to allow a single point sign-on to login to an ASP and PHP based system:

Peer Review
23/03/2004

Uni-Login Script Review

Moderator: Mr X
Author: James X (PHP), Peter Y (Architect)
Reviewer: Alistair X (Senior DB)
Reviewer: John X (Java Developer)
Reviewer: Simon X (Technical Documentation)
Reviewer: Tim X

Reviewers: Please make sure you prepare for the review meeting beforehand so you can become familiar with the code and arrive with a list of issues/questions and make use of the Checklist below.
Author: In the meeting you will be expected to read the code/design and explain all logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object.

Code to be Reviewed:
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSUniLogout.asp

http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/account.php

Related Files:
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Code Review Checklist.doc
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Uni-Login Script.doc

Results From Review:
ForumsUnifier.asp
ACTION: Missing Header/Footer
ACTION: ASP Comments (including related files) missing
ACTION: Use include to lmskeepalive.asp rather than static code

LMSUniLogout.asp
ACTION: Header/Footer missing
ACTION: Point to gatekeeper (update link)

ForumsUnifier.php
ACTION: Header/Footer Missing
ACTION: Not enough documentation
ACTION: Remove code which is not being used (Line 15,17,34 to 40, 41)

account.php
ACTION: Header/Footer needs to be updated with latest versions, with more information
ACTION: Line 247: Needs a header refresh to index.php and remove acountDetails() reference and function.
ACTION: PHPDoc comments missing.
ACTION: Line 97 – 99, 229 comment removal
ACTION: Lines: 127 to 171; Remove echo’s and drop out of php instead.
ACTION: Line 113; Remove magic numbers
ACTION: Line 114, 113; Remove rand functionality
ACTION: Line 212; replace “relevant” with “Company Systems”
ACTION: Line 218; change to “Back to website.com”

CheckList Items Added:
9. Any duplicate code should be put in a separate module for reusability.
10. Removal of code which is not being used.

Duration: 1 Hour

====

Yes, the phantom of the opera! .. it was either that or a french maid!

Dean went as “Chile” and Joy the new zealander went as scotland:

Yannis won the costume competition, I don’t know what country he came as… I don’t think anyone cared, he came as a maid. The funniest moment was when we all had to walk from the hotel to darling harbour to pick up the boat. The looks from the Japaneese tourists was priceless! also the wolf whisles and the bemused faces of people as he walked by:

Other photos:

Demiti works for GT in Jakarta, Indonesia and it was his first time outside the country… and the first time he has seen how we party… never seen a christmas cracker before… generally in shock most of the night but he did get into the swing of things. He managed to borrow a couple of elements of costumes from different people to make his own costume:

Picture from the boat looking back at Sydney:

My Crimbo Hamper:

Video to come!

BBQ at St Kilda:

It is interesting that this week Google Execs this week told their developers to stop creating so many applications and now look at adding features to the existing applications. Also to concentrate on getting them more integrated. It is definatly needed. Yes the spreadsheets app is good but I wouldn’t use it. I think if Google should go towards the idea of ThinkFreeOfice, offer a large amount of space to save files I think they can really get into the thin client integrated enterprise space. Create and edit any of your files in word, excel, powerpoint, calendar and email and allow them to be shared to whoever you want at any time. Powerful! Oh and if there was a calender integration for Outlook, i’d use it! …

Windows Vista RC2 has been released for anyone to download it! It will be the last release before it goes into production. Here are some screenshots of Vista. Its nice… very Mac like

Firefox 2 RC2 has been released – quite a few new features but its more stable, i’m hoping they have fixed the memory leaks which seem to plage me!

“The Father turns 60. His family, which is a big one of the kind, gathers to celebrate him on a castle. Everybody likes and respects the father deeply…or do they? The Youngest Son is trying to live up to The Father’s expectations. He is running a grill-bar in a dirty part of Copenhagen. The oldest son runs a restaurant in France, while the sister is a lawyer. The older sister has recently committed suicide and the father asks the oldest son to say a few words about her, because he is afraid he will break into tears if he does it himself. The oldest son agrees without arguments. Actually he has already written two speeches. A yellow and a green one. By the table, he asks the father to pick a speech. The father chooses green. The oldest son announces that this is the Speech of Truth. Everybody laughs, except for the father who gets a nervous look on his face. For he knows that the oldest son is about to reveal the secret of why the oldest sister killed herself.”

It was quite a good show, I especially liked how they represented everyone getting ready for bed. They had one bed centre stage which was used by all the characters in the scene at the same time but acting out their own little scenes totally independantly… worked really well

On the way back on the plane the cabin crew announced that the film was about to start and I overheard a passenger saying that it was a really good film, so I thought I should tune in… The film is called Kenny and was about Kenny Smyth who delivers pora-loos. He’s ignored and unapprciated, but its hilarious! … It was really bizare! on a plane at 30,000 feet, trying not to laugh. In the end I just gave up trying to hold it in, the rest of the aircraft was laughing so much! Toilet humour at its best! From what is says on IMDB it doesn’t have any release dates outside Oz at the moment, but I hope it does! Its the second film in as many months that has come out of Australia that has been great.

Homemade flight sim, I want one!

Its amazing what you find on the internet. But on the 11th January 1797 at the Old Bailey. Look who got arrested for stealing 50 pieces of wood pipe and a wooden boat! In the end jury found him guilty and confined to “The House of Correction” and fined a shilling. I wonder if he is any relation?

On the same day in another case, James Waring (Aged 16.), William Green (Aged 13.) and John Milton (Aged 14.) were all found guilty for:

“burglariously breaking and entering the dwelling-house of John Printon , about the hour of six in the night of the 5th of December, and feloniously stealing a black silk cloak, value 26s. six yards of muslin, value 18s. and a muslin cap, value 1s. the property of the said John ;”

They were all sentenced to death… over 200 years ago.

It all started one dusty day in April. I embarked on a research project to find the best laptop to do digital compositing and digital effects. It needed to be a laptop because I knew I would be travelling quite a bit over the next year or so and I wanted to had a bit of a beast to process all the high-end graphics. The first decision was do I go with a Mac or a PC… in the end I decided to stay with a PC because I knew how to use it ok probably not the best argument but hey!

The Research:
My list of requirements was this:

• The system needed to run Shake for Linux; this is a digital compositing package which I will be using the most
• The system needed to run Maya for Windows
• The system also needs to run Adobe products ok enough to do work on them… so After Effects, Premiere etc
• Built in microphone for conference calls
• Bluetooth for linking to my mobile

The main thing which I knew was going to be an issue was the graphics card. After looking at the technical specs your basically locked down to an Nvidia Quadro graphics card, there was basically an alienware MJ-12 or a… alienware MJ-12 the only problem being that it didn’t have built in bluetooth, but hey I can live without that.

End of May: The purchasing:
I knew that I was going to Australia at the end of may, so I looked into seeing if it was cheaper to buy the laptop in australia or the UK, because alienware have a website in the UK and Oz. Now the Australian website didn’t sell the MJ-12 laptop so I went onto the UK website and changed the delivery address to australia. When you do this all the prices change to dollars and it became VAT free. I checked the import duty to Australia and it was 10% so I made 7.5% saving already, and also the price was a lot lower so I made in all an £800 saving. Some eStores have difference prices for products depending on where they are being shipped, so if they want to get into a market they drop the price.

I mulled over if I should get it went back to the site and suddenly when I changed the delivery address to Australia it changed the price to… wait for it… Euros!?!?!?!! ok it was working with dollars the week before I’ll ring them up. So I rang them up basically saying I can pay either in Oz dollars or pounds but not euros otherwise I would get charged 2.5% in bank charges. First of all I was fobbed off that there was a problem with the website. I rang back a couple of days later and still a problem. So I ask them if I could buy it over the phone and pay using pounds, they said they would find out and ring me back… they didn’t … so I ring again and again each time being old something or other, in the end I gave up and ordered it on the internet using Euros… I rang my bank just to say that a large transaction was going through and it was a mail order which wasn’t going to my house in the UK. They said that would be fine and they would authorise it. Just to be on the safe side I ring them up a again and ask them if there was anything on the system and they confirmed that I had asked for this transaction to be accepted.. cool!

So on 28th May 2006 I purchased the laptop, knowing I was going to be in australia in a couple of days time for just over a month, plenty of time to ship the laptop.

On the 30th May I get an email asking me to ring up and confirm my order, which I do and they say that they have processed the order and everything if fine, I ask when it will be dispatched and they say its about 7 days sometimes less.

31st June:
I get and email saying:

“The bank will not allow us to perform an AVS check (a name and address check on the card). The country you are resident in does not allow us to perform an AVS check as either they are a data protected country or will not check the details over the phone for security reasons”…

Interesting! its a UK bank card… all banks that I know use AVS and the country is the UK?!?

1st June @ 15:53 (isn’t skype great!):
I give them a ring and ask them whats going on. They say I need to photocopy both sides of my card, and a card statement or an offical letter from the bank. I said it was a british card and its been authorised and I can’t see how it could have POSSIBLY been declined. Me now being in australia, I just didn’t think about bringing a bank statement with me, silly me! So they want a photocopy of my card! BOTH sides after thinking I decide that they aren’t getting it… I can’t even get to my bank statements anyway. So I know i’ll ring the bank just to check whats happened. I ring the bank.. they reply saying that no transactions have been declined at all. In fact no transactions from anyone in the last couple of days declined or otherwise. Right… so what your saying is Alienware isn’t telling the whole truth…

3rd June @ 10am:
I ring alienware and manage to persuade the person on the end of the phone that they can charge my card with the delivery address details and it will work FINE!… and after a bit of persuading they do it… and guess what … it WORKS!

I took a look at the alienware website and they have a nice little page which tracks your order status. It says on Pre-processing.. it hasn’t even got to the card charged bit, I wait a day or two because it may just update at night or something so it could just be out of date. I say I need it quite urgently and they put the order on priority.

5th June:
Its still on the pre-process stage. I ring them up to be told that the status page is not linked to there system and has to be updated manually and sometimes this doesn’t happen… GREAT! But you must be nearly done because I was told it would take 7 days to dispatch? and I am told its been delayed because of missing parts. Great only 2 weeks before I leave Oz!

13th June:
For the last couple of days it says its been saying that payment has been received but not a lot else. I give them another ring to check the progress and they say they have received the parts today and they are building now and it should be dispatched on friday! yupiee!!

16th June:
I ring up to check the progress of the order and its been shipped! I ask for shipping ref and it was on DHL Express so I would get it on wednesday for my flight on the friday to New Zealand for a filming project that I needed the laptop for.

I track the shipping online and see it going from Dublin to London to Sydney…

19th June (5days before flight):
I check the DHL website and it says “Clearance delay” … clearance delay? its in sydney but its stuck in customs. I ring up DHL and ask what that means and they say that its been delayed because it has missing paperwork! ARGH! and could take up to 3 days to be approved. ARGH! I ring up alienware, they ring DHL and fax over the paperwork.

20th June:
I go to the depot and pick up the laptop as I need time to install things on it before I fly to New Zealand. Yupiee!!! I have a laptop!

I install things on it…

I start doing some graphics work and try and increase the resolution… strange I can’t get higher than 1440×900. But the laptop I ordered was 1920×1200… they have installed the wrong screen! ARGH! no built in camera, no Wide UXGA 17″ screen.

22nd June:
I can’t bare to ring Alienware so I send them an email saying about the problem with the laptop… I get no reply. But I need to use the laptop but I make sure I keep the plastic over the screen.

8th July:
I send them another email… still no reply…

12th July:
I ring them and ask what I need to do, they ask me if I notified them… which I did and after AN AGE they find my emails…

After communicating with them some more I they ask if I want a refund as its cheaper than sending the laptop back to them. Which I would love to do but unfortunately I need the higher res and better screen so that I can see the colours better for my digital comp / graphics work. The screen and the graphics card was the only reason I got the laptop in the first place. So I suggest to them that I send it to Australia as they are based out there… Each time they say they will call me back .. each time they do not.

One point I ring them to be told by a sales or receptionist that they are all in a meeting… ALL of customer service!!! how bizarre!

…

29th August:
I ring them and I get someone who says that someone else is now dealing with my call, but he’s unavailable but will call me back by the end of the day. So I ask her to DEFINATLY send me an email by the end of the day or ring me even if nothing happens. You never guess what happens… yup… nothing… I even say that I will be contacting Trading Standards on wednesday next week if this hasn’t been cleared up.

3 months and 3 days since I attempted to purchased the laptop online … and counting.

Ok this is cool, its visual look of flight paths going over the US, using US flight data over a 24hr period.. over 19000 planes in the air at a peak time!!

I’ve re-found pimpthatsnack.com a great website with recipes for “pimping up your snack” … I think a mate created a huge cookie using a recipe on the site. I am going to make the kitkat bar! so watch out supermarket, here I come!!

Synthetica is a great easy to use look and feel framework for Java; AT LAST java doesn’t look square, blocky and horrible.

They specialise in contact centre systems and services, but they go a couple of steps further than a lot of the major contact centre systems (Oracle, Siebel, Peoplesoft, SAP). Their product can fit 100% into a companies business processes. It has a SOA based architecture to allow web, SMS, Interactive TV etc etc interfaces. The client I will be working with in Auckland is a very company looking at making all their services self service. I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m off to Melbourne later in the month to meet the team over there and do a spot of training on there contact centre system GTx.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4
Found this cool vid on youtube.com. This guy gets around the world showing off his expert dancing skills!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/315702
Online game. Its quite easy until you get to level 16 & 23 which I got stuck on for a bit… think its already done the rounds but its quite fun.

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
This is a great site if you want to learn Ruby, you can even download a ruby virtual machine from VMTN so your up and developing in… well the amount of time it takes to download! ooh how I love VMs

http://www.google.com/gmm/tour.html
You can now get Google Maps on ya mobile, you can plot a route and even see it via satelite too. I used to use wap to get rail times quite a bit. Every now and again I always wanted to get maps on my phone too, but now you can

Finally I give an award to the most “inventive” post to the iPod Shuffle story:

“Hi. The iPod was shorted out by a cabal of Jewish engineers who perfected the science of invisibility and secretly control the entire universe including Burger King, but not McDonalds. They call to me hypersonically from the little holes in the electrical sockets telling me to produce movies about phony messiahs who didn’t really exist. The dead iPod is NOT an example of the Holocaust although their are millions of dead iPods which have been burried in mass graves in Croatia. Hi, sugartits. ”

Truely bizare!

Saturday night in Ohakune

Well that was a week ago and i’m still in Auckland, really good snow! and its still snowing!! It takes about 3hrs to drive to Ohakune and then about 30mins driving up the mountain… or should I say volcano… BUT it only went active about 10 years ago and wipped the lift system and mountain cafes off the face of the mountain one… but you try not to think about that

I’ve now got a flat on the docks right next to the centre of Auckland. It takes about 10mins to walk into the centre of town. Out here its so cheap, there is no council tax and the top rate of tax is 33% and no national insurance so its basically another 10% cheaper. You do have to pay doctors fees which is about £10 per visit but you can get insurance for around £20 a month which covers everything.

Whakapapa is more or less dead centre of the north island of New Zealand, were going to be driving down from Auckland on Friday evening. Hopefully the mountain will be open. I was closed earlier in the week due to “to much snow” thats what I like to hear! Just a pitty I didn’t have more time to pop down to Wanaka to see the Rookies down there, but treble cone doesn’t open until the end of the month anyway.

Anyway I’ll be back in the UK on tueday. Yupiee can’t wait… (not) but I have to say it is warmer in the UK than it has been in Sydney. It basically rain non-stop for two weeks when I first got here. Also the house i’m in has no heating, well all except a fan heater in my room.

I have to admit it was a bit my fault. He was going to chuck it away so I thought hey why not take a quick look to see if we could fix it, worth a try. It was out of warranty, nothing to loose… well maybe a finger … he wanted to get an iPod Video anyway. I found the site and started the jabbing I just gave up too soon and he carried on. Oh and to the person who asked did we actually fix it … no i’m afraid we didn’t. The memorial service will be on Saturday @700 swatch internet time.

Just to get one thing straight it was nothing to do with “Apple’s shoddy workmanship” that resulted in what happend, it was our fault. I think some people didn’t quite get my English sarcastic in jest tone. I think the iPod design is a work of art, amazing engineering.

I’ve found it quite interesting to see how the story has progressed around the internet. A lot of blogs just seem to copy exactly the same text and put the same info on there blog. Others seem to have multiple blogs but all posting the same stories on different domains, I suppose all trying to get that little bit higher in the google rankings so that they can brag to their friends.

Anyway here are a couple of selected comments from around the web about the story which I thought were quite amusing:

• “ipod shuffle wins battle with knife wielding owner”

• iPod shuffle 1-0 Angry customer

• And this, children, is why Apple tell us not to eat the iPod Shuffle.

• [Using a knife:] That’s what hammers are for.

• fryPod (TM)

• originaly known as “Melting Pod”

• Kentucky fried shuffle

• The “Mission Impossible” iPod

• “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to audio files… This iPod Shuffle will self destruct in ten seconds after being opened and tampered with.”

• Does it smell like warm, fresh Apple Pie?

• He should’ve taken apples advice for when their products break. “buy a new one”

I actually never knew quite how explosive lithium iron batteries could be. I knew that you are not allowed to bin them or chuck them on a fire, I thought this was more to do with their corrosiveness and reactivity of the chemicals when burnt. Someone posted a video of one going off in an experiment:

Lithium iron battery over-charging experiment

He quickly checks to make sure his iPod is defiantly dead by plugging it into his laptop, looking back probably a bad move, mainly because he got straight into “fixing it” and didn’t let it discharge but we will never fully know .

Using a metal knife he started to ease the bottom of the case off… then with a kind of jabbing notion started to hack at it well then he must have hit a small capacitor and I found him running around the room swearing and screaming like a school girl wondering what to do. The iPod basically exploded in his face and caught fire, sparks flying and thick black smoke, and in the end he placed it on an electric fan, which in turn started to turn black from the smoke and heat coming out of the tiny little ipod…

I feel there are two morals of the story:

1) Apple made the iPod shuffle in a way for it not to be opened… there is a reason for this!
2) Project Managers should never think of themselves as “Hardware Engineers”.

The Dead iPod:

You can take a look at the trailer at the Caterpillar Wish website. Just hope its one of the very few Oz movies that gets out of the country. But so far no release dates, maybe see if I can salvage a DVD when/if it gets released.

Just take a look at the quality and the size of the guy in front of the screen! So when’s it coming to the UK? give IMAX a run for its money, ok maybe not

Just have to be a bit more careful on the rotoscoping! people will REALLY see your mistakes up big!

More Cinevision 2006 photos can be found here.
You can see more information of the Cinevision 2006 here.

Knowledge transfer (training):
No one developer knows everything or maybe only a couple of developers know how the system works inside and out. The code reviews can act as a way of spreading the knowledge of the system around the room. Making other developers aware of new updates to the system and how they work. So if something does go wrong they at least know roughtly where to look.

For example if you have an expert database guru or someone that is more knowledgeable on systems security, their input can increase the understanding of the other developers and help pull the no so knowledable developers up…

Even just developers talking and saying “Oh I would have fixed that problem but doing x y and z” increases understanding so that next time maybe they will try to tackle a problem in a more efficiant way.

Risk Management:
There have been very few companies that I have worked for where development documentation of a system has been “uptodate”. The only documentation that every seems to be the most correct is the user documentation, internal documentation? well thats another thing altogether. The moment documentation has been written it usually becomes out of date in no time at all. So in the end only the developer who developed the software unit/class etc knows really whats going on and therefore you get the all eggs in one basket problem. This was very real to one company I worked for when a developer went on holiday and wasn’t contactable. In a code review everyone see how things work.

… the list goes on and on. Code security, other developers seeing a potential security hole in anothers, more manageable readable code etc…

Ok now the nitty gritty, how to do an effective Code Review…

Firstly I don’t like the phrase “Code Review” it usually scares off developers…. So your going to look at my code and criticise it! I’ve called it a Weekly Project Review or Development Review in the past.

I’ve always done a review in the form of a meeting:

Moderator – Their prime role is to keep the review moving fast enough to be productive but slow enough to find the most issues. They would also distribute design or code to be reviewed and an inspection checklist, setting up the meeting, reporting inspection results and following up on any actions.

Author – Quite obvious, the coder of the code

Reviewer – Anyone who has an interest in the code. The reviewers take a look at the code before the meeting and discuss any bugs or questions during the meeting.

Documentor – This could be the role of the moderator if the group is small, but should not be the role of the author or reviewer (as its got a bit of a conflict of interest). The documenters role is to record the bugs/issues and the assignments of any actions during the review meeting.

Management – No way, this is purely a technical review so the focus is technical not political. Managers could receive a review report (list of actions from the review or notes on the checklist) very simple report which can be written during the meeting. But this shouldn’t be used to evaulate developers in any way.

* To have checklists which focus the reviewers attention on areas which have been problems in the past.

* The emphasis is on bug/issue detection, not correction.

* Reviewers prepare for the review meeting beforehand and arrive with a list of issues/questions.

* Information is passed on to the next review to improve future reviews (eg: adding/removing questions on the checklist)

* The meeting is for technical people and not management.

* Under no circumstances should the review results be used for performance appraisals, its just like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It doesn’t make sense anyway performance should be based on final products/projects and not work that isn’t finished. Another reason why there is no management It just means everyone is a lot more free to say what they think.

* The meeting should have a minimum 3 people and maximum of 6 people; any bigger and the review gets too big to manage and ends up becoming a hindrance.

Planning: The author gives the code/design to the moderator. The moderator then distributes the code to the people they think should review it including the checklist which focuses the attention of the reviewers so they don’t waste too much time looking at the code.

Overview (optional): The overview is used only if the reviewers aren’t familiar with the project. The author will spend some time just describing the project. This is generally a dangerous practice because the reviewer could end up glossing over issues. The design or code should speak for itself, the overview shouldn’t speak for it as that’s what the whole exercise is all about.

Preparation: Each reviewer works alone to become familiar with the design or code. The reviewers use the checklist. For every 700 lines of code the reviewer “should” spend about an hour but its really down to what works best in the organisation.

Review Meeting: To start the review meeting usually the author reads the code/design. They will explain all the logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object etc… while they are talking the documenter records any issues/bugs but all discussion of the issue stops as soon as they have been recognised. The documenter also notes the type and severity of the issue and the review moves on.

As I said above the meeting needs to keep moving otherwise you’ll loose concentration. So, depending on the project this shouldn’t take longer than 30mins/1hr. Everything needs to stay focused, I worked in one place where the group was banned from even discussing weather an issue really was an issue because they assumed that if one person is confused enough to think an issue existed then it was an issue and so the design, code or documentation needs to be clarified.

Inspection report: The moderator creates a review report usually during the meeting that lists each defect including its type and severity. At this point you could just put them straight into a bugtracking system while in the meeting as this will save time, and the report can be a list of these bugs. This therefore helps to ensure all the issues will be corrected and can also be used to develop the checklist which will in time highlight problems in coding etc and can help when creating risk registers… it can also give a good indication on the number of issues/bugs found. From the report you can find out the time spent on the issues over time which can be used to prove the usefulness of a review by giving hard data otherwise you are just left with saying reviews are good … because they are! This is also a good guide to see if they are working or not. Some people generally prefer end testing rather than reviews and it maybe that you will have to modify or even abandon the reviews. It depends on if it works in your company.

Rework: The moderator assigns issues/actions out to someone (usually the author unless its a larger project) for repair and the assignee resolves each defect on the list.

Follow-up: The moderator just checks to see how the issues/actions are being carried out.

Third-hour meeting: The code review or review is just that… a review so the people in the meeting shouldn’t be discussing solutions, but of course we will, so its better for those who wish to discuss different solutions to do this at another meeting either straight after the review meeting or at another time, this also allows it to be a bit less formal and get more people involved .

Fine-tuning the review: Hopefully over time the checklist will become more refined and things will be added and things will be dropped. We should find the same common issues appearing on the checklist and we can work on refining how we work to fix them. The checklist should be short and sweet so max of one page.

The Checklist:
As mentioned above this is used to track common issues so the developers use this as a guide when developing. It shouldn’t exceed more than one sheet of paper, an example of one is below, based on a PHP project:

Code Review
23/03/2004

Uni-Login Script Review

Moderator: Mr X
Author: James X (PHP), Peter Y (Architect)
Reviewer: Alistair X (Senior DB)
Reviewer: John X (Java Developer)
Reviewer: Simon X (Technical Documentation)
Reviewer: Tim X
Reviewers: Please make sure you prepare for the review meeting beforehand so you can become familiar with the code and arrive with a list of issues/questions and make use of the Checklist below.
Author: In the meeting you will be expected to read the code/design and explain all logic including each branch loop and each logical structure/object.

Code to be Reviewed:
http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSUniLogout.asp

http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSUnifier.asp

http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/Common_SQL/LMSkeepalive.asp

http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/forumsUnifier.php

http://internal-cvs/cvs/cvs.php/account.php

Related Files:
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Code Review Checklist.doc
S:\web-sw development\Documentation\Code Reviews\Uni-Login Script.doc

Results From Review:
ForumsUnifier.asp
ACTION: Missing Header/Footer
ACTION: ASP Comments (including related files) missing
ACTION: Use include to lmskeepalive.asp rather than static code

LMSUniLogout.asp
ACTION: Header/Footer missing
ACTION: Point to gatekeeper (update link)

ForumsUnifier.php
ACTION: Header/Footer Missing
ACTION: Not enough documentation
ACTION: Remove code which is not being used (Line 15,17,34 to 40, 41)

account.php
ACTION: Header/Footer needs to be updated with latest versions, with more information
ACTION: Line 247: Needs a header refresh to index.php and remove acountDetails() reference and function.
ACTION: PHPDoc comments missing.
ACTION: Line 97 – 99, 229 comment removal
ACTION: Lines: 127 to 171; Remove echo’s and drop out of php instead.
ACTION: Line 113; Remove magic numbers
ACTION: Line 114, 113; Remove rand functionality
ACTION: Line 212; replace “relevant” with “NCALT Systems”
ACTION: Line 218; change to “Back to NCALT.com”

CheckList Items Added:
9. Any duplicate code should be put in a separate module for reusability.
10. Removal of code which is not being used.

Duration: 1 Hour

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while I had a small problem with my laptop (I think the photo shows you why!). They always say things come in threes. My laptop harddisk died on me last week, I had a loverly time running around Sydney trying to find a replacement hard disk. I’ve spent the last week trying to recover my data, that of course I had carefully backed up! ok most of it but not all!

I’m sure everyone knows about The Universal Law of Gravitation, but the same thing can be shown in class rooms. You may be witness to The Second law of Gravitation.

“Students will gravitate towards the back of the class room. The seats in front fill up last.”

The only reason I think that this happens is so that the students don’t get picked out by the tutor or just don’t want to get eye balled by the tutor. But I generally prefer to be at the front. Less distractions on whats going on and also its a lot harder to dig out a book when you get bored .

It turns out that if you sit at the front or down the centre of the class your more likely to retain more information. Research shows that people placed randomly in the front and down the centre of the room will retain not just 10% more infromation but almost twice as much!

At Uni I remember a mate of mine who sat right at the front of the lecture hall. Unfortunatly for him he fell asleep. The lecturer then walked up to him and slapped the table next to his sleeping head. He awoke to see the entire lecture hall looking at him. From that day on my mate religously stayed at the back of the lecture hall, for all his lectures. If only the lecturer knew that that one incident could have reduced my mates learning capacity by nearly 50%!

How to snowboard for free in Austria
This is a clip about how a couple of snow bums stayed in Austria (one of the most expensive resorts in Europe) for the season for free. I especially like the ketchup soup!

Mikal is coming over from NZ for the weekend as its a bank holiday in NZ this weekend. Need to buy a bed tho! I’ll post some pictures of ma house when I get their!

Anyway just chilling out in Sydney Central. I’m working for a UK client out here for a bit and my plan is to sort out my show reel while i’m here too. Anyway time to hunt out some food… starving, i’ve been living of airplane food for the past 24hrs… not good. I do remember when I first flew and thought that plane food was amazing coming in different little containers etc. Think i’ve changed now

After posting to my blog I had a couple of suggestions… ok one. That was Jame’s idea of “you could try the old stick it in an air tight freezer bag with some silica gel and bung it in the freezer for 30 minutes trick.”. Which I slated him at the time but i’m slowly coming round to the idea. But still seems a bit radical. I’m sure silica can freeze as well and not soak up the damp as well…

Anyway I needed to test my last theory. Because the drive wasn’t being recognised by WinXP it maybe the controller card in the lacie drive which was not working. So the drives could be fine and dandy. The data could be fine. its just the interface to the computer which isn’t working. So in desperation I purchased ANOTHER Lacie 1TB Drive. The theory being that the hardware would be the same so I could swap the disks around and basically “replace” the controller card, and hopefully it would all work. Anyway posted my theory to Lacie to see if it was possible and got this back:

As long as both drives are the same make and model and both devices are Bigger Disk EXTREME devices bought around the same time, then yes in theory it will work.

Any variation of that it may not work. We don’t test this, for we don’t do any data recovery. Some bridges are only made to support particular models of drives. Drives newer then the case may not work. In the same regards certain makes and models will not work with certain cases.

This is of course in theory. We do not have a direct answer for you. This is not something we test.

Right so in english… maybe if I’m lucky. There was one minor flaw in my plan. The new lacie that I purchased was a tripple interface (USB2, Firewire, Firewire-800). My old drive was just a double interface (Firewire, Firewire-800). So the interface/controller was already quite a lot different, just need to hope that the RAID disk controller part hasn’t changed. Also it looks like Lacie have swapped disk manufacturer. As the disks in my old lacie were Seagates and the new system was maxtor, this maybe because they were having so many problems with failed disks in the past. So the harddisk params could also be different if they are not auto detecting the drives … the RAID array setup could be different connecting all the drives together as one… loads of things could go wrong and all kinds of chaos could happen… Also the backing plate screws are under a “Do not break this seal or your will invalidate the warrenty” so by openning up both of the drives will invalidate the warrenty on both. Anyway for £400 quid per drive to save my data. It was worth the price…. ok so I started to job, and hey if I was right and the disks were working I could easily put them in another machine so i’m not loosing the disks.

Here is what I did because I couldn’t find any photos etc on the net of what the lacie looks like inside and how easy it actually is to do:
1. Firstly I took the 4 screws out of the backing plate.
2. Removed the outter cover as you can see from the photo, by sliding it up and way from the front, looking down on the lacie drive you can see the double interface.

3. Now write down the serial numbers of the drives and where they are located in the unit so that you can put them back in exactly the same place. Just incase if they have cable select on and you put the drives in the wrong order then things will get very messy.

3. As you can see from the image above its in two parts a fan in each. Each side of the lacie holds two harddisks with the controller on one of them. What you need to do is unscrew is one little screw at the other end of the unit.

You can see that i’ve already taken the screw out. Then all you need to do is shift the two harddisks towards you and that “unclips” the two drives from the front panel. Make sure you take off the side with the controller attached to it, then you only have to remove two drives rather than all four.
4. Make sure you take off the ribbon cables and power cables carefully. I actully had to unscrew the drives from the chassie to get the power cables out.

5. You basically now just swap all the drives over with each other so you end up having all your old disks using the new controller… and put everything back together again. Both the double and tripple interface drives had exactly the same insides. The only difference was the fact there was three interfaces connected to the board… anyway a lot easier than I thought it would be
OK then came the big switch on. I replaced the lacie cover, plugged everything in … switched it on… the lacie seemed to boot up ok. Then plugged it into my computer and… BINGO! It worked WinXP regognised it and all my files appeared. So in my case it was the controller that was broken, not the disks. THANK GOD! Now i’m trying to get Lacie to send me out a new controller card for the drive which is “just” in warranty but isn’t really anymore because i’ve broken the seals to get into the drive. But even if they can send me over a new controller for 50quid i’ll do it.
I’m now copying all the stuff off my drive onto a mates lacie drive so I can then rebuild the new lacie that I just purchased. He’s also keeping a backup of some of my stuff… just incase

But PHEW!

http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/

Ok now back to the pain… All I can say is AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH… My 1TB lacie hardidsk has stopped working. I plug it into Windows XP and it just does nothing… WinXP isn’t even detecting it, nada, zip. Oh boy am I happy… not. It has ALL my digital compositing work on it, and of course no backups as its a 1TB disk, its quite hard to backup.
I’ve tried every combination of switching the lacie on, with the computer on… off, with the lacie on… off switching it on with it plugged into the computer, without then plugging it in.. you name it i’ve tried it and I tried everything!

Next… the search of the net
Ok I recommend against that, all you find are stories of wo. People crying over broken hardware and general upset people, mostly blaming lacie for selling drives that have no way of cooling down properly and blow up within 6 months. A perfect example is D’Arcy Norman’s Blog, he had so many comments to it he had to switch them off because it was getting too much!

What to do. I checked the lacie.com website, downloaded the lacie tools knowing that it wouldn’t work because XP can’t even see the drive so how would the tools work.. anyway tried it… failed. Also they say if you return it to them their standard process is to format the disks as they don’t do disk recovery. So sending the drive back to them was a no-no if I wanted to get the stuff off again.

They recommend sending it off to a disk recovery centre like OnTrack who do data recovery services and are infact about 20mins drive away from where I live. Anyway gave them a call and they said basically it would cost £300 for them to inspect the laice and between £1,500 and £11,000 to recover the data. BLIMEY! Their must be another way!
… to be continued

A mate of mine does art of a living and thought his gallery needed special mention He makes some awesome stuff. Anyway check it out if you get the time. Hit the round circles at the top to see more… (its not immediately obvious).

Found a good show Reel on YouTube for Digital Compositing Work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDvBy0bkyvg&search=vfx

This is quite a nice example of some camera stabilisation work. Nicely done, you can do this kinda thing using the stabilise node in Shake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9vRV8FgCu4&search=rotoscoping

I can only find the old version of the book on amazon but for some bizare reason it has the new cover on it. Its definatly the old version tho.

This is a classic! The BBC accidently put on air a cabbie who was waiting to pick someone up from BBC reception. BBC thought he was a technology expert. You have to see the vid for the cabbies reaction! You can see the vid here.

More Snow in NZ! Mount Ruapehu has had quite a big first dump, more info at their website.

Ok this is just bizare… the top 10 strangest robots! I particlarily like the Cockroach Controlled mobile robot, and the chair robet that rebuilds itself … I just have one question.. Why?

Ok I’ve seen this around before, bit hey it really shows that spelling doesn’t really matter If you can read this, you have a strange mind too…

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Linux Bang Commands:

Some cool little linux shortcuts to help ya out. Most modern shells
support csh's bang commands - bash, tcsh and zsh all do.
While some bang commands don't work in all those shells, all of
the following do. The plus side to using them is that no matter
what shell you're using, these shortcuts will work. For the purposes
of these tips, every tip will assume these are the last three
commands you ran:

% which firefox
% make
% ./foo -f foo.conf
% vi foo.c bar.c

Getting stuff from the last command:

Full line:     % !!            becomes:   % vi foo.c bar.c
Last arg :     % svn ci !$     becomes:   % svn ci bar.c
All args :     % svn ci !*     becomes:   % svn ci foo.c bar.c
First arg:     % svn ci !!:1   becomes:   % svn ci foo.c

Accessing commandlines by pattern:

Full line:     % !./f          becomes:   % ./foo -f foo.conf
Full line:     % vi `!whi`     becomes:   % vi `which firefox`
Last arg :     % vi !./f:$     becomes:   % vi foo.conf
All args :     % ./bar !./f:*  becomes:   % ./bar -f foo.conf
First arg:     % svn ci !vi:1  becomes:   % svn ci foo.c

Various shells have options that can affect this.  Be careful
with shells that let you share history among instances.
Some shells also allow bang commands to be expanded
with tabs or expanded and reloaded on the command
line for further editing when you press return.

Interesting sites found this week:
How to write copy for Websites
Screen shots of Firefox Alpha 2
Signs your a crappy developer
This is a nice little use of AJax and Google maps, visual mapping site… kinda cool.

Found this cool site www.topcoder.com, the basic premis is that topcoder put up a request for a component to be built and you supply a design or code for it. It then gets reviewed and if it is passed you get the dosh. topcoder then uses the code in one of their client projects and put the code in their repository for everyone to download and use. Found one Guy who calls himself adic and he’s made over $81,000, kinda crazy money.

Just found firefoxflicks.com made by fans of Firefox to get people using firefox, some of the vids are quite funny.

I was reading the register and came across this article… I feel a classic Copyright Police Train sniffer dogs to find DVDs

Ok, in T-Mobile’s T&Cs it says that your not allowed to use Instant Messanger or any VOIP over there mobiles. Which I think is just not right. If you are going to have an internet enabled then you have the right to use it however you please. If that means connecting to Skipe over your mobile or another VOIP service because its cheaper, then so be it. If they are worried about themselves loosing money then they should either reduce the cost of the calls from the mobile or increase the cost of their internet charges. But hey mobile operators are going to be dead in a couple of years anyway. Nokia has already decided that all new mobiles produced from Nov 2006 will all be wifi ready… so the death of all the mobile carriers in about.. say early 2007

This is going to be quite cool. Soon you’ll be able to add “notes” from google so you can store links in your google profile. Some screenshots here.

VNC Security Hole! IntelliAdmin has found a hole in VNC, basically anyone can get into the server without typing in a password. They have a proof of concept on the site but its been taken down because the site got overloaded.

Daddy, daddy want one! A Russian foldable helicopter! nice!

Software Asset ISO Standard

But before you go take a look at this… the World Largest Tetris Game!

The 2006 season has started early in NZ! They were expecting snow early and they got it! Here are a couple of pictures of Snow Farm in the South Island of New Zealand. Ok one of them isn’t! Its of the Bra fence! If you go to wanaka and travel towards Queenstown from Wanaka to go to Cardrona or Snow Farm/Snow Park you’ll see this fense. I just went on the snow farm website to see if they have any pics and I found the true story about it: The Cardrona Bra Fence true story. Its quite long and kinda tradition to leave a bra on the fence

Here is quite an interesting article about search engine optimization. The guy who wote it has worked for a number of search engine companies, so you get some interesting insights to how the closely guarded algorithms work! http://www.webmonkey.com/06/16/index3a.html.

BUT Google have launched another great web app “Google Calendar“. It looks quite good, this is the second project since gmail that directly completes with an existing Microsoft exterprise product Exchange because you can share you calendar with any other people on Google! Google is also making Outlook plugins for it and also integration into gmail so that if you get an email saying “Hi francis do you want to meet up on thursday for a pint at the kings head” gmail scrapes the email and turns it into a calendar item that you can put straight into your calendar! This is cool stuff The only thing that is a little worrying is the privacy concerns, the amount of info google will have on people, their emails, calendar and if the rumours prove correct with GoogleDrive then your personal files as well.

Heres a couple of articles i’ve found recently which are quite interesting. Also a quick Ruby on Rails tutorial.
The State of the Web.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial.
Password Cracking Times.

Oracle has launched Oracle Express Edition (XE) which is basically Oracle 10g database for windows and linux. Its a free version of Oracle with only a couple of limitations. Databases cannot be bigger than 4GB and that it will only use up to 1gb of memory and 1 cpu. Which IMH is great because it stops it from taking over your entire machine as Oracle seems to do. I think its obvious that this release is an attempt to get the MySQL/Open Source users over to Oracle and then getting them to pay for a license when they blast through 4GB of database. BUT the BIG improvement for linux. It used to be a total pain to install Oracle under linux, adding users here, groups their.. but now you just answer a couple of questions and bingo… done.

If you use Skype a lot i’ve found Pamela, its quite a nice extension to Skype which allows you to record conversations and setup a “Press 1 for x, Press 2 for y” type thing, you can also get it to create podcast xml files of recordings you have made but the later requires that you register it, but apart from that its free

I’ve been kinda interested in the battle between Flash and the Java VM over the last couple of weeks. The Java VM has never really taken off (I think manly because it takes so long to load! ) but once Sun get openGL working in the VM I think Java will take over Flash… maybe Just think, quake running on a Java VM in your browser. More and more good VM services are cropping up like The Switchboard which is an internet VOIP service. Maybe I should be learning Flex just incase?
Well I haven’t re-installed my lappy for blinking ages and I’ve been pondering if I should or not… but just don’t have the time at the moment so I’ve just found a great little app called JDiskReport. It basically looks at your machine and hunts out large applications or even large files that you have put in random directories which are eating up disk space for no apparent reason and gives you a graphical breakdown. Anyway check it out its a freeware java proggy. My laptop is a litter clearer now

Ok remember when you got your first computer? Well … hmmm… I don’t think I was that excited. But then it was BBC Electron hand me down with the expansion pack on the back so you got a lpt printer port on the back! With the tape player which you had to get the volume exactly right or the games wouldn’t load… the good old days

Oh and have to leave you with this… yes, Simpsons is to be made into a movie and you thought that the repeats on sky were getting anonying hoping its good tho!

Anyway me off to bed.. cya.

My next project is just a brief stint working on an eCommerce site for a couple of weeks. At the same time working on a travel site I help setup: www.qwertytravel.com. I’m going to see if I can improve it by putting a bit more “Web 2.0″ stuff into it. I’m currently looking at google maps and a JSP API (http://www.lamatek.com/GoogleMaps/) Google Maps is just great, Its quite cool technology. I do think that people have gone a bit “Web 2.0″ mad… Its not new technology its just I think the internet is in the “second coming” stage. Its become an everyday resource which people use without thinking about it… ok some people but some compared with the world population is a lot
Just found another good podcast for techies, its language independant and is focused on software engineering. Its great compliment to a programming specific podcast like Java posse. You can find all the info at: http://www.se-radio.net/

I’ve also found a site that pits different programming languages against itself. It definatly shows that C++ is faster a bit than Java but i’m not too sure if the algorithms used could have been improved to show better results. Which really shows that the speed of the language doesn’t matter if you have programmers that don’t optimise their code. Anyway its worth a quick look: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/index.php

Windows so slow? – Interesting article about the issues facing Vista (microsofts new OS) and that Microsoft bundling stuff in the 90s is to blame in the delay.

The robot dance kid is amazing! Julian (ma bro) is going to be working on the ninja acrobatics this year for part of his circus skills course, kinda amazing too.

 
The Art and Science of Digital Compositing 
by Ron Brinkman

But don’t get the 1999 version! a new version is just about to come out. This book is a good starting point and gives you a good feel on the technologies used and how compositing works. The book is supposed to be technology independant but definatly has a gearing to Shake.

You Tube is my link of the day… got loads of funny vids on it…

More info here

Techy:
Java Posse
A great podcast discussing java news and interviews, created by a guy from Kent University

The Twits
Technology chat

Security Now
Hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporta they talk about personal internet/computer security. Its really for the home user wanting to know more about cryptography etc but they have some useful stuff. I did listen to one episode and they kept going on and on about one time pad encyption. They said it was 100% impossible to crack. Which … yes is “technically” 100% full proof, but you still have to transfer the plain text pad to the receiver of your encrypted message and if that gets intercepted without you knowing you code is broken. So I wouldn’t call it 100% myself… they did get around to mentioning this near the end but not after I had shouted at my ipod a couple of times saying “no it isn’t what about transferring the pad!… etc…”. After receving a couple of strange looks from people on Clapham Junction station I swapped tracks to the Simpsons

Info:
New Scientist Podcast
New Scientist has a number of articles and news from the mag in the podcast and has some really good interviews with knowledge matter experts.

FOXCAST: The Simpsons
Well think this one is quite self explanatory.

WOW what a year to go and do the Rookie Snowboard course! For those who don’t know I did a snowboard instructor could in new zealand last year and it was… AMAZING! really good fun and learned so much, not just snowboarding, which have really helped in my professional career as well. You can see all my rookie posts by clicking Rookie Academy in the catagories.

ANYWAY the reason I say its a great time to go is because the UK -> NZ exchange rate at the moment is amazing! Its currently cheaper than when I paid for it so you can get quite a good deal.

I’m hoping to get back out there this coming season. I did the course with my mate Mikal and he stayed out well popped back to the UK got a visa then went out

Todays cool site of the day: http://www.deviantart.com/
Some of the images on it are amazing my favouite sections are:

3d Wallpaper
Abstract Wallpaper
Icon Sets for programs etc
A mate from work showed me the site, he said most of the icon sets are on GPL but to get permission to use them usually only takes a quick email to say could I use them and the fame and recognition for the designers is enough

I feel a blog design update coming on which reminds WordPress (the blogging software I use) has been upgraded to 2.0.2 so i’m now going to attempt to upgrade it. Wish me luck!

The 2006 Jolt awards are out. Microsoft won the best development environment for Visual Studio Team System 2005. But IntelliJ IDEA was on their heals which is the IDE I use for writing Java (highly recomended!) but i’m kinda getting into Netbeans as it has some great stuff for creating mobile phone apps.

OOhhh almost forgot. Take a look at VMTM (if you haven’t already), its VMWares “technology network”. Basically you can download a whole range of different VMs and also a FREE VMWare Player. The upshot being you can run Fedorra Core 4, MySQL, Oracle 10g!!, DB2 or even just an “internet browsing VM”! The browsing VM runs firefox so you can browse the web in the safe knowledge that you won’t get any spam installed on your computer, or attacked by any viruses, because if you do all you have to do is delete the VM and restart the fresh copy.

For all my Uni mates! remember David Barnes? Well I was listening to an interview with him on the BlueJ IDE. Its basically a Java learning Tool that Kent Uni has produced to help students learn OO in a visual way without going straight into the code (if only we had it when we were learning!). ANYWAY… Its seems that its soo good microsoft has copied it. The BlueJ team have done an article on their website about it so you can make up your own mind, dialog box for dialog box!. It does look very much like they have used the BlueJ ideas. Just as an aside a special version of Netbeans is being created by Sun which integrates BlueJ more info on Roman Strovl’s blog.

My Digital Compositing Mates! I know a couple of you program java, well there is a new Java framework out for key frame animation and timing. I haven’t tried it out but looks quite cool. More info here, and continued here.

Ok i’m off to bed, go faster caffine tablets on standby for the morning!

Anyway i’m off to play around with Netbeans…

Anyway I finished the the first animation piece today but forgot to upload it, so heres the one from end of play thursday, i’ve retimed the camera shake, got rid of the pulsing sun and added a cloud, shadow and a bit of colour correction

Well here it is … the first compostion… its a bit dodgy as i’ve only had half a day on it. The sun jiggles around a bit too much and the camera jerk is at the wrong time but hey! getting there This composition was made up of 6 elements: Vanilla (the girl), the tree and grass, the smoke, the background hill, the sky and finally the sun. Also if you notice there are a couple of blades of grass infront of her, these were originally on the background plate (the tree and grass) but I brought them to the front so that she walked behing them.

It also looks like there is still a huge demand for Digital Compositors in the market at the moment (which is good), anyway more tommorow…

Large:
Media Player (10.2mb)
Real Player (11.7mb)

Smaller:
Real Player (6.9mb)
QuickTime (6.3mb)

I’ll put the “wipe outs” vid up once i’ve converted it.

Since i’ve been back i’ve been working on the rookieacademy.com website and producing some promo vids for them using the footage that I got while I was in NZ. I also setup a discussion board for them, which so far hasn’t been used that much, I think mainly because all the ex-rookies from this year have been communicating via mass emails… hey ho, give it time Also been getting back into Maya and creating a space station, should have some piccies soon.

I’ve also been working on a Travel website bit like Expedia.co.uk but a bit simpler hopefully that will be complete mid-january. I’m also getting a mate to help me out on it.

Just after I came back to the UK, and signed up to a Digital Compositing course at Escape Studios in Shepherds Bush. Now for all those who don’t know what Digital Compositing is… here’s the dictionary definition:

“The digital blending together of a background plate and one or more foreground elements to create one seamless, well-integrated film image”

It starts on January 9th and goes on for 8 weeks, part of which you work on your show reel which ends up being your CV really on how good you are at digital compositing and giving pointers on what to and not to put in your show reel too. I’ve been wanting to get into a more media role for some time to get out of doing constant programming. When I look back on the stuff i’ve done so far i’ve found working for media companies like the BBC or print/design companies more fun! Hense doing film & video work over the past couple of years.

Well after 3.5 weeks of filming ‘Harry Potter Goblet of Fire’ they managed to compress my bit into 2minutes… maybe which even for a multi $$$ movie is quite amazing, yes they were very tech shots but hey! well I supposed i’d better get used to it.

Well Christmas is a coming! so HAPPY CRIMBO EVERYONE!, have a great new year if I don’t see you!

well off to bed so I am ready for the swimming pool… I mean slopes at TC…

wish me luck… I think I may need it!

All the skiers passed there exams last week (except one person who didn’t make it, another dropped out before the exams started) so its been a bit of a party atmosphere… they are now starting to concentrate on their BASI exams.

The mountain was closed today so I took the chance to dive over to Queenstown to finish off my medical which I need to do to get my Ozzy visa. Thats been sent off so should get something soon.

Today we got asked to stand by the trainers we wanted to teach us and infact it was quite evenly spread. I choose fatty because he hadn’t trained me for quite a while and he is one of the NZ examiners which is always useful before the NZ level 1 exam anyway i’m off to sleep… up the mountain tommorow teaching some friends of Mikals.

But hey look on the bright side its snowing in the saddle! Anyway we’re all heading down to Muzzies at noon to do some video MA, so at least we are doing something.

Anyway today I headed off to the Doc for my medical in queenstown. It was a lot more basic than I thought… blood test, urine test, answer a couple of questions… open your mouth etc.. oh and a chest x-ray, unfortunatly I have to go back for the results so thats another day off!!!! oh well.. got MA (movement analysis) tommorow and a practise teach. Gonna run through some lesson plans tonight with Mike before I hit the hay…

Mike was telling me about the conditions on the mountain today, he was basically wakeboarding on the beginners slope… hope the snow holds out for the exams! it was a nice 20oC today down in town, I was sun bathing in queenstown.

Overall its been a good week, it was good to get out of TC for a bit and try a different mountain at Cadrona. Its also quite good to see the examiner teaching in a slightly different way… quite good in that respect. The only thing that was a bit anoying was that most of the information we had been told before, so it was just re-doing the same things, but Rookie said they were going to put the CSI earlier next year which makes better sense.

We were introduced to how the board moves (as if we didn’t know them already), and we had exercises on each of the planes of movement. We then had to run a lesson that had nothing to do with snowboarding but fitted the lesson structure (Introduction, Analyse Students, Student Goals, Plan lesson, Present Information, Check understanding, guided practise, feedback & summary). So we did … “how to juggle with snowballs”, which was ok… and then we were given demos on the Level 1 progression (introduction, one foot orientation, skating, straight running and j-turns). We were doing so well we didn’t end up doing the evening session as we did it during the day instead.

The rest of the week we were doing rider improvement and the level 2 progessions. We were being assessed throughout the whole week on our riding and then on friday we had a mock test. There were 9 people in our group of which 2 failed their mock exam and I got a boarderline pass… Only one person got a really good pass.

The actual exam on saturday we were split into two groups and we won the stone, sissors, rock game so we got to choose if we went first or second. We wanted to get it out the way so we went first (it had dumped 12cms during the night so it was powder day!). We were expecting -19oC including wind chill but it ended up being a very nice +2oC. The examiner then picked decided what level the group had got too (ie “They have just completed J-Turns”) and we in turn had to continue the lesson for about 15mins.

… anyway… during this one of the other group turned up looking a bit shocked and he had just fallen off one of the rails and puncherd his leg which was a bit messy… five stitches! and before he had a chance to do his exam!!! anyway luckily the examiner had already seen him ride during the week so another member of the group did the demo for him and he just talked through the lesson… he passed Then Chloe from my group hit her knee on the boardercross track while we were waiting for our results… Dillon our examiner just thinks he’s cursed… every exam he does someone manages to break themselves…

Anyway here are my exam results… Dillon asked if we wanted to be marked as “Level 1″ rather than “CSI” so that we could get some meaningful feedback so i’m ok in the lesson side, just need to work on my riding. Two weeks to go before my Level 1 exam… ARGH!!!

In the afternoon we headed over to the sadle, we had about 2cms fresh snow the night before but it was sticky as anything. The most sticky snow I have ever had. It was like hitting earth every 2 metres or so, was really technical… then today we did a bit more freestyle and we took it in turns to guide our group down the mountain trying a range of different exercises. The afternoon was abandoned by the trainers as it was more or less raining on the mountain (it was definatly raining at base camp) and as our NZ CSI exam starts tommorow we came down and needed to get everything dry in time. Then headed off to the cinema!! its an amazing little cinema saw Batman… they have an interval half was through the film and I ordered a really nice pizza and they make really nice cookies during the first half so you can have just baked warm cookies during the second half… anyway then headed back for bed… CSI exam starts tommorow… ARGH! at Cardrona too… i’ve only once been there but its a much easier mountain to ride on than TC.

Wish me luck!! i’m off to bed…

Had a reading day today and i’m going up tommorow to practise my demos we have our CSI (NZ Certified Snowsports Instructor) starting wednesday the structure of the exam is as follows:

Day 1
AM: Introduce 4 movements and board performance concepts
PM: Introduce the teaching cycle & Level 1 Progression

Day 2
AM: Rider improvement (focus pedaling+steering)
PM: Introduce class handling/safety & Introduce level two progression
Night Session: Introduce MA formula & Introduce teaching children

Day 3
AM: Rider Improvement (focus pressure + edging)
PM: Introduce guest service elements & Practice teach levels 1 & 2

Day 4
AM: Examiners to present level 1 & 2 model answer
PM: Formal assessment (presentation of one exercise/drill to last approx 10mins)

Heres some photos from Friday, my board had around 3cms on it when I came out after lunch… 3cms in 1 hr!

They also opened Matukituki, Magnum and Sundance for the first time on Saturday.

Today was my first time at a pot noodle for lunch… not bad but had to finished it off with a chocolate cake from the restaurant (well its kinda still my “birthday week” )

I think the photos speak for themselves but we have some awesome footage and were waiting for the DVD from the heli-ski place too. Yes Helen I was in a helicopter all day! Rusty was our pilot (hope his name didn’t sugest his piloting ability! which it didn’t) some of his landings right at the top of the mountain had to be inch perfect! Some of the ledges were tiny! half the copter hanging off a vertical drop, at one point you could see the virtical drop from the foot well windows! crazy but amazing fun!

Some pictures from my Party last night:

Well i’m going to let the photos speak. Hover over the images for descriptions!

Got a big poster signed by a load of rookies, boot dryers, a packed lunch made by Jen my housemate, snowboard multi-tool, cards and a chocolate cake. Great day! Snow on my birthday, who would have guessed it!

Think of four points one under each toe and each heal edge. If you number them 1 to 4 so that your (if your a regular rider) left toes are 1. Right toes are 2. Left heal is 3 and right heal is 4. The range of movement when making toe side turn would them be 1, 2. Then 3, 4 to go onto your heal edge so your moving your posture/weight/centre of gravity over these points when you move down the mountain.

For me everything became a lot more stable as I was using the entire edge for the duration of the turn. I don’t think I’ve used any fore & aft pressure/weighting before to any great extent to it really did improve my riding. Anyway techno babble over (if you could understand it!).

SNOW INFO: The snow is getting very dodgy. It hasn’t snowed since the 31st and even then only 2cms. BUT it’s raining right now down in the valley so we are hoping were going to get at least 3cms up the mountain tomorrow… here’s hoping!!

After the training on the Tuesday night we were out on the mountain digging our snow caves. Unfortunately the snow was too dry to make snow caves so we had to make a snow “trench” instead…

Damit I knew it was a bad idea to go to the loo at night… now wheres our snow hole?!… Infact Matt did want to go to the loo in the night and the empty bottle you see in the picture of mike below was by the morning full of liquid… nice! … orange juice anyone?!

We slept right on the snow/ice I had a bivvy bag, under mat and sleeping bag. The general idea was that you kept your boot inner linings, fresh thermals for the following day etc in the sleeping bag with you. Anything that you want to stay damp and cold but not icy you have in your bivvy bag (so boots, jacket, trousers/pants etc).

We did manage to create a bar tho, with table, benches (made out of snowboards) and an ice chair.

If you look at this pic of Mikal you can already see the frost on Matts bivvy bag! (and the loo bottle!)

It got to around -6oC during the night. Not too cold for I was getting a bit cold by the morning. We didn’t build our hole in the ground that well. You should have a doorway at one point to let the cold air out otherwise it says at the bottom of your hole where you are. Unfortunatly the original place we had our door was facing the wind, so we had to fill it in and didn’t create a new one… DOH!

One jump for man on giant leap for mankind… well the snow holes had been made… hurray!

But the best thing has to be the sunrise in the morning. It was enough to get anyone up!

My frosty bag. Its supposed to be a brightish blue!

During the day we practised finding people/bags with avalanche transceivers in a mock exercise. What I didn’t know is when the transceiver points the direction you want to go it doesn’t point directly at where the signal is coming from. It takes you on an arc before you get to the person.

The last two days (Friday and Saturday) we were doing mountain first aid training. The training seemed to be a bit more in dept than the first aid training I have done in the UK. Basically because you may have to keep a patient alive for maybe 12hrs or more before help can get to you, unlike in the UK when you expect an ambulance to turn up well within 30mins. We were told a load of really gruesome stories of incidents that have happened. One was of a parent who had their child in a backpack doing some runs, after a while they thought the kid was being quiet so while they had another couple of runs. But when they got to the bottom they found that the kid had hyperthermia and in the end died. Also another interesting thing, if someone does have hyperthermia don’t put them right next to a fire or try and warm them up quickly, it will kill them, it has to be gradual as otherwise the mind thinks they are too hot and any warmth that is in the core of your body goes to the surface and you get even colder.

SNOW INFO: Quite slushy today but it started to rain at the base station, and snow further up the mountain, all in all 5cms by 5pm.

Earlier in the week we had some very nice lamb shanks… Mikal bit off a bit more than he could chew…

SNOW INFO: I didn’t go snowboarding today. We had 5cm in the main basin and 8cm in the saddle basin. But today the slopes have started to melt and areas are getting really dodgy from what the people who went up today have been saying… snow dance is continuing! Heavy snow is predicted for tuesday so heres hoping!

Yesterday I managed to twist my left thumb… friday I managed to twist my other one and my wrist! Not happy… i’ll take it easy over the weekend and everything should be sorted for monday.

A load of us went to “Star Burgers”, a takeaway burger bar who sell AMAZING burgers!!! if you come to Wanaka this is the place too go! Beef, chicken, fish, bbq burgers every type of burger you can think off.

SNOW INFO: No new snow about 0 degrees temp.

We ran out of food!!! Mike and Matt had to dive off the coach back from the slopes to buy…. well we wanted them to get some bread, milk and a couple of essentials, but came back with steak… wine… and lemon grass which is of course required in cooking steaks(!??!!). The wine went to good use and we now have none left.

SNOW INFO: No new snow over night getting really quite icy in places at between -2 and -3 degrees.

Went to my first Swiss Ball class today with Mel and Jen. Kinda strechy! good fun tho. Got another 5 sessions to go.

Mel and Jen got back from there night sleeping in there snow hole. Ironically the snow hole was warmer than our house!! (NZ people don’t belive in central heating… or insulation for that matter!). A couple of people got wet while they were making there snow hole so had a cold night, but everyone seems to have had fun. Just a bit chilly if you wanted to go to the loo in the night

SNOW INFO: Had a dusting of snow last night. A lot of the powder has gone on the main slopes but its not as icy as it has been.

Oh yes and I fell asleep on the coach home and someone took a photo… maybe it will appear on the blog tommorow… you never know … at least it snowed a bit today but most of the day there was quite a bit of flat light which made things challenging. The TC pistes have all these natural gullies, half pipes and jumps, its just one massive terrain park.

Mel and Jo (my house mates) who do skiing (boo hiss) are doing their back country course this week so they are sleeping out on the mountain tommorow night (they’ve packed enough food for about 6 weeks tho!). They need to dig a snow hole and sleep in it and during the day are doing avalanche awareness. Hopefully it won’t be too cold as I have to do it in a week or so!

SNOW INFO: Overcast today with about 2cms of snow in the afternoon, about -4 degrees

Part of the evaluation envoles checking to see if you “look the part” so you dont have tatty trousers, boots gaffa taped up etc. Matts goggles and board pants were … hmm… well not great so he went out and got some new kit and then pranced around the house:

When they got back we headed off for a walk around Wanaka lake before dinner got a couple of shots of the lake:

Oh and i’ve got my copy of Harry Potter don’t think i’ll be reading the BASI manuals much this week

SNOW INFO: No snow this weekend last snow fall was on the 14th July which was – Saddle Basin: 25cms, Main Basin: 18cm at the top and 8cm at base. But everything is more or less open now except the terrain park and Race training bar. But hey, with Treble Cone as it is with all the natural gullies and jumps you don’t need a terrain park!

Here are a couple of pics so far, we prolly have more video footage but we’re still editing it…

First couple of pics coming to Wanaka:

Well you would look like this too after 36hrs! :

Its a really nice house we’re living in, everything you need… good double garage come workshop, 46inch TV with DVD and skyTV. Washing machine, dryer, Dishwasher… and even a coffee maker! I’m living with Mikal (mate from Uni), Matt (mate from work), Jen and Mel. There is also a flat under our house where Tim and Jo live. Everyone is on a Rookie Course. These photos were taken by Jen!

The official day Treble cone was going to open was the end of June but due to lack of snow we couldn’t go up so we ended up going to Caldrona, another local resort that was getting snow, so while we waited for the snow Rookie started us on theory and days out:

A night out at in Queenstown with the Rookies (These photos were taken by Jen!):

The sky and landscape here is amazing! and has to be seen to be believed! heres just one sunset out the back of our house, but doesn’t really give it justice… “frodo you must throw the ring into the great fires of mount doom!” well you can see why they wanted to film it in New Zealand!

Everyone has still been taking the mic on the rugby! .. oh and we had our first experience of the “small town” yesterday. Mike got asked for ID at the irish bar in the high street and that they only except passports. Mike took a bit offence and left, then in the even we were sitting down for a meal at a local restaurant and the manager came over and asked mike for ID ))) … it was a classic, the manager had been told about the irish bar incident earlier on in the day… moral of the story… news spreads fast in a small town and Mike has sure made an enturance

Hopefully have some pics tommorow, trying to get a small vid together too…

We are staying at mountain view backpackers in Wanaka, not many people there at the moment just a load of snowboard/ski freaks looking for accomodation for the season, we have met chole who is also doing the snowboard instructors course with Rookie who is also saying at mountain view.

Well we lost at the rugby… boy has everyone been rubbing it in here!! Anyway until the next blog!

Francis

Hopefully our board bags will turn up later on today but at the moment we are just hanging out in Wanaka and soaking up the views. Everywhere you look there are mountains.