The holidays just around the corner and many project leaders running around in panic, I guess that could sum up the life for many this time of year. Now you might wonder why this time of year might be a headache for a project leader, the reason is quite simple and it spells resources. During Xmas holidays you often only have a ghost crew for a couple of days, you still want anyone actually in the office too have something to do. Just having people sitting around doing nothing is quite expensive and also very boring. Of course there is no silver bullet to fix this “problem”; you just have to be a bit creative. Here are at least a few suggestions:

• If you use scrum it might be an idea to switch to Kanban during Xmas, you could still keep the same delivery schedule etc to avoid getting out of rhythm.
• Seek and destroy defects
• Build competence!
• See who manage to eat the most of the left over Xmas candy!

If you have any other great idea, feel free to send it to me and I might post it on the blog!

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In accordance with the procedure agreed by the 2012 AGM, Henrik Didner, Didner & Gerge Fonder AB, has been appointed as a new member of the nomination committee of Cybercom Group AB (publ), as a representative of one of the three largest shareholders in terms of votes.

Front Page

Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move

The Hildon Foundation Board made a surprising and welcome announcement last week, notifying the community that Nokia has offered to cover the costs of migration for maemo.org: "In a conference held by Nokia, Nemein and the Hildon Foundation, Nokia has offered to help economically in the process of migration. The details for starting the migration are under discussion. Nokia is already working with the Hildon Foundation in a legal document to cover the transferring process ofmaemo.org assets. While this document is being reviewed and completed, the migration process of services should take place during the month of December."

Details are still being discussed, but so far Nokia will cover the costs of the migration and of new hardware for the site. Funding for hosting costs at Nemein will need to be covered by the foundation beginning in 2013.

Read more (maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia supporting Hildon Foundation in ecosystem infrastructure move
2. Development
   • Port Qt apps from MeeGo to BlackBerry 10 to potentially get $10,000
3. Community
   • Council meeting minutes from 23rd November

Hi again,

It’s been quite a while since I wrote my gvfs MTP backend work, but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened in the meantime. Since then, I’ve improved the functionality quite a bit, including submitting patches to libmtp to support grabbing thumbnails and detecting “Add Storage” events (which you want to do so that when someone unlocks their phone, the phone storage automatically appears). I’ve also started the review process for submitting upstream (See GNOME Bug 666195), so hopefully we’ll see it upstream in the next couple of months.

More practically, and the main reason for writing this post, I’ve finally got around to setting up a ppa to host builds of gvfs with my patches applied. Learning how to set up a ppa was interesting, and pretty painless – so the end result is working packages for Ubuntu 12.10. Note that due to 12.10 only including libmtp 1.1.4, neither of the features I mentioned above is enabled in these builds (so you’ll have to refresh your nautilus window after unlocking). Perhaps I’ll throw a build of 1.1.5 in there too at some point.

You can find the ppa here. Enjoy!

I now and then get questions on how the life as a consultant is. I’m going try and answer the most common questions here. If you happen to have any questions you wonder about you can of course mail me, or ask in comments, and I’ll try and answer it to the best of my knowledge. I can of course not talk about specific assignments or customers.

Do you like working as a consultant?

Yes I like it. Of course there is up sides and down sides, as to pretty much everything else. I like the fact that my job is constantly changing and that I have the opportunity to meet new interesting people all the time. I learn a lot by working with so many different people and hopefully they learn something from me as well. Of course it’s always sad when you leave people that you enjoy working with a lot, however just cause you finish your assignment it doesn’t mean  that you have to stop talking/hang out with people.  :)

Do you always work alone when going to a customer?

Not always, but it happens. For me this isn’t a problem to be honest, I feel comfortable going on my own just as well going with colleagues. I honestly don’t think any serious consultant company would send a consultant on his own to a company if the consultant didn’t feel comfortable with this.

Do they expect you to know everything?

Maybe I have been lucky but I have never had any problems with anyone having absurd expectations on me. I’m very open about what I can, what I cannot and what is possible for me to learn in the given time frame.

Is it not hard/boring to do interviews all the time?

I actually don’t see it as interviews in that sense. I see it more as a two way street, I want to understand the problem better so I know if I actually can help them solve it and they usually want to get a better idea on who I am. I’d hate getting an assignment where I felt useless and couldn’t contribute!

That was a few of common questions and like I said I’m happy to try and answer any questions you might have just as long as it isn’t about specific customers or assignments.  :)

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As a consequence of the rights issue resolved by the board of directors on 29 August 2012 and approved by the extra general meeting on 1 October 2012, the number of shares and votes in Cybercom has increased by 144,351,596.

Well, a short break on continuous integration posts!

Outotec and Cybercom have signed an agreement on the delivery of a new IT-solution to support Outotec's Virtual Experience Training service. The project has started and will be delivered in spring 2013.

Continuous Integration is such a great idea: it works as a trainee that constantly downloads/builds/tests/deploys you application and notifies you whether something goes wrong or nice. I really do believe that (of course, besides several other advantages) it improves the project overall quality and also helps you to keep the application ready to be reviewed by a stakeholder.

If you are still skeptical about it, please take a look that this marvelous post here [Martin Fowler] .

Let´s discuss how you can set up a environment for a more complex project. So, unfortunately, this is tutorial for beginners (for basic/how-to-install-and-run instructions, check it on internet).

Introduction

The system consists of one server located in a external environment (for example, AWS services) and several mobile clients (iOS, Android and QT clients). Basically, the mobile applications fetch content/data from the server.

We need to constantly build/deploy the server and build all mobile clients. One very interesting point in this scenario is the amount of platforms: iOS (to build iOS client), Linux (to build Android/QT client - I´d rather use Linux for Android projects) and Windows (to build the server).

Besides svn checking-out + building + testing + deployment, we will also use QA solutions, such as Sonar and some static analysis tools for different platforms.

We will use Jenkins as CI server.

Proposed design


As I said, the system consists of several components: mobile clients (iOS, Qt and Android) and also servers. In this case, I´d rather use master-slave approach. You can create one slave for each mobile platform and also another one for for servers. To the given example, the solution is defined as it follows:


You might ask me why this is too complicated! But believe on me. If you have complex systems to build, this approach works a lot better: it´s easier to organize and to maintain, and each component on its own environment. In my next post, I describe how we set up all of this :-)

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Android: Running on Android x86 - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 28, 2012 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like