Technology changes so fast in our society, that our methodologies, procedures, and comfort zones often lags behind. I’ve discussed the lag in acceptance for Telecommuting in my article, Telecommuting: Old-thinking vs New-thinking as one example of societal trends not keeping up with technology.

Another, is in our form of communication. In the past, we communicated almost exclusively with telephones and in person discussions. Now, we have email, chat rooms, and IM. We can access fellow team members at our every whim, even when they are working remotely. But this luxury of communication has it’s drawbacks. We all struggle with distractions, and these forms of instant communication create even more than we would already have. Focusing on a single issue at a time is generally the best method of completing a task, but being bombarded constantly with requests for help on other issues from teammates, requests for status updates on tasks by project management, and spontaneous team brain storming and problem solving meetings all serve to derail us from our train of thought and prevent us from completing the task at hand.

There must times when team members are allowed to focus on their current task, without risk of interruption in thought process. When developers are problem solving, it takes some time for the brain to get into the problem, thoroughly digest it, and get the creative juices flowing to find a solution. But how any times have you been involved in this process, only to be called into a meeting, get involved in an email thread, or be bombarded suddenly with IMs?

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I mentioned in my last post that I think and design better when I can use a whiteboard. I even carry a portable whiteboard in my laptop bag for when I work at a cafe with wifi. Another great solution for whiteboarding is provided by GE. It not only allows easy and free whiteboarding, but also allows you to print and save your drawings, and invite friends to participate in the whiteboarding.

You can use the tool at this link.

I love drawing on whiteboards. I’m very visual, and most times, can’t think through a problem, nor plan a problem without drawing it out. I’m terrible at drawing, so its not about drawing something that looks visually interesting, simply about using visuals to organize concepts, data, and flow.

I use the same technique when planning out a new web site. I like to draw a box for each page, and use lines to link them together. I also design the basic idea of each page, either on a white board, or on paper. In the past, I’ve mocked up my pages using HTML/CSS, and at other times done it in Photoshop or Gimp. The problem is, I waste so much time fooling around with the tools, or trying to get that CSS to look just right, that it takes longer than it should to come up with my basic design.
Thankfully, I’ve found a solution to all that, which I’ve already used to design my next project. With the new tool I’ll introduce you to in this article, you can sketch out which pages you need, and the linkings between them, as well as sketch out the look of each page, all with the ease of using a pencil and paper, yet, save it for later use and editing, and turn it into a functional mockup, perfect for handing to a HTML/CSS developer and a graphic designer.

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This weekend, I had a situation, due to a laptop hard drive failure, where I had two very large directories full of files and subdirectories. Each was a copy of the same directory, but one had my last 4 days of coding in it and the other didn’t. The trick was to find the files I had changed over the course of my last few days of development so I could get them back into the other directory, and then into my source countrol.

So I searched the Internet to see if there was a tool to help me determine the difference in all the files in my directories. I use both Windows and Linux, so I hoped, against the odds that I could find a tool that worked on both.

Thankfully, I found just the tool: KDiff3. I downloaded KDiff3, installed it, and started it up. When the app loads, a small window launches, which lets you select a File or a Directory for the base and for the comparison against the base. You then click ok, and within a few seconds have a list of all differences within the subdirectories. It flags the files that are different and then shows you the differences within the files. You can merge files, choose one or the other side to overwrite, etc. You can also do a three way comparison with three sources.

I was able to use this tool to get my folders in sync and save all my changes. What I thought would be a several hour process was finished in minutes thanks to KDiff3. There are a lot of configuration options that I haven’t tried yet. It looks to be full of features for file and directory comparision and merging.

I highly recommend this tool, and I’ve tried it on Windows XP and Suse 10.0. You can visit the KDiff homepage for more information.

This week I had to create a sequence diagram. In the past, I’ve used MagicDraw, my favorite UML tool. However, I do not personally own a license to it, and was only fortunate to use it at a company that did. I have used ArgoUML for Use Case and Activity diagrams, but have not attempted a sequence diagram with it until this week, and found it to be difficult and limited in functionality.

So the search began for an alternative, and I was fortunate to find Sequence. Sequence is a Java GUI, which allows you type in a notation for a sequence diagram and then it creates the diagram as you type. You can save the notation as a text file, and export the diagram as a graphic.

There was a mild learning curve for the notation, but once I learned it, creating the diagram was almost as easy as just thinking about it. In the past, sequence diagrams were always difficult to create, because they were so time consuming if you had to make a correction, like adding a bunch of new classes and method calls at the top of your diagram, which causes you to have to move diagram objects around.

With this tool, you don’t even have to consider what it looks like, or where you place any of the diagram objects, or moving them around if you left something out.
You can download the jar file here, and read back to the beginning of the tool’s history. When you start the GUI, there are several examples under the Help menu to teach you the notation.