No matter how agile your development practices are, and no matter how skilled your team is, you can still generate a failure.

There are some sure signs you are headed for a failure that you can watch for. One of the most obvious and common is when deadlines are set without regard to input from the development staff.

Artificial "drop dead" dates are always a sure sign of trouble to come. It is especially worrisome because it is so prevalent. I have participated in a number of projects where the milestones, phase durations etc, are set in stone before all of the analysis is even complete.

A common scenario, particularly in "internal" non commercial projects is that the business unit identifies a desired set of functionality and delivers the desire in the form of a loosely defined set of requirements, accompanied by a delivery date that is usually wildly optimistic.

I actually worked for a company where the development manager was fond of saying: "The customer will settle for 80% of the desired functionality."

This is far more common than anyone would like to believe. And the particular company I am speaking of is still developing internal projects with the same mentality 10 years later. (I am no longer there, but people I know still are.)

The result of this "settle for" mentality is that there is a loss of confidence in the development group by the customer, and a sense of hopelessness in the developers that becomes pervasive. Most developers leave, a core group will stay until they burn out, but by and large these teams are marred by high turnover rates, low morale and frequent re-organizations.

Do you work for a settle for group? Any idea on how to combat this from within? Please share your thoughts!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Why do software companies continue to tie software keys, licenses etc to email addresses? Most people have multiple email addresses, and they tend to be perishable and short lived.

I use a service called Pobox.com that addresses some of the issues. It allows me to have an address like myname@pobox.com which I can give out to anyone, and then I tell the service what actual email address or addresses I want the mail forwarded to. They also offer a number of other services such as rules you can apply to incoming email, spam filtering and scoring, and you can even use your own domain. Check em out!

But while this helps, I don't always want to give this address out to vendors. So I often use a throwaway address like me@yahoo.com or some other email address I don't mind getting spammed into oblivion.

Yet vendors want to use our email address to identify us. I can't tell you how many products I still use that were originally licensed to me via an old work specific email address. And invariably when it comes time for an upgrade and I have to retrieve my license details I have to enter the email address I used when I purchased the software.

Sometimes they even send the license or upgrade details only to the email address you used when you purchased the software. And on the rare times I have tried to convince a vendor that they should change my email address in their records it usually results in my account being forever irretrievable even by the vendor! sigh.

In fact a fair number of vendors appear to use your email address as an input into their key generation routines.

An email address is a poor identifier, yet its use as an identifier is prevalent. We need a better method for identifying ourselves electronically. I have been reading about OpenID lately and of all the attempts I have seen in the past (Passport anyone?) it seems to have the most promise. As far as I can tell the organization is not owned or unduly influenced by any particular vendor. And it does appear to be a truly open standard. 

We need something other than email addresses, perhaps this is it?

Cheers,

Robert Porter

There are a number of references floating around the Internet about how to use an upgrade version of Vista to actually perform a clean install. I am not going to recap the steps here but a simple Windows Live query will yield the steps.

But I did actually use the method, and it works. In my case I really was upgrading in the sense my system had a legitimate version of XP Pro on it when I bought it, and I therefor was qualified for the upgrade price. Since the process allows a clean install as opposed to an upgrade in place it was very attractive to me.

Upgrading an OS is always a rather tricky business and invariably leaves a lot of extraneous "crud" from the previous OS laying around your hard drive and registry. So when possible I always prefer to do a clean install and start fresh.

So I used the "trick" that is being circulated to perform a clean install with an upgrade only version. I believe since I did in fact have a full valid license to XP that I am not violating the spirit of the license even if I am technically in violation.

That being said I would not condone someone installing an upgrade version unless they were qualified to do so in accordance with the intent of the license agreement. I have heard many folks make the argument that since the installer allows it to happen, it must somehow be ok.

Sorry, I don't buy that argument. If you have a licensed OS that is allowed to be upgraded, and you are in fact upgrading that system then you qualify for the upgrade price. Otherwise you should pay full price. Its fairly black and white, I don't see any gray anywhere in there.

Now is Vista, whatever version, worth the price? The market will decide that.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

I own two Vonage phone adapters. The first is one of the Linksys 2 line adapters, the other is a VTech wireless adapter.

The Linksys system was and remains associated with my business Vonage account, which I pay for and use.

The VTech unit I also purchased, but associated it with an account owned by someone else as I was using it to work with them. I paid for the hardware, but not the account.

Now, here is the beware part. I wanted to move the wireless VTech onto my account to replace the older Linksys adapter and gain the flexibility to use the wireless phones.

No can do, apparently there is a balance owing on the other account, and even though I bought and paid for the hardware, I can no longer use it until the balance on the other account is paid up.

I cannot even pay the outstanding balance myself and close the account. So in essence I am out $100.00 for the hardware.

Something to think about before you do business with Vonage.

Robert Porter

In my post entitled “Gee, More Microsoft bashing, what a shock!” I ranted about the fact that no matter what Microsoft does they get slammed by a group that just likes to bash Microsoft. I did not do as great a job explaining my viewpoint as George Ou does in his recent post “Media bias rears its ugly head on IE7 ‘flaw’” so it you want to see what I was trying to say go read his article.

Then for fun look at the one line comments to his post. The majority are from folks that have an average mental age of about 5 years old. You get the idea.

Media bias exists against any large entity, but Microsoft always seems to garner much more than it’s fair share, and I for one am truly sick and tired of it.

Anyway, rant mode off.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

My ISP at my home office is Bellsouth. I use their FastAccess DSL and until yesterday the service had been more than acceptable.

Last night at 11:30 p.m. according to their website, they suffered a network outage. Now that happens, and I understand that things happen. But when I attempted to call Tech Support to find out if it was my end or if there was a system outage, I ended up getting the call dropped, not connected, fast busy, all kinds of issues.

Several times I did get through all of the automated voice prompts to the hold queue only to be summarily dumped. All of these issues combined began to give me the distinct impression that they were indeed having issues. But even when I had identified myself as a DSL customer, I never got an automated announcement that they were indeed experiencing an outage. Instead I just got placed on hold, and dumped.

An automated announcement to the effect that there was an outage in my area, (I had to input my DSL phone number so they knew what area I was in), would have kept me off the phone, and probably reduced the incoming call load.

What was worse, when I finally got a friend that had a different ISP, to go to Bellsouths web site and find the backup dialin numbers for me, I checked their network status page and was greeted with the standard “No Serious Issues” message. Only when I entered my state and city did I get the following:

Subject:	All Cities - Customer Affecting Outage
Problem:	What? Some customers may be unable to connect to the Internet or surf at this time. Who? All customers When? The outage began at 11:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, October 16, 2006. Where? The entire nine-state region that BellSouth Internet Services serves Why? We are currently investigating the cause of the outage. Additional Comments: FastAccess customers that have downloaded our Connection Manager Tool may see a yellow diagonal line, or a red X through the tool. The yellow line indicates which system is affected by the maintenance, and the red X indicates that the customer has no connection. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we thank you for choosing BellSouth Internet Services.
Status:	Open	-- Updated: 10/16/2006 11:29:14 PM

Notice the Where? line? “The entire nine-state region that BellSouth Internet Services serves”

If an outage that affects their entire service area is not a “serious” issue then I am not sure I ever want to experience their idea of a “serious” issue. (Nuclear war perhaps?).

Again, if this notice had been placed prominently on their help and support web page, or even the front page of the network status page it would have reduced calls. I had tried to get to this page via my PPC cell phone but although I could select my state, the city listbox never populated so I could not see this info until I had access to a PC based browser.

Someone at Bellsouth really dropped the ball AND shot themselves in the foot on this one. Over 12 hours later, service was restored.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Robert Scoble had a recent blog post where he wondered why there was not much in the way of interest in the press and blogosphere around Acrobat 8.0. It reminded me why I run as little as I can of Adobe’s products.

Licensing, Code Bloat, Instability, Licensing, Cost, Instability, Cost, Licensing.  You get the point. I have not used or recommended any of Adobe’s PDF related products since version 5.

Versions 6 and 7 were crash prone, and VERY slow to load on my high end (for their time) systems. I have used numerous 3rd party rival products that load MUCH faster, and are a fraction of the cost, have clear licensing and don’t crash every 3rd time you load them.

I have participated in enterprise projects that made heavy use of creating and distributing PDF documents, and in every case the decision was made to go with anyone except Adobe, since even corporate lawyers could not make heads or tails of their licensing, and the cost was always prohibitive as well.

(For fun we had 3 different people call Adobe once, all 3 asked the exact same licensing question of the Adobe rep, all 3 got very different answers!!)

So in conclusion, Acrobat 8 is more of the same, and that makes it un-news.

If you are like me, you get a half dozen “Free” subscription offers from IT magazines such as eWeek, InfoWorld etc in your e-mail or snail mail every month.

As we all know, the magazines, for the most part, make their money off of Ad revenue. Part of how they attract advertisers is their circulation or subscriber counts. Part is by demonstrating the demographics of their audience.

In order to gather that demographic information the “Free” offers are accompanied by a multipage survey that attempts to define who and what you are in terms their advertisers can digest.

Well let’s take a look at “Free”, a typical paid subscription for a year at XYZ Magazine is say $124.00. It takes me 15 minutes of my time that I bill at $500.00 per hour to a client to fill one of these surveys out, even if I cheat and just randomly select values.

So one quarter hour of $500.00 billable time is $125.00 worth of my time. Hmmmm, not so free is it? Now I don’t bill all my time, ( I would Love to!), but I don’t so even if you lower the value of your and my time drastically, it still is not a free subscription.

And discussing this topic with several co-workers and friends resulted in the not unexpected result that most of them just randomly select values on those survery as well. So the data that the magazines are collecting is useless for the most part.

So hey, Mr./Ms. Magazine editor, just send the dang thing! Or better yet, reduce your survey to one short page. I for one don’t have the time to read all the magazines I do get, including those I have paid for, so I am just chucking/deleting any more “Free” subscription offers I receive!!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

Hmmm