Planning Poker

We played poker yesterday in our Sprint Planning meeting.  Not Five Card Stud, or Texas Hold’em but Planning Poker.

Our previous planning efforts were okay — it was horrible at first but we got better at it.  This time I wanted to do something different to not only see if we can get more exact, but to get people to relax a little and for everyone to have some sort of input into every task.  I think it worked fine for the first 1.5 hours but the last 30 minutes we kinda ran out of gas.

The team members liked it — it was something different, we all got input in the decision.  My manager didn’t seem to like it — “too much time with everyone here”.  And it was true — two hour meeting with five developers is a man-day.  Yet if we spend a man-day working on good estimation, it may save us days of work and anguish.  As Jeff Atwood said, you are still playing poker with money, but it’s your employer’s money

Here are the cards I printed and handed out. Not sure if I’m ready to spend money on “real” Planning Poker cards yet.  We’ll see how this sprint pans out.

Digital Converters — Mission Accomplished

After a rocky road I finally have digital converters hooked up to two older TV’s that aren’t hooked up to DirecTV.  Gina tried to convince me that two is a better idea and then, after all the storms lately, I as finally convinced that, yes, we do need two.  (You see, heavy storms block out DirecTV.  Not generally a big deal, but this spring and summer it has been.)

I was a little on the ball and got our two coupons from the government.  And then they sat there for a while. But,  they expire after 90 days!  

Gina has been gone most of the week and Leah has been staying at her uncle and aunt’s house.  I went over after work, had dinner, got Leah to bed, and then came home.  One night on the way home I decided to see if Kmart had any digital converters.  And they were sold out.  Sears was also on the way home and I stopped in and, nope, they had sold out too.  I continuing on home and then I saw Shopko, which Gina likes to go to because no one else ever does.  I thought, “No one shops there!  Surely they have some left!”  But apparently people look for hard-to-find items at Shopko because they didn’t have any left either.

Leah was back home with me on Friday night.  On Saturday afternoon we set out to find two digital converters and we weren’t going home until we found some.  We went to Wal-Mart #1 and was told they sold the 20 they had in stock that morning (it was now about 2pm). I then drove to Best Buy. The sales guys proudly said “Yes we have them!”  and took me straight to an empty shelf.  Yes, they were sold out too, and the sales dude was just as disappointed as I was.

We then journeyed on to Wal-Mart #2, which is really straight south of Best Buy a few miles.  I didn’t even see an empty shelf there so I asked a sales guy.  He gave me a simple “Nope” and we went on.

By now, I was getting discouraged and Leah was getting antsy that we were going to all these stores and were not buying anything!   But SuperTarget is across the road from Wal-Mart #2 — maybe they have them.  But do they take the government coupons?  Well, I could just ask.

The sales guy at SuperTarget was busy so Leah and I were just walking around looking for the converters or an empty self but didn’t see either one.  As soon as the sales guy got free, I saw them. A huge pile!  I really couldn’t believe my eyes!!!  So I asked the sales guy if they take the government coupons and he said that they did.  So that is how we got our digital converters.  I then told the sales guy that he was probably the only one in town that had any left but he didn’t act like he believed me.

How well do these converters work?  Most of the time the picture is good.  Sometimes the picture freezes but that happens much less at night than during the day.  There are channels that come over digital that do not come on analog airwaves or our on DirecTV like 62O, which don’t think is really all that great.  NET2 is a good thing, though.

So shop early if you want your digital converters! Or you will be driving all over town . . 

Another Django Talk

Blaine finally let the cat out of the bag – I’m finally doing a Django talk for the Omaha Dynamic Language Group.  If you saw my Django talk for the Omaha Python Group, this one will be similar, only with a little more background and a small comparison with Ruby on Rails.  The application will be pretty much the same.

So, see you on Tuesday night!  See ODLG’s site for location information!

Is ack a better grep?

I’ve been playing with ack the past couple of days and, really, it’s pretty cool.  It automatically recurses into directories, only searching through files it knows about, and ignores VCS files and directories, like .svn, .cvs, .hg, etc.  You can easily tell it your filetypes with –python, –java, etc. on the command line. It’s in Perl, but it’s also fast.  Very fast.   And, because it’s Perl, it will run on Windows if you have Perl installed there. I live my Windows life in Cygwin, though, so that is nothing special to me.

So searching a Java project becomes “ack –java thing”.  This is better than doing something like

“find . -name *.java|grep -v .svn|xargs grep thing”.

If you put no file path to search on, it will try the files types it “knows” about.  Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t know about files that end in “.log”.  Know biggie — I just put “*.log” as the search path.

One gotcha is that ack searches with regular expressions, which may be good or it may be bad.  It’s good because it provides that power instead of adding an “e” or “-e” to the command.  Bad because regular expressions by default may bite you when you least expect it.  Like when searching for characters like *,?, etc.

I’ve been using it in my normal work this week and it has proven to be useful.  It would be hard to replace grep, but this is a great attempt.

Update  Andy Lester, ack’s author, emailed me and said:

 You can use –type-set log=.log and ack will recognize it.  Or, you can add that to your ~/.ackrc or ACK_OPTIONS.

As to the regexes, if you don’t want to think about which characters are special metacharacters, just add the -Q switch.

Thanks Andy, for the hints and the script!

Using Version Control in Emacs

I’ve recently discovered another wonderful thing about Emacs – Version Control

Let’s say you are working on a project that is under some version control system.  You are editing a file and you type “C-x v v”.  Then Emacs will do the next logical thing with that file.  If the file is not on version control, it will be added.  If it is, it will ask for a comment and check-in the file.  Note that no where do you actually tell Emacs which version control you are using.  It knows. I’ve done this successfully with Mercurial and Subversion and apparently their are many more.  I haven’t tried it under MKS, but that’s okay, because I refuse to use it anyway.

If you use Dired, then you can do “C-x v d” which is Dired under VCS.  See here for more about that.