Screen Sharing - Join.Me

Wow...just used the https://join.me/ for the first time. I called a support person who directed me to go the the join.me page and just click Share and then Basic. 30 Seconds later I told her the 9 digit number that popped up and voila she could see my screen and talk me through the steps needed. So Simple, Easy and Free.

So...To share your screen, simply download a small app, and then send the 9-digit code generated to your potential collaborator. They either click a link in the email, or go to the join.me website and input the code, and they can see your screen.

It fills a different need than the typical scheduled web conferencing solution (ie. GoToMeeting, WebEx etc). It is for instant web conferencing...click...click...read off a 9 digit number...they can see your screen. Try it...you just might be as impressed as I was.

Windows 7 Explorer up button

Windows Explorer in Windows 7 does not have a toolbar! What? Yep, it is replaced by useless buttons like 'Burn' that can't be easily removed.
Found a great solution and it is FREE!
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/index.html
Has all sorts of options, allows a nice directory up button for times when the breadcrumb thing is not really convenient. Besides after having an up button since using Windows 3.0 through windows 95, and XP...in other words over 20 years, I wanted it back and the great Classic Shell makes it available again in in a small convenient package.

Maybe I will get used to the breadcrumb someday, but for now I have my up button and I can reset many other annoying features of Win7.

Here are a few other things classic shell can do:

• Classic Start Menu is a clone of the original start menu, which you can find in all versions of Windows from 95 to Vista.
• Besides the single up button next to the forward and back buttons, you can have your full explorer toolbar back with copy, delete etc buttons.
• Fix the status bar
• Return the copy/overwrite dialog to one that is familiar

and more...

Innovation

I recently picked up a book I got at a trade show a few years ago called "The Art of Innovation" (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Innovation-Lessons-Creativity-Americas/dp/0385499841). It tells the story from inside Silicon Valley. Around the same time I came across this article by Bruce Nussbaum that claimed Innovation died in 2008.
I read that article on my iPhone using a cool FREE app called ReadItLater (http://readitlaterlist.com/) that allows you to quickly save articles for reading later and it optionally strips the article to plain text (a must for quick reading on the iPhone).
Last week a business partner's iPhone started messing up and he could not type some of the letters because of an issue with the touch screen. Dragon to the rescue. A free iPhone utility app from Nuance, the publisher of Dragon Naturally Speaking. A super clean interface (one big record button). You click it, say what you want to text or email to someone, Click the big Done Recording button and voila...there is your text. Extremely accurate, cool and innovative.
Then yesterday my friend Tom sent me a link to Google Fast Flip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/). Another cool and free way to consume a bunch of information quickly. It essentially grabs the first page of all major news articles, groups them into categories and allows you to qucikly flip through them and read the first page and click to read the full article! Awesome.

So is innovation dead...no I think not. If there is still any question look at the military UAV's or the dog robot.

ISO Mount - WinCDEmu

Check out this open source tool! Works great and is SUPER EASY to use...double click to mount Right click to eject. Could not be any easier.

WinCDEmu - A free CD/DVD emulator for Win32 and Win64 available at http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/

Outlook - Autocomplete email addresses

Have you ever wondered where Outlook keeps the hidden "address book" that auto-completes the email address as you type it in the To: box?

How do you get all those email addresses turned into contacts so you can move them around between computers etc?

The Answer: Outlook keeps them in an NK2 file. There is an NK2 file associated with each Outlook Profile on your computer and it is stored in the directory Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

More good news, there is a free utility called NK2View available from NirSoft It works magic on the NK2 file allowing you to fix an erroneous entry, export, delete etc. Just download and run it. It will open your current NK2 file and you can see all the auto-complete entries. You can export them as a text file and import them into Outlook as contacts. You can also do the reverse and take addresses in your address book and add them to your NK2 Auto Complete list. JUST WONDERFUL!

Remember before messing with files that are important to you...BACK THEM UP! You will be so happy if somehow it gets corrupted and you have a nice backup file :)

Extra Outlook - See Two different Exchange Servers at the same time

The problem has always been that Outlook supports only one Exchange server per profile. This means that if you are a consultant or work in a company with multiple Exchange servers that operate independently you were out of luck. You had to login to one...check your mail...close and open outlook again...select a second profile and login.

After a while searching on Google I found a solution to this problem courtesy of Paul Ockenden.

Tim Mullen and Jason Geffner worked together and came up with a solution! The problem is that the programmers of Microsoft Outlook basically do a FindWindow to see if outlook is already open and then if it is they kill the new process and open a window in the already open version. Once Jason got past that, he found that the next thing those efficient programmers did was check to see if a MAPI instance was already out there and if so use it, thereby eliminating the ability to sign into a second profile.

Tim wrote a little utility that jumps around all that and allows you to open a true second instance of Outlook. So...

1. Create your separate Outlook Profiles for each Exchange account and set it to prompt for profile name

2. Go to Tim's site below and download ExtraOutlook.zip

3. Copy ExtraOutlook.exe to your MS Office installation directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12)

4. Create a Shortcut with a target like "ExtraOutlook c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\outlook.exe"

5. Double Click and Enjoy having two Exchange accounts open at once.

Kudos for this information goes to

PCAuthority and Paul Ockenden

REblog and Jason Geffner

Hammer of God and Tim Mullen with his super utility ExtraOutlook

Been busy

Things have been crazy fun lately. Joined up in May with a new company called AAR Global Solutions. We are having fun building a new business.

So the other day we needed to send a large presentation with lots of pictures in it. Yeah...it was too big to email, so what to do. There are a ton of file upload sharing apps out there, but most of them require a proprietary client install. Even good old reliable FTP can be cumbersome at times for the receipient. A quick Google and up comes an easy to use service called senduit. It just plain works for files up to 100MB! Very easy and intuitive for the sender and the receiver. Check it out at http://www.senduit.com It works kind of like TinyURL. Cool!

Pictures and Editing

I have used many editors and tools.  I have tried Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro 7, 11, 12, DotNetPaint, GIMP etc.  They are all good (PaintShopPro 7 (2001 Anniversary Edition) is my favorite) and have their uses, but unless I need a lot of power, modifying heavily, or creating from scratch I really have found that the best out there for working with the digital files out of my camera is Picasa.

Direct from their website it says, "Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Sharing your best photos with friends and family is as easy as pressing a button!"

Advantages:

1. Free with a ton of cool features
2. Comes with a free website so you can share your pictures quickly and super easy
3. Easy!  Super easy to use adjustments (size, color, red-eye, brighness, sharpening etc)
4. Organizes your pictures easily and super easy to download from camera

Disadvantages:

1. Search, Find, tagging etc and finding an old picture could be improved
2. File moving, reorganizing and merging folders...is well...not easy at all!  Put your pictures where you want them and leave them there is pretty much how it works.  
3. The index that it creates gets really big over time on your hard drive and must stay on your C drive

Try it out.  I think you will like it a lot.   http://picasa.google.com

Requirements Traceability by using TheBrain

Last time (March 22^nd) we discussed kicking off the project and getting the requirements gathering started off on the right foot. There are a lot of great books out there for detailed Requirements gathering, one that I enjoyed reading was Software Requirements, Second Edition by Karl E. Weigers. However I don’t want to re-hash the great material covered in books like Karls.

As I mentioned last time, I would suggest that you break free from preconceived notions of what a requirement, a change request, a use case, user story have been traditionally and look at the problem fresh.  For this installment I am going to look at tracing the requirement through its lifecycle.

The one item that tends to show up late in the project and normally during QA or Customer review is a traceability.  Traceabilty is tracking where a requirement came from, where it is going, its lifecycle of changes/modifications and then proving that it is there in the final.  Why does it show up in the end?  Customer asks, “How do I do feature request A?” Product team happily opens the appropriate area of the application and says, “Ta-da”.  The customer analyzes what they see and then puzzled says, “What about being able to do ?” Now it is the product teams turn to look puzzled…hmmm…developer speaks up about then and rattles on about some work around that might be possible, 10 minutes later, it has become obvious that somewhere in the requirements trail, something went off track and the required feature was not fully implemented and it is going to be tough to get it back in by the due date.
YUCK!
So is there hope to get around the problem?

Run to Google real quick and look up requirements traceability and you get back a few hundred thousand hits. So obviously this is a problem more than one group has struggled with this. Definition of this area is pretty good on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_Traceability)

By mind mapping out all your requirements you can visualize complex requirements and pieces of a process that can otherwise feel overwhelming. Furthermore, if requirements or other variables change you can instantly see what’s connected and therefore what impact these changes will have. This will help you anticipate any complications with changes and make more informed decisions about the future direction of the project.

In the last installment I mentioned using Xmind or other mind mapping software to get things organized. I really think this is an area that traditional tools for requirements tracking fall down.
Visualization of the relationships between them, see groups and how the are realized in the product.  By mind mapping out the requirements it is easier to visualized the complexity of the requirements and the pieces of the a process or feature that can get lost in the overwhelming complexity.  Getting it all understood by the team is normally possible right prior to development kickoff, but then in comes the changes, technical hurdles, timeline adjustments etc, and now how do we understand the impact these changes will have.

I have found a slightly better mind mapping tool than Xmind for these types of challenges. (Thank you Bill Deweese for showing it to me!!!)
It is called the PersonalBrain from TheBrain Technologies (http://www.thebrain.com).
Of course there is a FREE version or I probably would not have tried it out!!! (Not open source but at least free for personal use :)

So let’s see what a simplistic example might look like. Here is the scenario depicted below.
We have a small project to develop a Resume Tracker for HR. TheBrain diagram below does not show the whole project, but shows the part of the requirement related to parsing the resume into the database and populating the persons biographical information. The part of the project team depicted below has a Project Manager (PM1), Lead Developer (LD1), Developer (D1), Developer (D2), and a Database Administrator (DBA1).

The above shows an expanded view....here is a more typical view that shows the ResumeImport function centered and the related items to it:


Try it on your agile project and see if it works for you.  So far so good in my limited trials.  I like the visual-ness of using TheBrain to see the relationships.  If I drop a developer from the project, I can quickly see what requirements and modules are impacted or add a requirement for additional fields it impacts both the D1 and DBA.

I will continue to keep track of my thoughts on this huge subject and occasionally post my ideas.
Good Luck on all your endeavors!

In Stitches

So my sister called and wanted to know what Emily's room looked like now. So I ran in there with my Nikon D80 with its 18-200 zoom lens. Hmmm...how do you get a picture of the whole room? So I stood in the door way and took 6 or 7 shots of the room. There...so downloaded them and they looked fine, but you had to scroll back and forth through them to get the 'whole picture' of what it looked like. Hmmm if there was only some easy way to stitch them all together...I am in a hurry and lazy...so do it automatically.
So I ask Google "stitch picture automatically" what my options are...the 3rd link on the page looked promising...something called AutoStitch. A quick trip the the AutoStitch website shows that I hit the bullseye first time out. I download the very small program (about 1 mb). Unzip it, click on the program name called AutoStitch.

There is a File menu, click open, browse to the pictures of Emily's room, select them and click ok, kinda wondering what was going to happen. The program, throws up a status thing about loading pictures and then something about RANSAC...I look away for a few seconds and bam, in my image editor there is a panoramic stitched together picture of my images of her room. WOW!!! I didn't tell it what order I took them in, I did not tell it where to start, no dragging, no dropping, just here are my files and it says here is your pano.jpg. Now it was not 100% perfect, but WOW!
The image posted here is the example that comes with AutoStitch when you download it. It took the seven images of the mountain and turned it into the full mountain.

Try it out...it is FREE and I think you will like it.

Thoughts to paper or to computer?

All of us have created a new, blank document or doodled on a pad staring at the vast empty space wondering what to do next. Well there are a number of tools out there to help handle that situation or brainstroming meetings etc, it is call "Mind Mapping". Mind mapping uses a process that gets the ideas out quickly, without needless organizational burdens.

In my ongoing quest of finding new tools, I have come across a couple in this category that are interesting. A commercial program that I have used previously is the MindJet MindManager product. It costs money (but does have a free trial), but it is out of consideration. Two others that are fairly prominent in the open source world are FreeMind and XMind.(note that XMind is a relative new comer to the open source world)

I have installed both and am trying them out. So far they are both AWESOME. I will update this post with which one is my favorite and why in a few days. In the mean time check out an example or two or three.

Update: 3 Feb - Uploaded a basic XMind map to http://share.xmind.net/ericmiles/sharepoint-hosting/. Xmind seems to work real well. Unfortunately, the ability to share mind maps between FreeMind and XMind is very limited. Heres to hoping for an open standard.

Update: 6 Feb - After using both for a few days, there are some great advantages to both. I really like the XMind layout options and floating nodes. I really like the copy and paste of text into FreeMind and its speed. I dislike the fact that interoperability between the two is so limited...please come up with a open standard format for mind maps. FreeMind has never crashed on me. XMind locked up one and blanked out my diagram (I had to close and reopen to get the graphics to redisplay.).
All in all if I was to tally points for features, etc, I think they would be in a dead tie. I will keep both installed for now. I find myself using XMind a little more because I can change the layout and look a little easier. Try them both you will win either way! :)

OpenProject - Microsoft should be worried

The number of great software projects that I never knew existed is simply amazing.  

Today I started using Serena OpenProj.  This is an open source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj) application that is freely available to run and use.  The amazing thing is that it works just like Microsoft Project!!!!  Yep.  First thing I tried was to open an MS-Project file I had been working on a few minutes earlier and just basically continued editing it with OpenProj.  The user interface is somewhat different and not quite as crisp, but that is mainly because this is a Java program that I can run on any platform, not just Windows.  

It is not all super sweet, there are some very minor drawbacks.  If you print out your project plan and are used to the specific look of MS Project Gantt charts, well...it is going to be a little different.  Oh...and don't expect to save it back as an .mpp file format.  You can save it as xml and then open the xml from MS Project.  Also if you are a true power user of MSProject, then there are numerous other minor things you will immediately notice.  But if all you need is a way to build the gantt, set up dependencies, use it to manage your project with...THIS IS IT...and it is open source! Free :)

TiddlyWiki and SlickRun

These are two utility programs that I have come to love in the short time I have been using them.   I have been using them since about the 8th of January.

TiddlyWiki - it is a wiki personal notebook.  I use it for keeping a daily journal of my notes and research and collection of links etc.  If you have a specific topic you want to collect notes about, just copy a blank Tiddly file and rename, double-click and begin adding content.   It is not designed to be multi-user.  It would be simple enough to publish the HTML to a webserver, but really it is supposed to run on your local hard drive.  I recommend using a different browser other than IE to edit it, because IE has all the warnings that pop up.  Personally I create a short cut to Google Chrome to open the specified Tiddlywiki file.

SlickRun - Switch little resident program that creates a little window that by default displays the date/time, but allows you to type in commands.  Each command is like a typical windows short cut link.  So you can set up a command (Called a Magic Word) in there to launch Microsoft Word.  You may decide you want your command(magicword) to be 'msword' or just 'w' or anything.  Then it will launch Word for you when you type the command.  Getting creative, you can set up a magic word called 'ts' (for timesheet) that will launch Microsoft Excel and open your XLS based timesheet.  Having it hover above all programs and being just a keystroke away is what makes it so Slick.  It is much faster to jump to it and quickly type 'exp' to launch explorer or type 'wiki' to launch Google Chrome with your TiddlyWiki file than to find the shortcut on your desktop and click on it etc.  it has some other fun features too, but I have not used them much.    

Check these two cool utilities out...I think you might like them :)

Sketching

What a cool tool. The Google Sketchup is amazing. So easy to use and yet very powerful 3d editor with a ton of free models available for making your drawing look great.

http://sketchup.google.com

I threw the below together in about 20 minutes of playing.  Pretty fun.

CD and DVD Burning

ImgBurn (http://www.imgburn.com) is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:

• Read - Read a disc to an image file
• Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write - Write an image file to a disc
• Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
• Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! 

Great little free tool!

Sweet little Excel Macro

I love Microsoft Excel macro's that make your life easier.  I was working on the collection of some data into a typical matrix grid, trying to compare items.  Formatting away getting layouts right and then it dawned on me, that I was going to have to put this grid online...ugh...I have seen the resulting HTML from an Excel save as...yuck.  So a quick search online revealed this little jewel of a macro.

http://www.meadinkent.co.uk/xladvhtml.htm  This macro was originally written by Chris Mead (www.meadinkent.co.uk)

It works clean and simply.  And produces a simple web page with the majority of formatting from Excel in tact.  Here is what it looked like in XLS

And here is what the output looked like in IE

Not to bad! And the HTML was clean and easy to edit for integration or use. The macro may require a bit of VB editing to make it work :) Have fun and enjoy.

The Utility Master List

If you have never seen Scott Hanselman's 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows, you must go visit.  Many of what I listed yesterday are on there and much much more!

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/radiostories/2003/09/09/scottHanselmansUltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolsList.html

I am trying out SlickRun and UltraMon from his list now.  Both seem great!  

More Utilities

I had to set up a new machine and as I started digging around I found a wealth of super tools that are mostly free and make experience on the PC and Web so much better. 

Here goes my list:

DropBox - http://www.getdropbox.com The first 2 GB are free.  Then it is $99 for 50GB per year.  With DropBox you're paying for 3 features. One is an offsite storage space for your files. Two is a syncing application to synchronize your files on multiple computers, and three, is a system to keep track of incremental changes which at first won't mean much if you aren't doing project related work. 

IDrive - http://www.idrive.com Similar to DropBox.  I am still comparing these.  Both are great products.  IDrive is cheaper... $4.95 a month for $150 GB.  No costs for the versioned files.

PicasaWeb - http://picasaweb.google.com Awesome picture program for the PC and free picture online hosting for sharing with friends, families and blogs.

AxCrypt - http://www.axantum.com  AxCrypt Great features like automatic re-encryption after modification, simple double-click to edit any file you encrypt. Love the integration with Explorer etc. Best of all it is GNU General Public License free software.  If you like it, consider their Xecrets free service as well.

CutePDF - http://www.cutepdf.com Create professional quality PDF files from almost any printable document.  FREE for personal, commercial, gov or edu use! It works great!

7-Zip - http://www.7-zip.org Free, open source Windows utility for manipulating archives. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, ISO, MSI, WIM, NSIS, RPM and DEB formats.  This is a great utility.

ZoomIt - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx This is a must have screen zoom tool.  Designed for presentations and it works AWESOME!  

WinSnap - http://www.ntwind.com/software/winsnap.html WinSnap is a small enhancement utility for taking and editing screenshots.  WinSnap Portable is a special version of WinSnap designed to run from removable media like a USB flash drive.

Although everything above this is Windows oriented, I must give a big pointer to some really great software that runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack.  Although these are not really personal use utility apps, some small to medium size business users will love this stuff!

XAMPP - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html New to AMP...just go get this.  It is slick and it installs super friendly and just works.  XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl.  Just get this :)

Trellis Desk - http://www.accord5.com/trellis A free help desk application with intuitive UI and user friendly system. PHP and MySQL.  

PureEdit - http://www.pureedit.com Simple easy to use Content Management System.

TiddlyWiki - http://www.tiddlywiki.com A little background to go with this one...I went to SD West 2005 and bumped into personal use of wiki's for the first time.  I used FlexWiki at the time.  It worked so great for keeping track of personal notes, the syntax was quick and easy to take bulleted notes during a session.  So as I set up the new computer, I realized that I missed having that around.  My search this time around came upon TiddlyWiki, a single file HTML wiki.  It is self described as "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook".   It just flat out works and works well.  I like it.  Try it out for a notebook.  If you are graphically inclined then probably Microsoft OneNote is more up your alley.  

Well that is all for this time

PDF Utility

Ever need to turn a document into a PDF file? Don't have the money or desire to install the full version of Adobe Acrobat?

There is a great FREE solution out there that downloads easily, installs, and just flat out works. It is CutePDF - http://www.cutepdf.com 
You can create professional quality PDF files from almost any printable document. FREE for personal, commercial, gov or edu use! It works great!

Need more than the free version offers? Consider their professional version (visit their website for the details).