But I hate not trying to be constructive, and just saying that it was disappointing for me won’t tell you much about the possibility of it being disappointing for you, so here we go:

• The choice of articles seemed “random”: clearly some of the authors had very good things to share, but many others didn’t sound that experienced or having so much interesting to say. I could imagine myself writing some of those articles.
• Many articles read like they want to give “general” advice, but extrapolating from circumstances that I may never have (like making a rule out of a “this happened to me once” kind of experience).
• I didn’t find it “inspiring” at all, if I wasn’t a project manager already I would not want to become one. The idea of working as a project manager felt dry, boring, and too focused on processes.
• Many articles feel written for someone that doesn’t have any project management experience whatsoever. That’s cool, but it’s useless for me and should have been clearer in the book I think.
• Many other articles seem written for project managers from other industries (or even simply “managers”) that are going to start managing a software project. That is not only plain useless to me, it also bores me to death. Seriously, WTF is with the definitions of super basic concepts? If you don’t know what an “iteration” or a “hack” is and you won’t check yourself out of curiosity you shouldn’t be allowed to manage a software project. Period.
• Many articles felt too “corporate” to me, there was too much jargon and too many references to job titles, methodologies and contractors instead of really essential stuff based on experience.
• Reading some of the more or less interesting stuff, I couldn’t help thinking that those things would be obvious for someone who has been working as a software developer for years and wants to become a project manager because she finds it interesting.
• Other articles were interesting, but lacked depth to make them really useful.

Don’t get me wrong, there are useful articles, but the book as a whole doesn’t feel that useful. Certainly not worth the time reading the whole thing.

And finally, something that kept popping in my head, even if the comparison is unfair (it’s a different kind of book), is that this book is in many respects the opposite of the things I loved about Making Things Happen (an excellent book that you should read if you have any interest in project management). Oh well.

One chapter that made me think a lot was chapter 7: “Your boss knows more about innovation than you”. It explores the relation between (traditional) management and innovation, and claims that managers can work against innovation if they just try to increase efficiency and keep things under control. In that sense, quality assurance engineers can be like those project managers, so I wondered a lot about my role and my duties with regards to innovation. On the one hand, you do have to control things that are being done and be conservative to a certain extent. On the other hand, innovation is such an important part of an IT company (particularly if it’s Internet-related) that you really don’t want to risk blocking or stifling it.

Fortunately, it also explains how to keep the workplace open to innovation, including things like having toys and “funny” things at the office. It turns out that they’re not there to spoil the employees, but to provide an environment where people feel free to “think different” and are not afraid of new ideas or to say what they think.

All in all, I think it’s a great book. Recommended!

Apart from other apps I knew already and didn’t particularly like, I found dfo (Desktop Flickr Organizer), a GNOME application. It was nice, and it was easy enough to upload pictures to Flickr with it, but it felt weird. What I would like to have is some application to manage my gallery, with some option to upload certain pictures to Flickr. However, this applications is more like a local Flickr mirror with synchronisation options. I don’t want all my pictures in Flickr, even marked as private. I just don’t care, and I don’t want to wait for all synchronisation between the app and Flickr. Moreover, I feel kind of tied to Flickr using that, and I’d rather work in a more “agnostic” environment. So it was cool using it to upload the pictures I had to upload, but I wasn’t really going to keep using it.

At the same time, one friend suggested using Picasa to upload some pictures, so I gave it a try. I had tried it briefly in the past, and I remember that some things were nice, but for some reason it was never my gallery manager of choice. So, trying it again, and even using the synchronisation options for the Picasa web albums, somehow I got the same feeling again: it’s nice, but there’s something undefined that makes me not use it. I have to admit that the interface is really fancy and easy to use, and it works decently well, but I don’t completely like the way the synchronisation works, not to mention that I don’t want to be stuck with only Picasa web albums. Also, I’m not happy with it being proprietary, not available in the Debian repositories, and with that special, anti-integrated interface. Some things work much better than in digiKam (I’m especially thinking fullscreen/slideshow, which sucks pretty badly in it), but I still prefer digiKam overall.

As I wasn’t too happy with the alternatives, I decided to have a look at the problem with digiKam. It turns out that digiKam just uses the so-called Kipi-plugins for picture exporting and other things, and that there was a new version of it that fixed a couple of issues… one of them being a problem with Flickr upload. The package is not available on Debian unstable because we’re currently in freeze (unfortunately, that means that Lenny will ship without a functional Flickr-uploading Kipi plugin). However, I saw that the new package was actually uploaded to experimental, so I decided to give it a try. Not only it works like a charm, but the new version 1.6 reworks the Flickr export plugin completely, and now it’s much nicer. So I’m happy now, back to digiKam with a working Flickr export o/. To install it yourself, make sure that you have this line in your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

Then, update your available package list and install kipi-plugins from experimental, like this:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude -t experimental install kipi-plugins

That should do it.