This post is inspired by TED talk by Prof. Luis von Ahn on Massive-scale online collaboration.

If you haven't watched the video yet, go do it. There are quite a few gems embedded in that inspiring talk. Don't waste time reading further ;)

Just thinking out aloud... on a possibility of introducing our students to Wikipedia and getting their help in translating content.

Most of our children in State Government schools (India) are taught English as Second Language. And as part of the curriculum, translation of English to First language (native language) and viceversa is a common exercise.

Some data points -

• As per 2009 est. (wikipedia), around 31.1% (~ 362 million) of India's population is in age group 0-14
• As per 2009-10 DISE report (pdf, page 21), 69.71% of total students in classes I-VIII are enrolled in schools managed by the Government

Can we introduce Wikipedia or similar sources at School? Our students can try to translate it as part of their regular curriculum? With wikipedia, our younger generation will be introduced to the vast reservoir of knowledge. And with translation, we are making information available to a millions of non-english people.

Couple of hurdles I can think of. First, requirement for a computer infrastructure in government schools (infra is something we terribly lack in, check DISE report). Second, the authenticity of translation. We must ensure that the translation is correct. This problem is already being solved by Duolingo.com, by combining multiple translations for the same source, we can obtain an approximately accurate result.

On a related note, WikiBhasa is a nice tool (developed by Microsoft Research India) towards Indic language translation of Wikipedia.

We just wrapped up the 0.5 release for gnome-shell pomodoro extension. Grab it from github or extensions.gnome.org.

Features

• Minimalistic pomodoro timer (with countdown support)
• Standard short/long pomodoro breaks
• Notifications via modal "take a pause" dialog or gnome-shell taskbar
• Sound notification
• Durations configurable via Shell UI or a json config file

Kudos

Thanks to all our contributors for patches, bugs and feature requests; special thanks to Kamil Prusko, Aman Bhatia for awesome patches.

Screenshots

(download)

Click here to download:

gnome-shell-pomodoro-extension-v0-5-released-FognojBblkIkDeFhHtAv.zip (493 KB)

Let us know your feedback here. Wish you a productive week ahead!

One liner, we could just use Message task.

Where to dump the variables/properties? The Project task defines an interesting entrypoint called InitialTargets, it is run before actually building the project (defined in DefaultTargets attribute). Modify the csproj file to something like:

That will dump AssemblySearchPaths before your actual project is built.

Some very high level notes on NDIS drivers. Hope it helps.

Click here to download:

NDIS_6_Cheatsheet.pdf (251 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

NDIS_6_Cheatsheet.pdf (251 KB)

1: kd> .formats 183616ac 

Evaluate expression:

  Hex:     183616ac

  Decimal: 406197932

  Octal:   03015413254

  Binary:  00011000 00110110 00010110 10101100

  Chars:   .6..

  Time:    Mon Nov 15 14:15:32 1982

  Float:   low 2.35344e-024 high 0

  Double:  2.00688e-315

1: kd> ?183616ac 

Evaluate expression: 406197932 = 183616ac

1: kd> .formats 0n406197932

Evaluate expression:

  Hex:     183616ac

  Decimal: 406197932

  Octal:   03015413254

  Binary:  00011000 00110110 00010110 10101100

  Chars:   .6..

  Time:    Mon Nov 15 14:15:32 1982

  Float:   low 2.35344e-024 high 0

  Double:  2.00688e-315

A test plan is more about finding the "right" scenarios than listing "all" scenarios. The later always deceives you by creating a false confidence that you've covered a lot quantitatively. In my experience, organizing your thinking plays a pivotal role in helping you outline the coverage matrix, and those few cases which are easily missed.

One useful pattern is creating a test matrix. Outline all the parameters which affect the behavior of a feature. Usually these fall into buckets - a) inputs from user or another component, b) the configuration of environment/ecosystem in which your application runs. Now based on the priority of a particular combination dive deeper into the scenarios by modifying these. Or you could use a pairwise testing tool to do the scenarios generation (nice introduction here). Also consider explicitly mapping the functional requirements to the scenarios.

A test matrix clearly calls out the cases you're not covering (because of low priority etc.). This coherent presentation of the scenarios will enable anyone with understanding of functionality of this feature to review/contribute to the scenarios (may be trick your Program Manager or Developer to help you with the test scenarios ;)).

Post an unproductive week and some moments of retrospection later; the root cause of my state of non-action seemed to be lack of clarity and focus. Every day this week, I had bunch of ideas related to the on going projects. Somewhere during this cycle of dealing with tasks, I got overwhelmed with the chained "task" reaction, and lost the focus to organize/think through.

Looking back...

I needed to get into the System again, let the System worry about ideas/projects/tasks. And then my goal should as simple as knocking the tasks off, one by one. My previous attempts to hack on a System were only moderately successful (apart from the few months when I hosted Tracks on my domain). Two lessons from the past -

• Go for the most minimalist yet tweakable user interface. You must know where what is
• Carefully choose the system (GTD et. al), or the system would get too complex, and ultimately take me down with it :)

Made the jump

Remember the Milk, it is. The biggest other online contender was Toodledo with great many features (per this comparison chart). I do care a lot about how and where my data goes (read encrypted), todoist only provides SSL with premium accounts. No go. Plus with RTM, I loved their usability and the amazing community around. If you haven't done already, check out their Tips and Tricks blog posts. So far so good :)

Next, choosing a system. I started with Zen To Done (loved the principles), thanks to ssimon for this nice writeup on implementing ZTD with RTM.

Tweak it up

Here are the RTM mods I'm using:

• User style: Remember the Milk - Keyboard Shortcuts (Smart Add)
• User style: RTM on top -chrome (with some modifications, available here)

And this is how the interface looks currently.

Book: Jack Welch - Straight from the Gut
Author: Jack Welch
Rating: 3/5

-----------------------

Read it early this year. Notes seem to be not complete :(

- "You Punk! If you don't know how to lose, you will never know how to win. If you don't know this,
  you shouldn't be playing" (page 4)

- Building self confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing
  opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do - rewarding
  them after each success in every way possible. (page 5)

- Building self esteem is very pivotal too. Small praises help a lot (page 6)

- The same is true for most business problems. The process helps you get closer to the darker shade of gray. There are rarely black-and-white answers. More often than not, business is smell, feel, and touch as much as or more than numbers. If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by. (page 18)

- Bosses usually have answers in mind when they hand out questions. They're just looking for
  confirmation. To set myself apart from the crowd, I thought I had to think bigger than the
  questions posed. I wanted to provide not only an answer, but an unexpected fresh perspective.
  (page 24)

- When people make mistakes, the last thing they need is discipline. It's time for encouragement and confidence building. The job at this point is to restore self-confidence. I think "piling on" when
  someone is down is one of the worst things any of us can do... Piling on makes leaders lose their
  confidence, panic, and spiral downward into a hole of self-doubt. (page 29)

- If we're managing good people who are clearly eating themselves up over an error, our job is to
  help through it.. That doesn't mean you have to take it easy on your star performers... Obviously
  a negative role model act doesn't play nice on everyone. You can do it with your best - as long as
  they know they're your best. Using role models always helped me make a point to the larger group
  (page 31)

- The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then
  give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses..
  (re failure in a similar swing for a product that never took off) we made a big point of rewarding
  people in the team. We wanted everyone in the company to know that taking a big swing and missing was ok. (page 31)

- I "kicked", but also I "hugged" (page 43)