Posts Archive

When parking my car today at the supermarket to take care of the weekend grocery shopping, I noticed this guy returning to his car that was parked in a spot reserved for disabled people. He was obviously not disabled, and his car did not sport the sticker required in Sweden to use handicap parking spots.

It really gets to me when people think that rules applies to everybody but themselves and handicapped people be damned, so I walk up to him and tells him that he seems to have lost his handicapped parking permit. This guy, in his fifties, loses it and basically tells me to go to hell, get a life and drop dead.

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. These are the ones I have got so far:

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.
• iTunes and iPod instead of rsync and iRiver. I’m not addicted - right :)

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. And it does not help that you implement it page by page or even component by component - that is just dividing the predefined work into smaller bits.

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. Also the deployed app needs to be initialized with a lot of data that is - surprise - saved both in a database and on the filesystem, meaning no easy test db setup.

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. (A truly crappy piece of software as a whole though)

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.