I took the bold (all right, crazy) decision to run with Ubuntu 11.04 whist still in heavy development directly on my Lenovo X201T tablet laptop, partly for the experience of the new Unity and Compiz desktop and partly to help with the testing.

As the 11.04 version of Ubuntu is still being written, I prepared myself to experience a few problems, but apart from one upgrade last Friday (my fault as I didnt look closely enough to see what apt-get dist-install was removing) I have been using Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity quite productively.

Occasionally I get the odd rendering problem with the menus when I login to a new Unity session, so I run the command unity --reset and all is well again.  I leave the terminal window open to see if there are any useful error messages.

I did have a little bit of a crash today with Unity (core dump), but as I also run byobu in my terminal window by default I was easily able to recover without loosing any work or any windows or applications closing.

The unity core dump made my desktop unresponsive to keyboard, though I could still drop down to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1).  When I logged into the virtual terminal, as byobu is set to run as default it picks up the same session I used to reset Unity and I see the core dump message.

So all I needed to do to get back to a working Unity desktop was issue the unity --reset command in the virtual terminal and jump back to my Unity desktop (Alt-F7).

So thanks Byobu, you have saved the day and I have found yet use for this great piece of software.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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A nice treat that came with this mornings upgrade on my laptop running http://www.ubuntu.com 11.04 was a first look at the new Unity application menu.

Its a nice clean look to the menu and really easy to use, especially when I am using the touchscreen on my laptop.

Its not feature complete yet as the top row just launches nautilus with the application list, but the bottom row of the menu launches the specific applications.

I am looking forward to seeing the further enhancements to unity in the run up to alpha2 in the next few weeks.

Thanks to the Ubuntu team for all your hard work.

@jr0cket

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At February’s Limited WIP Society meeting we are having a Kanban Clinic where you have your chance to build your own personal or team kanban board from scratch. You can also work with others to help them build a board if you want to see a kanban board evolve.

If you have an existing board (kanban, scrum, or otherwise), please feel free to bring it along (the design not necessarily the board) and get feedback and advice on any aspects you want to improve on the board.

There is no formal presentation although ideas and examples will be shown and questions arising from the practical work will be discussed.

The slides and presentation video from the January Limited WIP socieity meeting are available on the SkillsMatter website.

Thank you
@jr0cket

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Amazon Web Services have release “Elastic Beanstalk”, there developer cloud service that seems similar to Google App Engine, but sounds like you get more control over your environment.

From the AWS Elastic Beanstalk site:

“You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.”

You will have to pay for using a server and storage on the Amazon cloud, although it sounds like there are no other costs.

“There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk – you only pay for the underlying AWS resources (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3) that your application consumes.”

There are more details on the amazon web services blog

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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Here is an update of events happening that may be of interest to developers in London. There is also a summary of the events I went to last week, in case you missed any of them.

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Pattern recognition - the iron chief paradox

As our experience grows with some activity, our ability to automatically recognise situations grow - we become what people generally term an expert.

Pattern recognition lets experienced people process information very quickly and so reduces time wasted thinking, reviewing or planning where its not needed.

If you can see you are on the right track, or just know you are almost subconsciously then you can get more done.

By visualising work on the kanban, you can also use pattern recognition to quickly plan your activities, recognise upcoming issues.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

To help keep you in a good flow when you are learning or practising the TDD test first approach, it can be useful to use a simple kanban board to manage your flow. Here is a guide to this simple technique.

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To kick off 2011 and to help keep on track with our new years resolutions and goals for the year, the Limited WIP Society are running a personal kanban workshop at SkillsMatter on the 13th January.

Sign up page!!

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Change driven through command and control or positional power has a tendency to fail rapidly.

People can only truly accept and embrace a change when they understand the value of that change. Acceptance of change comes much more eaily if a person understands how that change will benefit them.

Change is hard for an individual, even harder for a team or organisation.

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There has been a huge growth in technology events taking place over the last few years, especially where I am based in London, UK. As well as major conferences through the year, such as JAXLondon, QCon, etc, there are a wide range of communities and user groups now well established.

There are a range of event styles that all these community groups run, so here is a breakdown of the most common event styles used

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