All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is the only task management tool that's designed specially for global, remote teams.

Lenovo did something really rotten

Technology,

The news that Lenovo pre-installed adware on all consumer laptops sold in the US for the last three months of 2014 (yup, that would be the Thanksgiving through Christmas prime shopping season of the year) is being sadly under-reported by the mainstream press, although the tech press has a better idea of just how much mischief Lenovo did.

The really outrageous point here isn’t that adware came along with the other bloatware that all Windows users suffer from: it’s the fact that this adware was deliberately designed to undermine SSL, which underpins all security on the Internet.

Here’s how SSL is supposed to work: if you connect to Kerika, you are using a secure, encrypted connection to somebody that you genuinely believe is Kerika, Inc. of Issaquah, Washington, United States.

But how do you really know that it’s Kerika on the other end, and not someone pretending to be Kerika?

The only reliable way is to click on the lock icon shown in your browser (whenever you are on a secure SSL connection to any website), and your browser will then tell you who you are connected to, and more importantly, why the browser believes you are actually connected to Kerika and not somebody pretending to be Kerika.

Kerika SSL certificate
Kerika SSL certificate

The image above is the actual SSL certificate shown when you connect to Kerika, and then click on the lock icon in your browser.

It says, in effect, that a company called Symantec Corporation is the one that vouches for Kerika’s identity: in other words, it is Symantec Corp. that is assuring you that it really is Kerika that you are connected to, and not somebody pretending to be Kerika.

These SSL certificates could be issued by anyone, for example Facebook relies upon a company called DigiCert:

Facebook SSL
Facebook SSL

And Bank of America relies upon a company called Verisign:

Bank of America SSL
Bank of America SSL

Unless you happen to be using a Lenovo computer that you bought last Christmas, in which case there is a “man-in-the-middle” that you weren’t aware of:

Lennovo's fake SSL
Lennovo’s fake SSL

(Above image captured by security researcher Kenn White, @kennwhite)

On this Lenovo computer, an adware company called “Superfish” is the one that’s vouching for Bank of America, which isn’t right at all!

This is a classic “man-in-the-middle” attack scenario: most people would see the lock appear on the browser when connecting to a secure website, like Bank of America’s, and assume that they are safe. Instead, their communications is actually being intercepted by Superfish before it gets to Bank of America.

This is inexcusable, even for the “very minor compensation” that Lenovo got from Superfish.

(And, by the way, this is pretty much how most Windows PC manufacturers make money: there is so much price competition in the Windows market that they all resort to bloatware and adware to juice up their profit margins…)

And because the same piece of adware was distributed on literally thousands of machines, the same private encryption key is being used on all of these machines, which makes it easy for people to use these bogus SSL certificates to create man-in-the-middle attacks on any number of banks and other secure websites.

(And, of course, the private encryption key has already been decrypted, just hours after the news about Lenovo broke this morning.)

All this makes for appalling news for anyone who bought a Lenovo PC towards the end of last year. Merry Christmas.

Cards with really long titles…

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , ,

Cards shouldn’t really have very long titles, most of the time, since the details of the task are better described within the card itself, but sometimes having a really long card title is unavoidable.

This is a problem that we have encountered ourselves, for example when we want to track bugs: if our Java-based server software records an exception (error), we need to track at least the top-level of the stack trace that we get from the Java virtual machine that’s running the server software, and this can get pretty long because it includes a bunch of critical information like the time stamp, process ID, etc.

Cards with really long titles
Cards with really long titles

Previously, Kerika’s UI wasn’t super-friendly when it came to long card titles: the entire card title would be displayed when you were viewing a Task Board or Scrum Board, but when you opened the card to view its details, the UI would only show the two lines of card title at a time.

(And this was by design: when we first designed Kerika, we really did think that 2 lines of text would be plenty for most people!)

With our latest release we have eased up on this: when you open a card, you can see the entire title, even if it is pretty long.

(Not that we want to encourage you to write really long cards!)

Easier to create lists inside cards

Usability,

With our newest update to Kerika, it’s become easier to organize the details of each card (i.e. the card’s description), in multilevel lists, like this:

This is done simply by using the Tab key to create an indented sub-list within an existing numbered list, and using the Back-Tab to “outdent” the list.

Nested lists inside card details
Nested lists inside card details

This also works with text blocks on canvases.

Making quick backups of your projects

Technology

We have enhanced our recently introduced Archive feature, so that you can now copy a current project and paste a copy directly into your Archives:

  • Go to your Home Page
  • Select the project you want to backup
  • Click on the Copy button that appears on the top of the Projects column (or use the right-mouse-button)
  • Go over to the Archive column, also on the Home Page
  • Click on the Paste button that appears on top of the Archive column.
Copying a project
Copying a project

One possible use-case for this, that some of our users have asked for, is to do quick backups that “capture current state” of important projects.

As with anything else that’s in the Archive, the copies you paste there are frozen, and can’t be changed unless and until you drag them out of the Archive and into your Projects list.

Kerika, now with less Kudzu

Usability

We have been hacking away at the application chrome within Kerika, removing some of the purely decorative elements that were starting to crowd out the user’s critical view of data.

Application chrome is like Kudzu: if you are not careful, what seemed like a nice-looking decoration on one part of the screen can quickly grow to overwhelm the application.

Kudzu
Kudzu

Here’s a before-and-after view of Kerika:

Kerika with column chrome
Kerika with column chrome

And here’s the same board, viewed with less application chrome, which allows the cards on the boards to stand out more:

Kerika with less chrome
Kerika with less chrome

This wasn’t just an aesthetic decision, although we are pleased with the new, cleaner appearance of Kerika: it was actually essential for our development of the new Planning View in Kerika, which lets you easily view a Task Board or Scrum Board from the perspective of Due Dates.

For the Planning View to work with workdays, it became essential to show more columns at a time, more of the time: showing at least 5 columns on most laptops became an essential requirement, and we could not achieve that solely by shrinking the width of cards — we also needed to remove the column chrome so that the board would not appear so crowded.

Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, , , , ,

At the Jan 12, 2015 meeting of the Washington State Lean Practitioners Community of Practice meeting, organized by Results Washington at the Department of Labor & Industries in Tumwater, Arun Kumar presented Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes.

Here’s the presentation on Slideshare (although most of it was actually a demo!):

The meeting was attended by dozens of Lean experts representing a huge variety of state agencies in Washington!

Lean Practitioners meeting
Lean Practitioners meeting

How long things stay in the Clipboard

Technology, Usability, , ,

When you copy or cut an item on a Kerika board — a set of cards, or may be some things sitting on a Canvas — these objects are placed in a special Clipboard that sits on the Kerika server, not in your browser.

This is important to note for several reasons:

  • Because the Clipboard is on the server, you won’t lose the items if your network connection breaks before you have a chance to paste whatever you cut.
  • The Clipboard will hold on to the items for 20 minutes, to give you time to think about where you want to put them. (And, to recover from any network problems you may have experienced.)
  • If you don’t paste something that you had previously cut, the Clipboard “releases” it back to where it was originally, after waiting 20 minutes to go by while you ponder. But, if you are impatient, you can reverse your cut action sooner simply by clicking on the cut items, which continue to appear in a faded (greyed-out) appearance on your board.
  • Because the Clipboard is on the Kerika Server, other team members won’t see the change until you actually do the paste. So, for example, if you have cut some cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board and haven’t pasted them yet, your project team members will continue to see the items on the old board until you complete the paste.
  • And, finally, here’s a great feature, thanks to the Server Clipboard: one of your team members can be making changes to a card while you are in the process of cutting-and-pasting it, and those changes aren’t lost. That’s because the object is stored on the server rather than your browser, making it possible for your team members to make changes even as you are in the process of doing a cut-and-paste.

Avoid using these characters when you name your projects

Technology,

Some characters shouldn’t be used when you name a project — and we are going to make a change in Kerika that will rename any old projects you have to replace these characters with blank spaces — because they cause problems when you need to export the cards on your Task Board or Scrum Board.

Here’s what you need to avoid:

  • Forward slash (“/”)
  • Backward slash (“\”)
  • Colon (“:”)
  • Semi-colon (“;”)

When you do an export, the exported data are stored in a file in your Google Drive (if you are using Kerika+Google) or your Box account (if you are using Kerika+Box) and these characters are used by these cloud services as file separator characters, which means they cannot be part of a file name.

So, your export will fail (and we end up logging an error on our server, which doesn’t make us happy either)

We did make a change in Kerika a month ago that stopped new projects from using these characters in their names, but it looks like there are still a bunch of old projects out there that have these characters in their names, and now we are going to try to clean up these as well.

Archived cards are not included in your 6AM task summary email

Technology,

When you archive a project, it’s possible that some cards still had Due Dates set on them: these dates are preserved along with all the other project data at the time you do the archiving.

But, these dates, which will inevitably become overdue dates over time, are not included in your 6AM task summary email, because there’s nothing you can do about them while the project remains in the Archive.

Archiving a Scrum Board doesn’t affect the Backlog

Technology,

If you are working off a long Backlog (like we do at Kerika!), then you will have many Scrum Boards that pull items off this shared Backlog over time, and with our new Archive feature you will want to freeze old Scrum Boards as you get done with Sprints.

(Each Sprint should be done as a separate Scrum Board, that connects to the same Backlog.)

When you archive one particular Scrum Board, you only freeze that board: the Backlog remains available for use — and modification — by other Scrum Boards, now and in the future.

Which means that when you open an Archived Scrum Board, the view you will get of the Backlog will show the Backlog as it exists today, not as it existed when you archived the Scrum Board.