Say It in Six -- part 2

My briefing went very well. I highly recommend this book. I never would've been able to get my point across otherwise.

Programmers' block

Bill de hOra has a post about programmers' block that rings true.

Psyco update

For those who don't know, Psyco is an Python extension module that can speed up your code significantly. (On some heavily computation-intensive code, I got a 5x-6x increase.)

I haven't taken a look at the Psyco home page for a while, but the good news is that it's now up to version 1.4. It also now handles Python functions that use local variables (like eval).

Say It in Six

I picked this book up in the bargain section of Barnes & Noble for $6.98. The big idea behind the book is that any good business presentation can be given in six minutes or less. I just happen to have a big meeting coming up at work, and this caught my eye.

The author, Ron Hoff, breaks the presentation down into an outline of five steps:

1. The "Burning Issue". What's the point of the presentation? Time: 30 seconds.
2. The Overview. Why the Issue has developed, and how you intend to find the answer. Time: 60 seconds.
3. The Idea made Tangible. Evidence that you've thought about your idea, and why the crowd should take it seriously. It helps if you can hold something in your hands to make the idea real to people. Time: 120 seconds.
4. The Payoff. Why the audience benefits from your Idea, not you. Keep it simple. Time: 120 seconds.
5. The Interactive Close. Wrap it up by opening the floor up to the group for discussion and resolution. If you can discuss the Idea over food & coffee, so much the better. Time: 30 seconds.

Hoff also sprinkles the discussion by illustrating many different types of sample presentations in the book. There's also some good tips on dealing with nervousness. One of my favorite parts of the book was a section where he transforms a ponderous 12-minute speech by President Clinton into one with a 6-minute punch.

Too bad the book can't take its own advice. The author runs too long after he's made his point. By the halfway mark, you either accept the six-minute idea, or you don't, and the 7th or 8th illustration won't make a difference. Fortunately, the rest of the book is easy to skim, and I didn't lose much time there.

A good read worth the money. I'll know in a couple days how well the book pays off.

And no, I'm not watching the Super Bowl

... although I am keeping track of the game via CNN.com.

I'll probably watch all the good commercials later on IFILM. According to them, they will be posting them seconds after they air (although I'm not in that big of a hurry).

Source control

At work, I've been scouting for a new source control product to replace Visual SourceSafe (VSS). Our branch is going to be connecting with another remote office, and VSS can't handle the job.

As a result of Werner Vogels' post on the subject, I've looked at Perforce, StarTeam, CVS, Subversion and Vault. At work, my overriding concern is ease of use. My team still has trouble with VSS sometimes, so I don't need anything more complicated than our current situation.

A quick review of what I've found out so far:

• Perforce's GUI is bad. Very bad. A definite no.
  
• StarTeam won't install correctly on Win2003 Server. It depends on a JRE library being installed. Borland recommends Sun's JRE. I tried it -- it created a partial install that wouldn't uninstall correctly either. Frustrated, I gave up and deleted everything manually that I could.
• CVS is command-line stuff, which won't meet the ease-of-use requirement by itself. I've used WinCVS, the Windows front-end to CVS, when I've looked at the Mozilla source code, but I had trouble understanding their interface.
• Subversion also consists of command-line programs. Fortunately, their GUI situation is a little better. Of the two Subversion GUI programs I experimented with, I preferred TortoiseSVN over RapidSVN. TortoiseSVN is integrated with Windows Explorer, and although the interface isn't spectacular, it's better than the spartan RapidSVN GUI.
• Vault looks the most promising since it's the most like SourceSafe. However, we haven't been able to try it yet. Vault uses Microsoft's IIS, and due to security concerns, we can't install IIS on our server. The same concerns don't exist at the remote site, so we may still be able to try it there.

What's amazing is that there isn't really a clear winner emerging. We aren't confident in SourceSafe's ability to safeguard our data, but it sure is easy to use in comparison to most of these products. I honestly would wait for Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Builder if we could, but we need a product now.

In the meantime, I'm using Subversion on my home machine. I read Ned Batchelder's recent article to get me started, plus I'm using an IDE that has some basic Subversion integration built into it. So far, so good.

The Disciple-Making Church

This book by Bill Hull is great. It applies principles gleaned from how the apostles trained disciples in the early church and how we should apply them to a modern church.

I was surprised by the way the book is written. I was expecting something more along the lines of an essay on how the author had applied disciple-making at his church. Instead, the book is a fairly thorough treatment on the book of Acts, including in-depth information about the various New Testament churches (Antioch, Philippi, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica). The author does an especially good job of making you feel the personality and character of each church, and the unique challenges that the apostles had in listening/responding to God and moving the church forward. One of the most interesting insights was that the church never prayed for safety in the midst of persecution, only for courage and boldness in sharing the Gospel.

Only after extracting principles from the Bible does the author present his own ideas on disciple-making in the last few chapters of the book. One of the most powerful ideas was the method of training small groups to share about Christ:

... I favor and support evangelistic events that gather people to hear a direct Gospel presentation. The far better way, however, is to train people to walk down the paths of their lives, where, quite naturally, they find people who need Christ. Training people in small groups to do event evangelism did not work across the board for us. People could not translate the event skills into the natural flow of their lives. When they left the groups, they stopped planning events, because they just didn't find it practical.

Changing our style, we helped Christians network more effectively and began to ... [count it] outreach when someone took a friend to a baseball game, helped him landscape his yard, or baby-sat his children. This laid the foundation for future talks and opportunities to lead that friend to Christ.

... Most of our people faced the obstacle of where to gather with the unchurched -- they lacked a natural vehicle into which they could take people. The most natural place was the small group. To the seeker, unchurched, and the Christian looking for a church home, the Christian can naturally say, "Would you like to come into my small group?"

This made it much more clear how I could introduce the idea of disciple-making into my College & Career class at church. First is the idea building common ground and love with those around us we want to reach, and second is creating a small group environment where members can feel comfortable in bringing others to see and hear about Christ. The challenge is to work on these ideas myself as I introduce them to the students.

Amazon DevCon

Via Werner Vogels, a link to posts about the recent Amazon Developers Conference at the end of January. Presentations were given on AspectJ, Struts, MySQL, Hibernate and JBoss, RedHat, Sleepycat, Mozilla, Eclipse and Python. One talk was given by Guido van Rossum, Python's creator.

Ubuntu gains ground

I see some bloggers are switching to Ubuntu and they are liking the experience.

Stranded

I was gone last week to FL for our company's annual technical interchange and awards banquet. Due to the ice storm in Atlanta, our return flight to Baltimore on Sunday was delayed a day and a half.

Despite wanting to be home with Doris, there was a distinct bright spot in the trip. While waiting in the airport yesterday, Todd Montgomery, one of my college friends from UWF (University of West Florida), spotted me in the terminal. I hadn't seen him in about ten years, but here we were, waiting on the same flight. We talked for about two hours, just catching up.

I was just thinking about Todd a few weeks ago and regretting that I hadn't kept in touch with him. When Todd and I parted in Atlanta as he headed on to Palm Springs, I was grateful to God for connecting us again. I really don't believe in coincidences like that -- I think God sometimes works on our behalf even when we don't think to ask Him for help.

Suddenly being stranded wasn't so bad after all.