15yrs later...

I remember working on an airline reservation system coding a Passenger Name Record (PNR) parsing system. One of our biggest concerns was the special characters embedded in the PNR which caused the code to fail as it wasn't intelligent enough to detect real data from the special characters. Of course, we got around the scenario by coding to the bad data rather than fixing the bad data or normalizing the data.

Fast forward 15yrs. I'm working in healthcare IT and building a solution that involves parsing data from a third party provider. One of the challenges of parsing data is ...guess what...special characters in the data causing the code to break.

Why do we not stop to fix the data and end up writing code to work around the issue? Time and time again!

Apple Sept 9th press event

So, Apple finally confirmed the Sept 9th press event. Looks like its the usual announce new products guessing game from now until then.

The most popular predictions are:

• an ipod with a built-in camera
• an itablet

How about if Apple releases an iTablet that also doubles up as an e-Reader a la Kindle? That would be a one-in-all device. It would be worth it at $699 too.

iPhone Product of the Day

The award for Product Of The Day has to go to Air Video by InMethod.

http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html;jsessionid=F7EF22C725F70A98E2C07048F7FBC62F

All you need to watch movies from your NAS is a host server. Either Windows or Mac will do.

Install the Server component on your Mac, point it to the shared NAS and you're good to go.

Note: It currently doesn't support TVOut due to a firmware glitch.

Multi-room streaming using Songbird, iTunes, Airport Express, iMac

Apparently, iMac supports simultaneous audio streams to different audio destinations.

Here's how my configuration worked:

* Play Audio Stream #1 in Songbird which will default to the iMac speakers

* Play Audio Stream #2 in iTunes but select remote speakers via Airport Express

You now have multi-room streaming through a single iMac server.

Agile Project Management

Agile seems to be many things to many people. It is a "drink the kool-aid" approach. It is a Waterfall-done-right approach. It is also the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Having experienced Agile at a large Healthcare IT company, the greatest revelation was that it was all of the above and yet none of the above. Here are my findings:

• The team has to find its comfort zone with Agile. (Translation: how much is the team willing to stay within and step outside of their comfort zone to adopt Agile)
• Agile has to be modified to fit the company/team culture and working practices. (Translation: Agile is not a one-size fits all approach)
• Adoping Agile for the sake of adoption will lead to uncomfortable results. (Translation: Identify value realization before adoption)

Was Agile successful? Agile did lead to a higher level of engagement from the team.

It's been a long time since last blog...not sure if that's due to the Twitter, Facebook effect!