link

I want to play ball with my kids before I get too old, and before that happens I need to get laid, and before that happens I need to be in love, and I don’t want to hear edddon’tknow I can’t help eddon’tknow. No, No I’m a catch and I’m not going to be the one that got away.

…

There’s nobody I hate enough to write her name on this card.

brilliant

I was going to put in the time and get a forked ruby out to fill in some feature gaps, but the maker of tender love beat me to it.

Brobinus adds some much needed features like Object#tase! and brobinius –screencast my_code.rb for youtube integration. link

I’ve been using Chicken of the VNC for the last month only to be annoyed by it’s slowness and scrollbars added because of the higher resolution server. I did a search for VNC clients for Mac and found the.taoofmac.com Mac VNC list.

JollysFastVNC is my new VNC client and it is much faster than Chicken of the VNC. Switch and be joyful.

OMG Some behemoth bugs! For instance, those variables at the top should be declared constant. Any ole dev could decide to increment the feature count, decrement the bugs, and set ready to release!

Chances are you didn't port install git-core with the svn option:

post uninstalling the old hullabaloo

Came across this document that is the progress report for the first half of the grant that CSU Chico received for robotics while I was there. The report included example project papers, one of which was from one of my groups and included several pictures of my lovely boebot along with some colorful language:

That particular design was used the two sensors pointing at the ground to follow a line and detect the ending point, a perpendicular line.

From the look of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory page they are doing well with several interesting projects in the works.

Wooohoo Ubuntu 8.04 beta works perfectly in parallels on Leopard. I had some problems with 7.10 from the iso and cd so instead of using the alternate (text based install that is reported to work) I downloaded 8.04. So far everything is running flawlessly. Parallels tools reportedly has problems running due to an Xorg change, but I haven't gave it a try for my self yet and that post/bug was submitted a couple of months ago.

Check out the Ubuntu 8.04 features. It's exciting to see the new apps, features, and versions in open source land that are all being pulled together to create a great user experience.

So I was sitting here trying to decide whether to re-setup my few small drives into a big chunk of storage with LVM as I had in my previous Gentoo setup. The LVM draw is not having to think about which drives you've stuck x, y, and z and the drawback being having to set it up and not being able to easily recover the data in the case of system failure.

However, it turns out that Ubuntu or Linux or some sort of supermagical force made my old volume group that existed in Gentoo still exist in Ubuntu! I mounted the logical volume and walha, all of my old files were still there. LVM must record special LVM data on to the drives in a volume group that dictates the configuration rather than storing the configuration to the system (in a file somewhere). Sweeet

On a side note it was tough to nuke Gentoo after a great 6 year ride and at the same time its really nice not waiting hours for software to compile. Plus Ubuntu is beautiful + just works.

This caught my eye on Riding Rails Blog the other day. This site has a built in rails IDE. This looks nice in the demos, but it would be interesting to actually give it a spin to see if it's usable. The coolest thing is the instant deployment of the rails app to Amazon's EC2! This seems like it would be very attractive to someone just getting started with rails since you would get to put full focus into the development and skip the other pains in the ass (deployment, capistrano, web servers, mongrel instances....).

It's been brought to my attention that many people, perhaps all people :), did not get that I don't really believe/practice what I coined "Development Driven Development", which had it's fat penguin debut here. I wrote it from the approach of "what could out agile agile" and what if it had very little to do with actual agile techniques even thought it was claiming to be such.

I definitely believe there are benefits of agile practices in software development and use several of them. I had also just read the Tom Gilb’s “evolutionary delivery,” a great improvement over its successors post at Lean Software Engineering and had just learned about a new agile practice that I hadn't known about before. This got me thinking that I need my own agile solution. :)

In my limited knowledge I have to agree with Corey Ladas thoughts:

There’s something odd about a software culture that is so obsessed with novelty and technological determinism that it perpetually loses the knowledge of the past in an endless pursuit of the reinvention of the wheel. The race in the 2000’s to “out-agile” each other and distance ourselves as far as possible from any crusty old notions of “software engineering” in the flight from some phantom bogeyman of the “waterfall” has resulted in the neglect of a great deal of hard-fought knowledge and wisdom from the great systems engineers of the 1960’s-1980’s. It’s our loss. We’re forgetting things that are better than what we think we know now.

I wonder why this seems so true in software land. Maybe it relates to the developers constant search to learn new and exciting programming languages, tools, operating systems, techniques? Part of survival and coming up with elegant, deployable solutions is having a grasp on the "new goods" in the field. It also, however, depends on knowledge of what has already been done with success and failure in the past and there are many great books on these topics. There must be a large number of developers and managers out there with "hard-fought knowledge and wisdom" who are also practicing agile techniques and merging them together in productive ways.

Development Driven Development (DDD), not to be confused with Domain Driven Design, is a fairly new software development process that's been gaining a considerable amount of traction in the last few months. While DDD stems from the core lean and agile methodologies, it takes a slightly different approach, which I'll be summarizing here, to project management than the practices that currently fall under the agile umbrella.

DDD's sole focus is on the development of software being development. Instead of focusing on the domain, features (FDD), behavior, quick development/test/release cycles, or the customer, focus is placed solely on development. The best way to explain this is via a short example. You have a customer or marketing team saying exactly a, b, and c are required. This is your requirement list. It should be conveyed to the development team very casually, preferably when they are still busy with their current round of DDD. This may sound like it would be highly ineffective, however, it avoids distracting developers (all of which are potentially in the flow/zone) and keeps from providing them with a direction or amount of information that could inhibit creativity.

A core principle of DDD is that other project management and development models entail too much mental overhead to implement successfully. By omitting these overheads the development team is free to quickly and blindly develop whatever is dreamt up on any whim. With all of the saved brain cycles they will be able to develop at such rapid pace that when the software is finished and potentially completely unusable the team will have plenty of time to start over with a much better idea of what the end result should actually be. Since they will be using DDD for the next iteration they will most likely finish in a similar situation as they were in at the end of the first cycle, but with an even clearer idea of the scope of the problem and will be that much closer to a working solution.

Since DDD is extremely rapid and involves many, many iterations, it is clearly more agile than even agile is capable of being, hence earning the name aagile. Aagile (pronounced by extending the amount of time spent saying the a) is the only proper way to refer to DDD and will help keep it from being clumped into the bucket of common agile development techniques.

If you have any DDD success stories I would love to hear about them and what key DDD principles helped make them a success.

Perl's cryptic syntax, powerful regular expressions, and "dynamicness" are more useful than I've previously given it credit. :). As a bonus it's in Christmas colors courtesy of my syntax highlighter.

Interestingly enough my markup module chooses to remove the trailing pipe "|" from line 19 in "VIEW PLAIN TEXT". So if you want to run it you can either copy it from here or use your text editors fancy block select cut feature to remove the line numbers from the html view. :)

Or as I prefer to say it, he who wants to watch cable TV must pay his comcast bill.

For all of comcast's horribleness, specifically in the customer support realm, they do have these wonderful fireplace videos with joyous carols. =]