Fortunately small TDD cycles and experimentation made us realise that it was the combination of new line characters and mustache code made jade work/break.

We would try something like this:

script(type="text/html", id="my_checkbox", class="partial")
  li 
    label(for="{{code}}")
      {{name}} 
    input(id="{{code}}", checked="checked", name="{{code}}", type="checkbox")

The set of statements above would be valid mustache (once converted to HTML) but jade complains because the {{name}} is on its own line. The fix was to use the pipe (|) character to force jade to recognise a line break. It looks like this now

script(type="text/html", id="my_checkbox", class="partial")
  li 
    label(for="{{code}}")
      | {{name}} 
      input(id="{{code}}", checked="checked", name="{{code}}", type="checkbox")

Simple, but not particularly obvious from the examples in their documentation.

Feedback appreciated.

More details here: https://npmjs.org/package/grunt-regex-check

I found the book sometimes jarring, perhaps it’s just the conversational style and the translation that means it’s a bit halting. The constant references to manufacturing terminology also makes it slow to digest, but I find it fascinating to see how many of these ideas easily translate into the world of software as well. The book touches upon a little bit of thing when he goes on to analyse the difficulties of the “white collar workers” and how it’s much harder for them to “go to the gemba” to see the results.

Much of the advice is still appropriate today. Many take aways reinforce many of the ideas espoused by many of the lean movements such as tool makers should not be separated from the tool users, or they end up creating tools that are not useful. The idea that improvement cannot be mandated centrally, away from the “gemba” but must be done by the people “on the gemba”.

The book also starts off with his attitudes towards people being human, the the problems that we have with our own mental models or misconceptions that lead us to be wrong. Chapters like “The wise men mend their ways” and “If you are wrong, admit it” are good examples of how to cope with these human traits.

The book is a short read, and is full of nice little soundbites. Probably my favourite out of the book is:

“There are so many things in this world that we cannot know until we try something. Very often after we try we find that the results are completely the opposite of what we expected, and this is because having misconceptions is part of what it means to be human”, in the Chapter: “If you are wrong, admit it”

Here’s one that works for us:

var Builder = function() {
  var a = "defaultA";
  var b = "defaultB";
  
  return {
      withA : function(anotherA) {
        a = anotherA;
        return this;
      },
      withB : function(anotherB) {
        b = anotherB; 
        return this;
      },
      build : function() {
        return "A is: " + a +", B is: " + b;
      }
  };
};

var builder = new Builder();

console.log(builder.build());

var first = builder.withA("a different value for A").withB("a different value for B").build();

var second = builder.withB("second different value for B").build();

var third = builder.withA("now A is different again").build();

console.log(first);
console.log(second);
console.log(third);

Our feedback forms were quite short with two quantitative questions (out of a 1-5 scale), and three or four free text questions. Although the quantitative questions gave me a good indication of general feedback from the audience, it is not specific enough for me to really understand what things to do more of, or things to do less of. It reminds me of a traffic light system some conferences used (red, yellow, green) for evaluating conference presenters. Fun, quick, but entirely useless to know why people put numbers down.

Although the free text answers to feedback forms take more time to read, the feedback is much more helpful, particularly around getting an understanding of where expectations for a session matched or didn’t match, and useful suggestions or ideas to focus more on. I can take this feedback and actually do something about it for a different presentation.

For conference organisers, or if you’re putting feedback forms together for your own workshop, please don’t leave feedback as a binary, or based solely on numbers. Although there are advantages to getting quicker to an evaluation, you don’t really know why people rated something well or not well. Ask open ended questions and provide these to speakers unedited and raw.

I think if conferences really wanted speakers to get better as well, I think having some peer presenters sit in a session and provide targeted feedback would be even better. I could imagine something like this could focus solely on the mechanics and/or execution of the presentation and give timely, helpful feedback to improve the session and the presenter.

Unfortunately I rebooted my machine today, and found that my backup service was no longer working. I scoured their twitter stream, their website to see status, but it all looked good. I figured something must have changed on my machine. I forgot that I had installed JDK7 earlier in the week on my machine, but didn’t really link the two events because I barely need to restart the mac.

Fortunately this post told me how to reconfigure crashplan to run on Java 1.6 again. Thanks interwebs.

The book is largely domain agnostic, although the coaching examples they use tend to be focused on a business context (i.e. not life coaching, sports coaching or agile coaching). I think that makes it quite accessible to any person interested in developing coaching skills, but aren’t necessarily looking to be a full-time coach themselves.

They introduce this “Multi-modal” coaching model made up of four different perspectives a coach can focus on:

• Logical levels – Beliefs (why), Environment (where, when), Behaviours (what), Capability (how), Identity (who). A good point is that an effective coach considers which logical level to focus on and where their efforts might have the most impact. Doing so at the wrong logical level leads to frustration and an ineffective coaching relationship
• Remedial versus Generative Continuum – Coaching falls along a spectrum, of whether or not it needs to be targeted at a specific instance (remedial) or outcome, or help with exploring options (generative). Once again, consider what is most appropriate for the situation.
• Systemic Context – With a strong nod to one of my favourite books on systems thinking, The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization: Second edition, the idea here is that coaches are working with people who are working in a larger environment that drives their behaviour. It’s useful to step back and view this larger context, and explore it as part of the coaching conversations
• Interpersonal-intra psychic continuum – Lastly, and the one I understood the least, is the idea of trying to not simply focus on external relationships/observations but also to think about exploring the inner beliefs and internal drivers of the coachee.

I agree with quite a number of the other chapters in the book and I think they offer quite a number of practical examples and advice on items a coach focuses on, such as “Building the Alliance” with a client (agree on how/when to meet, develop an agenda, establish goals and how to measure progress) and the importance of identifying the “Mind-Body-State” necessary for both you as a coach, and the coachee to have a healthy conversation.

One of the most useful resources for a new coach is also found in the appendix, referring to core competencies outlined by the International Coach Federation.

Go on. Read it It ties in really well with his recent article about ThoughtWorks Eliminating Sales Commissions.

The print copy of the book is now available via Amazon (all the links are below). Buy one for you, your team or as a gift today.

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.de
• Amazon.es
• Amazon.fr
• Amazon.it

Pre-requisites
I work on a mac, but the only software they provide to reset firmware effectively runs on windows. Fortunately I had a windows netbook still around that I could use to reset it.

Boot the machine using TFTP
This approach for booting the machine remotely is well-documented here, but unfortunately their linked software didn’t work for my case. A kirkwood one floating the internet and listed on this forum post seemed to work best for me.

The steps that worked for me included:

1. Connect the NAS via ethernet directly to the windows laptop
2. Set a fixed IP to 192.168.11.1, allowing the default gateway details to fill in (tabbing away works). Save this
3. Start the TFTP Boot.exe program from the kirkwood zip
4. Start the LS-CHL Linkstation Live in TFTP mode (hold the function key down for a while, turn on the power and wait for the blinking blue lights). The red flashing lights came on, and when I hit the function key again, it would eventually bootstrap
5. You should see two console messages as described in the post saying “uImage.buffalo, xxx Blocks Served” and “initrd.buffalo, xxx Blocks Served”

Reset the firmware
At this point, I figured, the machine is rebooted, now you have to apply some firmware. I downloaded the latest, and then waited to see if the machine would come up for an update. At this point, you need to make sure you follow the Force Firmware Update post instructions.

One extra step that I ended up having to do was in response to a “Couldn’t connect” problems. At this point, another post pointed out that I needed to remove my static IP I had set earlier. I changed the windows box, fired up the NasNavi (to obtain a different IP and to establish a connection to the Linkstation) and then I could follow the firmware update.

I rebooted the machine, and it still flashed red, but trying to go through this cycle again, at some point – I don’t remember when I saw yellow blinking lights. I counted them, and they informed me and, according to the manual, the machine was resetting its firmware. Yay! A little bit more waiting, and I had to repartition the drive and it was blue lights all on again.