I took the train home to Stockholm from Skövde yesterday. The train was to my very small surprise late, somehow Swedish trains have a hard time dealing with snow.

The more interesting thing was how Swedish train company SJ calculates when the late train will arrive at its destination. The train started in Gothenburg, and had continuously become more late as it approached Skövde. But according to SJ, from Skövde and on we would not only start going faster, we would actually be going faster than normal.

As I found this highly unlikely, I figured it would be fun to follow up and see if the algorithm ever picked up that trains actually were slow today?

Below is a graph of the first calculated time that SJ presented. We left Skövde 25 minutes late and according to SJ we would make up 15 minutes on the rest of the journey. This included make zero minutes stops at the stations on our way to Stockholm.

As the graph shows we actually continued losing time the rest of the journey. But just like a few project managers I’ve had, SJ’s algorithm insisted on a sometimes ridiculous make up of lost time.

This is the graph showing the next to last updated timetable. It shows that we should make the last leg in four minutes rather than the 14 minutes it normally takes.

Funnily enough, SJ marked the train as “Arrived” when we still were a minute away from the station.

I found this very analogous to the behavior I’ve seen in a few projects, where time estimates are made to please the recipient rather than to provide actual information. As if I would feel better that SJ “tried” to go faster but couldn’t.

All I know now is that what they call their “calculated” time is actually “in a Unicorn world” guess.

I got a new laptop at work the other day. It is a Lenovo X230 which replaces the best laptop I ever had, the Lenovo X200. I carried the X200 around wherever I went for three years, and in that time I had to replace the battery once. Which is really simple: you buy a new one, take the old one out (no screws) and put the new one in. Oh, I replaced the old hard disk with an SDD one too. That involved taking one (1) screw out, pull the old one out and push the new one in.

Lenovo might not make the prettiest laptops, but they have a feeling of being an engineers laptop that in my opinion no other brand is even close to matching.

So, what’s the difference? The new one has a camera so I will finally be able to join Google Hangouts. Not that anyone ever invited me to one, but I am ready if it should happen.

The screen is wider, and with a lower resolution than the old one. The old one was 1440x900, this one is 1366x768. The thing is, I actually think I prefer this one. The X200’s resolution was so high I couldn’t use my favorite font Profont, it was just too small. But on this screen it feels just right. I also get the feeling that the colors are more vivid, but that could just be that the old one was … old.

However, the biggest change is the keyboard, which I was very suspicious of to start with. You see, Lenovo used to be only vendor that could produce a real fricking keyboard, and when they replaced that with something chickletty, I was in the FFFFUUUUUU camp.

After spending a week with the new keyboard I have to say I was overly suspicious. The keyboard has a really good tactile feeling, and it produces a clear clicking sound which I find important. (My external keyboard is a Filco with blue Cherry switches to by colleagues delight)

I also love that they made the keyboard backlit, but still kept the little lamp on the top of the screen.

After a week, it feels like this one will make my old one the next best laptop I ever had.

We’re experimenting using veewee to create our vagrant boxes. However, when we tried to regenerate them, the disk was never attached and the installation halted.

We tried deleting the whole VM directory to no avail, the disk still was never mounted. It was only after trying to mount it manually in the VirtualBox GUI that we saw that VirtualBox keeps a sort of registry of disks.

To solve the problem – open the Virtual Media Manager, remove the old disk and restart the veewee install process.

I will give my talk on “Design for Replaceability – Architecture For An Agile Lifestyle” at DevLin2012 Thursday next week. I was quite happy how the talk was received at JFokus, and will incorporate some of the great feedback I got. This time I will only have 25 minutes though, so I will either speak very fast or cut out some slides.

I had a great time at DevLin last year and l reallly look forward to this years conference.

Following along the Deploying Rails book, I stumbled immediately when vagrant up hung showing;

Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.

even though the server in fact had booted ok.

I found a solution in the mailing list from a Stefano Pallica:

Boot in GUI mode:

config.vm.boot_mode = :gui

Login to the server when booted.

Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following before exit 0:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Worked for me.