Show effect - collecting ideas!

Hello, my dear fellows.

Show effect - as is
I have recently thought of the 'Show effect'. You know it - when you are presenting your application, or the new iteration to the customer (or anyone external) - you frequently run into situation when the small action results in a large stack trace spanned for the screen?

Imagine the demo to your customer. You:

• show nice things - feature A is implemented
  
• show great things - feature B which is very important for the business - is implemented! (applause on the background)
  
• show awesome things - the designs ARE there, even if they were provided 2 days ago!
  
• and then you are about to show little bit of functionality (notifying user about their registration), which is not that important (and thus not that verified) - you get an awful error statring with text Unhandled exception java.lang.NullPointerException

Then all your show becomes a bit compromised.

Minimize your risks with smaller efforts
So, I kept thinking on this for a while - how does one minimize these 'show' risks?
I have been feeling this myself - we had a demo each week for 5-6 weeks with a customer, and we had to demonstrate the progress.
It is pretty hard to show significant feature progress within a week, isn't it? And we were on really tight schedule.
So, these are several things I figured out - sure that I'm not the first who found them, but better would be if you the readers would get them from other's experience than from own:

1. Time and connection. Be sure that you don't make everyone wait too much and also that everyone is setup for the show. In the distributed teams it is common that dev team is located in different country, so that the technical solutions for presentations are being used (screensharing services and the voice calls usually)
   Make sure everyone knows where to get and how to setup the screensharing before you start the show. Provide your help if needed.
   
2. Always have a plan of presentation. Even if the things are simple, you need to have written plan before you so you don't waste time thinking on 'what should I click next?'. You should be presenting your work in such a way so your listeners feel that you are completely confident with what you are doing.
   Surely, there is always a place for unforseen changes - your customer may ask you to perform some action which does not fit to your plan. Be calm and confident :)
3. Rehearse the demo, at least 2 times, following the written steps you've done in item 2 of this list.
   
4. Try not to show too much - if some features are half-implemented you'd rather not show them than make the whole appearance of the project half-complete.
   
5. Make sure no one could compromise your demo without knowing it. Good point here is that you ask no one to touch demo server during the show - by any means. 2 demo users logged in with the same accounts from different machines can lead to catastrophic results.
   
6. Don't forget about the user experience. If you are showing something to non-technical people (or even technical people but not of your organization) make sure that you have the unexpected exception page configured correctly - so that even if everything fails, user is still presented with the comfortable page with correct and unambigous steps of what to do next. Making custom pages for HTTP 500, 404 etc is also a nice thing.
   Another point here is that if the custom error page is not breaking the overall design feeling. With this little trick subject of your demo would feel much more like a complete application (if it even is a prototype).
7. Put mocked things in. If you have designed sketches with very nice flash application you don't have yet (and your customer knows you don't) - put them as static pictures. And then as soon as the new feature is completed, replace that static pictures with the functioning parts.
   
8. Don't forget to say thanks once the demo is over - the people involved had to put off their ongoing work and tasks (which may be also important) to take participation in your show.
9. ...

The question is still open
It would be great if you could share some of your great experience - cases, practices, ideas - about the show effect.
Thank you! And comment on, I'll add the wise thoughts to the list :)

Design anti-patterns

I have not had so much fun for some time.
If you know what are design patterns - take some time to read through the document, I am sure you'll notice many wel-known real-life examples of this.

That's where life meets theory:
http://brajeshwar.com/2005/resign-patterns-ailments-of-unsuitable-project-disoriented-software/

Splitting blogs

So, I decided to split the blog to two separate 'threads'.

This leaves for technical things, as well as some interesting reports, everything related to work, IT, outsourcing, java and Unix. And the new one (http://way-up-only.blogspot.com/) is designated for personal things.

Yes, the new one is cyrillic. :)

So - welcome!

The first 'real' posting will be about our trip to Crimea mountains. Soon, really soon... :)

I'm back!

Just got back from the trip to Crimea mountains. That is really cool!
Photos will be soon.

Also, I'm feeling this blog became less technical. So, I think, I'll split it to two :)

PdfChm - find the freshest books for FREE

The PdfChm resource is a large collections of books on programming, science, maths, law, photography and lots more. There are even books on crime.

So, enjoy. Registration is free, but you can download no more than 2-3 books per day.

There are pdf, chm :) , ps, djvu, and other formats available.. Readable anyway.

Good practices vs Bad practices

If you are software developer, or designer, or photographer, or engineer, &c, you may have heard following:

– there are good practices and bad practices, and you should always - i said ALWAYS - use good practices.

That's wrong. You should use good practices in 90% only. Not more. And also you should apply your head when deciding if to use that cool design pattern in this place.

Have a look around, and you'll find tons of the examples.

• You may have heard of database normalization. Basically, this is the way of developing DB schema powered by straight mathematic researches form relation theory. Idea is that if you follow that theory you'll never get data inconsistency. Opposed to this, there is denormalization, which is used 10 times more rarely than normalization, but brings beatiful performance shifts.
• Rule of thirds in photography - split the frame into 9 common parts and situate the object in the crosses of the splitting lines. You'll concentrate viewers' attention on the object.
  - yes, that's true. And now go to any more or less interesting photo museum, and look how frames are organized. Basically, this is the second level of harmony ;)
• You know - you should never use magic numbers. NEEEEVER! If i see something in your css code saying offsetWidth = (width - 16) + "px" I would not be happy with that.
  But nature owns all of us :) Following picture describes that very well.
  Explanation:
  
• Google uses different stylesheets for different browsers.
• Internet explorer handles 100% widths awfully. If you embed some element with paddings and margins into other element, it will take more than 100%, because IE does not use padding and margin values when calculating 100%
• Width of the scrollbar in IE is 17px
• There is a way of doing correct 100% width with IE. It utilizes IE css "expression" facility, and recalculates the width on each page event (even mouse move). This would be canonical way.
  
• Although, Google decided to use -17px right margin just to stop loosing performance. It's easier, and better for both user and developer.

Don't you think it is beautiful?


P.S. There's no attempt to reverse-engineer Google code - just attempt to learn how big guys work. No IP violated :) Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

Typetester - a little free service form choosing a font

So, you need to select a font for your

• Blog
• Site
• Publication
• Page on the web
• ...

Or even worse - you have done that work partially, but now (after 2 month) you want to restore the work. And you just can't figure out what font you've used before :)

If you are not professional in printing, I don't really think you'll be able to notice difference between Bitstream Vera Sans and Sans.

So - typester is a solution for selecting correct font.

Hope this will be useful.

Spiral Universe school management system

I'm not interested in school software.

But this startup - Spiral Universe School Management System - seems to be emerging fast and might be interesting.

As usual, such systems tend to solve some specific tasks, like schedule management or class journal or medical log, but this system incorporates social network idea together with the school management tools.
Business model seems to be agile enough - you can use this system for free, but for additional services/support you may pay some money. Also, additional user space for media can be bought.

This startup seems to be fresh-technology-oriented. I found out GWT on Spiral Technologies page, so - here it goes.

Waiting for a live demo or a start to try this out :)

Forests-Forever are CLOSING

There are only two weeks left to watch out the gratitude of the forest all over the world.
I'm not promoting it - just give it a try.

There are really beatuiful pictures of the forests from all over the world. I mostly liked the ones from Ural, Russia. They give you a little of the fresh air.

While watching those photos I wanted to leave that job, get out of the city and just be there...

So, only two weeks left for Forests Forever. Don't miss it.

Getting UNIX to work

I like the UNIX operating system family. I would not switch to window$ now, maybe I could live with Mac (it's BSD, :)).
As you could hear before, UNIX can be hard to get working as you want it to work. It may require some ... actions from you :)
I got this picture from Kirill Scorp Malyshev ;).