Minimize Outlook to System tray

I found this small registry hack today because I have always been tired of having Outlook consume space in my Windows Taskbar. Enter this registry key and whenever you minimize Outlook it will only appear in the System tray. Sweeeeet....

Disclaimer (primarily because 90% of the readers of this blog are from the States ;o) ): Do NOT in any way try to alter settings in the Registry if you do not know what you are doing. I will not be held responsible blablabla.... if you mess up your own machine.

Hack is for Outlook 2003 - the Key path will be different if your Outlook is not the 2003 version.


Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Key: Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Preferences
Name: MinToTray
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1 = System Tray, 0 = Taskbar


Reference: Click here

How to share knowledge amongst teammembers

I had an idea today - it was triggered by the countless number of Emails flooding my (and my teammember's) Inbox. The problem as I see it is not that people send Emails - that is perfectly fine. The problem is that they often send me valuable information which I have a hard time backtracking when I need the information 3 months after I recieved the Email....

I tried figuring out how to avoid this scenario and came up with a few stories:

S1: A user should be able to save valuable information received by Email
S2: A user should be able to search through stored information
S3: No anonymous access to the information should be possible
S4: The cost in time of storing information should be very close to zero to assure that the shared container of information will be updated frequently.


I think we actually achieved all goals in a matter of 2 hours work... How did we do it? Well, Uncle Google to the rescue:

I had an idea that saving everything in a private blog could be the silver bullet for us and ensure that story S1 and S2 was easily solved so I created a GMail account which could serve as a shared login to ressources hidden behind the login. I quickly set up a blog and clicked around a bit to ensure the privacy of the blog (no search engine should index the content, no pingback to tracking sites etc.). Then I changed the blog from being open for anybody to only being open to the people I invited. Everything went fine - until I discovered that RSS is not possible for a private blogs... Oooops. That wasn't part of my master plan at all because I always had the idea that invited people should be able to subscribe to the RSS-feed of the blog.

I tried fiddling around Google to see if I could establish a workaround but I discovered that due to the nature of RSS it is not possible to validate the viewers... Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger... I knew for sure that my idea required that viewers should be notified somehow whenever new content was added otherwise the Email-hell would continue.

I actually thought that my idea was going down the tubes until I discovered that Blogspot has this nice feature called Mail-To-Blogger. When you want to add something to the blog you could simply do it by Email to make it magically appear on the blog! Voila, problems solved...

I set everything up and now whenever somebody in our team has something they want to share with us ("I updated the server X with patches Y and Z - it shouldn't have any effect on process B but be aware anyway. Read about the patches here" (where the link is the valuable information nobody can find 3 months later) they send an Email to each of us as usual - but they also send a CC to a special Email-address to save the Email in our private blog. If I recieve something such as a new password to a service we use I send it to this Email to ensure that when I go on vacation nobody is stopped in their work because the Email is located in my Inbox only. Sweeeet.......

Security? Well I have made a lot of effort to turn off RSS, to explicitly tell Google to NOT index anything on the blog etc. The content of the blog is viewable only to the people I have sent invitations to - the Gmail-account which was used to create the blog has been shared between all members so everybody are able to administer the blog. Does anybody have any experience with private blogs and how private they really are? Please let me know if you do.

We will evaluate the blog in a few weeks time to see if we have had any value out of it. The Email-hell is still there but Emails are not bad just because they are Emails. They only become a living hell when you as a user are unable to find that single Email which contains information you need and that's the problem we are trying to solve right now. I will get back to you with an update when we have more experience on the subject.

Definition of quality

I just started in my new job - I am about to work with 3 highly intelligent and competent software developers plus whatever consultants and external ressources we add to our pool of ressources.

I have a few personal goals with this new job. One of them is to try to ask the questions which are impossible to answer correctly but nevertheless make people think. So I took the initiative and gathered our small crew to a little session which was supposed to be a wrap-up of all the things I had worked on in my previous job. What had I been doing, what had I learnt, what kind of personal insight had I gained and so on... Primarily I wanted to focus on the process and not so much on tech-stuff and implementation of projects.

I started out and soon I had wound up all the failures and fuckups of my previous projects... Yes, I have made lots of weird, unmaintainable sicko-code which however had made the business happy and had earned loads of money to the company. I started thinking: "What is quality?". Ooooooohhhhhmmmmmm........ A sudden insight appeared before my eyes and I felt it coming: "Define quality!". I asked the other guys when we came around the subject in our talk and asked them to define quality. They went quite blank and I knew I hit something. When I asked them who should define quality one of them said without blinking: "Well... in this firm we do..."

I have thought a lot about what quality is after we had our talk. What is quality? As a software engineer I tend to focus on issues such as code readability, ability to extend, logging, choice of technology and so on. For a guy working in a sales departement I think quality can be summed up to: "Can I earn a shitload on money on this feature?" He couldn't care less that I use LINQ or NHibernate to fetch data from the database. He only cares that when somebody clicks "Confirm order" the order is stored in a way which makes it possible to invoice the customer.

It makes a lot of sense to me to define quality as the least possible amount of effort spent to keep the sales departement happy. Why should we measure things differently? If they are happy it means they are able to sell - and if they are able to sell you know you will also be payed for your work at the end of this month. I regret that I haven't found any better definition because it actually promotes cowboy-coding to be an legal approach to new software in about 80% or 90% of all new business cases!! Oh my God...

Somebody save me - how can I go to work tomorrow knowing that I am obliged to be writing sloppy, unmainainable code in order to have a short Time To Market which will enable Sales departement to earn a shitload of money because we were first movers on the subject?

The day before the day

This is it - I'm leaving my office for the last time tomorrow. Yup - I have gotten myself a new gig at DGI (Danish site only) which is a non-profit sportsorganisation. They want to build up services and websites for their members which they can use to i.e. administer members, create tournament plans for competitions and other services which I haven't really got a clue about yet.

I'm leaving my current project with a sense of akwardness and sadness. We have been late for a long time delivering what we were supposed to deliver mainly because the scope of the project has changed and we have suffered from numerous of confrontations between team members, between team members and the house and between the house and the house... I think we have been like boiled frogs - we somehow grew accustomed to living in chaos all the time with changing directions and team members being frequently added ore replaced. We have lived in it for so long that we as a team didn't or at the end couldn't even manage to describe why we failed on deadline after deadline. Phew... The last thing I have heard on my way out of the door is that the ASP.Classic guys have estimated a solution which is based on the current ASP.Classic platform. The same platform that my project was intended to replace with a .NET solution. Do not get me wrong - I totally understand that the business HAS to take some sort of action and it is not plainly wrong to go with what you know when everything else have failed you. I am just not overly excited by having worked on a project for about three quarters of a year just to see everything being buried three days before I leave for another job. It sucks - big time.

I have learned a number of things which will be a big, red warning sign for me in future projects:

- If developing in an agile enviroment and the team fail to deliver running code after a sprint
- When the technical infrastructure for various reasons breaks down often enough to inflict progress
- No technical backlog at the beginning of the project
- No established estimation techniques of backlog stories from project kickoff
- No infrastructure established at kickoff (testing servers, QA servers)
- Lack of communication between projects
- Lack of communication within the project
- Lack of written documentation on completed issues

...plus a number of other issues I probably will be painfully aware of in the weeks to come.

I have a strong feeling that I can't save the world on my own by doing all these things the right way from day one in my new job so my main focus when I start on Friday at 9am is this: I will NOT accept that we fail to deliver running code at the end of future sprints. If - (I know - if and if and if) - if we had delivered something which could be deployed and tested by the business I am sure we would never have been in this situation. We might be somewhere else but 90% of all the issues we have discovered have been a combination of lacking communication on all levels and the fact that we never delivered anything. The business thought they knew what we were about to give them but they hadn't actually seen anything on the screen. We blew it totally on this one - and it has cost my to-be ex-employer quite a lot of money having us coding away on something which probably will never be used anyway.

"Success is something built on the top of all your failures" - damn, I am gonna be good at this some day ;o)

Regards K.

Test-Driven Development and the quality issue

There has been quite a lot of fuzz lately regarding Test Driven Development (TDD) - I have seen a number of posts where poeple are asking if the maturity of the tools on the market make old-school TDD obsolete. I have also seen posts where Ben Hughes asks if TDD really ensures quality.

That made me think about the term "quality" - what is software quality seen from a customer's point of view and how can we convince them that the software we produce are better than the one of our competitors?

I don't really think you can measure very much out of TDD in a sense of software quality seen from a customer's point of view. I mean - do you really care how Microsoft develops Windows XP and Windows Vista? I couldn't care less - neither do our customers as long as our sh** works every time. Even when our customers have a negative experience because they are unable to fulfill whatever task they were set to do because we as software engineers have failed to deliver - do they start to ask questions? Not really - they start looking for the products developed by our strategic competitors on the market to look for a replacement of the crap we have convinced them to install on their harddrive.

The principles and paradigms on which a software product has been built upon can and should never be a quality metric for our customers. They will never care anyway. TDD is just one (very useful) tool out of many when we develop software. In terms of quality it should only be a metric inhouse whether or not our software has a certain degree of code coverage for instance... We must not be mislead to believe as developers that anyone else but us really care what tools are in our toolbox!

Why do we not get fired when we deliver poor quality?

I have just read the following post: There is too much money to be made in software development and I started thinking... I have heard about painters who were fired for doing a lousy job. I have heard about carpenters, accountans and bar staff who have been fired for being lousy at their work. But after some 6 years in the software industry I haven't heard about _anyone_ involved in developing software who have been sacked merely for delivering low quality software... Why is this?

A: Are we as developers not able to define what's quality seen from a developer's perspective?
B: Do our superiours even know what we're doing - and hence does not know how to measure the quality of the software we produce?
C: Is this just proof to the fact that the users of our system do not care one bit and hence our superiours do not want to fire somebody on the basis that the quality of the software is poor - as long as the users are happy?

I don't know... What do you think?

Backup part 1

Lately I have moved every piece of data I treasure the most (images, documents etc) to a SubVersion repository to ease maintaining such as trivial backup procedures to a remote location. Things like these just turn out to be a lot easier when everything is gathered in the same location on your harddrive and when you get full revision history of all your Word documents as well - why haven't I done this years ago? Hmmm...

Anyway - I have bought an external harddrive on which I want to store a backup of my repository on a nightly basis. This way I will always be able to take with me the latest documents and images whenever I feel like it. I started whipping up a Robocopy of the repository but somewhere along the way it started saying "Out of disc space"... On a 250Gb harddrive that is.

A little debuggin revealed that I have never formatted the disc so it was delivered with a default FAT32 partition... This way files can never be larger than 4 GB and that really sucks when one of my Subversion revisions contained all my images which grossly exceeds that size... So as we speak I am moving everything away from the external drive (I have of course cluttered it with secondary things like audio, videos, loads of PSD's and other stuff which doesn't take up space AT ALL...) so I can reformat the drive to NTFS.

Lessons learned:

1. Check before you do anything that your source drive is NTFS (not so obvious but it should take you 5 seconds to check and verify that you don't get caught with one leg on each side of the creek).
2. Possibly you could add smaller portions of data - a 4GB revision is indeed a lot of data
3. Write PackardBell (the harddrive vendor) and ask the sales departement why the heck they are shipping stuff with ancient partitions? "Backward compatibility" - I know I know but at least put a large yellow sticker on the disc if you decide that you still want to support systems like Windows 98 ;o)