Posts Archive

I’ll be traveling to Dallas, Texas this weekend to speak about agile documentation at Valtech Days.

I am looking forward to attending other sessions, the rest of the conference is looking really interesting. If you are in the area and want attend the conference, I believe there are still a few seats available.

Why do so many organizations still demand that you add “www.” in front of their domain name when browsing their site?

People, it is so 1997. Typing is boring. Stop using it.

I switch browsers like others switch … something they switch very often. Why does it have to be so hard? All I want is a browser that:

• Is small and nimble
• Feels like a Mac application
• Has good ad blocking support
• Handles Flash on demand

Safari locks up too often, and a number of sites do not work with it. Shiira is small and nice, but has no decent ad blocking. Firefox has lousy Mac integration and eats memory like there is no tomorrow. Flock just does not feel ready yet. OmniWeb has clunky ad blocking and is not worth the money.

I was trying to get my head around Axis and read this:

Apache Axis2 is built on Apache Axiom, a new high performant, pull-based XML object model that was released two days ago.

Quote of the Day: Assaf: “I never saw a programming language that can cure stupidity, only languages that add safety caps so they look safe, while slowing you down.”

(Via Raganwald.)

From Revolution in The Valley:

Instead of arguing about new software ideas, we actually tried them out by writing quick prototypes, keeping the ideas that worked best and discarding the others. We always had something running that represented our best thinking at the time.

Alan Francis: Jobs, etc.: “[…] being an old-school XP-er who thinks Kent got right the first time and only dug a deeper hole trying to re-explain himself. "

Well put. XP 1.0 is mostly brilliant, whereas the additional value of 2.0 could could have been published in a short addendum.

Kent Beck is probably the hero of the geeky part of my life and I am sorry to say that I find the quality of his work receding. Whatever he wrote or spoke about before, it was always empirically based and with a very appealing rebel touch. It seems to me that he is becoming more and more theoretical. For example, I found his keynote at XP2006 about “responsible developing” very abstract.

I don’t like Fit. Believe me, I want to like it, I have tried to like it. I mean, Ward Cunningham created it for crying out loud, the man is a genius, so I am probably just missing something - right?

Every time I have looked at Fit, I always like the parts that handle column fixtures. They are clean and easy to read and generally does a really good job. Buth then we get to weird cousin Row Fixture which is not at all that easy to read and uncle Action Fixture which just won’t stop and finally family FitLibrary which does all good things but are utterly unreadble - which probably is due to my lack of experience, but then again wasn’t this intended for non-programmers?

I always knew one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn’t know it would be called Ruby.

– Kent Beck

Blaine Buxton links to this quote at ozmmdotorg."

(Via Mike Bowler’s thoughts.)

Why in the name of one trillion unused functions of which the one you actually use doesn’t work can something so completely dysfunctional as Word ever become so successful?

Update: Yes, a lot of aggravation was the cause of the rant above, and yes, I actually have to use it as Pages can’t handle .dot files or quite complex table based company headers and footers.