Pete On Rails

Microsoft has been issued a patent on Page-Up/Page-Down functionality (see below). I was annoyed when Amazon patented One-Click-Checkout, but this patent is even more troubling. I have written about Patent craziness before, mostly as it related to “Submarine Patents” (i.e. patents for products that will never see the light of day, to the benefit of the patent-holder).

This tactic is somewhat different. It patents an industry standard that has been in effect for a long time. 30 years ago, computers had page-up and page-down keys on their keyboards. It seems a little late to be seeking protection for such an innovation.

Anyone know the prior art backstory here?

From the USPTO

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page.

For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

I have just introduced the “has_karma” mixin to VoteFu. It aims to assign a karma score to the owners of voteable objects. This is designed to allow you to see which users are submitting the most highly voted content. Currently, karma is only “positive”. That is, +1 votes add to karma, but -1 votes do not detract from it.

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class User 
  has_many :posts
  has_karma :posts
end
 
class Post
  acts_as_voteable
end
 
# in your view, you can then do this: 
Karma: <%= @user.karma %>

This feature is new and probably going to be enhanced significantly, but useful enough that I’m releasing it now.

A lot of people are in the business of cataloging “Scrum Smells”,  those warning flags that indicate you may have some problems in your agile development process.

These are the ones that I think are important, and common. If these things are happening on your team, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

1. Your Burndown Chart does not have an entry on it for every day’s remaining activity.
2. Someone asks you how your sprint velocity is changing over time and you answer, “It’s hard to compare sprints, because each one is a different length.”
3. You can’t tell me when the next Sprint Planning Meeting is, or what was agreed to at the last meeting.
4. You have no idea what you’ll be working on in 4 weeks. Not even a foggy notion.
5. When asked if you use scrum, you have to answer, “We use our own special flavor of scrum.” Seriously. There isn’t enough process involved in scrum to have seasonings added to it.
6. You are the product owner and the scrum master.
7. You are the scrum master and the boss of your scrum team members.
8. Your burndown chart goes up sharply at the beginning of each sprint (hint: play planning poker 2 days ahead of the sprint meeting).
9. Business stakeholders get mad at the engineering team when their feature isn’t scheduled for an upcoming milestone (hint: that’s the product owner’s baliwick.)
10. You have more than 3 or fewer than 1 sprint goals on the board.

My day job has been keeping me busy-busy-busy, but I had some time this weekend to add some more to MyQuotable.com. Here is what is new:

• You can now edit your user profile. (Name, etc)
• The color scheme is slightly different.
• You now collect positive karma every time someone votes for one of your quotes.
• Pagination!
• I refactored the statusbar. Breadcrumbs and navigation work better and more consistently.

Next up: Search and Categorization

MyQuotable is a fun project for me. Here is what is new:

1. Tags:  Tag your quotes and filter by those tags.
2. /popular: See which quotes have the most votes
3. RSS Feeds for Recent, Popular, and User specific quotes.

What’s next? You tell me. The alpha testers I have so far have had some great feedback. Here is my punchlist:

• Quote updates via email
• Pagination
• Wordpress plugin
• Friending / Following
• Tag other user’s quotes and View items you have tagged
• View items you have voted on
• Tag cloud view
• Manage my account settings

If you haven’t given the site a try yet, please do. I welcome your feedback.