.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

A few days ago, I received a free copy of the new book by Mike Gunderloy called “Painless Project Management with FogBugz”. This is for FogBugz 4.0 and for those of you who don’t know what this is, it is a bug tracking system done by Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek. As I enjoy reading both of these two authors and the fact that I have done some research into bug tracking systems for work recently, it was nice to have a go at this book. Also, I should mention I knew a little about FogBugz and had tried it out a few months back.

Generally speaking, I guess before going for such a system you have to define your strategy as to how it fits into the big picture. By this I mean as your organization is trying to climb up the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) ladder you will need processes and tools for request analysis, requirement gathering, design and development work, testing, and maintenance and for this purpose you will need to define how you want to approach this. There are a few ways to approach it but by now I am starting realize more and more that the best strategy is to be able trace things between different phases For example if you find a bug you should potentially be able to trace it from bug to test case, design and all the way up to a request. I don’t want to go into too much details about this as it is a separate discussion but my point is to think about your strategy and don’t evaluate products for source control, project management or bug tracking by themselves but rather how they fit into your overall picture.

In any case, after that little intro, here is what I thought of the book. I will avoid talking too much about the product itself as I have not played around with this version, but rather what I thought of the book and how it’s written.

Mike starts with a top down approach by giving us a an overview, thoughts and philosophy of FogBugz and does this by giving you a feel for what it was created for with a few scenarios. Drilling down, you will then read about how a case is managed, what the pieces are, how you create them, filter, attach files etc to a case. This is then followed by a whole chapter for the administrator of FogBugz and another one for the software manager on how to deal with deadlines, estimation of time and so on which I found interesting and useful. FogBugz also handles communication with customers through discussion boards and email and he dedicates a whole chapter to this which I just skimmed through to see what features it offered.

After that, he tells us how FogBugz integrates into your source control product. This one was important as bug tracking and source control are in my opinion step 1 if you find yourself to be 0 on the CMM and want to do something about it. And finally he shows us how FogBugz is installed.

While the book is well written and easy to get through, even though this is a product reviewing book, I would have found it more useful if Mike had given us a little more about his views on strategies regarding project management, bug tracking and source control a bit like I mentioned above and how FogBugz relates to it, its limitations and advantages. This is because, if you haven’t done your home work on the big picture and are not sure how a bug tracking system fits into it, you will find it more difficult to see the drawbacks and advantages that FogBugz will bring to the table.

And finally, “A Guide To Evaluating a Bug Tracking System”

As the geek in the family I am also the private computer support for my sisters and parents and from time to time it ends up in frustration as it takes too long to explain over Skype and I can’t do remote desktop these days due to their ISP limitations. On one of the blogs (can’t find it now since I deleted it seems) I found out that you can record actions on the computer along with voice on a regular wmv file and all this using the free to download and use Windows Media Encoder 9.

So now I can have my family download instruction videos on how to install firewall or mail merge in outlook. I guess other areas of use would be for demo to customers or peer developers…you set the limit. And if you want to do it programmatically, I found this sample article on Codeproject.com

WinDirStat (via daily Grind) saved me a few gigs on my HD and there is something to be said about data that is presented visually in a nice and useful way and this one does it for sure.

This has been in my thoughts for some time and I don’t feel I have optimally answered this question yet. As a developer I try out different software, I mess around in registry, I create and register my own components (VB6 and .net) and after some time the computer gets slower and slower to the point that its time to start over.

So far it’s not a big deal. The first time I formatted my machine and put XP pro SP2, I took an image of it with the most essential tools that I know I will be using for at least the next year or two (VS.net, VB6 and office) so re-imaging takes full 10 minutes and I have a clean machine again. All I need to do then is to copy back everything (from my external drive) over to my data partition (where I store all dev work, email, pictures etc) and run the restore office settings and I am back.

The problem is though; I want to have access to most of my data that are kept by specific applications and re-imaging wipes them out. For instance, history of IE and Fire fox, my Skype contacts (it’s about time they stored this on the server). Bookmarks is a different story since I want all my bookmark sources (work pc, dev pc and laptop) to be have same bookmarks once I add a bookmark from one of the computers but that can be fixed by favoritesync, an excellent tool that a friend has written.

What is the easiest way to do this? My quest for optimal fresh starts continues…

Three Apple Engineers and Three Microsoft Engineers

So, I left the discussion last time with asking how can we realize the truth if we detach ourselves from everything in order to attach to the higher nature, and accept the guidance provided by the Manifestations of God. One could argue that our free will allow us to do that, but I will argue that if we don’t know what truth is, how is our free will going to recognize it? If you are blind, how are you going to tell light from darkness through free will? And this is where things get interesting. Detached from everything, we are to recognize the manifestation of God for the particular time we live in (as guidance will always be provided, progressively).

This can only happen if a) we examine things in life with a pure heart and motive and b) through assistance from God. The first part is not to be taken lightly. Think about it, anything we do we always have a motive for doing it, from learning to eating, meeting new people, working, basically anything. And the beauty is that only one can know one’s own true motives in their actions. So what happened in each time a prophet came? And this has always been the case, from Moses to Jesus to Muhammad and even further back, the clergy of the era before them always denied the new prophet and gave him hardships. Was it because of ignorance? Or was it simply because they had power over people and were not ready to give it up and hence they used this power to serve their purposes, i.e. their motivation were anything but pure.

So bottom line, if you are pure in your motives in anything you do, be it that you screw up, you will be fine, but only YOU know if your motivation is pure or not and no other human being can judge or tell your motivation.

Another interesting point regarding free will is the very definition of what society seems to define as free will, i.e. as long as I don’t hurt anyone I should be able to do what I want. Is that really free will? Or is giving into empty desires anything but free will? I disagree with today’s most common definition of free will. Free will is about being on control of your will, knowing what desires are to strive after and what desires are to be controlled. By that I mean any desire that serves humanity at large, that I will encourage in myself and pursue it, anything that is only self-serving, I will control, and read this part well, control, not suppress, not abstain but control it in order to not lose my goal in life.

I will leave it at this for now…

It’s been a while since I posted. Today is a slow day, one of those days that you have to fight to take a step forward and get something done and on days like this I try to think about stuff that on busy, productive days I won’t stop to think about. Most of these thoughts are work related, such as what should be the strategy regarding searching of data or regarding the different options to improve security, you know geek stuff. But somehow, when thinking about searching today, I ended up thinking about the creation. As a Baha’i I believe that the reasons for us being on this planet are a few but foremost we are here to serve. Serve mankind and civilization to continue to advance according to the teachings of Baha’u’llah. And during this process grow spiritually and prepare for the next worlds of God.

So how does everyone get to understand this then? Well, as Baha’u’llah says in the opening sentence of the Book of Certitude, “No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.”.

This mean that the process is that every once in a while a Manifestation of God appears on earth to guide us. Those of us that are detached from all that are in heaven and on earth can understand the truth that we are being presented by. In this process that is ongoing from the first prophet God sent and will continue to be so, many fail to see the truth that is brought to us. This is a test obviously, so that not everyone can realize it unless they try their best to achieve this according to their given capacity and only if they do this, through the grace of God can they understand it, because how else can you see the truth if you are detached from EVERYTHING.

So why is the process this way? I know I can’t answer that, but still it makes me ask this…Test is a way to separate true seekers from the false ones, but why was it set up this way? Well, you could argue, that if it was not setup this way we would not have had free will which is huge subject by itself. Ok, true, apart from certain predestined things such as birth and death we have free will and that gives us the ability to choose and see the truth or not see it through detachment and the grace of God. But this still doesn’t answer the question…and I will explain why in the next post as I have to run now…