You can download a copy of at Scribd. If the link doesn’t work or you can’t download it let me know and I’ll see if I can e-mail it to you or post it up on here. It places all the information on a nice landscape page!

I’ve copied some of the text below to give you an idea of how it is set out.

Roles

Scrum Team

• Team is cross-functional and consists of 5-9 people
• There are no set project roles within the team
• Team defines tasks and assignments
• Team is self-organizing and self-managing
• Maintains the Sprint Backlog
• Conducts the Sprint Review

Product Owner (PO)

• Accountable for product success
• Defines all product features
• Responsible for prioritizing product features
• Maintains the Product Backlog
• Insures team working on highest valued features

Scrum Master (SM)

• Holds daily 15 minute team meeting (Daily Scrum)
• Removes obstacles
• Shields the team from external interference
• Maintains the Sprint Burndown Chart
• Conducts Sprint Retrospective at the end of a Sprint
• Is a facilitator not a manager

Artifacts

Product Backlog – (PB)

• List of all desired product features
• List can contain bugs, and non-functional items
• Product Owner responsible for prioritizing
• Items can be added by anyone at anytime
• Each item should have a business value assigned
• Maintained by the Product Owner

Sprint Backlog – (SB)

• To-do list (also known as Backlog item) for the Sprint
• Created by the Scrum Team
• Product Owner has defined as highest priority

Burndown Chart – (BC)

• Chart showing how much work remaining in a Sprint
• Calculated in hours remaining
• Maintained by the Scrum Master daily

Release Backlog – (RB)

• Same as the Product Backlog. May involve one or more sprints dependent on determined Release date

Update: For some reason or another people are have problem getting to the Scrum Cheat Sheet. I would recommend you try and get it from the above link but for those who can’t I’ve decided to upload it here –> Scrum Cheat Sheet <–

• Blackboard @ QUT
• Facebook Community
• Book a consultation slot with Jason
• Lecture Audio / Podcast Feed (you can subscribe to the podcast stream or right click and save individual files)
• Blog index for INB Undergraduate students
• Blog index for INN Postgraduate students
• Aggregated / Blog Feed? *need to find or create one from all blogs*

Perhaps a more familiar term is ‘The wisdom of the crowd’. The idea is that many people can do more than one, a collection of opinions can construct a better opinion than that of an individual. For example, if you had a problem with the brakes on your car but weren’t sure why you could ask someone. They might respond that it could be they need replacing, while if I ask another person they may suggestion to check the brake fluid in the car. Another person may give another solution, and before you know it you have a list of 5 things to look at which is more helpful than before. You have started to hardness a collective knowledge and have a much better opinion than if you had of asked one person.

Continuing on with this metaphor, problems can happen. The people I might have asked could be all Holden mechanics and showed a bias against my Ford. The range of people who I asked might be very wide – as in some opinions were very qualified as they have been an mechanic for 30 years and another person may have never drove a car before yet their opinions get valued the same (as I might not know there background).

So how can this be applied to the internet? Are there any examples?

Wikipedia – It hardness collective intelligence as multiple people can contribute and edit articles to provide better answers and once that are more up to date. In many cases it does better than many encyclopaedias.

Yahoo! Answers – A way to ask questions and find answers. You can post a question and then people can answer (similar to my example above).

E-How – A place where you can find how to do something, or tell the world how to do something you know. From E-How’s home page, “What would you like to do? How to Attract Consumers? How to Lose Weight? How to Make Money in a Bear Market? eHow is the world’s most popular place to find step-by-step instructions on how to do just about everything.”

So is anything on the web an example of collective intelligence?

No, information must be presented or processed in some sort of way, otherwise it is a collection of opinions and not knowledge. This information must flow freely and not be censored.

The collective or group needs to also have some attributes to. Opinions to be as diverse and independent of one another (a persons opinion shouldn’t be a reflection of someone else opinion), aggregation (a way of hardness opinions to make a decision or judgement).

I would like to welcome everyone who is studying Web 2.0 this semester. Due to doing this subject I’ve create a new category (web 2.0) which I shall be using to post my Web 2.0 subject material. As most of the work was done in setting up the blog last semester, I’m hoping to spend a bit more time on tweaking the site and adding in more detailed information in the static pages.

– stay tuned

So I put together a car loan calculator in excel, did some research on the net and input all the figures!

So to break it down. Everything in red is what can change, but you are really only interested in how much it will cost each month and how much it will actually ‘cost’.

Loan Amount = The total amount you wish to borrow
Establishment Fees = The total amount you are going to get charge to set it up, bank fees, REV’s, anything to get started.
Monthly Fees = The amount you have to pay each month to have the loan (crazy right, you are already paying interest and Establishment Fees)
Loan Term in Months = How long you plan to have the loan for in months….
Interest Rate = The interest rate you will have to pay – This can change daily, it could be fixed, variable, secured, unsecured, etc.

Monthly Repayments = How much money you will have to pay each month (roughly anyway).
Total Loan Cost = How much money you will have to pay in fees, interest, etc… on top of the full amount you borrowed (Bank Profit in my eyes)

Now I put this together a week or so ago and I know some interest rates and fees have changed, also if you get the loan through a car dealer each one will be different and I actually believe you have ’some room to move’ in regards to the loan.

Oh also use this excel spreadsheet at your own risk, and check for official rates, fees and all of the terms & conditions as you normally would. Basically don’t trust what I’ve put together, but I found it a great tool to compare quick against the different banks (Suncorp, Bank West, Commonwealth, NAB, ANZ, etc). Oh one place you might not think to look at but would be worth checking out is the RACQ or similar as I think they have great deals.

Yes, yes – Did I mention an excel spreadsheet? I’m making this available for download because I couldn’t find anything that helped me on the internet so hopefully this will help someone else. Of course it was customer to my situation, but I’ve decided to leave some values in there to get you started. You can download the spreadsheet by clicking over there –> Jasons Loan Calculator <–.

I can see my blog entry how it would appear on my site, as I’m typing it. I can also go back an edit entries as well. The speed is fairly slow to be honest. It appears as if every character needs to get sent back to the server, so I can type a lot quicker than what the text appears on the screen. It hasn’t picked up on the categories features of wordpress correctly and it also appears as though I can’t add in tags easily.

It also doesn’t allows me to upload photos through iPhoto, and  would need to export the photo from iPhoto first before I could use it. This isn’t any different in how I would have to do it through the web browser, but considering that this is an application installed on my computer I would of expected it to have some advantage.

Well so far, I would rank Adobe Contribute about 1/10 and I would have no reason to use it in the future to write up a blog post on my site. (I’ll have to log in later to fix up the categories and tags)

The first was using a video camera, and just recording the presentation.

The second also used a video camera to record the room, however this presenter used a PowerPoint for the basis of the training session. I’ve been thinking of the best way to keep this together. Unlike the first sessions the ‘video’ from the second session wasn’t that valuable but the audio and PowerPoint presentation is.

I wanted a way to combine all of this together and thus I came to a feature I’ve never used before in PowerPoint. The idea is fairly simple but you can save the slides as pictures (File > Save as Pictures).

I’ve also seen the ‘Save as Movie’ option and ‘Save as Web Page’, but in this case .jpg’s of the slides worked out.

I’ve taken the Video of the entire training session as the baseline line. I’ve then dropped the .jpg image over the video feed as required. Some slides go for longer or shorter which I can easily change with Adobe Premiere Pro (or similar software).

This also allows me to take down the .jpg in between slides where there was discussion. Overall I was fairly pleased with the outcome.

I’ve seen other methods of doing this, such as having the PowerPoint slides on half the screen and then the video feed on the other half, but on this occasion this seems like a nice fit.

The next training session is next week, which I’m planning on recording a screen capture (recording the users PC) of the entire session as the sessions will be demonstrations on ‘live’ sites where the content is dynamic and wont be in a PowerPoint slide (flicking through windows, watching the screen change, etc).

I wont be able to show you any of the work I’ve done though due to the training sessions being an internal thing at work, but if you have ideas how the best way to record ‘training sessions’ is or you know of any other useful tips and tricks, even software to make the job easier I would be interested to know.

Upon getting the beta invite in an e-mail because I joined up with the pre-registration (by the way, not everyone who pre-registered has received an invite), I logged in and got presented with the Welcome screen. It very sleek and gets right to the point.

Login Screen for Guvera Beta

From this point you have 3 main options presented to you:

Random: If you don’t know what your looking for, click on Random. It will ‘randomly’ take you to a channel where you can see what songs are being offered.

Browse: If you want to look by artist, or by channel. (Browsing by artist isn’t enabled at this stage).

Search: If you know what you want, just type it in – (I think everyone knows how a search box works). One nice thing about the search is that it brings up a small photo of the album, song title, artist and gives you the ability to preview the song.

Channels is where it all happens!

Yep, That is right it is all about finding a channel where you can see a list of songs. So far on all the channels I’ve seen you can preview a song for 30 seconds, stream the whole song or what most people I think want – download the full song for free.

So how does it work? Well each channel is sponsored. For example a company or business can set up their own channel that has there branding on it. Additional links and information that is targeted towards the user. Each channel has had a different look, but have the sleek look which Guvera has going from the welcome page.

Your File: A module that shows you the album cover, artist, song, duration, size of the song. (At the moment this doesn’t dynamically update to the song you have previewed or clicked on to stream and not all of the fields are populated like duration and size).

Your Credits: Shows you how many credits you have and how to get more. (At the start you might not have that much but once you re-fill in all the details you did when you pre-registered this increases)

Playlist: A standard set of media controls to play music.

Music: The list of music being offered in a nice grid view (Love grid views). Title, Artist, Duration with button to Preview, Stream and Download. This is essential the main window where you do all you need to do.

Links: Sponsored links such as information, promotion or competitions you can entered provided by the channel sponsor.

Do you really get songs for Free?

Yes, you do. You get credit allocated to you and you can use this up. For example I had 1.60 worth of credit after I updated my profile on each one of the channels I visited. Once I downloaded a song at one channel I had .6 credit remaining. However on the other channels I still have 1.6 credits.

I downloaded a song and got the full length .mp3. Here are some more of the interesting details for those of you who are interested:

Size: 5.5 MB
Bit Rate: 256 kbps
Sample Rate: 44.100 kHz
Format: MPEG-1, Layer 3
Encoded with: LAME3.98

Negatives / Bugs / Feedback

As it is a ‘BETA’ you are to expect bugs, and problems to occur. The idea is to give a small group a test at the system and to address issues found before it goes main stream. Often a users first impression lasts and it could taint them from using it in future. If you are a BETA tester you should keep this in mind, that what you are seeing isn’t the full product. So here is my feedback:

No ability to give feedback: Ironically, I couldn’t find a submit bug/forums/e-mail button anywhere to submit any problems I was having. This is the main reason I’m doing a blog post. I’m hoping this gets back to them and so they can make some improvements.

No ID3 Tags on MP3’s: This would have to be the number 1 problem I have. The mp3 I downloaded (at around 220 Kb/s) had a massive file name that doesn’t describe the song or the artist. I also made the assumption there would have to be ID3 Tags that would handle this instead. This is not the case. There is pretty much no way to identify the song you have downloaded (not unless you manually edit the file name or insert ID3 tags yourself).

Updating Profile / Favourites: There is a fair amount of questions and I had to refill in all this after I had done this to pre-register. It seems like double handling and I don’t like it. Also when it comes to your date of birthday details it actually doesn’t save this correctly. For example my date of birthday is 1 day out, as after I save it and return to the details screen it has entered in the previous day I was born.

Your Song Box: This doesn’t dynamically update to the song you are playing or have selected on the channel.

Multiple Windows: You really can’t go opening multiple windows. You can’t for example up 3 different channels and save those channels to your favourites. It will only do it for the last one you opened and you will soon see that the 3 pages you have loaded up are all the same instead of 3 different channels. You basically have a ’single click, one window only mentality’.

Address Verification: Not sure how this is meant to happen and there is no information on this. This needs to be expanded and explained further. There also needs to be a ‘why do we need to do this’, ‘why do you need this information’ thing going through my head.

Forums / Chat Room: I would like to see a forum \ chat room made available. I might not use these features myself but I was looking for a way to communicate with other users. Imagine if a channel had its own chatroom available or a forum? It may be a way to engage the audience and create a community where people will come back (not just to download songs). This would provide greater exposure for the sponsors and Guvera and a reason for the user to stay connected. With the targeted information (such as location), it could be easy for a Brisbane radio station to get people in the Brisbane area talking to each other…. – I’m sure this idea can be expanded more and thought out more if it hasn’t already.

Credits: Credits look strangle similar to dollars. I feel like I want to call the dollars or money. I also don’t know how much a song will cost me (money term there). Perhaps this could get looked at. EG: I have 1.5 credits meaning I have 1.5 songs. I have no idea how I get half a song, or how my credits will increase now that I’ve updated my profile. I bit more explanation here guys would be great. That grid view of songs would be good to see how much credits a song costs. I’m assuming all songs cost the same, but maybe they dont?  If this gets a bit more of a look, that would be great.

Conclusion:

Guvera, does what it set out to achieve. I was able to download a song legally as an mp3. It was easy to navigate around and find the song I wanted, however once I got the song on my computer I expected more (ID3 Tags). This has actually led me to deleting the song I download so it won’t ruin my music collection rather than re-naming it myself. There are a few bugs with the site and things that need to get looked at, but see potential.

The music being offered isn’t ancient, but it also isn’t the latest stuff out there. Guvera is working on extending this further, and I look forward to it. I’m keen to see how things pan out and I would like to encourage people to pre-register but at this stage I wouldn’t recommend it to other people in this BETA stage.

Oh and ‘hi’ to the guys working there at Guvera, I believe your office is just down the road in Robina, QLD. I would like to see this work out for you guys, as support local talent is always nice.

Update 14/1/2010:

I’ve received some nice Feedback from Guvera via twitter which I would like to say thanks for taking my thoughts on board. I’ve noticed a ‘report a bug’ button. Once there are more changes, I’ll be willing to go through it all again.

I heard that Virgin? has this enabled for free.

Telstra up until last Saturday, there simply was no option to do this. ZDNet Australia (amongst other news sites) have a post on this if your interesting in the finer details you can check out over here or jump straight to the comment on the Telstra’s forum here.

Now it is enabled it is easy to get working.

1. Plug your iPhone into your PC and open up iTunes
2. If you don’t get prompted to update your carrier settings you will have to do this manually
3. To do this manually, click on your iPhone and click “Check For Updates”
4. It should then prompt you to download these settings, do that and your set.

If your like me though, this didn’t work. I would click on the ‘Set Up Internet Tethering’ option and I would get a prompt telling me to call Telstra or go to their website.

The problem was fairly simple, but out of my control. To get data on the iPhone previously I’ve had to change the APN settings to telstra.wap as telstra.iph didn’t work. Now to check this, if you set your APN settings to telstra.iph (should be this by default) try and browse the internet on the phone. If you can’t do this (like I couldn’t months ago when I first got the iPhone), I manually changed this to telstra.wap as I knew data worked on my previous phone.

After getting a called escalated to level 2 technically support. We tried the basic things and we both couldn’t figure it out until I remembered what I had to do get data to work on the phone. The guy on the phone reset my network profile / enabled the settings and I was then instantly able to browse data on the phone through the telstra.wap APN Carrier setting, and thus when I clicked on setup Internet tethering this just worked.

Now I’ve got the option and the technical staff at telstra can help out the next caller better to. Let me know how you go!

On a side note, OPTUS ? seriously $10 to get this feature enabled. If I went on a <$30 BYO phone plan with you which included 150mb+ data and $150 worth of phone calls. I’m not willing to pay another $10 for nothing! Lift your game. Did I mention your mobile network doesn’t compare to Telstra’s in terms of coverage/speed/performance (as much as it pains me to say it), why would you place greater hurdles upon your users?

If you can’t find the information on the QUT Site (which strangely I haven’t been able to do until right now – perhaps it got update since the release of the results), you can use this as a basis:

• 7 – High Distinction: 85%-100%
  Provides evidence of deep and critical understanding in relation to the unit learning outcomes, competence in using the discourse/s of the relevant knowledge community/ies, and ingenuity, creativity and entrepreneurship in application.
  
• 6 – Distinction: 75%-84%
  Provides evidence of the integration and evaluation of critical ideas, principles and theories in relation to unit learning outcomes and the application of knowledge in new professional situations in flexible combinations to produce a novel, calculated effect.
  
• 5 – Credit: 65%-74%
  Provides evidence of learning going beyond mere replication of content knowledge or skill to show understanding of key ideas, awareness of their relevance, some use of synthesising and analytical skills and the ability to apply fundamental concepts and skills of the unit with some originality or insight.
  
• 4 – Pass: 50% -64%
  Provides sufficient evidence of learning, such as demonstrations of knowledge of fundamental concepts and basic skills and some attempt at application, to be considered satisfactory or adequate or competent or capable in relation to unit learning outcomes.
  
• 3 – Fail: 47%-49%
  Provides evidence of limited and unconnected learning which falls short of demonstrating all unit learning outcomes.
  Students who receive a grade of 3 in a unit may be eligible to apply for supplementary assessment (see E/6.4).
  
• 2 – Fail: 25%-46%
  Provides minimal evidence of learning in relation to unit learning outcomes.
  
• 1 – Low Fail: 1%-24%
  Provides little or no evidence of learning in relation to unit learning outcomes.

* Sources: http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/C/C_05_02.jsp

Now even those this is what the QUT Standard Grades are, they don’t apply to all subjects. For example I have one subject in which the lecture felt it should be the following (I’m guessing this was changed so that around 36 students, or 32% of students would pass the subject rather than failing and look bad on the teaching staff):

• Grade 7 (>=80): 6, 5%
• Grade 6 (70-79): 25, 22%
• Grade 5 (60-69): 33, 29%
• Grade 4 (45-59): 36: 32%
• Likely to Fail: (<42): 6, 5%
• Others (didn’t sit for final exam): 8, 7%

Also another point I would like to make is that your GPA is calculated by for average grade point for the subject (what you are awarded at the end of the semester for the subject), instead of your actual grade for each subject (the percentage you obtained for the subject).  I wasn’t aware of this myself until I saw this post at dearqut.com – http://dearqut.com/messages/160 which I say I agree with.