Back It Up

So the home Windows computer now has over a 1TB of storage. How did that happen? Perhaps less important is how, more important how to back up all this data safely!

We have around 8 years of pictures, 10 years of my music collection, 15 years of files I've scanned or documents I've typed up, all my contacts I know, all my emails, licence details for software I own (you get the idea, lots of digital stuff).

Backups are traditionally very painful to do. People either think they are too complicated, think they take too long to run, or think they are too expensive to do.

I wanted the least pain to make sure backups happen, so here's what I use. Hope this helps convince you to do similar.

1. Buy an external hard drive and install this making sure both it and your PC use USB2.0 for speed.  I picked up some 750Gb for around £50. Just make sure this is big enough for all the things you want to backup.
2. Download and install a copy of Microsoft's SyncToy 2.0, it's free
   
3. Create a folder pair.  There are options when creating the pairs, but essentially you are telling SyncToy "I want you to copy this source folder (left folder in the screenshot) to the destination folder (right folder in the screenshot).
4. Run the sync.

What's pretty smart here is SyncToy takes care of the delta process.  That is, if a file changes in the left folder, the right is updated by SyncToy.  If a file is deleted on the left folder, the right can (optionally) remove it too.

The initial sync can take ages depending on the size of the left folder and the speed of the drive and connection between your PC and drive.

Within the Help menu is a helpful (odd that) description of how to schedule this process so your folder pairs are automatically synchronised. Means you don't have to concern yourself with remembering to run backups.

You have no excuses now. Don't come crying to me when it all hits the fan...

I'm interested to know, does anyone do anything else from this? Anyone backing up to the Internet, how and at what cost / speed?

(In fact, small lies above. I have a second internal drive and an external drive. I prefer to schedule the backup to the internal drive to happen weekly, and run the backup to the external drive every month storing the drive out of the house for safe keeping).

Todo Lists for the web

I've been playing around with the Vitalist service. It offers an on-line todo set of pages.

My first impressions were poorer. I wasn't impressed with the garish colours and without really studying it sort of dismissed it out of hand.

However, taking another look at it, they offer:

- Mail / SMS you your reminders
- Integrate with Google calendar / RSS readers
- Simple UI
- i.e. basics for GTD

The only fly in the ointment for me? I can't get the todo list onto my copy of Outlook.

Perhaps it's time to leave the notion of sync everything behind and start down the 3G route with on-line access to my data / integration with SMS etc...

However worth a look if you are into stuff like this.

FriendFeed

Some of you I've noticed are using Twitter with some success. I've noticed a few other sites push toward FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a social aggregation tool, does a very good job of pulling together all of the social feeds from quite a few sources (Picasa, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, BlogSpot and more).

The very nice part about it is you are subscribing to me without actually knowing what services I use. However FriendFeed aggregates the things I do and puts them into an RSS feed / page you can keep up to date with.

I've used it to tag a few services I use and have created a profile for you to also tag and watch if you want. From that, you can separately drill into the social sites I use.

Well worth a look if you want to follow someone or be followed.

Wii Stream

We were lucky enough to receive a Nintendo Wii this Christmas. Suffice to say Boxing day clocked up around 9 hours of gaming when my family got together on Boxing day.

I'm a terrible geek when it comes to new things. When I first got my PSP, within a week I'd managed to get an emulator on there running megadrive games, custom web browers, SNES games and more. I cannot help myself!

And now that I'm back home and the holidays are done, I turn my attention to the Wii. It may not be the most powerful new kid on the block, but there is a fair bit of oomph in there.

My interest is in playing movies through it.

A friend at work pointed me toward http://www.tversity.com/. There is a media encoder which encodes videos to flash on the fly and streams them to a web browser. Since you can download Opera for the Wii (500 points I believe), it is possible to use this combo to pull movies, music, pictures, etc all through this package.

Best of all TVersity is free (they accept donations).

So guess what I'm doing this weekend in any spare time I can find...

Any advice appreciated from other Wii Streamers out there ;-)

Are We Nearly There Yet?

I bought a book around 6 months ago called Software Estimation: The Black Art Demystified. It's one of those types of book along with Code Complete which should be on every developers reading list, and by reading list, I mean read it once per year, every just a refresher.

So the book was parked after around 80 pages shortly before Emily arrived (our new baby), and now she's here the book is gathering dust.

Two articles appeared on my aggregator recently. One from Joel Spolsky on Evidence Based Scheduling and one from Jeff Atwood on Planning Poker, partially responding to Joel's post.

Both posts are very well written and are worth a read. They rekindled my interest in this topic, sort of the point of them I suspect!

As the Black Art book explains, everyone thinks they can estimate. While influencing people's decisions can prove hard, actually changing their approach to estimating I find is even harder.

A few techniques I wonder about using:

• Planning Poker. I love the idea of this, it seems a smart and tidy approach to reach a good consensus. However the flaw here is you need a set of equally able and open minded people who actually listen, otherwise failure is on the cards. I feel a slightly diluted version of this will work well to turn the tide.
• Track estimate against actual. I think of all of the suggestions, this is the easiest to deliver and shows exactly how good your estimates are. The FogBuzz product from Joel's company uses this to good effect.

I've set myself a target to read this book cover to cover within the next 2 months and hope to reflect on it here.

What do you think? How do you approach estimating in your workplace?

Clarifying Requirements

As software developers, we have a job to push back on unclear requirements and to help achieve a clearer, and importantly a shared understanding of the system.

Most users will not be versed in creating contracts. As a result, ambiguous terms will creep in without the user realising. Phrases such as 'The interface must be intuitive' don't make our jobs any easier.

When I receive these types of requirements I used to spend time reading and marking the documents by hand. This can be quite a laborious process and is very dependent on the experience of the reviewer.

I've been using a technique to help me become more consistent at giving feedback on requirements and to help establish a shared vocabulary of ambiguous terms.

The idea is simple. Create a document with all of the terms you know of which lead to ambiguity, then create an index showing where each of these terms appear in the requirements document.

I'm afraid I'm a Microsoft Word man, so the technique will need to be adapted to your personal tool of choice.

1. Grab a copy of the text in this list of ambiguous terms. Pop it into a new word document and save the document somewhere.

2. Take a copy of the document to be reviewed (the target document). You will be altering this document and don't want to change the original.

3. Make ALL of the text lower case within the target document (explained in a moment)

4. Use the 'automark' feature to highlight the terms in your 'requirements' document. This feature asks you to select a source document for the automark entries. (In Office 2007 this is found under the references tab, 'insert index', then select the 'Automark' option.)

5. At this point, Word has marked each phrase in the target document where the phrase in the 'ambiguous terms' appears.

   Now, to create an index showing the user where the terms are:

6. Insert an index using the index feature within Word. In Office 2007, this is in the 'references' tab under the index section.

7. Finally, review the usage of the terms in context and send appropriate comments back to the user.

The automark feature of Microsoft Word is not the greatest for this usage, but if you are prepared to follow these steps and develop your own version of the ambiguous terms document (and share it with others in your team), this will help contribute toward better quality requirements.

In particular, I dislike the requirement for the ambiguous terms document to need two columns, both containing the same text. I haven't looked to solve this, let me know if you do!

In itself, the process is not fantastic. But if you share a master copy of the ambiguous terms document, then the whole team can contribute their experienced view to improved requirements.

(The concept here was unabashedly taken from Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Grab a copy and read it, highly recommended).

Update: I've pushed the 'Acceptable Terms' doc into a published Google Doc here
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgdfgwms_5cp9v8k
and have updated the URL's above

Synchronising data - Handy

(Following my post about Sync'ing data)

I've failed so far to get any of the Lotus Notes utilities to export to Google or Fumbol servers from within the NAG network (behind whatever firewalls exist).

Meantime, I've found a utility called Handy. It's able to take an exported Lotus Notes file and convert it into an iCal. Google calendar imports iCal's which suits my purpose.

The command line I needed was:

handy -a calendar_in -o calendar_out.ics -f dmy4/

The switches tell you:
-a : which file to use for input
-o : which file to create
-f : what is the interal input file date format

From there, it's fairly easy to import an iCal into Google Calendars.

The issues I have at the moment:
- Haven't tried to automate the Lotus Notes export. A quick search shows this isn't promising.
- I'd like to be able to export just a delta of the Notes changes. Again, doesn't look promising.
- The export benefit relies on me importing this iCal into Outlook at home to merge the calendars, or exporting my Outlook calendar to Google. Neither are my ideal.

I'm starting to think that this isn't something which is easy enough to do for the benefit it gives me. My goal I think may shortly change to simply exporting my work calendar to Google so I can view it at home.

Shame, I really like the benefit of a single calendar view... I hate giving up on goals! Grrr.

Synchronising data

The Task
For me, having a work and personal calendar separate is a bit of a pain. I'm not great at keeping both sets of dates and appointments in my head and can double book myself easily. Ideally I like to want sync them both together so I always have a good view of what's happening in both calendars.

Problem is, my new place of work uses Lotus Notes, not Outlook! :0(

I've been chasing the ideal world of data synchronisation for a while now. Devices and application I use are:
- Pocket PC (Dell Axim X51V)
- Lotus Notes 7 (work)
- Outlook 2003 (home)
- Google Calendar (currently home)
- Yahoo Calendar (not using, but might)

My requirements are simple (to me):

1. Merge work and personal calendars "somewhere". This can be on the web or a device., preferably a device.
2. Support Lotus Notes and Outlook calendars (my two primary sources).
3. Automate the sync as far as possible. I don't want to have to remember to "Press sync" (I hate Palm's HotSync cradles because of this).

Nice features would be
1. Support two way sync of the "somewhere" with whatever sourced that data.
2. Offline read access to the merged calendar via my Pocket PC. Don't require to change it offline.
3. Keep the client installation simple. My work PC is locked down so I cannot simply install lots of software to make this happen.
4. Sync contacts too for easier scheduling of appointments.
5. Support Google calendars in some way, simply because I have mentally subscribed to the Google way of life...

I cannot believe I am the only person who wants to do this. However I think Lotus Notes will be the biggest problem here. So full speed with the research...

The Options So Far
ScheduleWorld
ScheduleWorld has an excellent diagram which on first impressions does exactly what I want.

I use Lotus Notes (not by choice) at work for my calendar. This means I have the pain of making ScheduleWorld work with Lotus Notes which doesn't appear to be an out-of-the-box feature. This isn't going to give a smooth experience, but holds promise.

Outlook 2007
Yet another option might be Outlook 2007. This supports Internet Calendar Subscriptions which avoids ScheduleWorld and seems to give a good experience. Google Calendars supports RSS feeds, so this also holds promise for a picture where I push the work calendar into Google, share to Outlook and sync up Outlook to the X51V.

I particularly like involving Google in the mix as their tools offer a good mix of a rich experience, solid service and the promise of more social networking features as we transition into Web 2.0!

Also, I'm not very keen to spend more money on doing this.

Remote Calendars
Interesting this one. Remote Calendars seems to support sharing my home calendar with Google and supports two way sync. I foresee a problem in that there are limits over the number of records being synchronised (read a few people mentioning this, but no-one solving it).

Roll My Own
Not my favourite option here, but it's a possibility.

As Lotus Notes both support structured files for export, there is an option of writing my own code to push this into an iCal format keeping the data very open and very usable. Writing something in MS Outlook to import this data doesn't seem to provide too many problems, but we will see...

I'll add more solutions as I find them then go back and review them for others to read about.