ThinkGeek’s new four-port USB 3.0 hub is a nice gift for fans of action or sci-fi flicks. It has two toggle switches, a keyhole and of course a red button. When you toggle the controls in the right order, the hub will play an explosion sound effect.
Learning to embrace conflict as a part of startup culture
A startup is a journey of questions with as yet unidentified answers. Most startups fail because they never find true enough answers to succeed. Startups succeed when the founders are focused on finding the truest answers to their most important problems.
What is the best way to engineer a product that will delight customers? What is the most efficient channel to get that product into your customer’s’ hands? What is the most effective way to scale up that model to maximize the impact and commercial success of the business? Who are the right leaders to help achieve these goals? Even small questions seek “truth” – What color button on a website is most likely to convert the customer?
While there isn’t a single “truth” that is the correct answer to any of these questions – each fork in the road has more and less true answers. The job of the founder and leadership team is to find the truest path to success. Unlike large companies operating at scale, at a startup the unknowns are overwhelming, and data cannot by itself resolve most of these decisions.
Most team leaders will agree on the majority of decisions that need to be made and good startup teams seem telepathic at times, but there are inevitably going to be profound disagreements. It’s critical that entrepreneurs embrace these conflicts because solving them properly is often the difference between success and failure.
If the decisions were easy, someone would have made them already. The conflict exists because the answers aren’t obvious. It’s in the conflict that the right answers emerge. You have to lean into the conflict to win.
JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images
Conflict Failure Modes
Avoiding the Conflict
I believe the most common conflict failure mode at a startup is when the leadership disagrees on what should happen, but no one speaks up because it’s uncomfortable to do so. The team is in full denial that there is even disagreement on the hard choices that need to be made. As a result, these choices aren’t made at all and the leadership of the company makes the wrong decisions while pretending that everything is okay. Inevitably, after the company fails, leadership team members lament that they knew that the company was going in the wrong direction and should have spoken up sooner. Yes, they should have.
Ego
Ego makes conflict painful because we try to avoid hurting others’ feelings, while protecting our own. But for many, winning the argument becomes more important than the company making the right decision. Therefore, when we engage conflict, we become emotional and want to win for ourselves, confusing this emotion with our desire to win collectively. While each of us struggles with this tension, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that everyone in the debate naturally is subjective on the superior value of their perspective. This tendency can often lead to anger, insecurity, and unnecessary emotion that makes conflict painful, relationship threatening and unproductive. Unfortunately, ego frightens many team members to shift into conflict avoidance.
Strong Personalities vs. Wall Flowers
Often in ego-driven conflict, stronger personalities will win despite having no greater insight on the truth. It is crucial for a company to make sure that conflict is not resolved simply by the strength of personality. Otherwise, the company will have a scenario where personal victory – “I need to be right” – comes before company victory – “we need to be right.” The wallflowers have no less claim on the truth of their market, operation, or product. They often just have less eagerness to fight.
Softening The Edges
In polite conversation with friends and relatives, we are all taught to soften the edges of our conflict. In other words, we pretend that we mostly agree, even when we don’t. This adaptive approach to conflict at least arguably makes sense in a social setting. We can politely agree to disagree largely because in social settings we don’t have to collaborate to make critical decisions. At startups, softening the edges can be catastrophic. It causes leaders to work in opposite directions or procrastinate making the hard decisions.
Revert to Mean
Empathy is often misapplied in a startup context. It’s great to embrace the idea that everyone’s opinion counts, but critical to understand that these opinions do not yield equally correct outcomes. The inability to decisively move forward, and instead find a middle ground on each topic, leads to Frankenstein solutions that rarely yield the correct answer. In this way, the startup prioritizes compromise over finding truth. If there is always a more true answer and team members are in conflict on what that answer is, there is little probability that the compromise answer is the right one. While everyone might feel good that their point of view was persuasive to a consensus outcome, they will feel much worse when they realize that compromise and truth have little in common at a startup.
AP Photo/Isaac Brekken
How to Embrace Conflict
It’s easy to say that a company should embrace conflict and far harder to do so successfully. Ultimately, engaging conflict is among the most significant cultural challenges for startups, but also among the most important.
Reframe Conflict As The Search for Truth
Most people don’t think about a startup as a search for truth. It’s important to frame the quest of the startup this way and make sure that everyone understands that the purpose of a startup is experiment constantly in the service of finding the best answer to pressing problems. Everyone has the right to question the assumptions and no one has a monopoly on being correct – yet in aggregate the company making the right decisions will make or break its success.
Call out Objectivity and Subjectivity
Companies need to build a culture where it is okay to question whether a colleague is being fully objective. By acknowledging the natural human tendency toward ego, it should become okay to check with colleagues whether their judgment is being clouded by their own need to win the argument, versus their desire to find the right answer. By being willing to engage in this type of self-reflection and giving others the license to question you, egos can be moderated.
Be Hard on Problems, Not People
Remind everyone that it is the problem, not the people, that should be the focus of the conflict. When team members start to attribute negative intentions and motives to their colleagues, it becomes very difficult to put ego aside and focus on finding the right answer. By being soft on people and hard on problems, the company can build trust as the basis for the exercise of doing the hard work of making decisions collectively, rather than playing the ego game.
While maintaining empathy for individuals, the culture shouldn’t have empathy for ideas. The best ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, from the CEO to the most junior team members, and everyone should be speaking truth to power at a startup. Having said that, everyone must accept that not all ideas are equal. Being respectful of everyone’s contributions is often confused with valuing all ideas as equally likely to be truth. Every single idea has a relative truth value to all others and must face that crucible.
Debate, Don’t Fight
Ego turns conflict into a fight. The goal is to avoid the fight, but engage the debate. Try to be objective and curious about others’ points of view. Listen to each other and work toward finding the truth. Keep debating until you find it and work hard to parse differences in assumptions and beliefs. The challenge is to build a culture where team members work as hard as possible to defuse the fight by showing enthusiasm for the debate.
Hard decisions take time and deserve intense debate, but when debate becomes a fight, it’s time to take a break and calm the negative energy. When taking a break, always address when the debate will continue, or breaks can often slip into conflict avoidance.
Gauge Magnitude of Beliefs
Some people just like to argue for the intellectual value, even if they don’t feel strongly about a particular outcome. Others are stubborn and don’t like to lose arguments, on principle. Both of these instincts must be subordinated. However, there is often truth in the magnitude an individual feels about an issue. Those who are effective at subverting their egos, but feel very strongly on a hypothesis, often have strong insights powering the magnitude of their belief. It’s important to listen to those who feel most strongly – particularly when they are not the strongest personalities at the table.
Consider Hierarchy & Roles
On teams where debate becomes unproductive, drawing lines around areas of responsibility can help. Deference to greater experience, domain knowledge, or responsibility for the outcome are all reasonable solutions for many debates. Let anyone add to the debate, but in many cases it is best to leave the decision to the responsible party. Note that this approach can be risky—if an individual pulls rank too often and he’ll find himself without a partner or team, and will often lose credibility in the next debate.
At Some Point, The Debate Must End
Truly convincing or being convinced of the best decision for the company is the optimal path to resolve a conflict, but it is not the only way. Sometimes a team has sincerely delved into the differences as much as possible and is running out of time to make a decision. In those cases, the company must find a way to pick a direction and move forward as one. Constant dissent on the decision, once made, can be as problematic as not engaging the conflict in the first place. After the decision has been made, the company needs the benefit of a single team moving forward together.
Get Out Of The Way
When a decision is made, everyone must lock arms and move forward or simply get out of the way. We’ve seen many circumstances where talented team members needed to part ways after a high-quality debate, because they simply couldn’t agree on how to move forward. Sometimes startup leaders must accept that if they aren’t part of the solution, they are part of the problem.
You’re Paid For Your Opinion
I had a boss who frequently repeated the statement, “you’re paid for your opinion.” He was encouraging energetic debate by trying to draw out the wallflowers and build a culture where the stronger personalities learned to listen. Crafting this type of culture is the key to a successful team. Studies have shown the difference between good marriages and bad ones isn’t the lack of fights, but learning how to fight productively. This is also true for startup teams.
A CEO who believes he is always right, and rams decision making through an organization, will create a culture of people who feel frustrated, suppressed, and will regularly make poor decisions. A CEO who integrates dissent and healthy debate into the company will be primed for success and likely find the truth she is seeking.
via TechCrunch
Learning to embrace conflict as a part of startup culture
Tips for Women Buying Their First Handgun
Tips for Women Buying Their First Handgun
A few factors for the first-time gun buyer to consider: comfort, capacity, size, weight, ease of maintenance, whether they have sufficient grip strength. Not to mention the most important aspect — what you want your new gun to do.
Of course, all of these considerations apply equally to both men and women when they’re looking to buy their first handgun. But as anyone who’s spent much time at all in gun stores can tell you, not all of them are amenable to the inexperienced woman looking for her first firearm.
Maybe the best advice in this video: if you’re not getting the answers you need, or are getting an attitude…move on. Find another store that will give you the time you need and answer all of your questions.
You can see this and hundreds more videos from God, Family and Guns at their YouTube channel here.
via The Truth About Guns
Tips for Women Buying Their First Handgun
Percona live Dublin – Migratin and living on RDS/Aurora
It was a long time ago so I won’t write about the conference (it was good as always), but at least I share the slides of my talk here.
via Planet MySQL
Percona live Dublin – Migratin and living on RDS/Aurora
Cop Shuts Off Dashcam During Drug Dog Sniff. Appeals Court: This Is Fine.
If cops have the ability and opportunity to record a traffic stop, should it be held against them when they don’t? Arguments have been made to that effect for a few years now. Dashcams have been in wide use for at least a couple of decades. Law enforcement agencies all over the US are issuing body cameras to officers. But it seems whenever something questionable happens, footage is nowhere to be found, or what there is of it is almost useless.
Unfortunately, years of discussion by (mainly) defense lawyers hasn’t resulted in policy changes. Worse, it hasn’t budged the judicial needle much. In rare cases, the absence of footage is used against officers, but in those cases, it mainly seems to be because efforts were made to destroy footage already captured.
In this case [PDF] reviewed by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, no effort was made post facto to destroy footage. Instead, an officer proactively prevented footage from being created by disabling the dashcam recording the traffic stop. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The defendant made a few different arguments for suppression of evidence obtained via a search of his vehicle. Citing Rodriguez, he claimed the wait for the K9 unit unnecessarily prolonged the traffic stop. The appeals court disagreed, saying its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision gives officers about 20 minutes to freely violate citizens’ rights.
Defendant next argues that the search violated the Fourth Amendment because the officers extended the stop beyond the time required to investigate the traffic violation in order to conduct a canine sniff. The district court determined that the delay was not excessive, relying upon United States v. Collazo, 818 F.3d 247, 257-58 (6th Cir. 2016), in which we countenanced a traffic stop that exceeded twenty-one minutes based on the totality of the circumstances. Here, the district court observed that the canine unit appeared within ten minutes of the stop, the car’s paperwork, which was a rental, did not include any of the passengers as authorized drivers, and the GPS information indicated that defendant had been out-of-state, which was prohibited by the terms of his parole. While these factors might individually have an innocent explanation, the court found that “from a law enforcement perspective all that adds up . . . to a reasonable suspicion for an extension, which . . . wasn’t very long anyway.”
This completely ignores Supreme Court precedent, which made it clear it wasn’t the length of the rights violation, but rather the violation itself. Once the purpose of the traffic stop has been achieved, any fishing expeditions by law enforcement past that point are Constitutional violations, whether it’s five minutes, ten minutes, or a half hour. A holding like this makes it that much easier for officers to slow roll traffic stops so they can run a drug dog around a car they stopped for a lane change violation. That’s what appears to have happened here and both courts (district, appellate) said this is fine.
Trooper Boven returned to his cruiser after collecting everyone’s identification and ran the information through two law enforcement databases to check for outstanding warrants and to confirm that Mercedes Hunt was a valid driver. Defendant contends that Trooper Boven entered the information slowly in order to prolong the traffic stop until the canine unit arrived, which it did shortly after he finished processing the licenses.
In this case, there was plenty to be reasonably suspicious about, hence the call for the K9 unit. But once the K9 unit arrived something strange happened. The officer turned off his dashcam, ostensibly to "protect" the confidentiality of an informant.
Once Deputy Osbun arrived, Trooper Boven explained the situation to him to “keep him in the loop” and for officer safety. He also turned off the dashboard camera. According to his testimony, he did so to prevent information about the confidential informant from coming to light in case the stop revealed no drugs. After speaking with Deputy Osbun, however, Trooper Boven apparently forgot to restart the dashboard camera and, as a result, there is no footage of the search of the car. In total, twenty minutes elapsed before the camera was restarted.
The defendant challenged this, stating the missing footage prevented him from directly challenging the supposed probable cause generated by the dog’s nose. And there were sufficient reasons on record to warrant doing so.
Defendant contends that the lack of a visual record of the search undermines his ability to challenge the legitimacy of the canine alert to narcotics. First, there are no records maintained of the dog’s prior performance in the field. Second, Deputy Osbun recalled up to six false alerts at the suppression hearing, which defendant contends is a significant number given that dogs are deployed only when the presence of drugs is suspected. Third, the lack of dashboard camera footage makes it nearly impossible for defendant to challenge whether Deputy Osbun’s interaction with the dog may have influenced its subsequent alert. Finally, defendant characterizes the missing video footage as “spoliation” for which the government must be held responsible.
The district court, however, didn’t view this as spoliation of evidence. For the most part, the legal argument is sound. You can’t ruin evidence that doesn’t exist. The problem is that if you can prevent such evidence from ever existing, you can probably get your questionable actions excused by the courts.
The Appeals Court affirms the lower court’s decision. While the totality of the circumstances makes this a less-than-ideal test case, the fact remains too much slack is being cut by the courts. The camera could have been left on. Any concerns the trooper had about his informant’s confidentiality could have been addressed by the department. They could have been presented to the court prior to turning over the footage in case redactions were warranted. But shutting off a camera during a stop — especially a pretextual stop where an officer deliberately slowed down his ticket-writing duties to bring a drug dog to the scene — should be treated as a failure to preserve evidence by law enforcement.
In this case, the Sixth Circuit does double damage: it ignores the issues raised by cops disabling cameras during traffic stops, and gives officers in its jurisdiction 20 minutes in which to violate rights (and the Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision) without fear of reprisal.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
via Techdirt
Cop Shuts Off Dashcam During Drug Dog Sniff. Appeals Court: This Is Fine.
New letter: Top Uber officials engaged in illegal wiretapping, shady spycraft
The highly-anticipated demand letter written on behalf of a former Uber employee, which has become central to the unfolding drama that is the Waymo v. Uber trade secrets lawsuit, was publicly released on Friday afternoon.
As previewed in earlier court hearings, the “Jacobs Letter” outlines in detailed terms the questionable and possibly illegal behavior that former Uber security official Richard Jacobs and his former colleagues engaged in during his 11-month tenure at the company.
This letter, which was only recently shared with lawyers involved in the lawsuit and the judge overseeing the case, ultimately led to federal prosecutors opening a criminal investigation into Uber, which is still ongoing.
Waymo v. Uber began back in February, when Waymo sued Uber and accused one of its own former employees of stealing 14,000 files shortly before he left Waymo. The former employee, Anthony Levandowski, went on to found a company that was quickly acquired by Uber. Levandowski refused to comply with his employer’s demands during the course of this case and has since been fired. Uber has denied that it benefited in any way from Levandowski’s actions.
The outcome of the case will likely determine which company will end up ahead in the cutthroat and rapidly-growing autonomous vehicle sector.
Among other explosive claims, the Jacobs Letter specifically says that two named high-level Uber employees, including Craig Clark, a since-fired Uber lawyer and Mat Henley, who still works at Uber and recently testified in court, orchestrated this scheme.
The men “led Uber’s efforts to evade current and future discovery requests, court orders, and government investigations in violation of state and federal law as well as ethical rules governing the legal profession. Clark devised training and provided advice intended to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation of several ongoing lawsuits against Uber and in relation to or contemplation of further matters within the jurisdiction of the United States.”
The letter also contains detailed allegations of abuse of the attorney-client privilege. At one point Clark allegedly ordered that “double secret A/C priv” (short for “double-secret attorney-client privilege”) be written on a document as a way to shield it from being disclosed in ongoing or future lawsuits.
This, as many lawyers on Twitter noted, is not a real legal term.
If you invoke double-secret attorney-client privilege, it cancels the first privilege out. Little known in-house secret. https://t.co/sOZh9lDKrU
— Feliz Navi-JJ (@J_Dot_J) December 15, 2017
In addition, the Jacobs letter describes what it calls “illegal wiretapping” of a phone call discussing an internal report of sexual harassment. Earlier this year, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, came forward with her experience of such abuse, which ultimately lead to the ouster of then-CEO Travis Kalanick.
Another section of the letter describes the use of a “new technical capability” by “CIA-trained case officers” that Uber contracted with. In 2016, these people allegedly “collected mobile-phone metadata either directly through signal-intercept equipment, hacked mobile devices, or through the mobile network itself. The information eventually shared with Jacobs and others included call logs, with time and date of communications, communicants’ phone numbers, call durations, and the identification of the mobile phone subscribers. The subsequent link-analysis of this metadata occurred on U.S. soil.”
The 37-page demand letter, which was filed by a Minnesota attorney on Jacobs’ behalf, was essentially a warning that Jacobs may sue the company.
Rather than go to court over his claims, Uber ended up paying Jacobs $4.5 million, and his lawyer, Clayton Halunen, $3 million.
In a recent court hearing, Angela Padilla, Uber’s deputy general counsel, testified that this letter was “extortionate,” but noted that going to court would have cost the company far more. (Halunen has not responded to Ars’ request for comment.)
In another court filing submitted on Friday, outside court-appointed advisor Special Master John Cooper determined that this Jacobs Letter should have been made available to Waymo much earlier as part of the civil discovery process.
The revelation of the letter’s existence, which only became known late last month, resulted in the trial being postponed a second time.
The trial is now scheduled for early February 2018 in San Francisco, just blocks from Uber headquarters at 1455 Market St.
via Ars Technica
New letter: Top Uber officials engaged in illegal wiretapping, shady spycraft
Use the Waterfall Project Management Method to Organize Your Life
The tools we typically use for managing personal projects have a major drawback. To-do lists
To-Do List App Showdown: Any.do vs Todoist vs Wunderlist
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Some to-do list apps stand head and shoulders above the rest. But how do they compare and which one is best for you? We’ll help you find out.
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and their variations (like Kanban boards
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) are fine to track what should be done and (maybe) who should do it. But they aren’t as good at planning out the when. This is the domain of business-oriented tools, such as the Waterfall project management approach.
One of the primary reasons companies use a set of tools and processes to manage their projects is for profitability. Once management decides a particular project will add value to the business, there is a cost for every hour that project isn’t finished. As individuals, however, it’s very easy to let personal projects slide. We’re sick, or too tired, or work is too busy, or there are too many cat videos on the internet. Part of the discipline of project management is not only to drive projects to completion, but also to set them up initially so they finish in an acceptable time frame.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can use business tools to keep yourself on track and get your projects done.
Waterfall Project Management Principles
There are a couple of important tenents of project management you’ll need to learn:
Work Breakdown Structures
Given a desired end goal, the first step in most projects is to break that goal down into achievable tasks. For example, if you’re looking to spin up a WordPress blog your high-level might include writing some content, designing a logo, and WordPress installation/deployment to your server. Creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) involves dividing and sub-dividing them until you’re left with tasks that are easy for someone to look at, understand, and execute.
The actual WBS for this simple project might look like this:
- Create Content
- Brainstorm some post ideas
- Write content for posts (separate tasks for posts 1-6)
- Edit/proof all posts
- Creative
- Visual design (pick a color palette, etc.)
- Contact logo artists
- Select designer
- Logo draft
- Installation and Deployment
- Install WordPress
- Install/configure theme and plugins
- Upload logo
- Create posts
- Change DNS settings
The smaller the tasks, the better. For example, the “write content for posts” items could be further split out one per post. Making them smaller not only allows you to see progress sooner. It also provides flexibility in shuffling them around to meet a target date. You should also have a concept of what needs to be completed before something else can begin
6 Project Management Tips You Can Use to Organize Your Life
6 Project Management Tips You Can Use to Organize Your Life
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, known as predecessors or dependencies.
For example, your designer can’t produce the draft of your logo until after you’ve selected her. So the outline of your project now looks like this:
- Create Content
- Brainstorm some post ideas
- Write content for posts 1-3 (dependent on 1a)
- Edit/proof all posts (dependent on 1b)
- Creative
- Visual design
- Contact logo artists (dependent on 2a)
- Select designer (dependent on 2b)
- Logo draft (dependent on 2c)
- Installation and Deployment
- Install WordPress
- Install/configure theme and plugins (dependent on 3a)
- Create posts (dependent on 1d and 2a)
- Upload logo (dependent on 2e and 3b)
- Change DNS settings (dependent on 1, 2, 3b, 3c, and 3d)
Resource Management
Now that you know what needs to be done, you need to figure out who will do it and when. To assign a task to someone, you’ll first need to be sure they can do it at all (e.g. don’t assign 3.5 to your graphic designer). But you also need to know how much they’re available in general, as well as when. This is called resource management. It starts with understanding how many hours a day someone is available, then tracking that availability against the work you assign.
For example, you may have a day job. At your 9-to-5, you’re available probably eight hours a day. But for your personal projects, you may block off an hour or two
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at night. This means you have a weekly capacity of: (2 * 5) = 10 hours a week (go on, take the weekends off… you deserve it). This means a given task that a person working full-time at it could complete in one day will take you four working days. Calculating things according to capacity will tell you how long your projects will really take.
Scheduling and (Optimized) Planning
We’re calling this “Optimized Planning,” because creating the WBS is in fact also planning. But what you may find is you’ll make the initial plan for the “best case scenario.” There will be one and only one task going on at any one time (easy to manage), and they all fall neatly one after another. But this is rarely how projects work in practice. During this phase you’ll adjust the structure and assignments in the project depending on:
- Hard constraints on particular tasks (i.e. it cannot start before a particular date)
- Tasks that can happen in parallel (one person does A, another person does B)
- Tasks that two people can work on at once (two people both work on A)
What you’ll likely find is that some parts of the project grow in duration, and you’ll seek out ways to shorten others. Now that you have an idea of what you should be putting into your project plan, let’s take a look at how to actually do it.
Managing Personal Waterfall Projects With ProjectLibre
Before the step-by-step, a quick word in defense of project management tools. I’ve heard something like the following many times, when suggesting or tasking someone to learn one of these apps:
- “I just need a list.”
- “Gantt charts take too long.”
- “MS Project? I’m out!”
There is a reason Gantt charts (which have been around for over a century) are still in use today — and why they’re so popular in Waterfall project management. They are the best single view to visualize your timeline, its status, and individual task assignments, especially if you’re using Waterfall project management.
Calendars don’t give you a one-shot view of your project. Linear to-do lists rarely account for dependencies, and no other tool helps to auto-update start and finish dates like Gantt-based applications.
What many people get wrong about these apps is how they use them. But we’ll show you how to do things the easy way. We’ll be using ProjectLibre for our Waterfall model example project, although the steps should work almost identically in anything that provides an interactive Gantt chart
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(desktop, mobile, web, even Excel files).
Installing ProjectLibre is as simple as downloading the latest release (1.7 at the time of writing) and running the EXE installer (Windows), dragging the DMG to your Applications folder (Mac), or installing the RPM or DEB package via your preferred method (Linux).
Once you’re installed, fire ProjectLibre up and select the Create Project option. It will give you a dialog to enter some preliminary information like name and a start date.
Step 1: Create Your WBS
The first step is to create your WBS. Start jotting all the tasks you know about down anywhere: email message, plain text file, Word Processor document, OneNote. Whatever you’re comfortable with while brainstorming is fine. Now, open ProjectLibre to the Gantt view, and paste the text into the cells at left that resemble a spreadsheet.
Many people’s first mistake is using these apps in a point and click fashion. Don’t. Treat the left side of the screen exactly like spreadsheets and use keyboard shortcuts
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: arrow buttons to move around, F2 to edit, and Enter to commit.
The only additional things you’ll need to know are the keystrokes to indent (Ctrl + . (period) for ProjectLibre, although it’s Tab in MS Project) and outdent (Ctrl + , (comma) in ProjectLibre, Shift + Tab in Project) tasks. This part works just like an outline in Word. It allows you to quickly create the various phases and tasks (which are bottom-level entries) in your plan.
Next, put in your Predecessors (i.e. A must finish before B can start). Here again, use arrow keys and Enter/Tab for quick entry. Finally, add Work, or the amount of time you think each item will take.
You’ll notice two things happen when you start adjusting the WBS. Firstly, lines that become “parent” items are converted to phases, meaning they finish when all their child tasks are complete. Second, as you add predecessors, you’ll notice the start and end dates are automatically adjusted. While it may still seem like a big undertaking, watch the following for an example of how quick and easy this can be. (The time to create this plan was just over three minutes. The only part not shown below was typing in the prior tasks.)
Step 2: Register Resources and Assign Tasks
Although you entered Work for each task, you’ll notice their Durations all show something like “.25 days?” including the question mark.
This is because the app assumes each will be performed within an eight-hour day. But this can be affected by other factors including resource capacity. Your capacity.
For this project, I’m assuming I’ll be available for a couple of hours a day. Based on an eight-hour day, this equates to 25 percent capacity (if I was available full time, this would be 100 percent). When I enter my name as the resource for each task, I’ll be adding “[25%]” after it, which is ProjectLibre’s notation for capacity. Watch in the short screencast below what happens to the “Duration” column as I assign these tasks to myself. Taking into account my capacity, ProjectLibre has increased the duration of each task fourfold.
Now I can see that while the project is only a little over 80 hours long, it will actually take about five weeks to complete.
This is one of the advantages of the Waterfall methodology: it shows you more realistic timelines.
But don’t fret! There are a couple of adjustments we can make to dial that date back.
Step 3: Adjust Timeline for a Realistic View
Once all your resources are entered, you have a chance to step back and examine your plan. For example, you can see that the Visual Design and Logo Draft tasks aren’t assigned to me. This is because I’m a terrible artist, and if I tried to do this myself it wouldn’t go well. But it also means that while some talented artist will be working on these tasks, I can work on something else in the meantime.
We’d set the initial version of our plan in a strictly linear way: each task was started when the one before it ended, and likewise with phases. But let’s adjust the predecessors such that phases aren’t dependent, and remove the ones for the tasks I won’t be doing. Note how it moves the parts of the timeline around.
Now we’ve scaled the project down by about a week. Considering I’m doing the bulk of the work, this isn’t too shabby. We could probably do better yet by moving the Creative section first, and working on content while that logo is in production.
Use the Waterfall Methodology to Plan Realistically
With your own projects, it’s all too easy to just pull out a calendar
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In organizing your life, two tools are indispensable: your calendar and your to-do list. But most task management solutions keep these two things separate. We’ll show you how to combine them.
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, pick a couple of dates, and go on your merry way.
Using lightweight tools like OneNote (how to use OneNote for project management
How You Can Use Microsoft OneNote for Project Management
How You Can Use Microsoft OneNote for Project Management
OneNote is the ideal collaboration tool for managing simple projects in small teams. And it’s completely free. See how OneNote can help your projects take off!
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) or Trello (how to use Trello for project management
A Guide to Trello for Life and Project Management
A Guide to Trello for Life and Project Management
Trello can help you get organized. It’s a free tool to manage any kind of project. Read this guide to understand its basic structure, the navigation, and how Trello can be useful to you.
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) gets you a little closer to the mark, as they at least account for who is doing what.
But going through this exercise in something like ProjectLibre forces you to think about how much time you actually have to dedicate to it, what bottlenecks exist, and places where you may want some help. It also helps to break your projects down into manageable pieces to make sure you’re making progress. While you may think a tool like ProjectLibre was overkill, hopefully, we’ve shown how easy it can be.
Do you typically just wing it when it comes to your pet projects? Or do you use a system like Waterfall project management? Let us know how you “self-project-manage” below in the comments!
via MakeUseOf.com
Use the Waterfall Project Management Method to Organize Your Life
Check List: Tools & Rifle Parts to Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle two
Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle Parts & Components, Check List:
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- Recently AmmoLand News, Aero Precision and Brownells had gun writer Tom Mchale build out one of Aero’s DIY Custom Rifle Builder Kits. You can read the article series here at the following links.
- Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle from an Aero Precision AR Builders Kit
- Aero Precision Builder Set AR-15 Rifle Project – Picking Parts & Components
This page is the supporting Tools List and Part List for that build. While we chose the Aero AR15 Builder Set, (not everyone likes arctic camo) you could pick any number of AR 15 rifle parts kits and use the below list of components and all the same gunsmith tools to complete your AR rifle build’s upper and lower receivers.
**Click on the product names below to purchase online.
Custom AR Upper & Receiver parts that are unique to this AR-15 rifle builder kit. :
- Aero Precision M4E1 Enhanced Arctic Camo Builder Set. (Limited Availability, Alternate Build Kit Link below)
- Magpul CTR Stock and MOE Grip – Arctic Camo (Limited Availability, Alternate Build Kit Link below)
- Magpul PMAG 30-round Magazine (Limited Availability, Alternate Build Kit Link below)
Basic AR 15 Rifle Kit Gun Parts :
- Aero Precision 18″ .223 Wylde Fluted Stainless Steel Barrel
- Brownells Black Nitride Gas Tube
- Midwest Industries Low Profile Gas Block
- Aero Precision Gen 2 Enhanced Handguard
- BCM Gunfighter Ambi Charging Handle
- Smith Enterprise Ar-15 Vortex G6-A3 Flash Eliminator
- Crush Washer
- Lower Receiver Parts Kit
- Geissele SSA Trigger
- Brownells Mil-Spec Buffer Tube Assembly
- Brownells Nickel Boron Bolt and Carrier Group
All-Purpose AR-15 Riflescope Info:
Must-Have AR15 Rifle Builder & Gunsmithing Tools:
These essential gunsmith tools will make your AR rifle build a whole lot more fun and make many gunsmithing tasks much more precise and clean. All these tools will prove useful for years to come as you build out more cool rifles.
- Brownells AR Armorer’s Wrench
- Nylon and Brass Hammer
- Alignment Pin Tool
- Brownells Extra-Large Bench Block
- AR-15/M16 Action Block & Lower Vise Block Set
- Roll Pin Punch Set
- General Purpose Torque Wrench
- 5/32″ Center Punch
- Loctite Silver Grade Anti-Seize Stick Compound
- Red Loctite Thread Locker
- Brownells AR-15 Pivot Pin Detent Installation Tool
- Nightforce Scope Ring Torque Wrench
Need more detailed AR15 rifle assembly instructions or to return to the build page, click here and check out the companion article, “Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle from an Aero Precision AR Builders Kit.”
This post Check List: Tools & Rifle Parts to Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle two appeared first on AmmoLand.com .
via AmmoLand.com
Check List: Tools & Rifle Parts to Build Your Own AR-15 Rifle two
Behold The Most Hilarious Wildlife Photos of 2017
Wildlife photographer Tibor Kércz would spend a few nights each year camped out in a tent near a tree, hoping to capture photos of little owls and their nestlings. But just before nightfall on one fateful evening, three of the birds flew out onto a short branch. They landed and tried stabilizing themselves… but the owlet on the end began to fall.
“So I started to shoot in the right moment,” he told Gizmodo in a Facebook message. That series of photos won him the 2017 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
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The awards are meant to highlight whimsical, “possibly unpretentious” photography of wild animals doing funny things, according to their website. Some of the silliest images from past contests have gone viral, and this year’s certainly have the potential to do the same. Ultimately, the founders’ main goal is conservation.
“Well… you are now obviously going to go to your office, home, pub, club, or wherever and talk about the dire need for us all to be conservationists in our own little way,” the competition’s founders write on their website. The contest is affiliated with the Born Free Foundation wildlife conservation charity. But Kércz likes how it gives humans the chance to see animals in a more relatable light.
“It is a great initiative and [gives us the] chance to show people how funny and lovable these cute creatures are, like we are,” he said.
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The contest received over 3,500 submissions, which were required to have been taken by the photographer, not of a pet or domesticated animal, and without being digitally manipulated. Also, term number 16 of the website’s Terms and Conditions is “16. You must think Bohemian Rhapsody one of the greatest pieces of popular music ever written, just kidding. No seriously….” So yeah.
Anyway, here are the pictures:
Overall winner: Tibor Kércz
Winner, “In The Air” Category: Jon Threlfall
It’s a fart joke.
Winner, “Under the Sea” Category: Troy Mayne
Winner, “On Land” Category: Andrea Zampatti
Highly Commended
[via Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards]
via Gizmodo
Behold The Most Hilarious Wildlife Photos of 2017
Replicating in Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten
While investigating alternatives to migrate to Google Cloud SQL, I encountered a lack of support for external masters. However, it’s possible to overcome this limitation by replicating into Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten replicator.
Cloud SQL is Google’s database-as-a-service solution, similar to RDS for Amazon Web Services. You can get a fully managed database in only a few clicks (or API calls). At the time of writing this, the only supported databases are MySQL and Postgres.
Cloud SQL alternatives
Google offers two different options for MySQL deployments.
1st generation instances:
- Only MySQL versions 5.5 and 5.6 can provisioned
- Max memory is limited to 16 Gb
- Max of 250 Gb storage (up to 500 Gb with Silver or higher support package)
- MyISAM and InnoDB
- Asynchronous replication for read replicas
2nd generation instances:
- Only MySQL versions 5.6 and 5.7 can be deployed
- Maximum memory is limited to 205 Gb
- Maximum of 10 Tb storage
- InnoDB storage engine only
- Semi-sync replication only
- GTID replication only
- No support for external master
There are some limitations that are common to both flavors:
- no SUPER privilege
- no triggers
- no performance schema
- no replication between 1st and 2nd generation instances is possible
From the above, it is quite obvious most production deployments would want to use 2nd gen instances.
The problem is there is no migration path that doesn’t involve stopping application activity to be able to take a dump of the data, due to the fact that external masters are not supported on 2nd gen instances.
So how do we migrate our database to Google Cloud SQL while keeping downtime as low as possible?
The solution
The answer is to use Tungsten Replicator, so that replication is completely external to the database.
Note that since we only need the replicator, the FOSS version available on Github is enough for our purposes. There is no need to buy Tungsten commercial version, which includes the cluster functionality and official support.
We will need to install two different Tungsten processes: One will attach to the source database to read transactions from the binary logs, while the second will apply those transactions to the Cloud SQL instance.
This is what it looks like:
Preparing the environment
The first thing you will need is a place to install the replicator. I suggest to provision a dedicated instance (instance-1 in the diagram) in the same zone as your Cloud SQL instance.
At minimum you would want an n1-standard-1 size, as Tungsten does consume its fair share of memory.
Tungsten needs some packages (do check out the complete requirements list here) so let’s go ahead and install them:
apt-get install ruby default-jre
Now we need a database user for Tungsten on the source and target databases:
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO tungsten@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
It is usually a good idea to have a dedicated OS user as well:
useradd -m -d /opt/continuent tungsten
Get the replicator package from GitHub and extract the contents as tungsten OS user:
wget http://ift.tt/2krtebg
tar zxf tungsten-replicator-5.2.1.tar.gz
Tungsten installation
Prepare the Tungsten config files on instance-1 as follows. instance-1 is the server where Tungsten will run from, and instance-2 is the server that has the source database.
Process that will read from MySQLvi /etc/tungsten/tungsten-mysqlreader.ini
[defaults] replication-user=tungsten replication-password=secret skip-validation-check=MySQLUnsupportedDataTypesCheck skip-validation-check=MySQLPermissionsCheck skip-validation-check=MySQLMyISAMCheck [mysqlreader] install-directory=/opt/continuent/mysqlreader master=instance-1 members=instance-1 datasource-host=instance-2 datasource-user=tungsten datasource-password=secret
Process that will write to Cloud SQLvi /etc/tungsten/tungsten-writetocloudsql.ini
[defaults] replication-user=tungsten replication-password=secret [writetocloudsql] datasource-type=mysql install-directory=/opt/continuent/writetocloudsql master=instance-1 members=instance-1 topology=master-slave datasource-host=cloudsql_ip_address datasource-user=tungsten datasource-password=secret privileged-slave=false skip-validation-check=InstallerMasterSlaveCheck skip-validation-check=MySQLPermissionsCheck skip-validation-check=MySQLBinaryLogsEnabledCheck rmi-port=10002 master-thl-port=2112 master-thl-host=instance-1 thl-port=2113
Note the use of privileged-slave=false and the various validation checks that need to be skipped for the applier process. That allows us to get past the SUPER requirement and the other Cloud SQL limitations.
Since we are running both extractor and applier processes on the same instance, we need to manually specify the ports on the second process so that there are no conflicts.
Now we are ready to install the replicators, by running the following as tungsten OS user:
cd tungsten-replicator-5.2.1/tools
tpm install
Replicating into Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten
At this point you would start the reader process using trepctl online command to start capturing events from the source instance, and use something like mysqldump to dump & load your dataset into a Google Cloud SQL instance. Make sure you have the binlog coordinates of that dump available.
Once the Cloud SQL instance is properly seeded, we would start the applier process from the appropriate position e.g.
/opt/continuent/writetocloudsql/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/bin/trepctl online -from-event 'mysql-bin.000011:0000000000002552;0'
Checking the status of each process:
tungsten@instance-1:~$ /opt/continuent/mysqlreader/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/bin/trepctl status
Processing status command...
NAME VALUE
---- -----
appliedLastEventId : mysql-bin.000007:0000000000000520;112
appliedLastSeqno : 1
appliedLatency : 0.355
autoRecoveryEnabled : false
autoRecoveryTotal : 0
channels : 1
clusterName : mysqlreader
currentEventId : mysql-bin.000007:0000000000000520
currentTimeMillis : 1511354659857
dataServerHost : instance-2
extensions :
host : instance-2
latestEpochNumber : 0
masterConnectUri : thl://localhost:/
masterListenUri : thl://instance-1:2112/
maximumStoredSeqNo : 1
minimumStoredSeqNo : 0
offlineRequests : NONE
pendingError : NONE
pendingErrorCode : NONE
ndingErrorEventId : NONE
pendingErrorSeqno : -1
pendingExceptionMessage: NONE
pipelineSource : jdbc:mysql:thin://instance-2:3306/tungsten_mysqlreader?noPrepStmtCache=true
relativeLatency : 3.857
resourcePrecedence : 99
rmiPort : 10000
role : master
seqnoType : java.lang.Long
serviceName : mysqlreader
serviceType : local
simpleServiceName : mysqlreader
siteName : default
sourceId : instance-2
state : ONLINE
timeInStateSeconds : 72.806
timezone : GMT
transitioningTo :
uptimeSeconds : 74.46
useSSLConnection : false
version : Tungsten Replicator 5.2.1
Finished status command...
tungsten@instance-1:/etc/tungsten$ /opt/continuent/writetocloudsql/tungsten/tungsten-replicator/bin/trepctl status
Processing status command...
NAME VALUE
---- -----
appliedLastEventId : NONE
appliedLastSeqno : -1
appliedLatency : -1.0
autoRecoveryEnabled : false
autoRecoveryTotal : 0
channels : -1
clusterName : writetocloudsql
currentEventId : NONE
currentTimeMillis : 1510939133227
dataServerHost : cloudsql
extensions :
host : cloudsql
latestEpochNumber : -1
masterConnectUri : thl://localhost:/
masterListenUri : thl://instance-1:2113/
maximumStoredSeqNo : -1
minimumStoredSeqNo : -1
offlineRequests : NONE
pendingError : Replicator configuration failed
pendingErrorCode : NONE
pendingErrorEventId : NONE
pendingErrorSeqno : -1
pendingExceptionMessage: Unable to translate property value: key=serverId value = 3555962359
pipelineSource : UNKNOWN
relativeLatency : -1.0
resourcePrecedence : 99
rmiPort : 10002
role : master
seqnoType : java.lang.Long
serviceName : writetocloudsql
serviceType : unknown
simpleServiceName : writetocloudsql
siteName : default
sourceId : 35.184.133.21
state : OFFLINE:ERROR
timeInStateSeconds : 431.65
timezone : GMT
transitioningTo :
uptimeSeconds : 433.596
useSSLConnection : false
version : Tungsten Replicator 5.2.1
Finished status command...
I’ve discovered there is a bug with Tungsten 5.2, where high values of server-id parameter prevent replicator from working. CloudSQL sets very high server-ids by default, and this cannot be modified by a user.
I have already reported this to Continuent so hopefully they will come up with a way to fix this soon.
In the meantime the only way to get past this is to open a ticket with Google support, and have them modify the server-id on Cloud SQL instance for you.
Conclusion
Cloud SQL is a very interesting platform for those wanting a fully managed database solution.
Until 2nd gen instances have the ability to replicate from an external master, replicating into Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten after the initial load is one valid alternative. By doing so, you can keep data in sync until you are ready to do the cutover to the new platform.
via Planet MySQL
Replicating in Google Cloud SQL using Tungsten