OK – I know that a lot of stuff has been written on this. But most of these doesn’t really cut what I want. Mainly for two reasons: Either you could export your contacts to CSV (comma separated text format). This causes loss of non-text data such as images etc. There are some really good (I presume?) tools for this. But they all cost money… Some of the cost a lot. $49 for Outlook Contacts Exporter. My solution is free. Don’t bother about that. Here is how you do it easily and absolutely free. Open Outlook (I’m using 2007) and go to Contacts. Mark them all, right-click and go “Send as Business Card”. This will attach all the marked contacts to a mail. Send the mail to a mailbox that your Mac can read. Open the mail and save all contacts (Save->All) to the hard drive of the Mac Use...

Last week on the Kanban course we brushed on Root-Cause analysis several times. It is really a great tool for getting to the “root of all evil” if you like, or in any case the problem. Although the base concepts are quite easy to grasp some guidance and best practices is always a good way to get you started. Mr Kniberg has done it again and serves us a great article that introduces the subject, with a humorous twist. Thanks Henrik!

Yeah – I know that I already has written about an online PowerPoint, but this tool actually replaces the need for that and PowerPoint altogether. I often found myself hacking away on a presentation just to find that I is sooo boring at the end. A lot of slides with a lot of bullet points on. I know that you can make it nicer and cooler in PowerPoint but I don’t know how. Here is the tool that helps with that – Prezi. It’s more like making presentable mind maps but it works really great. Even I can make things that looks … well, not bad any way. It could also be one of the coolest GUI’s I ever worked with. Here is my first try, summing up some stuff that David Andersson wrote on the flip chart during the Kanban class last week.

During the last week I took a course in Kanban (Jedi level mind you well) a Crisp in Stockholm. Giving the course was David Andersson, more or less the father of Kanban for software business as I understand. If you don’t know anything about Kanban (as I didn’t) then this article by Henrik Kniberg is a great introduction. Also keep your eyes open on Info-Q for a complete book on the subject with some great case studies. I think that the course was really good and gave me some deeper understanding in Lean-thinking. There are some simple but powerful tools in there; visualization (put it up on the wall!), give room for the value-adding things in your process and minimize waste, root-cause analysis etc. Kanban itself is not really that hard to grasp (thank God!) but it’s like any game; the rules are simple but mastering it takes a lifetime....

OK – this has been quite a journey and I am not completely satisfied with the solution yet – but I works. During the journey I have also deleted all my contacts and calendar items on my phone about five times… Brrr – equally scary each time. The problem is as follows; as a consultant I am working for customers that have their own Exchange Server (or similar). When I start there I am given an account for example marcus.hammarberg@anycustomer.se. So my coworkers at AnyCustomer will start sending me emails and making appointments in my AnyCustomer-calendar. Also I work for Avega – that of course supplies me with an email address and accompanying calendar. Finally I have a private Gmail account for private stuff. So I have three synchronization problems; mail, contacts and calendar items. Here is how I am synching them right now. I hope that a better solution...

Last Thursday the day had finally arrived. From a not very well planned post after an article it has been quite a journey to finally get a visit from one of the IT-gigants – Ivar Jacobsson. I have made a short recap of what he said here (in Swedish), but the main thing for me was just to see and hear a man with that amount of experience, with all the enthusiasm still intact. Also I like the ideas on the computer industry being a fashion industry that chases trend after trend. Ivar has started to look away from the different processes and instead focus on the practices that is used and can be combined into great support for the organization. I really laughed hard at one of his statements: “We really has gone crazy with the documentation” (my translation). This said from the father of RUP that so many...

I found a cool tool that allows you to create, edit and show slide show presentations online. The tool is called 280slides.com and is completely free. It also allows you to upload presentations in Power Point format, to save presentations “in the cloud” and also download the presentation in several well-know formats (ppt(x) and pdf for example). I like it! BTW, this is my 600th post… It’s been a joy and I have no intention to stop. But I never knew from the start

Although there is a some time since the vaccation I realized that I haven’t posted photos from it. Here are a short summary of what we did and went during those lovely summer months. Not too far away…   Albert enjoying himself on the seashore - he stayed here most days…   Here we are on our way into the water. Again. Elin and I went to Liverpool for a short holiday without Albert. But thogether with Kalle and Fanny. Here is a picture from the shores of the Ireland sea. Albert in Västra bodarna where his cousin Hilda is living. She wasn’t born yet, but is now.   And one of those lovely barbecues on Hyppeln. Notice the Swedish summer evening weather.

I have noticed that I’ve been reading some reference literature in the IT-department lately. I don’t know why but it’s a great way to get to know some of the giants that frequently is mentioned in current hot developer topics. So after Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Clean Code the time had come to Test-driven development: by example (my good –Google Books is almost scary). This is was by far the funniest IT-book I ever read. I burst out laughing from time to other and found myself giggling through the whole thing. For example read this paragraph about the time when Kent Beck was young. The book itself is centered around two example that take you through a variety of disciplines in TDD. And then mr Beck talks about patterns in TDD; design patterns, testing patterns and refactoring pattern. Overall I felt that the book was more about the...

As I wrote earlier I attended my first ever Alt.Net un-conference this weekend. It was very rewarding and great to meet fellow developers under such informal circumstances. The open spaces was the most rewarding part I think. One of the open spaces I took part in were about Pair Programming. It soon evolved to a session about how to convince developers / management and other that it’s a good idea. Here is a short recap of some of the good thoughts that emerged from that session. Good ideas Switch the keyboard often. I.e. one developer writes the test and one the implementation or use some kind of a pomodoro clock for ten mintues. Switch partners often – once a day for example Argument for the benefits of Pair Programming It’s fun! No more agrument should really be needed than this. You need fun at work or else you should work...