I have now moved this blog to a Moveable Type based blog providing categories and TrackBack facilities.
The new URL for the blog is www.typingahead.com/management/.
The syndication feed has also changed and can be obtained either as RSS or Atom.
Please update any bookmarks or RSS subscriptions to see new posts. At some point in the future this site will be taken down.
Attempting to formalise my PRINCE2 knowledge has been frustrated by the fact that the Open Examinations in the UK conducted by APM Group are booked through a web site booking form which which uses some outdated JavaScript to display available booking slots. From my testing this appears to only work on Internet Explorer on a PC, though Internet Explorer on the Mac will display the options even if you can't book them!
I'll see if I can persuade them to fix this, but in the meantime, if you are a user of Firefox or Safari you can circumvent their JavaScript museum by typing the following line (as one long line) into the location bar and hitting Return:
javascript:var str=document.f.T1.value; document.getElementById("Topic").innerHTML=str; document.getElementById("Topic").style.visibility = "visible"; alert("Done!");
Replace "T1" (for Milton Keynes) in the above with "T2" for Winsford or "T3" for York.
Once the dates are displayed you can proceed as normal.
Perhaps I live in the dark ages, but somewhere down the line I’ve missed the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) movement and it appears with recent reading that I’m missing out, so I feel overwhelmingly obliged to read “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity” by David Allen.
The final straw that lead me to this conclusion was reading one of today’s “Cutting Through” entries, “Prince 2, product and Getting Things Done”, which was about the 10th reference I’ve read to GTD in the last month.
What is the point of a blog?
It’s an interesting question to which I can personally think of too many answers to consider writing about, but a few short ideas have permeated recently which seem worth noting and provide an amusingly recursive entry, if you get what I mean…
I read blogs because they inform me, so blogs are often about informing people. How do they inform? They inform because they share knowledge, and often they share a learning process. The writer moves from point A to point B in their understanding of a subject area, and the reader, who reads the blog because they feel an affinity for the writer, is also given a stepping stone to move from A to B without having to do all the work involved in discovering the step.
So, whilst a blog can be anything, in this understanding, a blog is about sharing what you are learning rather than attempting to write some creative or editorial masterpiece.
This being the case, a blog of this kind is not something that should take a long time to compose, because it doesn’t need too much thought, it just requires the thoughts to be composed on the screen and it doesn’t need to take long for another reason…
Normally writing is constrained by the need to complete things… the need to make something into a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end. From the perspective of a bit of prose this is probably still true if you want your blog to read well, but it doesn’t matter with regard to the thoughts it communicates.
Forget etiquette, forget the norms of old, blogging is about a conversation separated from time. I blog something and someone blogs a response somewhere else in the world at some time later. Perhaps I never hear the response, but someone else does, and it takes thoughts forward and builds on them.
What’s the point of completing a thought and wrapping it up in a parcel. For one thing it hits the old 80/20 rule that applied here says that wrapping up a thought takes 80% of the time and probably contributes 20% or less of the substance. It’s perhaps hard to admit that a thought isn’t complete and that we don’t have the final answer, but I know as a reader of blogs that I would be sorely disappointed if all the blogs I read had censored by the ‘completed thought’ police.
Funnily enough a blog could be described as agile publishing. Perhaps I should register that definition. Anyway, I could go on but…
From time to time, when I have a problem to solve I like to get out pen and paper and start drawing out ideas and thoughts and connecting them together. Using some random variation on mind mapping and Goldratt’s “Current Reality Trees”, I try to make order out of some disparate thoughts and often find the whole processes extremely helpful.
It’s hard to tell whether it’s the process or the product that matters, perhaps it’s both. Anyway, pen and paper and getting hard to use nowadays so from time-to-time I try to find a more appropriate tool to aid the process.
In the last few days I’ve taken another look at the free open-source application FreeMind. It’s a Java application so it works across platforms, and it currently has a new version 8 pre-release tucked away which takes away a number of the serious issues with the current full-release and makes this a real appealing application.
It’s a simple tool for ‘mind mapping’, designed to allow large mind maps to be created and navigated with minimal fuss. It has a ‘fairly’ intuitive interface and shortcuts that make the building process sufficiently quick to be really useful. Some serious bonuses include the ability to export to a nice selection of formats including PDF, and the fact that the underlying file format is XML, so there are endless ways by which the resulting maps can be repurposed, or by which other things can be converted into mind maps.
I will try it out some more and see how it stands the test of time.
Following the automated software testing theme I've just run across Eggplant an automated testing package which uses VNC to remotely control and watch a computer system under test. This allows it to work across a range of platforms. It can even record movies of the test taking place for later review.
For those unfamiliar with VNC, it is a cross platform solution to controlling and viewing the screen of another computer across a network connection.
There are two issues. Firstly, they don't give any pricing away on their web site, so it could be ridiculously expensive, but that said they do claim it is "affordable", so there's a basis on which to beat them down! The other issue is that it only runs from a Mac OS X based system, so development teams without Macs may have to fork out an additional £500 to buy a testing machine. Given the price of some other testing packages, this may not matter much, and at least it won't required daily patching to render it virus free!
