Author Archives: Marius

About Marius

Owner of Henriska Technology and Project Manager by profession.

Wisdom from NASA on Project Management

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While reading John Tolva’s blog I came accross some NASA wisdom around projects and I quote:

“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”
— Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module* that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.

Now at IBM we strive to be innovative for the customers we serve … does this mean that we as Project Managers should not be bound by fixed project cost and fixed project schedules?

Being innovative means that some leeway must be provided for.  To be innovative also means that there is no history and/or experience on which costs and schedules can be based.  However what goes hand in hand with this is to make sure you have good Risk Management processes in place since being innovative also means that one must take more risks.

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Budget day in South Africa

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Yesterday was budget day here in South Africa.  First surplus budget (this probably mean that the income will be more than what the goverment plan to spend). 

From first glance it seems to be a very balanced budget.  Lot of money going to education which is a good thing and even more needs to be done. Our future in this country depend of good education and we (meaning us and the government) need to do everything to make sure each and every kid in this country gets the best education possible.  What I realy would like to see done is that educational expences become tax deductable.

Glad to see that tax on pension funds is abolished.  We as ordinary citizens will get a bit of tax relieve.  Companies will get some and then obviously some money for the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

Now lets hope that the money that Trevor gave out get to where they suppose to go and not into the pockets of some corrupt government official.

Some links:

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IBM vs Microsoft on Open Standards

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I wanted to comment on the spat that is going on between IBM and Microsoft and Open Standards.  Actually it is not really a spat since all IBM is saying, support a ratified open standard like ODF rather than getting another quasi standard like openXML from Microsoft.  Now Microsoft is blaming IBM for taking sides.  Glyn Moody summed it up well in his post titled “Microsoft’s Fruedian Slips”.  I quote

What Microsoft glides over, of course, is that the choice is within the standard. There are now a number of programs supporting ODF, with more coming through. That’s choice. I doubt whether there will ever be a non-Microsoft program that supports fully its own XML format: there will be no choice, just lock-in under a different name.

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Now powered by WordPress 2.1

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This blog is now powered by WordPress 2.1.  The only real issue that I had was that my Links and Blogroll in the sidebar did not work properly.  For some reason the developers of WordPress has decided to combine the Links categories with the Posts categories which meant that the index numbering for the Links categories got changed so not to clash with the Posts categories.  I had some hardcoded (will teach me not to hardcode things) category indexes in my sidebar so had to change my templates.

If there is any issue you encounter when visiting my blog, (btw thanks for visiting), please leave a comment here.

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Found a new host

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A while back I blogged about searching for a new web host.  I eventually decided on one after reading good comments about PolurNet.  I settled for their smallest and cheapest reseller option.  It has all the options I need and seems that their support is very good.  Already had a support question for them and they responded and resolved my query very quickly.

One of the first things I am doing on it is testing WordPress 2.1 on a domain I setup there.  This is a pre-amble in upgrading this version (which currently is 2.0.7) to WordPress 2.1

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So it was D-day for MS Vista

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Yesterday Microsoft officialy released Vista to the wider public. So why would one upgrade?

From the little bit I seen about Vista and read about it, I can find no reason to upgrade. Firstly you would probably need a new faster CPU, more memory and a much more powerfull graphics card with lots of memory. And what do you get for this .. juts more bling. You will still write the same documents, fill the same spreadsheets, play most of the same games and all this will probably be slower than on your existing Windows XP.

Rather than upgrade to Vista, why not switch totally to some Linux distribution. No hardware to spend money on, no OS to spend money on and your machine will in all likelyhood be faster so you will be more productive in the end. And you would have access to thousands of software applications for FREE — let me say that again FREE — it is going to cost you nothing.

So what is the ultimate goal why Microsoft want you to upgrade to Vista — make more money. You as the consumer will not get much value for that hard earned money you going to give Microsoft. So use the money rather to enjoy life and change to something thats not going to cost you any money and give you freedom of choice, ie Switch to Linux.

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WordPress Upgraded

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I have just upgraded my instance of WrodPress from version 2.0.5 to version 2.0.6. If you see anything that is not what it should be then please let me know. Readers that get my feed via FeedBurner should pay particular attention since there was a bug in the released 2.0.6 version that has since been patched.

Update [16-01-2007]:  The bug that is patched, mentioned above, is actually patched in version 2.0.7 which this blog is now running.

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Building Second Life on Linux (Ubuntu)

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This one is for for Andy who is looking for a stable Linux version.  Now that the SecondLife client code is released as Open Source, he can do it himself. 

Allison Randal has build it on both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Seems that the Mac build was a bit easier than the Linux one … Linux one build successfully but crashes when trying to log into the live SecondLife world.  Well I am sure you coding geeks will get it working, I will just wait till a good working Linux build for Ubuntu is available before I go down that road.

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