Typemock starts 2011 in a new location

Eli Lopian    Fun    

This is really a great way to start 2011, we moved to our new offices, after outgrowing our older space, we moved to a great location with a view to the sea, in the center of town. The place is amazing and has managed to both keep our open-space, team-driven values with the correct closed areas to make sure the team can focus. Funnily enough, the interior design, felt much like our agile process. Here are some pictures, starting from the gory details of construction.

A huge thanks to the great team who made this happen

The 5 Critical Qualities of an Entrepreneur

Eli Lopian    Fun    

Michael has a post about the best characters of an Entrepreneur. I think that other qualities matter.

1. Curiosity
   To start this adventure in the first place you will need a load of curiosity and a passion to learn.
2. Courage
   You need to have an adventurous nature and the courage to go on this journey to the unknown.
3. Drive
   You must keep on the journey and not turn back, this requires drive to keep on when things look bleak.
4. Integrity
   You must know by now that I am an integrity freak
5. Empathy
   You will be meeting and needing other people on the way and must respect them help them.

photo by Werner Schnell (1.stream)

Going to Vegas!

Eli Lopian    Fun, SharePoint    

I am going to be at the SharePoint Conference this year in Vegas (See plan on TripIt). Sorry guys the ticket have been sold out. We are going to have fun and help promote unit testing SharePoint.

This will be my first time in Vegas, I am sure going to have loads of fun, and you are invited to.

Just follow #typemock and get ready for loads of surprises.

Hardware and Software spring Cleaning [off topic]

Eli Lopian    Fun    

I did a little spring cleaning to my personal PC. It was full of dust and that drove the dual-core CPU temperature to rise to 60°C / 140°F. Once the physical cleaning was done, I did some software cleaning, uninstalling unused applications, killing unneeded services and shortening the system and user login time.

I used CCleaner to clean the registry and Startup items. But had to manually pick the services that don’t need to run, I wish there was a site/tool that would do this for me.

The biggest pest, was the GoogleUpdater (See how to uninstall it) for a company that does no evil, this was annoying, it kept coming back at unknown intervals. Turns out that this is due to the use of the Task Scheduler.

Then I completed my home movies and photos backup scheme (onto a detachable disk) using SyncToy. What a great simple piece of software, just what I needed. Using this PCHell.com article, I managed to automated the backup.

(photo by Sidewalk Story)

I am being followed

Eli Lopian    Fun    

I received an email from a few people who want to follow me on twitter. The problem being that I don’t have a twitter account.

Instead of letting them down, I creates an account and followed them back. Now I have to start twittering.

My twitter is http://twitter.com/EliLopian

Home Movies and Integrity

Eli Lopian    Fun    

I have been taking home movies for over 10 years now, I now have an HDD camera, but I still have loads of Mini-DV’s hanging around the house. I have always wanted to edit the material. I have searched for the right tool ages ago, but the moment that I chose my tool (Sony Vegas), I have been stuck. This was over 5 years ago

What I told myself is that I don’t know what format to save the files? Should it be 17GB/hour raw dv? Our perhaps 4GB/hour Mpeg-2? Or maybe 700MB/hour XVid?

The truth is that I have no integrity with the movies, although I did search for the right tools (that was really fun), I never really use them. I felt like someone who is looking for a job, but who just spends his time looking for a job, and not actually taking one, and just keeps on looking for a job. I spent my time looking for a tool instead of actually editing the movies.

Having no integrity with the movies, made me stop even thinking about editing (I never succeed so I might as well not try) and eventually film less (what will I do will all the tapes). Like a chip on my shoulder, I keep on reminding myself that I have to do something with the tapes.

So this week, 5 years later, I decided to clear the slate and work with integrity to solve my tape problem. I started by intending to talk to 3 people about the format that I need. I managed to talk to one and I finally decided: I will go for the 4GB/hour Mpeg-2.

I then intended to look for someone to do it for me, so I talked to 5 shops, but they where either too expensive or not professional enough (they could only convert DV to DVD, or they never answered my call)

So I then intended to do it myself, I plugged in all the hardware, and I started by capturing 1 hour onto the disk trying different Noise Reduction Filters and Mpeg settings, the clips are looking really good, and now I have written an automating script to render all the clips. (1 DV hour takes over 3 hours to convert end-to-end)

So now I intended to do 1 DV a day (when the computer is free), this way I will get all the clips on disk and they will be more accessible.

Funny discussion from Twitter

Eli Lopian    Fun    

Here is an entertaining snippet from twitter:

Ben Hall asked

Wonder how TypeMock came up with the "Cut costs by as much as 40%" (twitter)

Daniel Fernandes answered:

TypeMock.Expect(x => x.GetMinimumCostSaving()).Return(.4) (twitter)

touché!

For those that want the real answer.

We do case studies from our customers and we measure the cost of development (including QA) before using Typemock and unit testing and after. We have witnessed many customers that once they start unit testing and getting up to speed with automating their code tests (I call this code integrity), the time to find and fix bugs is much shorter. Our customers have seen long QA process, that take both QA and developers time fall to 0 (yes zero.) thus saving 40% of their development costs!