Neil Davidson’s book is an excellent, short, easy to read guide to software pricing. It all starts with some very basic economics: what’s the best middle ground between quantity (number of sold products) and price. At which ratio can you maximize your revenue?

Further Davidson advises that you should first think about what you actually want to sell. Better to say: What’s your actually product? In most cases this is not just the software, it’s additional services, support, reassurance and eventually many other things.

After these two introductory chapters, Davidson comes to to the core of the topic: Chapter 3 – Pricing Pitfalls: Keep an eye on your competitors, be fair to your customer and finally chapter 4: Advanced Pricing meaning: versioning, bundling, multi user licenses, site licenses and the popular freemium model. Last but not least chapter 5 talks about what the price of your product says about you and how you can change it if you don’t like what it says. The last chapter is a very useful checklist about product pricing.

The book is available for free on the web or you an buy a paper copy at Amazon.

“Die Kunst über Geld nachzudenken” ist André Kostolanys letztes Buch und jeder der sich für die Börse interessiert sollte sich zunächst dieses Buch zu Gemüt führen bevor er zu irgendeinem anderen Buch über dieses Thema greift. Was nicht heißen soll das viel gute weiterführende Literatur gibt. Mit Kostolanys Buch bekommt man jedoch ein erstes Gefühl dafür wie die Börse funktioniert.

Themen sind unter anderem:

• Einstellungen zum Geld. Wer wirklich zu Geld kommen will, darf _nicht_ denken, dass Geld stinkt: Geld stinkt nicht.
• Börsenteilnehmer: Über Makler, Money-Manager, Finanziers, Arbitrageure, Börsenspieler, Anleger, Spekulanten.
• Womit kann man spekulieren: Über Anleihen, Devisen, Rohstoffe, Sachwerte, Immobilien und Aktien.
• Die Börse an sich. Geschichte. Inwiefern spiegelt die Börse die reale Wirtschaft wieder? > weniger als man denkt
• Was die Börse bewegt: Es ist letztendlich lediglich der Mechanismus von Angebot und Nachfrage
• Langfristige Einflussfaktoren: Friede ist das wichtigste
• Mittelfristige Einflussfaktoren: Geld + Psychologie = Tendenz; Rolle von Inflation und Deflation
• Börsenpsychologie:: Das Ei des Kostolany, die vier “G” des Spekulanten: Geld, Gedanken, Glück, Geduld. Um an der Börse erfolgreich zu sein muss man antizyklisch handeln.

A few days ago I had to analyze a string, figure out whether it is a URI and if yes, then do something with parts of the URI, like the host, the pathname and the parameters. Since I was coding in C# I thought the Uri class would be just ideal for that.

So first I implemented this

Uri myUri;
try {
    myUri = new Uri(myUrlString);
} catch (UriFormatException) {
    // do something
}

Then however I realized that there is a function for testing the validity of a string:

Uri myUri;
if (Uri.IsWellFormedUriString(myUrlString)) {
    myUri = new Uri(myUrlString);
}

This is much nicer. I don’t like using exceptions to handle expected workflows. In this case the string can be a valid or invalid Uri, so really the if-then-else construction is nicer than the try-catch. The problem is that even though IsWellFormedUriString returns true you might not be able to create an Uri instance from it. Consider this small programm:

using System;
namespace DemoConsoleApp
{
	class MainClass
	{
		public static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			Uri myUri;
 
			string myUrl1 = "www.mydomain.de/test/file.aspx";
			string myUrl2 = "http://www.mydomain.de/test/file.aspx";
 
			Console.WriteLine(Uri.IsWellFormedUriString(myUrl1, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
			Console.WriteLine(Uri.IsWellFormedUriString(myUrl2 ,UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
 
			try {
				myUri = new Uri(myUrl1);
			} catch (UriFormatException) {
				Console.WriteLine("Failed to create Uri from myUrl1");
			}
 
			try {
				myUri = new Uri(myUrl2);
			} catch (UriFormatException) {
				Console.WriteLine("Failed to create Uri from myUrl2");
			}
		}
	}
}

The output is :

True
True
Failed to create Uri from myUrl1

According to the documentation, the first call of Uri.IsWellFormedUriString should returns false. If it did this would be also consistent with the constructor, which fails for myUrl1.

By default, the string is considered well-formed in accordance with RFC 2396 and RFC 2732. If International Resource Identifiers (IRIs) or Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) parsing is enabled, the string is considered well-formed in accordance with RFC 3986 and RFC 3987.
The string is considered poorly formed, causing the method to return false, if any of the following conditions occur
[...]
The string represents a hierarchical absolute Uri and does not contain “://” – www.contoso.com/path/file

I recently noted that some elements on my page randomly weren’t rendered like I expected even though other elements of the same CSS class were rendered correctly. Looking at the code I noticed that Firefox was adding weird tags to link tags:

<h1>
    <a _moz-rs-heading="" href="/lists/1?locale=en">Gute Weine</a>
</h1>

But not only that. The whole HTML structure was messed up.

The green area highlights a correctly rendered element like it was coded in the plain file. The red area highlights what happened randomly in Firefox.

After a bit of googling it turned out that this false rendering was caused by a mistake from my side: You should not wrap block elements like div and h1 with a link tag. So the HTML really should look more like this:

<li class="list" id="list_19">
    <div class="list_content">
        <h1><a href="/lists/19?locale=en">Einkaufsliste</a></h1>
        <div class="summary">
          <a href="/lists/19?locale=en">
              4 items in total, 3 items done.
              <br>
              Last updated 3 days ago
          </a>
        </div>
    </div>
</li>

In this code a-tags wrap only text elements. img-tag would be fine, too. Other elements you should avoid in order to prevent rendering you don’t expect.

It looks like amongst a lot of other cool stuff HTML5 will bring us also block-level links.

Today I ran into a nasty bug which is only reproducible in Google Chrome. In Firefox the very same code worked perfectly fine.

The code was supposed to work like this: After the user clicked the delete icon, jQuery would send an ajax request to the server, which then would delete the list. In the call back the UI gets updated by removing the list entry element. It’s as simple as that. The HTTP method was set to DELETE to be clean. In Firefox that worked great, in Google Chrome not at all. However you didn’t get a client side error, at least not at first, but a Rails error which would look like this:

Error occurred while parsing request parameters.
Contents:
 
[object Object]
/!\ FAILSAFE /!\  Sat Feb 20 18:56:39 +0100 2010
  Status: 500 Internal Server Error
  undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/whiny_nil.rb:52:in `method_missing'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/xml_mini/rexml.rb:29:in `merge_element!'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/xml_mini/rexml.rb:18:in `parse'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/xml_mini.rb:12:in `__send__'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/xml_mini.rb:12:in `parse'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/core_ext/hash/conversions.rb:164:in `from_xml'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/params_parser.rb:34:in `parse_formatted_parameters'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/params_parser.rb:11:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/session/cookie_store.rb:93:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/failsafe.rb:26:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/lock.rb:11:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/lock.rb:11:in `synchronize'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/lock.rb:11:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/dispatcher.rb:114:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/reloader.rb:34:in `run'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/dispatcher.rb:108:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/rails/rack/static.rb:31:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/urlmap.rb:46:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/urlmap.rb:40:in `each'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/urlmap.rb:40:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/rails/rack/log_tailer.rb:17:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/content_length.rb:13:in `call'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:50:in `service'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:104:in `service'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:65:in `run'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:173:in `start_thread'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in `start_thread'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:95:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:in `each'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:23:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:82:in `start'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:14:in `run'
    /home/siebel/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/commands/server.rb:111
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
    /home/siebel/projects/Memento/script/server:3
    -e:1:in `load'
    -e:1

Since the server returned a HTTP 500 error, the client side displayed a message to the user that an error occurred. That certainly was ok, but why the hack did Rails throuw an error?

I had to google a while till I found this ticket: Bug in Chromium with GET parameters when doing a POST request

So it looked like something is going wrong when you send URL parameters alongside during a POST, PUT or DELETE. Since I’m using a URL parameter to specify the locale, I first thought that’s the issue: http://localhost:3000/lists/14?locale=en. Sadly removing it didn’t help.
While searching through the code I realized that for non-GET requests I was adding data to the PUT, DELETE, POST URL by this code:

$(document).ajaxSend(function(event, request, settings) {
        settings.data = { SomeParameter: "value" };
});

Once I commented out this one line things started working. I could finally delete the list using Chrome. The question now: How do I send this additional data. Fun thing: I didn’t have to … it was already added by other parts of the code. So the real issue here was that I had two parameters with the same name in my request. This was gracefully handled but Firefox but not by Google Chrome.

If you ever considered freelancing as an alternative to earn money, you might want to check out this book. It touches a lot of, if not all, parts you should think about before you start freelancing. It contains a rich set of resources for getting additional information and serves perfectly as a checklist you want check from time to time during your first year as a freelancer.

Even if you’re currently not thinking about freelancing the book gives you some good ideas about what everything is important in (web / it) business. It’s more then just programming and that’s maybe hard to understand for some coders: there’s marketing, sales, accounting, creating and maintaining partnerships, business development, taking care of legal issues and dealing with difficult customers. You scratch the surface of all that in Burke’s book. And for the beginning the surface might be just enough. I guess once you run your own business you’ll soon find out in which areas you need to get more information. Again, you can check out the additional resources mentioned throughout the guide.

An often heard argument pro freelancing is to gain more freedom compared to a solid job as an employee of a company. However to truly gain this freedom you need to strictly organize your time which means also separating private time from working time. In this book you’ll find examples and techniques to do so.

All in all a book worthwhile reading, no matter whether you really want to freelance or not.

In “Die kleine Stechardin” schreibt Hofmann über das Leben des Göttinger Gelehrten Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Es ist eine unheimlich menschliche Geschichte mit vielen Höhen und auch Tiefen. Es geht um Emotionen, Hoffnungen, Liebe, ganz einfach um das Leben an sich. Obwohl mit Sicherheit und eigener Aussage des Autors nicht alles auf geschichtlichen Tatsachen beruht, wirkt nichts gekünstelt oder falsch. Eine Geschichte, die man sich nach Möglichkeit nicht entgehen lassen sollte

I just ran into an interesting warning and since it took me a few minutes to figure it out I thought I share it here.

I’m rendering a partial template like this:

render :partial => 'list_items/list_item', :locals => { :list => @list, :list_items => @list_item}

Now, when running this code I got this deprecation warning:

DEPRECATION WARNING: @list_item will no longer be implicitly assigned to list_item. 
(called from _run_erb_app47views47list_items47_list_item46html46erb_locals_list_list_item_list_items_object 
at /home/stefan/projects/Memento/app/views/list_items/_list_item.html.erb:1)

The problem here was that in the partial I’m using the local variables are named list and list_item, in the render call however I’m passing in list and list_items. Everything still works because rails implicitly assigns @list_item to the local variable list_item. This is what the warning says…

So the fix is simply removing the additional “s”.

render :partial => 'list_items/list_item', :locals => { :list => @list, :list_item => @list_item}

Not specifically hard but yet another prove that taking “a close look” at your own code is always difficult ;-) I bet a peer what have see the problem in a sec …

Freakonomics promises to “explore the hidden side of everything“. Well, it doesn’t … obviously it can’t. Nevertheless it’s funny to read and there are a couple of interesting things in the book.

A few notes:

• There are three different kind of incentives: moral, social and financial; Incentives are the cornerstones of modern life.
• Everybody cheats, that’s nature.
• The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Just because you feel comfortable with something it doesn’t mean it’s correct. Use hard data to check whether something is really true.
• Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.
• Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda >> information asymmetry

The final two chapters are mainly about parenting and children names … which was not particularly interesting for me, but might be for others. Just one thing: there’s almost no other area where false conventional wisdom is so widely spread like in parenting.

I’d say out of five stars it gets three.

Learning Rails on a real project (ListKungFu.com) is great fun and you’ll find out everyday something else which makes Rails the awesome framework it is. In the beginning of cause, that are rather small but unbelievable convenient things, in this case that is: The content_for helper command.

In an application as simple as List Kung Fu most views are structured like that:

So we have the ListKungFu logo, a profile and a logout link in the header and some notes in the footer. All this you typically would find in a layout file (application.html.erb) because it’s likely you wanna display these elements on each page of your application. The more page specific data is rendered using a template, in this case show.html.erb.

List Kung Fu uses a fair amount of Javascript. My first approach was putting everything in a single .js file and loading it in application.html.erb. That’s ok for the beginning but becomes pretty soon pretty ugly. First, you end up with one big Javascript file which is not really nice for maintaining, second and that’s much worse: The user’s browser is loading the Javascript code for the complete application even though just a fraction of it is used per page.

Obviously the first thing you wanna do is splitting up the big Javascript file. My splitting strategy goes like this:

• Code which is used all over the application and which might be useful even in different applications I put into application.js. This file in included in the layout file.
• Second, I created a file called listkungfu.js containing Javascript which is also used over the whole application but is more specific and therefore unlikely to be reused in another application.
• All Javascript code which is specific to just a small part of a application, e.g. a single view, I put into a separate file. Following above example there is for instance a file called lists_show.js for the show.html.erb view.

All we have to do now is including application.js and listkungfu.js in the layout file and lists_show.js in the view template.

<%=javascript_include_tag 'lists_show' %>

Done.

Hm… after loading the view in the browser and looking at the generated HTML you might not be satisfied a 100%. The Javascript files included in application.html.erb nicely line up at the bottom of the page, but lists_show.js is loaded somewhere in the middle of the HTML.

So, how do we move it down? You might have guessed it: content_for to the rescue!

Let’s replace above code with:

<% content_for :addtional_scripts do %>
    <%=javascript_include_tag 'lists_show' %>
<% end %>

And yield the content at the end of the layout file:

    <%= javascript_include_tag 'application', 'listkungfu' %>
    <%= yield(:addtional_scripts) %>
  </body>
</html>

After reloading the view in the browser you’ll find the view specific Javascript file loaded after the two general files.

Very cool!

content_for can be used for a dozen other things, too. Think about having a side bar defined in the layout displaying view specific information, etc…

Schon Des Teufels General hat mich überrascht, da ich normalerweise nicht der typische Leser von Theaterstücken bin. Zuckmayers Stücke sind erfreulicherweise wenig abstrakt, haben eine klare Sprache und plastische Charaktere.

Die Ausgabe von “Der Rattenfänger” die ich gekauft habe enthält vier Theaterstücke:

1. Der Kranichtanz – Der fünfte Akt eines Stückes von dem es die ersten vier nicht gibt.
2. Der Heimkehrer – Eine Auftragsarbeit für die Stadt Mainz.
3. Das Leben des Horace A. W. Tabor – Eine wahre Geschichte.
4. Der Rattenfänger – Basierend auf der Fabel über den Rattenfänger aus Hameln.

Mit Abstand am Besten gefallen hat mir “Das Leben des Horace A. W. Tabor“. Das es sich dabei um ein auf wahren Begebenheiten beruhendes Theaterstück handelt, habe ich erst erfahren als ich den Anhang gelesen habe. Die Figuren gehen einem nahe und obwohl es sich ja rein von der Seitenzahl her um recht kurze Geschichten handelt, schafft es Zuckmayer den Charakteren eine unheimliche Tiefe zu geben.

Auf dem zweiten Platz landet der Kranichtanz, auch wenn es sich nur um einen 5. Akt handelt. Es ist schade das die erste vier Akte nie geschrieben worden sind.

“Der Rattenfänger“, das Stück welches dieser Ausgabe den Namen gibt, halte ich für lesenswert, hat mich persönlich aber nicht so angesprochen wie die beiden ersten Stücke. Es ist eine Fabel und somit nicht so aus dem Leben gegriffen wie der Kranichtanz, die Geschichte der Tabors oder des Teufels General.

Der Heimkehrer landet mit viel Abstand zu allem anderen was ich bisher von Carl Zuckmayer gelesen habe auf Platz vier. Für meinen Geschmack zu poetisch, zu künstlerisch. Ich bin kein Theaterkritiker, sondern Genießer und als solcher hat es mich wenig angesprochen.

Ich freue mich schon auf die nächsten Bücher von Zuckmayer. Bisher bin ich wenig enttäuscht worden.

I thought this is an excellent article:

Doing It Wrong

So good that I want to waste some of my time citing from it:

[...] What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups. [...]

[...] More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. I don’t hear a lot of talk these days from anyone claiming to “do Extreme” or “be Agile”. But then, in Web-land for damn sure I never hear any talk about large fixed-in-advance specifications, or doing the UML first, or development cycles longer than a single-digit number of weeks.[...]

Everybody knows that many millions and billions have been wasted in enterprise IT systems, so:

Plan A: Don’t build systems

If you really have to, Plan B: Do it better.

Please read the article: Doing It Wrong

When you start using Rails you pretty soon start using partials for saving forms in an extra template in order to re-use them in the different views of a CRUD interface.

If you go just a little bit further you’ll find out that partials are also very useful when building Ajax applications with Rails. Often when you do an Ajax call the one thing you want to do in the callback is updating the DOM of the page.

When the user clicks on the plus-button in above user interface, a form will popup which allows him to add another list. Once the form is filled in it will be send to the server using an Ajax call. Finally in the callback the new list will be added to the DOM.
So there are two situations when you want to render a list:

1. When the page with all available lists is rendered.
2. When the user adds a new list.

This sounds like the perfect use-case for a partial, so let’s create one. For above user interface the ERB template could look like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

<li id="list_<%=list.id%>" class="list">
    <div>
        <h1><%= list.title == '' ? '<em>enter a title</em>' : list.title  %></h1>
        <div class="summary">
          <%= pluralize list.list_items.length, 'item' %>
          , <%= pluralize list.list_items_done, 'item' %> done.<br/>
          Last updated <%= distance_of_time_in_words list.updated_at, Time.now %> ago
        </div>
    </div>
</li>

We save this code in a file named _list.html.erb.

In the view which generates the complete list of lists, we call the partial from within an each loop (index.html.erb):

1
2
3

<%- @lists.each do |list| -%>
  <%= render :partial => 'lists/list', :object => list %>
<%- end -%>

If you look back to the partial code in _list.html.erb, you’ll notice a local variable being used called list. By adding the parameter :object => list to the render call in index.html.erb we make this variable available in the partial.

Let’s finally have a look at the view for the Ajax callback. It’s saved in create.js.erb and can be as easy as this:

1
2

    var new_list = "<%=escape_javascript(render :partial => 'lists/list', :object => @list)%>";
    $("#all_lists").prepend(new_list);

All we do is assigning the list-HTML to a Javascript variable. For this we need to wrap the render call into an escape_javascript. Next we prepend this list to the ul-element using jQuery. That’s it.

Even though this is not a complete code example I hope it’ll point into the right direction. Please post questions as comments to this post.

“So ein alberner Vogel, ein sogenannter Phönix, den es früher mal gab: alle paar Jahrhunderte baute er sich einen Scheiterhaufen und verbrannte sich selber. Muß ein naher Verwandter des Menschen gewesen sein. Aber jedesmal, wenn er sich verbrannte, entsprang er neugeboren wieder aus der Asche. Es hat den Anschein, als machten wir es ebenso, immer wieder, nur in einem sind wir dem Phönix voraus. Wir wissen, was wir da eben für einen Stumpfsinn angestellt haben. Wir wissen alles, was wir seit tausend Jahren an Stumpfsinn angestellt haben, und solange wir das wissen und es uns immer wieder zu Gemüte führen, besteht die Hoffnung, daß wir eines Tages doch einmal aufhören, diese verdammten Scheiterhaufen zu errichten und mitten hinein zu springen. Im Laufe der Zeit sind es immer wieder ein paar Leute mehr, die sich erinnern.”

Neben 1984 und Brave New World gehört Fahrenheit 451 zur Klasse der dytopischen Romane. Anders als bei den Klassikern von Orwell und Huxley wird der totalitäre Staat nicht von oben herab diktiert, sondern wurde vom Volk gewünscht. Man fühlt sich wohl in der Konformität der Gruppe, man lässt sich lieber berieseln anstatt selbst zu schaffen. In dieser Welt ist die Feuerwehr nicht zum Löschen von Feuern da, sondern zum Verbrennen von Büchern, da diese als Quell allen Übels angesehen werden.

Ich bin kein Literaturexperte, sondern lese nur gerne Bücher und bei diesem stimmt meiner bescheidenen Meinung nach alles: Aufbau, Sprache, Geschichte und die Aussage selbst.

If you used the public transport in Prague recently, especially the metro, you might have noticed commercials of Bonus.cz.

The idea itself is great and for sure pays out for the company running the site. The concept is this: People buy points. For these points they can bid on a product. By biding on a product the price increases. The product is available for at least 24 hours during which the user can bid. If someone else bids in the last 30 seconds however, the countdown resets again to 30 seconds. If no one else bid during that last 30 seconds period, the user who bid last on the product won.

The calculation for the user:
Final product price = Cost for points he needed for biding + final state of the bid

The calculation for the company:
Profit = Cost of all (!) points bid on that product – Price for buying the product

So far so good. The “dangerous” thing here is that most people won’t get that this is pure gambling (like in the casino) and the bank always wins: You buy your tokens and make a bet e.g. when playing roulette. There’s a small chance you win but usually you’ll loose!

So your calculation is not really “Cost for points + final state of the bid”. By trying again and again to “win” you will invest so much money that in the end it’s likely that you’ve paid more for points than you would have paid for the desired new mobile phone, digital camera or what so ever…

There’s a similar site in Germany: www.dealstreet.de and I’m sure you’ll find sites with the same concept in other countries, too.

Just read this article: Business leaders to get back to basics

Great stuff:

Leadership qualities are constant, yet fluid. Those that were important a century ago – for example, integrity, leading by example, motivating people, developing talent, customer satisfaction, creating and maintaining a competitive advantage – remain vital today. Still, other qualities have been less enduring, proving to be panaceas for their time.

A Novel About Project Management

Inspired by George Gamow’s story-like books about the secrets of physics, Tom DeMarco delivered a great book about project management. Since his lectures are wrapped with a nice story it makes them a) nice to read and b) easily understandable because the story is sort of a real world example of what DeMarco wants to teach us.

It all starts with Mr Tompkins, the central character of the book, being laid off from his job as a manager. While attending some HR lectures he’s kidnapped. A few hours later he finds himself in the fictitious post communistic country of Morovia where he’s offered a job to build up the countries software industry. He accepts and from that point on the reader is learning about management by simply following the adventures of Mr Tompkins as a top manager. Luckily Mr Tompkins writes all his experiences down into a diary.

His diary starts with the Four Essentials of Good Management:

1. Get the right people.
2. Match them to the right jobs.
3. Keep them motivated.
4. Help their teams to jell and stay jelled.

(All the rest is Administrivia)

I’m pretty sure I can’t just copy all entries 1:1 here due to copyright issue or such, but let me try to sum up the key points I got from reading The Deadline

• Change is essential to all success in project work, but people need to feel save in order to embrace change and take risks.
• Threats are a bad people motivator or tool for increasing performance.
• Management is not a completely technical discipline at all: Management involves heart, gut, soul and nose. However, you can try to model your hunches. You can use models to simulate results and tune the models by comparing these results with the actual results.
• Don’t try to hire alone – two guts are more than twice as good as one. Also listen more than you speak.
• Productivity improvement always comes from long-term investment, never short-term.
• You can’t and shouldn’t avoid risks. Just you need to manage them. Part of that is to have a method to discover early symptoms of a risk. A good method to do so is to appoint a risk officer, one person who is not expected to maintain a Can-Do attitude. Another method could be to establish easy and / or anonymous channels for bad news.
• Keep good teams together.
• A lost day at the beginning of the project is as bad as a lost day at the end.
• Pathological Politics: You have to be willing to put your job on the line any day, even though that doesn’t guarantee that this sort of tactic will work out.
• Pathology has effects on team size: Leanly staffed projects become unsafe (Because it might be argued that you didn’t put enough men power on the project)
• Metrics are useful but don’t worry necessarily about the units. For a first try that could be anything. Try to collect archaeological data to derive productivity trends.
• People under pressure don’t think any faster! Also extended overtime is a productivity reduction tactic. Short bursts of pressure however can make people focus better and increase the sense that the work is important.
• Anger and contempt in management are always counter productive. When upper management is abusive, lower management is likely to mimic the behavior.
• If a specification of a software product doesn’t come to the point (doesn’t at least specify input and output of the system) it’s often a sign of unresolved conflict among the various system stakeholders.
• Conflict deserves respect. Conflict is not a sign of unprofessional behavior.
• Negotiation is hard; mediation is easy. BUT: the parties need to agree on mediation and it can’t come from upper management, rather from someone who is not involved or wouldn’t have any advantage from the one or the other outcome.

As always a summary can’t tell the whole story so I really recommend everyone who is interested in the topic and who has come that far reading this article to get a copy of The Deadline at Amazon:

Even in a 5 out of 5 stars book, there’s always one point you don’t totally agree with. For me that is DeMarco’s suggestion to invest the major amount of project time into the design phase of the project, so that coding can be pushed rather to the end. This should improve the quality of the software and also limit the need of QA and later refactoring (which is expensive). In my mind this won’t work in most real life projects because the requirements are just to fuzzy and become more stable in a rather iterative process. Therefore the software development process should also be rather iterative like suggested for example in various agile methodologies

Additional Resources:

• More books by Tom DeMarco
• A review of The Deadline by Dr. Patricia McQuaid

The new version of Wordpress, 2.9, brings us some basic image editing which turns out to be really handy:

Thanks for that feature!

Gut das die Erlöse aus dem Verkauf von “Die Märchen von Beedle dem Barden” an eine wohltätige Organisation, die Children High Level Group gehen, die unter anderen auch von Rowling ins Leben gerufen wurde.

Die Märchen von Beedle dem Barden besteht aus fünf kurzen Märchen die recht schön zu lesen sind. Das Buch hätte jedoch ca. 2/3 weniger Seiten, wären da nicht die Kommentare von Albus Dumbledore, die wohl eher an die eingefleischten Harry Potter Fans gerichtet sind…

Für echte Harry Potter Fans sind die Märchen wahrscheinlich ein Pflichtkauf. Der Rest greift lieber zu einem anderen Buch. Aus fünf möglichen Sternen vergebe ich 2,5. Es wäre schön wenn das Buch von sich selbst leben könnte und nicht so stark an den Erfolg von Harry Potter knüpfen müsste. Ich hoffe man sieht in Zukunft noch ein paar bessere Bücher von Rowling.

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