Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Planning Poker anyone?

I stumbled upon ;-) this "Planning Poker" tool.

I think that it could be used, it can be seen as a mean to a better effort estimation, that runs through a group discussion; each member "plays" her/his estimation (picking a card from a deck) and when everybody has played you can start discussing the result - probably you will notice some sensible differences between various estimations, and so people will start talking and eventually correcting...

It can also be funny. I read that there are also real card deck sold somewhere, but the web version is simple and quite good.

What do you think of it?

full deck

Sunday, October 07, 2007

MSN Messenger - the credit card message

I'm stealing this from a dozen web sites around the web, but I need this hint periodically, so I put it also here.

When you start a chat in MSN Messenger a warning is shown that says
"Never give out your password or credit card number in an instant message conversation"
This tweak allows you to customize this message for example to display your company chat policy
Open your registry and find or create the key below:
[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MessengerService\Policies]
Create a new String value, or modify the existing value, called "IMWarning" and set it according to text you want to display
You may need to restart or log out of Windows for the change to take effect.