Posts Archive

"While at Lecando, I was quite proud of the library of computer books we assembled oveer the years. These days as a consultant for Valtech, my employer does indeed have a library, but as I am almost never at the office it is not really accessible. I have therefore started to buy the books that I find necessary for my daily digital life out of my own pocket so that I can have access to them whenever I want."

"After getting the PowerBook, I’ve made quite a few additional switches in my digital life: Mac Mini instead of a PC with Ubuntu Linux at home. After a few weeks with a Mac at work, I could no longer live without one at home, so whoops, there it is: a Mac Mini. It is oh so quiet. NetNewsWire instead of Bloglines. I have not visited my previous darling Bloglines once since I started using NetNewsWire TextMate instead if JEdit, Vi, Emacs … it rocks."

"These days when almost every body is doing the agile thing, there is still one part of the software development process that is missing out - the design of the GUI. Too often some snazzy web design studio is brought in, thumb rings and all, to produce mockups in Photoshop. These are then given to the programmers to implement to the last pixel. I am sorry, but this is the waterfall process straight up."

"I’ll be attending the conference part of Javapolis. Anyone else?"

"Lots of people have had problems with Ruby and MySQL. The ever so pragmatic Rails book links to a popular solution which involves installing the MySQL gem and specifying the path to the MySQL. This did not do the trick for me, and I’ve failed trying different alternatives after that. Today I came across PJ Hyett’s idea of installing Ruby-MySQL from source. It worked like a charm."

"These days when I talk to people who claim to have adopted agile development, they say they use Scrum. While standup meetings and iterative development with regular demos are good, it is simply not enough. Chris Brown posted the strip below which sums it up pretty good: (Via Planet TW.)"

"At work, the task at hand is extending an existing J2EE based product. This means that half of the .war that is to be deployed is hands-off, and the other half is written by us. The problem I am having is how to get a productive environment. Unfortunately the products file organization is a mess, so there is no way to have a version checked into the version control system as it never would survive an upgrade."

"Google Talk is the thing to mention today so why should I be different? I really hope that it catches on, as it is based on Jabber, which is open, meaning hackable without resorting to reverse engineering and hoping that the protocol does not change overnight as is the case with MSN and ICQ for example. Presence awareness and IM integration in various contexts can provide some really cool features and is considered a killer feature by IBM in their Workplace product for instance."

"I submitted my soul to iTunes an hour ago, as Depeche Mode so far has released their new single on the net only. Since I’m an avid loather of DRM this was not an easy step, but I really couldn’t help myself. The song? Classic Mode stuff - really, really good."

"Wow. I am back in Mac land, which I left in 1996 when I started my career at IBM and turned into a PC drone. Now, after four days of pure Mac joy, it feels like I am never going back. This also goes to show what a cool company Valtech is. I mentioned this to Jon who got really jealous. Apparently the Thoughtworkers get company issued Dells and all Mac stuff is paid for by themselves."