When will Britain learn that it snows in winter?

I'm one part amused and one part exasperated by the following report, read on MSN UK this morning:

"Snow showers sweeping across the North West of England have led to the closure of around 200 schools and are heading towards the South."

The most any area has had is 10cm of snow. It really is not that much. However, traffic comes to a standstill, people can't manage to use a pavement, they don't show up to work and schools shut. Just what you need when there's deepening recession, I might add.

My friends and colleagues look at me funny if I get too enthusiastic about the snow in Helsinki. What they don't understand is that it is a leftover from childhood in the UK. Snow means no school, because the infrastructure can't deal with anything as predictable as the seasons. No school and playing outside all day making snowmen. Great! - when you are a child, or else have nowhere to go.

When you do have somewhere to go, you won't get there. The snow ploughs and gritters are few, and who in Britain owns winter tyres?

My former step-father mentioned that not 50 years ago, Brits treated their cars the same way as Finns are legally required to in winter; they would change to winter tyres. Somehow, the knowledge has not been passed on. Furthermore, people are too lazy and protective of their money to do so without any legal encouragement. I can't blame them for the latter, but how much is lost if you cannot make it to work?

Well, while Britain 'suffers' snow, I am off into the rain and sleet. Sometimes I wonder if I have moved countries, or if the countries just swapped themselves under my feet while the aeroplane hovered on the spot.

Risto Siilasmaa on start-ups in a recession

Risto Siilasmaa is the founder of an internet security company and its former CEO. He is now also a board member at Nokia and backs several start-up companies.

Slush Helsinki is a conference for entrepreneurs. In 2008 it was held on November 24th.

You can see the keynote speech at the Arctic Startup blog. Risto keeps it short and offers some general advice to start-up companies on the attitude they must take to increase their chances of weathering an economic storm.

My favourite moment was hearing Risto say "American football is like life."

Scandinavian Agile 2008

Yesterday, I attended the first ever Scandinavian Agile conference, in Helsinki.

The event was going to be limited to 200 participants, but there was enough demand that there were over 250 admitted in the end. The event ran smoothly, with the sessions starting and ending on time and regular refreshment of the refreshments; every time you came out of a 'session', there was something new on the tables outside.

There were three tracks:

Awareness

Practitioner

Open space

I took advantage of the ability to flit between them. Before any flitting occurred, there was the keynote speech by Gabrielle Benefield of Yahoo! affiliation.

Gabrielle Benefield

Gabrielle's presentation was a rather general overview of what it is like to convert teams in a large organisation to agile. She surveyed the audience beforehand and found that all but six already used agile practises in their daily work. Despite this, the session felt very much like a primer speech. Perhaps she did not expect quite so many people to be practising agile already. This seems strange, because she quoted statistics concerning how widely used agile practises are in the Nordic countries.
There was a lot in Gabrielle's speech about overcoming resistance: spreading the word about agile; encouraging people to take it up; calming people's fears; taking advantage of people's desires; generally using political tactics to smooth your way. I imagine the advice was useful for many people, but I am pleased to say that I am not in a company where much of this is required.

Bjarte Bogsnes, A journey beyond budgeting

I was not too keen on the format of the presentation. It was a little rushed at the end due to too much detail about motives and the underlying philosophy in the beginning of the presentation. However, there were some key points made, and some of them were about Key Points - Key Point Indicators, or KPIs.
One central theme is that companies have to stop using KPIs as Key Point Incentives or as a power and control tool to force people to act in a certain way. This was especially true if a company also tried to do the same through personal incentives. KPIs should be used as the indicators they are; they should be the intermediate point between the goals that you wish to achieve and the actions that you know will (most likely) achieve those goals. A KPI should be a checkpoint: are you doing what you need to do to achieve the goal?
This tied in with the 'league table' theme. I call it the league table theme, because it was an analogy Bjarte used very effectively. Instead of setting a goal to reach a certain performance value, set a goal to reach a certain relative value: football teams do not try to score the most points in a season, they try to outscore other football teams. A more business-centred example would be:

'Don't tell sales people their bonus is based on meeting some stab-in-the-dark estimate of contracts gained, tell them it is based on how many contract announcements you get to make in comparison to competing companies'.

The main theme was, of course, budget. Bjarte criticised the practise of giving people a one month window to estimate their spending for the entire year. He compared it to doing that with your personal finances. According to the speaker, the benefits of going without departmental budgets are many: money won't be spent just because it is there (people think about things more); damage that is caused by estimation will be reduced; damage that is caused by the foolishness of awarding bonuses to people based on under-spending is eliminated. He neither talked about how long it takes to make an acquisition nor whether removing all budgeting affects the quantity of paperwork, particularly that done by middle-management.

Bas Vodde, A journey through development literature

Staying on the awareness track…

After the relatively heavy-going budgeting talk, this presentation was a nice one to listen to. It was a collection of small quotes from development industry books that highlighted themes that ran between the books, even though none of them had been written about that theme. It was cleverly done. It imparted the speaker's intended messages and highlighted the fact that all the books made statements in accordance to agile principles. At the same time, it added a little conflict between quotes that seemed at first to contradict each other, but then he opened them up with the use of another quote. I admired the style.
A lot of this presentation was about the importance of teams, and the importance of cross-functional teams - something we've just made radical steps towards doing better on in our company. It also highlighted the fact that when cross-functional teams were mentioned in literature, it was not a case of 'you have architects, developers and testers in one team, aren't you doing well!', but rather that cross-functional teams include marketing, documentation, design... you name it.

Business Value Workshop

After lunch I switched to the practitioner track. First up was a workshop on Business Value. Workshops are wonderful, in my book, as there's nothing like getting practical. This was a fun 'game' to play and is open source and available from the host's website.
The game forced the team to juggle customer happiness and the threat of potentially losing contracts or customers against development output. Development was measured in velocity and contained an unpredictable random factor. On top of that, the team had to take into account potential profit, potential savings from process improvements and other important factors.
The exercise highlighted the importance of knowing what is really valued in your business, and what really drives prioritisation issues: Is it the volume of a customer, the money coming in, the long term savings that can be made, how much fun a contract is to do, what brings the sales personnel the biggest bonuses, what is easiest for the developers, or something else?
This is really important for people to know at all levels of an agile organisation. Customers and business stakeholders impose their priorities on the product owner, who communicates them to the development team. When the development team works on a high-level item, it splits the item into tasks and gives them a priority. New methods of prioritisation may get introduced at each level.

The exercise highlighted also another problem: how the important details slip by in time-restricted circumstances, particularly once a team has become accustomed to a way of working and does not spot a change slipping in. In the game, the small print about what customers considered 'good enough' was added without the organisers mentioning it. While our team spotted the small print, we did miss one line and it cost us two customers and two increments of work that we had delivered. We made the mistake during the round where our time to think and act had just been halved by the organisers.
Of course, the random factor of the development velocity was one of the most important things to take into account during planning. Managing the risks (and disappointments) caused teams headaches. A roll of a die determined whether the velocity would increase or decrease in each increment, and there were a lot of jokes about not hiring more developers, or skilled developers, but lucky developers.

Scandinavian Agile Panel

Lastly, I attended a panel where five speakers (whose names I do not have, but one of them was actually Scandinavian*) discussed agile issues and some questions raised by the audience. The most interesting topic was how both local and European laws are limiting the competitiveness of agile companies when competing for contracts. People had problems because some contracts require you to allocate, schedule and price the time of design, development and testing time of a project separately. This conflicts with agile methodology. While I find it interesting, I'm glad once more that it is not relevant to my current work.

Open Space

One thing I haven't mentioned so far is the Open Space track. I went to one of these sessions, at the end of lunch. It was about user interface design in agile. My main reason for wanting to attend the conference was a presentation on this subject, which was pulled last minute from the Practitioner track. Unfortunately, the half-hour chat was not very useful. It confirmed that we are not the only people who are tackling the problem of fitting large-scale design methods and departments of designers in with agile deliverable development work. It didn't give me any insights that I had not managed to glean from reading around. I believe we will have to do as I suspected here and simply experiment by trying to improve the problems that we have, the way that the agile system allows and encourages us to do.

That's enough work-like evening activity for me (eugh). The only reason I am happy to do it is because of the delights of Nordic sauna relaxation, but sadly the experience also encourages headaches and I now need to have a good rest.




*The thing about Scan' Agile is that, well, it's not in Scandinavia. Finland is a Nordic Country, not part of Scandinavia, as such. However, most people's idea of Scandinavian culture does include Finland.

Oh no!

I just found out I missed this year's Helsinki book fair (Kirjamessut 2008).

It's not as much of a problem as it could be, as it is mainly a place for bookshops to sell stuff. At least, that was the impression I got last year. Sure, there were talks scheduled in open presentation areas, but they are in Finnish and my comprehension is not good enough to get much value from them.

Still, I would like to have been there, for the love all all things bookish. It also wouldn't have hurt to see how much better I understood the speakers this year than last, but I think the poetry reading I attended at Night of the Arts a month or so back already did that; I'm still a bit rubbish.

I looked at the website for the book fair briefly, and cringed. You can see for yourself how ugly and, well, 1998 it is. There are some pretty good graphic designers in Finland, so I don't think they have any excuse. I can immediately think of at least one local designer who could have done a better job, JDV Design, and that's without even trying. Someone tell them, please.

Accordion update

Just a brief update on my progress with the accordion restoration.

I opened it up a few weeks ago at the bass end, with some difficulty. The pins were rusty and very tight. I'm glad none of them were far enough gone to snap, but I do wonder where I will find replacements. You're always meant to use the originals, but in this case that would be pretty foolish. I have to work out a way to clean the rust residue from the tiny holes, too.

Once opened, my suspicion that a reed block had come loose was confirmed. The glue is so old and hard that it is not holding on to parts as it should. One side of a reed block was stuck to the frame and the rest had fallen away from it. The separation from its own side also means that two of the reeds have fallen out of their mount entirely. It's going to be a tough job getting them back in place and aligned correctly. The presence of thick lines of brittle glue do not help. I have no idea right now if there's a safe way to remove some of it, and what kind of strong glue I need to buy that can glue wood to wood or metal without harming leather.

The other problem with the reeds are the little leather strips that prevent air from flowing over reeds when the bellows are being moved in one direction or the other. Some of them have curled so badly that the bellow action just pushes them further upwards, instead of down to protect the reed. What's worse is that some of these are difficult to reach, inside the hollows of the 'giant harmonica' structure. It will be difficult to unglue them, and perhaps even more so to glue replacements without getting glue on the reeds; this assumes I can find the right kind of soft, fine leather patches.

Since discovering this, I've not touched the accordion. I've been busy working, writing and looking to buy an apartment. I'm hoping to make an offer on a new place in the next week, and if accepted, I'll have to think about packing ready for the new year. This doesn't just mean I have no tie for the accordion, it means I need to work out how to transport it without losing any parts or losing track of the placement of the parts. I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

My 10 Favourite Finnish Words

Before I came to Finland, people would ask me why I want to learn Finnish. Here are ten reasons why:

1. Kuunsilta

This one means 'moon's bridge' and describes the reflection of the moon on water.

The Melody pronunciation guide: coo-n : sill : ta!

2. Hävytöntä!

This expression can be translated as 'Shameful!' The key to the beauty of this word is in the ä and ö sounds; the sounds that you pronounce low in the throat and simply can't find in English are used to great effect in words denoting unfavourable actions or feelings. In this case, the very pronunciation of this word forces you to sound like a prudish old lady.

The Melody pronunciation guide: have : euur : duh!-n : tah!

3. Valitettavasti

Many adverbs have the -sti ending in Finnish and it improves them all, but this is my favourite. It means 'unfortunately' and it has a wonderful snappy staccato rhtyhm.

The Melody pronunciation guide: Val : E : tête : tah! : vasz : tea

4. Taivaanranta

This word isn't as fun to say as some of the others on this list, but what's nice is the direct translation. It means horizon, but actually says 'beach of the sky' or 'sky's shore'. She saw stars shine on the sky's shore.

The Melody pronunciation guide: tie : vahn : ran : ta!

5. Höpöhöpö!

This is 'nonsense'.

The Melody pronunciation guide: huur : puur : huur : puur

6. Krapula

It's such a distinctive way of describing a hangover, and couldn't be more true. You're in a place of krap indeed.

The Melody pronunciation guide: Crap : ooh : lah!

7. yrjö

Staying on the drunken theme, here is the word for throwing up. I believe it became the word for throwing up, because it is pretty much the sound you make when you try to say it. Give it a go.

The Melody pronunciation guide: euih-rr : yeuhh

8. Suhista

This is a lovely word for describing a rustling sound or the sighing of the wind.

The Melody pronunciation guide: Sue : hiss : ta!

9. Mielenkiintoinen

This means 'interesting'. I can just hear Montgomery Burns saying this; it's got far more of the long, drawn out vowels that make the word so... iiiinteresting.

The Melody pronunciation guide: me : L : N : keen : toy : nen

10. Britti-poppi

Okay, so it's a loan word at best and modern slang at worst, but this word contains the best thing about English to Finnish loan words. They turn 'Brit pop' into 'britty poppy'. How cute!

No pronunciation guide needed here. Just tie your hair in bunches and repeat after me: Britty poppy, Britty poppy, Britty poppy!


DISCLAIMER: I hold no liability whatsoever for the Melody pronunciation guide, the Finnish language, or indeed my interpretation of it. In fact, I won't even claim that the guide is usuable even if you know to pronounce the words with a 'BBC English (southern)' accent plus rolled r's. I take no responsibility for the emotional trauma that may occur in the event that Finns, or any other nation's people, laugh themselves silly at your earnest attempts to communicate and it's certainly none of my business if you injure yourself trying to pronounce the letters ö y and ä.

Melody.

Sending messages into space

I've just finished reading an article about Bebo users sending messages into space and I feel the need to voice an opinion on the matter.

The article reminded me of a similar publicity stunt, for that is clearly what it is, by the company that make Doritos. The chaps at Doritos ran a competition for people to create their own advertisement for the crisps (US: 'chips') and the winning entry gets beamed into space towards solar systems thought to be capable of hosting life.

The Doritos advert depicted crisps that came to life when a human left the room. They dance around and 'sacrifice' one of their number by making it fall into a pot of dip. The human returns and the lid jumps back on the dip. The human opens said dip, and gobbles up the sacrificed crisp. Now forgive me please for thinking this is not the best message to send an alien civilisation. Assuming they are intelligent enough to work out that dancing crisps are not a representation of reality, we are still depicting a culture based on lethal sacrifice to higher beings. Gigantic higher beings, us, who are oblivious to smaller things and do not question their activities except to devour them if they happen to cross our path. You might argue that this description has some truth to it, but really, I do not think we are anywhere near that extreme.

Then we have Bebo, who have sent a lot of barely literate ramblings and teen culture images out. I've been reading some pretty funny comments about what an alien race will make of these, but the sad fact is that if they were received then they might be taken very seriously indeed. I'm not sure the probability that humour exists among sentient lifeforms has been calculated.

It's a good job that the chances of anything coming of these messages is so tiny. Even assuming we can locate a suitably advanced race of beings, they have to recognise the signals, receive them clearly, and decode them. I am guessing that the only reason scientists and politicians allow this nonsense is because they know it will fail, while bringing in a little cash for the real research. Yet still, it annoys me a little. We should have a plan about these things. We should be submitting constant, simple 'pings' that are recognisable as non-random data to a range of destinations where life may be found, and we should keep doing that and listening for 'pongs' coming back at us. Then we can try to communicate something more complicated. Perhaps the binary system of counting? I really hope someone is going to tell me this is already being implemented. It would be nice to think that we have a plan that is not limited to the narrow vision of our own lifespans.

Nanoo nanoo.