Robert Horvick's Weblog : General

PDC Hours - Come and Talk Team Foundation Server Setup, Configuration and Administration

RobertHorvick — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:47:00 GMT

I'll be available to talk about TFS admin scenarios at PDC - my hours are:

Monday - 12:30 - 6:00 in the VSTS Lounge

Tuesday - 12:30 - 6:00 in the VSTS Lounge

Wednesday 10:00-12:30 in the VSTS Lounge and Ask The Experts from 5:30-9:00PM

I won't be available Thursday so please find me before then!

New Years without snow is ... great. (Want to find out?)

RobertHorvick — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:37:00 GMT

Happy New Year and all that. I spent the long weekend at Myrtle Beach soaking up rain or sun - depending on the moment you checked.

I’ve been out of Fargo for a year now, after nearly 30 years living in Minnesota and North Dakota. I wasn’t timid about the winters growing up. I’ve slept outdoors in the dead of winter (in an igloo and not), ice fished in 40-below temps and done the whole “run from the sauna into the snow drift” thing (poor-man’s polar bear club) more times than I can recount. Growing up Minnesotan was all about snow, ice and fun.

But this year I spent New Years in a pair of shorts walking the beach and playing mini-golf with the kids.

I’m hooked.

The Indigo Girls said it well … “When god made me born a Yankee he was teasing”.

So if you didn’t enjoy your New Years weekend as much as I did … why not consider a change? We’re hiring. (If the direct link does not work – visit http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/default.aspx and search for the “NC – Raleigh” location and the “Visual Studio” product. Leave the other defaults and click “Search Jobs”).

[My regularly scheduled rant is coming shortly]

"Lord I was born a ramblin' man" ... and it was killing my productivity.

RobertHorvick — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:42:00 GMT

This week is the one year anniversary of my move from the Fargo, ND office and the Business Framework team to the Durham, NC office and the Team Foundation Server Version Control team. I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the last year. This is one of those reflections. It was written for myself but I thought I’d share it – my blog is a glorified backup system if nothing else…

My work habits are somewhat reflected in my writing style. I am overly verbose, I get off topic quite frequently, and once I can understand how the problem will be solved I get bored and want to move on to the next problem.

Oops– just did it again. The last part has nothing to do with my writing style. Or perhaps everything to do with it.

The point is that I ramble.

I’m like a hound dog chasing its nose through unfamiliar woods. I end up miles from where I should be and I'm not always sure how to get home.

My rambling is not limited to the world of writing or conversation. When I do something I go all the way. I also ramble around the office.

In the Fargo office the building layout is your typical cube farm. Hundreds of people crammed into 8x6 cubicles in the most economical means possible. It was too bright, too noisy and there were too many interruptions. I would solve this by going on walks. Long walks. Thinking walks. I might put on four to six thousand steps a day on my walks (I often wear a pedometer to work). On these walks I would think about the problem I was trying to tackle. I would think about schedules and estimations and meetings.

Basically it ruined walking for me.

But it became a habit. When I have a problem I think it through on a walk.

After moving to the Durham, NC office things were different. I have a private office so I can control the light levels and noise. I can close my door when I want to be left alone, and I can leave it open when I don’t mind hearing the exterior conversations. But what didn’t change was that I still took long walks. In Fargo you could not leave the building for half the year – it is simply too cold. But here I can go outside and walk around. Ridiculously long walks. I once came home with more than 12,000 steps on my pedometer (though I did think my way through a rather complex problem so it was worth it).

The problem is that I sometimes was walking when I shouldn’t be. Any gap in my day was suddenly filled with aimless rambling. I started keeping track and discovered I was leaving my office for a short walk (7 to 10 minutes – two or three laps around the second floor) more than 6 times per day. I’d leave the building for a long walk twice a week on average.

Add on to that the trips to the restroom and break room and I was leaving my office upwards of 20 to 25 times per day.

This was keeping me from getting into the zone. When I’m not in the zone I’m not productive. When I’m not productive I fall behind. When I fall behind I get stressed. When I’m stressed I can’t get into the zone.

What’s a rambling-addicted fellow to do?

I took a piece of yellow business paper and a black dry-erase marker. I wrote the words “Where are you going?” in huge print and I hung it on my door in such a way that I could not leave the office without seeing it.

I can’t tell you how many times I stood up to go on a walk, without even thinking about it, and seeing the paper made me think for a few more seconds before walking out the door.

Is this walk going to be productive? Can it wait? Do I really need a thinking walk or do I just need to stretch? What is the goal of this movement?

After a few weeks of having that sign hanging the number of times I leave my office has been cut by more than half. I still take think walks but I go on them with a goal so I know when I’m done walking and can measure if it was successful or not.

I am spending less time rambling and more time in the zone where I get my best work done.

Three easy steps to a sane tomorrow...

RobertHorvick — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 16:54:00 GMT

It seems that every work-day ends just a little too soon. I’ve spent all day getting into that zone where I’m the most productive. By now my door is closed and Molly Hatchet is pouring out the speakers. Inevitably I’m about an hour from being “done” when quitting time rolls around. The desire to finish the task is strong but I’ve finally hit that point where I’ve come to understand that it’s important to leave on time when you can – there will be plenty of times when you can’t.

The problem with breaking away early is that it took half the day to get into that zone. My mind works differently when I’m in the zone than when I’m not. My understanding of the code is fresher and more accurate. I have ideas coming into my mind that seem like they should be easy to remember. I’ve mentally mapped out the next 45 to 90 minutes of work – I’ve written the code in my mind but my fingers haven’t caught up yet.

I used to just walk out of the office knowing that the ideas would retain in memory until tomorrow. Surely when I look at the code again I will remember where I left off. Right?

Wrong.

About 35 seconds after leaving the office my mind is a blank slate. I start trying to figure out if I should take I-40 or US-55 to get home. Is there an accident on Davis today? Does it look like the freeway is moving slowly? Why doesn’t 96 Rock give me the traffic report every 5 minutes instead of every 10? Oh – and the kids! How do I get Big B to scouts at 7 when Little B needs to be at Taekwondo at 6:30 and Big C needs to be at school by 6? What about dinner? And homework. And did I remember to setup the DVR to record Heros? Oh shoot... Now I’m stuck in traffic. I knew I should have taken Davis to 55.

I’ve been out of the office for all of two minutes and I’ve already forgot every detail of that algorithm I was working on.

When I arrive the next day I go through some email, pick what will be my life’s sound track today, check for a quick update on that news story I’ve been following … pretty soon 30 minutes has passed. I know I should be working on something but I can’t remember exactly what. So I open the source code editor and build. It succeeded so I run a test pass. If something breaks – that must be what I’m working on. If nothing breaks I get the latest code and try again. Still nothing broken? Then I get to decide – bugs or features? What am I working on today?

I played this game for years. I would wager that over the last 7 years I’ve wasted at least 10% of my time by not knowing exactly what I should be working on because I didn’t have a system to remind myself. That doesn’t even begin to account for how much time I’ve lost by not being able to quickly get back into my effective work “zone” – that mental state in which I am most productive.

But now it’s different. I’ve developed a few simple techniques that make it so I can leave on time, forget everything I know and still get back into the zone quickly – picking up where I left off the night before.

It’s a simple three step process that I perform before I leave:

1) Write a brief summary of what you are working on before leaving.

a. I open notepad and write up a few sentences about what I am working on, what the core problem(s) is and what the next steps are. I think differently when in the zone then when not. I need to capture not just the problem but also the next steps otherwise I will approach them differently tomorrow.

b. I maximize notepad on my primary monitor (it has to be primary to ensure I see it if I connect from home using remote desktop).

c. I do not save notepad. I want it to complain it I try to close it so that I don’t accidently dismiss it.

2) Email that summary to myself with a red flag or high priority.

a. Most get deleted without being read. But sometimes at night I want to see the list. If I emailed it to myself all I need to do is check my mail – 15 seconds of time. Otherwise I’d need to use the VPN which means about 15 minutes and that means I won’t do it. The only thing I’ll remember the next day is that I had an idea – not the idea.

b. Sometimes SMS patches my machine and reboots me. I want to make sure I’ve captured the notes in a way that I will notice. By emailing it to myself I will notice a new email and read it.

c. If I read the email before arriving at work I mark it is unread so I don’t forget to read it at work.

d. I only delete the email when I’ve completed the tasks in it.

3) The last line of code I write each night is almost always the same thing.

a. throw new NotImplementedException();

These three things take about 2 minutes per day but they save me about 30 minutes the next morning – more if over the weekend or when I’m taking vacation.

I no longer forget what I was working on and I am able to get back into my productive zone much faster – and if I’m not in that zone then nothing important is getting done.

What do you do?

My first foray into Ink - the Dots-And-Boxes game.

RobertHorvick — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 17:34:00 GMT

As a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the car traveling from Minneapolis to the lakes country of Minnesota (near Detroit Lakes, if anyone cares). Two 4-hours trips a weekend was pretty normal. So what do you do with 6 kids crammed into a Suburban for 250 miles? Whatever it takes to keep them quiet!

One of the first games I learned to pass the time was the Dots-And-Boxes game. The premise is simple enough:

There is a grid of Dots in a rectangular array (such as the 6x6 grid in the image below). There are N (usually 2) players. Each player takes one turn. A turn consists of drawing a single line between any two adjacent dots. If that turn completes a box then that player receives a bonus turn (which must be immediately taken). Players may not pass on a turn. Two adjacent dots can only be connected once (can’t draw the same line twice). When a box is made the player writes their initials in the box. At the end of the game the player with the most completed boxes is the winner. It is possible to tie.

In the car if a tie occurred we played a "cycle-bikel slug bug". This would be much harder to explain and involved a lot of punching. Our parents encouraged us not to tie.

Below is an example of a game being played:

So the question is … is anyone interested in walking through some of the more interesting points in the development of this simple, but quite challenging, game?

The interesting aspects are:

1) ink input (figure out what dots to connect, best guessing, eliminating bogus moves, etc)

2) Simple AI players (The screen shot above is from a Computer Vs. Computer game) using “Solved Form, Random” players. The solved form of the game states that if a player can make a box, they must. The “Random” part means that if a box can’t be made then a random valid move is made. Only this particular computer player is bound by this rule, if a human player were involved the Unsolved Form of the game is played (any valid move is allowed).

Games are not my thing. I’m not a games programmer. This was a learning exercise not an example of game programming.

If there is any interest I’ll write a few columns on how I went from knowing nothing about ink input to creating this game (which admittedly does not require a lot of knowledge about ink input but which covers some fundamentals).

Let me know.