Twitter

Blogging about Twitter, ehhh... right. I've looked into Twitter for the Datema-project (www.wikipilot.org) and think I have the hang of it now. But the big question is: will it be really useful? I'll give it some time to find out.
I see a great use case for Twitter in the chess world. If every player or captain gave some tweets after the game, you'd have a really nice way of following all the matches. But I'm afraid I'm probably the only member of our club who has a clue about Twitter.

Research

Last week I went to a seminar on research. Boring? Dry? No! The seminar was titled "Research in professional education, there's more possible than you think" and was run by Bas Haring and Maarten Lamers. Bas Haring is best known of the two, but they make a great couple and complement eachother seamlessly.

The angle of the seminar was that the universities of applied science (which in the Netherlands are just getting started with research) shouldn't try to emulate what the research universities are doing for centuries. Instead we should make use of our own strengths to find new subjects and research them in creative new ways.

For me the biggest takeaway however was an enhanced vision of what research is, separated from how it's done. Another big point we kind of discovered as a group is the confusion between "uitzoeken" and "onderzoeken". (Trying to translate these in English doesn't resolve the confusion.) Probably a lot of activities which are called 'onderzoek' in reality are 'uitzoeken'.
Finally I also have some ideas about how to integrate research in our curriculum. That might be useful because the rest of the organisation is kinda struggling with that. :-)

A new project for Agile Software Development

For years we used the Cab Dispatcher as the standard project in our Agile Software Development course. It still is a great (fictional) case study but it was time for a change. Last year we experimented with the case study on monitoring mentally handicapped people. Doing a new case poses a number of challenges to the lecturers, but it was closer to the real world.
This year we're taking it a step further by doing a real-life project with a client in the business of shippingnavigation. I think it will be very interesting. Let's see what the students think about it.

Summertime & mobile devices

It has been a long summer which I have used to study a lot of stuff, both professional and private. One of the things we did was buy a Nintendo for the kids and find out how to (...).

What amazes me is the amount of game- and userexperience comes from such a small device, i.e. in a nice game like Picross3D. Compare this to the new HTC smartphone (Windows mobile) I got from my office a while ago. It looks cool but has the size of a refridgerator, the powerconsumption of a SUV and I'm not enjoying the usability.

When is Nintendo developing a mobile phone?

Lean architecture

Just before the summer holiday started I went to a NLJUG university session by Xebia. The evening was about their concept of "lean architecture". Lean architecture means applying lean principles like "eliminate waste" to the architecting process. And there is quite some waste to eliminate at most companies :)

After presenting their principles (http://www.slideshare.net/xebia/lean-architecture-university-session-for-nljug-at-xebia-on-july-8th-2010 ) we quickly got to work on a case study. And maybe this was the most instructive part for me. Getting a fuzzy assignment, too little time and a bunch of people. "Go and do it." As an outsider I would say that there were way too much degrees of freedom in the workshop (I counted 8). While you were working on 1 or 2, you would be interrupted about one of the others. Never mind, my take away point is to keep this in mind when I set my students to work.

At the questions at the end they put on their "process" slide. I felt a bit uneasy with it. Agile was al about keeping things simple. But now the scrum process was extended with a productbacklog kanban and an architecture kanban and relationships between the three. Oh well, when you need to choose between changing people or processes, maybe changing processes is easier?

Finally!

After about 8 years of trying (not fulltime ;-), I FINALLY got an RMI example to work. And with that I mean working as it should by transferring classfiles, not cheating by putting the classfiles of the server on the clientside.

In 2002 I understood the concepts in about 15 minutes and the rest of years was pure frustration on crappy tutorials and technical details (trailing slashes, classpaths, codebases, security policies). I tried to find my original 2002 posts on the Sun developer forums but they are either archived or banned. My point was then and still is now: if you can't get a HelloWorld working in 15 minutes (ok, 1 hour) then the technology won't catch on. I've seen plenty of students give it a try and I couldn't blame them when they quit.

Glad I can put this one behind me, let's move on to other things now. I have a whole list for the coming holiday ;-)

Update: : http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/rmi/index.html was the most useful tutorial

Karlstad university

I visited Karlstad university (Sweden) with some colleagues last week. It's a former Högskule that has transformed itself into a university with a lot of research activities (and funding!). This took a long term effort however. I can imagine this is the vision our rector Henk Pijlman has of the direction the Hanze should move into. My estimate is that it would take 10-15 years of concentrated effort, a lot of it on the personnelmanagement side.

We met some nice and interesting colleagues (Anna Brunstrum, Donald Ross, Martin Blom) and discussed collaboration possibilities on agile among other things. I got a nice idea about the coding dojo which I would like to give a spin next year. Finally we also went to the Compare Testlab and met Sven Wedemalm.