Using a Mac – A MindMap

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Photo by rbieber

Experimenting with MindJet MindManager, an application used to create mind maps. Tom the Architect has talked to me about mind maps a bajillon times, but I have been reluctant to start using them because the only "free" program was a Java app. The folks at MindJet shot me a complimentary copy of their software and I’ve started using it. Sat in a meeting yesterday and walked away with more content than I’ve ever walked away with note-wise. Excellent software.

This is something I used just to play with the software. These are things I like about the Mac, as a new user.

I’m really liking the complimentary copy of MindJet MindManager I received the other day from the folks at MindJet. I have been intrigued by mindmapping since first reading about it in a book and later watching Tom the Architect produce them as a form of meeting notes (using FreeMind). Lately, I’ve been watching Cote produce a slew of them. Playing around with the software, it makes note taking so much easier.

I just might buy a copy at some point to show my appreciation for the productivity gains I believe I will receive just from having this software installed on my machine.

As I use it more in “real life” I plan to write more about it. Mind mapping definitely puts you in a different state of mind in a meeting. I’m one of those people that has a hard time taking notes because I wind up editing sentences while people are talking rather than getting the data down. This process removes me from that mindset all together. I can see all sorts of uses for this to increase my productivity.

Perfection

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I’m currently reading Lean Thinking : Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones in my quest to learn more about lean principles in general.

During my reading this evening, I came across this quote that I really liked.

Perfection is like infinity. Trying to envision it (and to get there) is actually impossible, but the effort to do so provides inspiration and direction essential to making progress along the path.

This kind of reminds me of this Bruce Lee quote:

A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.

People tend to think of goal setting from only the S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) perspective. While these goals are important, and give you an idea of short term goals, the idea of a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) as outlined in Jim Collins Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies are also very important, as they give you somewhere to move towards.

Just a little something I was thinking about this evening after reading that quote. Goals of the ‘Big Hairy Audacious’ type, with buy in and commitment from everyone, can be a really good way to drive behavior in a long term direction rather than keeping everything at an attainable and realistic viewpoint, which can often keep us in a very short term frame of mind.

Subversion 1.4 Released

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The Subversion team has released version 1.4 of its popular version control software. You can check out the release notes over at the official site get the the details, but here’s a summary of the changes, pulled directly from the aforementioned release notes:

  • svnsync, a new repository mirroring tool
  • Huge working-copy performance improvements
  • Support for BerkeleyDB 4.4 and its “auto recovery” feature
  • Size improvements to the binary delta algorithm
  • A handful of new command switches
  • Many improved APIs
  • More than 40 new bugfixes

I was going to post about this yesterday, but I wanted to make sure I had the software built and installed here at the Labs before throwing the link out there. The upgrade went relatively well. Since I still use Berkeley DB for some of the repositories here, I build my own software to minimize the amount of dumping / loading I have to do. Currently I am still running Berkely DB 4.2. Referencing this during the build allowed me to avoid some problems people have reported using pre-packaged distributions that upgrade Berkeley DB for you, rendering your repository useless. Building my own also allows me to get the software without waiting for the binary distributions to become available.

One note on the upgrade. I’ve been a little lax in upgrading my Apache server (also custom built) and was running version 2.0.48 or so. The new release requires an up to date version of the apr libraries, so this also forced me to upgrade Apache to 2.0.59. Overall, the upgrade was painless.

As mentioned above, this release also includes the svnsync tool, which is a repository mirroring tool. From what I’ve read so far, the destination mirror must remain read only – there is no synchronization between two duplicate repositories (at least from the limited reading material I’ve found around so far), so this release by no means invalidates the SVK tool. Nevertheless, the working copy improvements and the mirroring capability shows that the team is still on the right track.

Also noted in the release notes:

… the new working copy format allows the client to more quickly search a working copy, detect file modifications, manage property metadata, and deal with large files. The overall disk footprint is smaller as well, with fewer inodes being used. Additionally, a number of long standing bugs related to merging and copying have been fixed.

I’m going to reserve judgement on these improvements until I get the Solaris boxes at work upgraded. The working copies are really an Achilles heel on Solaris environments, where 20 or so developers use one machine to do all development. We’ve had a number of inode-maxouts over the last year or so. When I get these machines upgraded, I’ll post a follow up on the performance on Solaris.

One other enhancement I’m glad to see, the diff and merge commands now support a -c option which you can use to merge one revision between branches. This allows you to avoid using a revision range for a simple one revision merge. This should simplify things a bit …

Subversion is still, overall, the best version control tool I’ve worked with thus far (and I’ve worked with quite a few of them). Kudos to the team on the new release. I like what I see so far …

Screencast Demo of Castblaster Podcasting Software

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If you’ve been looking for a tool to make podcasting much easier than using Audacity, you might want to check out Castblaster. I’ve used it for quite some time and each release it just gets better and better.

While browsing the Castblaster forums, I came across this screencast put together by Troy of the Rutters Ramblings podcast that shows a pretty complete picture of what Castblaster does.

If you don’t feel like downloading the software, but are curious as to what you could get from it, check out the screencast. Yes, it can be that easy.

Jon Udell Screening Room Screencast on IronPython

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Episode 8 of Jon Udell’s The Screening Room features Jim Hugunin, creator of Jython and now IronPython, a .NET implementation of Python. For Python fans, this is a fascinating screen-cast to watch. They’ve done some great work on IronPython, which just hit its 1.0 release this week.

Some of the cool things I liked about what I saw:

  • Integration of the Python language with the Visual Studio IDE (including the Debugger)
  • Full access to the .NET framework (The Avalon demo was cool)
  • Optional integration of CLR methods into Python objects (String.Trim() vs. String.strip())
  • The PowerShell demo was also pretty cool
  • In the early part of the screen-cast, Jim takes a benchmark program and increases performance of the program dramatically by refactoring one function into C#. Shows off the optimization opportunities possible with the platform, along with the great integration between IronPython and other .NET languages

IronPython looks like a really fun thing to start playing with and could be a really great addition to a Windows development group for prototyping. I am a big fan of dynamic languages and think this is a great addition to the .NET tool set.