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• why xml parsing in android

  - by apoorva

  why do we need xml parsing in android and which one is really better (SAX,DOM.PULL)

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• Standards Matter: The Battle For Interoperability Continues

  - by michael.rowell

  Great Article, although it is a little dated at this point. Information Week Article Standards Matter: The Battle for Interoperability goes on Summary If you're guilty of relegating standards support to a "nice to have" feature rather than a requirement, you're part of the problem. If you want products to interoperate, be prepared to walk away if a vendor can't prove compliance. Don't be brushed off with promises of standards support "on the road map." The alternative is vendor lock-in and higher costs, including the cost of maintaining systems that don't work together. Standards bodies are imperfect and must do better. The alternative: splintered networks and broken promises. The point: "The secret sauce to a successful 'working standard' isn't necessarily IETF or another longstanding body," says Jonathan Feldman, director of IT services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. "Rather, an earnest and honest effort by a group that has governance outside of a single corporation's control is what's important." In order to have true interoperability vendors as well as customers must be actively engaged in the standards process. Vendors must be willing to truly work together and not be protecting an existing product. Customers must also be willing to truly to work together and not be demanding a solution that only meets their needs but instead meets the needs of all participants. Ultimately, customers must be willing to reward vendor compliance by requiring compliance in products and services that they purchase and deploy. Managers that deploy systems without compliance to standards are only hurting themselves. Standards do matter. When developed openly and deployed compliantly standards deliver interoperability which provides solid business value.

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• Team Foundation Service Preview now open for all!

  - by Tarun Arora

  The concept of TFS in the cloud was first presented back in early 2010, the product team worked hard to preview a constantly evolving solution at the BUILD conference last year and after having completed 31 Sprints today the preview service has been opened for all. No more invitation codes required, TfsPreview has been made public! “Since we announced the Team Foundation Service Preview at the BUILD conference last year, we’ve limited the on boarding of new customers by requiring invitation codes to create accounts.  The main reason for this has been to control the growth of the service to make sure it didn’t run away from us and end up with a bad user experience.  In this time period, we’ve continued to work on our infrastructure, performance, scale, monitoring, management and, of course, some cool new features like cloud build. ”   - Brian Harry Since the service is still in preview, it is free for all… If you haven’t, now is the best time to try out the offering. There is no fixed time line on how long before service becomes chargeable but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and the product team committed to carry all of your data forward into production. “The service will remain in “preview” for a while longer while we work through additional features like data portability, commercial terms, etc but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and we expect to carry all of your data forward into production. ”  - Brian Harry As of today it’s possible to use TFS Preview with VS 2012 RC, VS 2010 SP1, VS 2008 SP1, the service currently does not work with VS 2005, this is something the product team is actively working on. You can refer to Brian’s announcement blog post here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/06/11/team-foundation-service-preview-is-public.aspx

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• SSIS Script Component Testing Strategy

  - by Paul Kohler

  This question is in respect to the script component specifically. I am aware of ssisUnit etc… With simple SSIS Scripts Components, it’s sufficient to let basic testing flesh out issues, however I am working with a script that has grown in complexity over time. To better test the functionality I am considering abstracting the script logic into a DLL that gets deployed with the package, and then use the custom component in the script. The advantage is that the function will be more testable etc but it’s one more deployment artefact that needs to be managed. My question is, does anyone know of a better way to test such an SSIS script in a more isolated manner than to run the whole package and examine the output?

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• DataView Vs DataTable.Select()

  - by Aseem Gautam

  Considering the code below: Dataview someView = new DataView(sometable) someView.RowFilter = someFilter; if(someView.count > 0) { …. } Quite a number of articles which say Datatable.Select() is better than using DataViews, but these are prior to VS2008. Solved: The Mystery of DataView's Poor Performance with Large Recordsets Array of DataRecord vs. DataView: A Dramatic Difference in Performance So in a situation where I just want a subset of datarows based on some filter criteria(single query) and what is better DataView or DataTable.Select()?

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• Apart from SCITE can anyone recommend a good tool for programming Ruby

  - by WANNABE

  I have used SCITE for a few weeks now, wondered if there was an better alternative.

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• Improve responsiveness of $(...).click on touch interface

  - by Bram W.

  I need access to a web-based on screen keyboard which will be used on a touch interface. This example looks nice and functional, however when I try it on an iPad, the responsiveness it very low IMHO. It's not comfortable to use and sometimes whole words are misspelled due to slow response. Is there a way to improve the experience on this type of on screen keyboard? This implementation uses the $('#id').click(...); function to process the events. Is there a better way to achieve the goal of typing on the screen? Are there better plugins out there? Note: The final application will run on different types of devices. For several reasons, native on screen keyboards are no option.

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• Fresh install on SSD with Ubuntu and Windows Vista, using whole disk encryption for Ubuntu

  - by nategator

  I would like to do a fresh install on a OCZ Vertex Plus R2 SSD 60GB drive I purchased on the cheap. Since the AES-encryption looks like it may not work optimally for this drive, I would like to set up a dual-boot to Windows Vista (the only Windows copy I have for clean install purposes) and Ubuntu 12.04 with the best encryption scheme possible. My plan is to have Windows around just in case I need to use a program that won't work with Wine and Ubuntu as my daily OS with all of my information secured in case the laptop is ever stolen or sold. Although this setup will not provide a lot of space, I think I can squeeze both OSes and have enough for second-computer office tasks. So, my questions are: Which OS should I install first, Ubuntu or Vista? Any special considerations when partitioning the drive? How should I install Ubuntu to ensure full disk encryption for the Linux partition(s) and or my daily computing? Is there a significant performance upgrade with doing a solo install of Ubuntu instead of a dual boot setup? Will TRIM, for example, work correctly? Are there any significant security concerns with going the route of a dual-boot, other than the fact that any activity on Windows may be fully recoverable if the drive is stolen or sold? Thanks in advance!

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• Efficiency of while(true) ServerSocket Listen

  - by Submerged

  I am wondering if a typical while(true) ServerSocket listen loop takes an entire core to wait and accept a client connection (Even when implementing runnable and using Thread .start()) I am implementing a type of distributed computing cluster and each computer needs every core it has for computation. A Master node needs to communicate with these computers (invoking static methods that modify the algorithm's functioning). The reason I need to use sockets is due to the cross platform / cross language capabilities. In some cases, PHP will be invoking these java static methods. I used a java profiler (YourKit) and I can see my running ServerSocket listen thread and it never sleeps and it's always running. Is there a better approach to do what I want? Or, will the performance hit be negligible? Please, feel free to offer any suggestion if you can think of a better way (I've tried RMI, but it isn't supported cross-language. Thanks everyone

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• Is it common for a development position to be extremely mundane and not challenging at all? [closed]

  - by Kim Jong Woo

  Hi guys so I am working at this company as a web developer but after 1 week of working here, I realize the stuff I am doing seem to be very easy stuff compared to what my peers who have been around for longer are doing. I am way ahead of my schedule and finish my projects early but it's because the work is not at all hard or problem solving involved. So I am puzzled why I would be thanked over doing such menial tasks. Is this normal? This is driving me nuts, I ask to be given more work and I do get it and still finish it quickly and accurately. Now I am having this paranoia that they are just conspiring to use me for a short period of time and terminate me. Am I going too far with this? I keep losing sleep over this. On days when I have a full load of work to complete, this uneasiness goes away but so far I feel like I am not being allowed to pursue what I thought I would do like solving and designing solutions. A lot of it doesn't require any thinking, just cleaning up other people's code and closing bug tickets.

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• Managing Strategy objects with Hibernate & Spring

  - by Francois

  This is a design question better explained with a Stack Overflow analogy: Users can earn Badges. Users, Badges and Earned Badges are stored in the database. A Badge’s logic is run by a Badge Condition Strategy. I would prefer not to have to store Badge Condition Strategies in the database, because they are complex tree structure objects. How do I associate a Badge stored in the database with its Badge Condition Strategy? I can only think of workaround solutions. For example: create 1 class per badge and use a SINGLE_TABLE inheritance strategy. Or get the badge from the database, and then programmatically lookup and inject the correct Badge Condition Strategy. Thanks for suggesting a better design.

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• An Efficient data structure for Sorted List

  - by holydiver

  I want to save my objects according to a key in the attributes of my object in a sorted fashion. Later on I'll access these objects sequentially from max key to min key. I'll do some search tasks as well. I consider to use either AVL tree or RB Tree. As far as i know they are nearly equivalent in theory(Both have O(logn)). But in practice which one might be better in performance in my situation. And is there a better alternative than those, considering that I'll mostly do insert and sequentially access to the ds.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 Faster boot, Hibernate & other questions

  - by Samarth Shukla

  I've recently started exploring Ubuntu (my 1st distro). I fresh installed precise without a swap (4GB ram). The only issues are, slow boot (regardless of the swap) and instability after a few days of installation. The runtime performance is immaculate otherwise. Even though not needed, I still set swappiness = 10. I've tried the quiet splash profile to GRUB; already have preload installed. But it still is pretty slow. I am not too confident on recompiling the kernel yet. But you could please advice me on that too. I've also added the following to fstab: #Move /tmp to RAM: tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid 0 0 (Also if you could please tell me the exact implication/scope of this tweak on physical ram & the swap.) But nothing has happened really. So what alternatives are there to make it boot faster? Also, right after fresh install, though no swap partition, the system still showed /dev/zram0 of arond 2GB which was never used (probably because of the above fstab edit). Finally, I experimented with Hibernate a little, but many claim that it doesn't work on 12.04. (Not to mention, I made a swap file of 4GB for it). What I did was: sudo gedit /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/hibernate.pkla Then I added the following lines, saved the file, and closed the text editor: [Re-enable Hibernate] Identity=unix-user:* Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate ResultActive=yes I also edited the upower policy for hibernate: gksudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy I added these lines: < allow_inactive >no< /allow_inactive > < allow_active >yes< /allow_active > But it did not work. So is there an alternate method perhaps that can make it work on 12.04?

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• Unescape _xHHHH_ XML escape sequences using Python

  - by John Machin

  I'm using Python 2.x [not negotiable] to read XML documents [created by others] that allow the content of many elements to contain characters that are not valid XML characters by escaping them using the _xHHHH_ convention e.g. ASCII BEL aka U+0007 is represented by the 7-character sequence u"_x0007_". Neither the functionality that allows representation of any old character in the document nor the manner of escaping is negotiable. I'm parsing the documents using cElementTree or lxml [semi-negotiable]. Here is my best attempt at unescapeing the parser output as efficiently as possible: import re def unescape(s, subber=re.compile(r'_x[0-9A-Fa-f]{4,4}_').sub, repl=lambda mobj: unichr(int(mobj.group(0)[2:6], 16)), ): if "_" in s: return subber(repl, s) return s The above is biassed by observing a very low frequency of "_" in typical text and a better-than-doubling of speed by avoiding the regex apparatus where possible. The question: Any better ideas out there?

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• ngModel and component with isolated scope

  - by Artem Andreev

  I am creating simple ui-datetime directive. It splits javascript Date object into _date, _hours and _minutes parts. _date uses jquery ui datepicker, _hours and _minutes - number inputs. See example: http://jsfiddle.net/andreev_artem/nWsZp/3/ On github: https://github.com/andreev-artem/angular_experiments/tree/master/ui-datetime As far as I understand - best practice when you create a new component is to use isolated scope. When I tried to use isolated scope - nothing works. ngModel.$viewValue === undefined. When I tried to use new scope (my example, not so good variant imho) - ngModel uses value on newly created scope. Of course I can create directive with isolated scope and work with ngModel value through "=expression" (example). But I think that working with ngModelController is a better practice. My questions: Can I use ngModelController with isolated scope? If it is not possible which solution is better for creating such component?

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• Get external metadata with streamripper using python script

  - by user72379

  Hi I like using streamripper to rip music from the web. I have a favorite radio station that doesn't have the metadata for the songs, so I have to screen scrape it from its website manually. I created this neat python script in the format that the docs suggest, and linked the address in the GUI for streamriper. But it still doesn't work, any one know how to make it work..? I know it used to work. It gives you a sample here: http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/history.php import http import time import re u = 'SEE IMAGE FOR THIS URL' s = http.Session(0, 0) s.add_headers(h, persistent=1) while 1: c = unicode(s.get(u)) pat = r'class="title"([^<]+)([^<]+)' m = re.search(pat, c) title = m.group(1) artist = m.group(2) print 'TITLE='+title+'\n'+'ARTIST='+artist+'\n.\n' time.sleep(30) [img]http://s11.postimage.org/sok928lsz/urlstream.png[/img] I put the address to the script here: [img]http://s17.postimage.org/4bhmhi4yn/streamripper.png[/img] I've tried putting it in the root of the streamripper application and doing this: lax.py I've even compiled it to a EXE, and tried linking to that.. nothing What am I doing wrong?

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• Going on 15 months for me...

  - by Ratman21

  About 5 face to face interviews, 4 telephone ones and except for the two weeks Census Job. But, after 15 months looking for work, I am still with out a JOB. What is wrong here or with me? Let’s see, hard worker (check), self motivated to do well on a Job (Check), Certified CompTIA A+, Security+  and Network+ Technician (Check), 20 + years experience in “IT” (CHECK), in good health, in 20 years of work only 15 days off due to health issues (Check), 18 years experience as technical Help Desk support (Check), can still work better than younger personal (Check), Strong trouble shooting skills for software, computer hard ware and circuit issues (Check) and Multiple software languages (Hey I have done some programming) Check. Hmm I don’t see any problem with me (of course I could have missed something, please let me know if you see what I am missing).    Now as to what have I been up to since I last blogged. The same things of course, Job hunting, job hunting and study.   I have set up sim of my home LAN and will be adding a wireless print server to the sim and in real life, soon.  I was able to pull up and copy the examples of Cisco router commands that I had on my old lap top, to my newer PC. Every time I used a new command while working the NOC on my last job.   I would cut and past a copy of the command on the router (and what it did) I was working on.  Along with notes on the problem and commands use for same router. I used these to make documentation for on how to handle these types of issues, for the other Operation Techs. My old notes are helping me in studying for the CCENT test.    As to Love Dare, I think it will take more like 40 weeks, than the 40 days of the book. Yes I am making progress, slow but, it is progress. I will have more on that in my next blog.

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• Problem on jboss lookup entitymanager

  - by Stefano

  I have my ear-project deployed in jboss 5.1GA. From webapp i don't have problem, the lookup of my ejb3 work fine! es: ShoppingCart sc= (ShoppingCart) (new InitialContext()).lookup("idelivery-ear-1.0/ShoppingCartBean/remote"); also the iniection of my EntityManager work fine! @PersistenceContext private EntityManager manager; From test enviroment (I use Eclipse) the lookup of the same ejb3 work fine! but the lookup of entitymanager or PersistenceContext don't work!!! my good test case: public void testClient() { Properties properties = new Properties(); properties.put("java.naming.factory.initial","org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory"); properties.put("java.naming.factory.url.pkgs","org.jboss.naming:org.jnp.interfaces"); properties.put("java.naming.provider.url","localhost"); Context context; try{ context = new InitialContext(properties); ShoppingCart cart = (ShoppingCart) context.lookup("idelivery-ear-1.0/ShoppingCartBean/remote"); // WORK FINE } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } my bad test : EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("idelivery"); EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager(); //test1 EntityManager em6 = (EntityManager) new InitialContext().lookup("java:comp/env/persistence/idelivery"); //test2 PersistenceContext em3 = (PersistenceContext)(new InitialContext()).lookup("idelivery/remote"); //test3 my persistence.xml <persistence-unit name="idelivery" transaction-type="JTA"> <jta-data-source>java:ideliveryDS</jta-data-source> <properties> <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop" /><!--validate | update | create | create-drop--> <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect" /> <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" /> <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true" /> </properties> </persistence-unit> my datasource: <datasources> <local-tx-datasource> <jndi-name>ideliveryDS</jndi-name> ... </local-tx-datasource> </datasources> I need EntityManager and PersistenceContext to test my query before build ejb... Where is my mistake?

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• How to collaborate on features using github

  - by Robert Dailey

  github encourages 1 fork per user, so that that user can work independently on a feature and then request that feature to be accepted into the main repository via pull request. However, what if 2 developers need to collaborate on that feature? What is the ideal workflow for this? I could see a number of options: Both developers fork the original repository. Each developer pulls/pushes changes between each other's repository. This seems like a lot of work (tiny micro operations) and also creates a delay between changes, so increases the window for conflicts. Developer 1 forks from the main repository, developer 2 forks from developer 1. Same as #1 mainly but hopefully simplifies Developer 2's life a little? Developer 1 gives Developer 2 permissions to his own fork, so they both work out of the same central repository. Not sure if this is ideal. I'm also curious where branches come into this. Obviously there would be a branch for the feature itself but that branch can't exist in a single place, it would have to exist on multiple forks and be synchronized. Basically just really confused about this workflow, would like an approach for how this can be best accomplished.

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• Visual Editor vs Manual code

  - by Albinoswordfish

  I'm not sure how it is using other frameworks but this questions is strictly regarding Java swing. Is it better to use a Visual Editor to place objects or to manually code the placement of the objects onto the frame (Layout managers or null layouts)? From my experience I've had a lot of trouble using Visual editors when it comes to different screen resolutions or changing the window size. Using manual code to place objects I've found that my GUIs behave a lot better with regard to the screen size issue. However when I want to change a small part of my GUI it takes a lot more work compared to using a visual editor Just wondering what people's thoughts were on this?

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• Gtk+ vs Qt language bindings

  - by Adam Smith

  Put shortly: For those familiar with language bindings in Qt and Gtk+. E.g. python and ruby. Are there any quality or capability difference? More background: I know C++ and Qt very well. Minimal experience with Gtk+. I know C++ is not ideal for language bindings due to the lack of a well defined ABI (application binary interface). I also read that Gtk+ was designed to be bound to other languages. So I wonder how this manifets itself in practice. Are the Gtk+ bindings better maintained or work better in some way than their Qt counterparts? I am presently quite interested in the Go language, and they have started developing Gtk+ bindings. However C++ bindings is far away. It makes me wonder whether learning Gtk+ is worth it.

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• Multiple Broadcast Messages with Less Data or Less Broadcast Messages with More Data?

  - by niko

  Hi, I am developing an application which is communicating with the server. Tha application can perform log-in and get different parameters from server. The application consists of a RESTful client (custom class for making requests), Communication Service (the service which runs in the background) and the main activity. For now I created multiple broadcast messages and multiple broadcast receivers in the main activity so when the application performs login operation a receiver (loginBroadcastReceiver) in the main activity receives a message and when another parameter is received from the server different message is broadcasted and another receiver handles the message. This way however the application performance is poor but I am not sure whether it is due to multiple broadcast receivers. Does anyone know what is the best way to exchange data between service and main activity - is it better to create a single broadcast receiver and retrieve all parameters from message or is it better to initialize multiple broadcast receivers for multiple parameters? I would appreciate if you could provide any useful resource about the topic because I'm writing the thesis and it would be good if the solution could be explained.

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• From Oracle PL/SQL Developer to Java programmer - Is it a good decision? [on hold]

  - by user3554231

  I will explain my question in simple words. I have little over 1 year experience in Oracle. My dream is to be "called" as a 'Developer', be it database developer if not software developer. But right now I don't develop anything neither I am in good touch with PL/SQL and other Oracle Utilites like SQL*LOADER, shell scripting and stuff like that as I am only a System Analyst where I analyze and configure database using SQL queries. To be honest, I know very basic PL/SQL and good knowledge in SQL but that won't ever give me a chance to be a developer as I am lagging way behind the "real" developers knowledge. Now I feel I should learn JAVA as well so that I can cope up with the competition. But I am too scared to learn new things as it will take much more time which will indirectly increase my useless work experince(just analyzing) which values nothing in todays market. Moreover that, I am too lazy to work hard i.e. to study and not to work during office hours. To sum it up I am lazy and confused and scared but I want to learn things as well but don't know if I am intelligent enough to learn whole of PL/SQL or to master any other language. Is there any other way from which I can feel confident? Actually I even feel sometimes that after 2-3 years if I still don't achieve my goal, I won't ever be able to reach my destination. I just want to live my dream of being a developer. Give me some tips and hopes but not false hopes.

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• What can be the cause of new bugs appearing somewhere else when a known bug is solved?

  - by MainMa

  During a discussion, one of my colleagues told that he has some difficulties with his current project while trying to solve bugs. "When I solve one bug, something else stops working elsewhere", he said. I started to think about how this could happen, but can't figure it out. I have sometimes similar problems when I am too tired/sleepy to do the work correctly and to have an overall view of the part of the code I was working on. Here, the problem seems to be for a few days or weeks, and is not related to the focus of my colleague. I can also imagine this problem arising on a very large project, very badly managed, where teammates don't have any idea of who does what, and what effect on other's work can have a change they are doing. This is not the case here neither: it's a rather small project with only one developer. It can also be an issue with old, badly maintained and never documented codebase, where the only developers who can really imagine the consequences of a change had left the company years ago. Here, the project just started, and the developer doesn't use anyone's codebase. So what can be the cause of such issue on a fresh, small-size codebase written by a single developer who stays focused on his work? What may help? Unit tests (there are none)? Proper architecture (I'm pretty sure that the codebase has no architecture at all and was written with no preliminary thinking), requiring the whole refactoring? Pair programming? Something else?

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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