Managing user expectation

Many years ago my lecturer, Clive Boughton in one of his COMP8100 class would asked us some opinion on our definitions of (software) requirement. I remembered some precise definitions from ISO/IEEE standard and quotes from software engineering books from his pdf file presentation. But I raised my hand and suggest an alternative. Requirement includes user's expectation.

It was difficult at that time for me to explain why. I just knew that some of the projects i was involved with that came to sudden halt from technical point of were not as many as which unable satisfy the client's subjective imprecise and always changing "expectation". Maybe this warrant some more looking by researchers?

Article from 2006 discuss the merit on consciously making mock-ups looks unfinished, which lead me to a relevant article by Joel Spoesky. Making visual mock-up looks ugly idea has even led to a real gold prototyping tool: Balsamiq Mockup.

At the end of the day, I'm still clueless. How do you actually measure user expectation? Is it ethical to bring down their expectation of getting good software, just so at the end we have a lot more lee way and they won't complain much? Does it actually improve requirement gathering process by excluding irrelevant aspects of discussion? Or should we simply shrug off and forget those and focus on delivering the best we could and hope everything would gone well?

Installing XCode 3.2 (Snow Leopard) offline documentation

If you have flaky internet connection, and XCode's preference->Documentation always displays either "getting" or exclamation mark, try following Peter Hosey's steps on the following site to download the package using your download manager.

http://boredzo.org/blog/archives/2009-09-02/the-other-way-to-install-the-mac-reference-library

MOSS 2007 Master Page quick reference

This is the break down hierarchies of default Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 master page found at TEMPLATE\GLOBAL folder. Use this as quick reference when creating your own custom master page and publishing page layouts. CSS class name also displayed so you can tweak then within your own css style sheet block (e.g. in content editor).

(whoops messed up on previous post, edited)

Download it here:
http://dodysw.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sharepoint/masterpagemap/spmasterstruct.html

Increasing ASP.NET performance

This by far the easiest way to increase your ASP.NET page performance. Put this on top of .aspx file.

<%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam= "None"  %>

More detail of this technique is taken from this site, as you need to know the caveats and situation where this technique can benefits.

Did a quick benchmark using jMeter on a simple site with themes, LDAP connecting, permission checking to database, and constructing menu, with 10 concurrent threads hitting the server 100 tries:

Before:

• Average response time: 374 ms
• Throughput: 1295 request/minute

After:

• Average response time: 132 ms
• Throughput: 2708 request/minute

Response time reduced about 30% from original. Another page with more complex queries reduce response time 800 ms to 210 ms or about 25%.

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dsw

ASP.NET 4 + VS 2010 released

Umm, while i'm at it, found news that ASP.NET 4 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has just been released.

Download at will

ASP.NET in-lining saves time

Been coding ASP.NET aspx files without code behind (inline) for a while now, and all I can say that it's a great time saver. Most code behind files can be easily ported without problem. Development cycle improve and has the similar feel to code in PHP and Python/Django. Visual studio's code complete and highlighting still works. When client requires simple change that I know where to look for on running web site, it only takes seconds now and it does make good impression on them. Try it.

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dsw

Google search through your Goole Talk chat

Inspired by a lazy office mate of mine, made a quick chat bot to help her query google via Google Talk. Just invite gudangterasi@appspot.com as your friend and ask him any question :D

To start your own chat bot, you need to know a little bit of Python.

1. Download the gudang terasi source code here.
2. Get a Google Appengine account
3. Download the sdk for your platform, and add the gudangterasi folder into your Google App Engine Launcher
4. Edit main.py file to your liking
5. Click deploy!

Pynetmony with OUI

For everyone who uses Symbian S60 mobile phone and loves wardriving must have heard Pynetmony. Well I made some of the following updates:

• Maximum speed on GPS tab: really simple max() field so I have a proof when my taxi driver sped above my comfort safety zone
• Displays OUI for bluetooth and wireless lan devices: so I can fulfill my curiosity of what brand of mobile phone is more popular in my area, or what kind of wireless lan router my neighboor uses. Manufacturer data uses database from the public IEEE Registration Authority. As it's really big, I cropped down the company name to the first 10 characters to safe memory.
• Remove startup and closing screen loading to speed up opening the apps :D
• Based on Pynetmony 2.03 (can't find it on web, I got it by updating from inside the apps)
  

Installation instruction:

• Download my version of pynetmony and extract
• Send them to your mobile phone's c:\data\others\pynetmony, overwrite or rename existing .py file
• Start!

Note that sometimes the apps hang and become unstable, send me feedbacks if you've got some hints.