Shared Items – May 26, 2009
May 26th, 2009
- Joan Rivers: interview
May 26, 2009 – The one I’m going to take away is the story of a note from Lenny Bruce – “You’re right, they’re wrong.” Own the stage. For those 5 minutes – it’s yours.
Shared Items – May 15, 2009
May 15th, 2009
- Five Reasons To Be Excited About the Eclipse Ecosystem
- Picking Pockets, Wirelessly
- Five Minutes of Googlefail
- Hands on: WolframAlpha review
- Whither Sockets?
- The Big Agile Practices Survey
- Agile Architecture or Accidental Architecture
- Grids vs Clouds
- Flight of the Conchords: interview
- Exclusive: SecondLight explained: MS Surface on steroids
- Human brain helps crack computer challenges
May 15, 2009 – Good article covering some cool Eclipse tools.
May 15, 2009 – The final nail in the coffin for the smartcard behind the Oyster system (and a good number of security swipecards as well). Every time I read one of these things I can’t help but think what a huge waste of cash the RFID based id card scheme in the UK is. I give it about a year before someone works out how to copy and manipulate information on them.
May 15, 2009 – Maybe it’s time to find a backup search engine? I like http://cuil.com – it’s done by some ex-Google guys and tackles search from a slightly different perspective.
May 14, 2009 – More WA teasing. Bookmark next Monday as it launches to the public.
May 14, 2009 – Here’s an idea – are the low-level APIs that we use as a foundation for our apps limiting what we can do? Maybe it’s time to have a rethink.
May 13, 2009 – Makes for very interesting reading. Comparing what others think is important with what you’re doing is a great sanity check.
May 13, 2009 – Don’t feel bad if you’re doing Agile and want to do a few diagrams before coding.
May 13, 2009 – If you didn’t know, now you know.
May 13, 2009
May 11, 2009
May 12, 2009 – Human brain + computer = scary
Go on funny boy, tell us a joke
May 14th, 2009
A while back I had a good look at myself and decided that life was too short and it had to be lived. After all, no one really wants to spend their limited time living the day to day grind until retirement. Since then I’ve gone out and traveled more, taken a few career risks and clocked up a good few adrenaline sports. And I’d encourage everyone to do the same. So in that continuous vein of putting myself out of my comfort zone, a couple of months back I signed up to a stand-up comedy course.
My best description of it would be that it’s a bit like that feeling you get when you go skydiving and the plane takes off. It’s that horrible thought of “what the hell am I doing here”, rapidly followed by “what was I thinking”. An adrenaline sport where the build up fear lasts for months.
It’s two months in, with a month to go until the course end and with it my first gig. And this week I finally hit a couple of breakthroughs. And none too soon. After 8 weeks of writing on an almost daily basis, there’s finally some stuff there on paper that looks like it might get laughs. That’s been one of the hardest things – you just can’t tell after a while. Dissecting sentences trying to extract that little nugget of mirth that you know lies within tends to kill the joke for you. It’s been a huge relief – kind of like getting to cloud level (if I can go back to the skydiving analogy) and being told that by the time you’re here again the chute will be open.
Stand-up is not like telling jokes. You can’t run them past your mates. It’s all about atmosphere, context and typically a chained story (you could be doing one-liners). So there’s no real test bed other than getting out in front of an audience and giving them your best shot. To make it more complicated, it’s 90% delivery. If you want proof, just check out these sets that Michael McIntyre wrote for TimeOut (spoiler: they’re not that funny when you read them). So it’s this bizarre art form with immediate feedback when you perform, but absolutely none beforehand. No wonder it’s mind-numbingly terrifying to those of us who haven’t braved the stage yet (and probably for a good number of gigs afterwards as well).
The course has been really good in getting some valuable stage time in front of an audience where anything goes. So far, I’m loving it. Lots more writing and practice ahead.
Shared Items – May 8, 2009
May 08th, 2009
- Configure your IDE to run your tests automatically
- Jetpacks Go Mainstream
- Oxygen: A 3D Animated Short
- Presentation: The Market Risk System
- How Many Chickens Are Too Many?
- Financial Transaction Exchange at BetFair.com
- Moving Data around the Clouds
- Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off
- Contracts for Agile Software Development
- TED 2009: One woman, eight hilarious characters
- New G.I. Joe Movie Trailer is an orgy of exaggerated, awesome visual effects
May 8, 2009 – This is really cool if you use Eclipse. Stops you from getting sloppy with your test runs. It’s like your own personal build.
May 8, 2009 – The future has well and truly arrived! You can order your own jetpack at http://www.martinjetpackusa.com, but at $100,000 (USD) you might have to wait until that lottery ticket comes in.
May 7, 2009 – I wish I had a better chemistry teacher. This is much more fun that I remember.
May 6, 2009
May 6, 2009 – Too many managers at your scrum? Here’s what to do about it, if anything.
May 6, 2009 – If you ever wondered what sort of stuff goes on under the covers of a trading system, this is a good place to start.
May 5, 2009 – Just out of stealth mode, CloudKick allows you to move tour apps between cloud providers. Given the substantial differences in not just tech but ideologies between providers, it’d be interesting to see how they do it.
May 5, 2009 – Looking forward to kicking the tires on Wolfram Alpha when it becomes available for public use in a few weeks. Similar idea to True Knowledge, which is also in beta. It’ll be interesting to see how these products change the game for search once they hit live.
May 5, 2009 – Gives good coverage of a number of options around agile software contract pricing. Gives a number of good alternatives to standard fixed-cost and time-and-materials contracts.
May 4, 2009 – Unbelievable rendition of a number of very funny characters.
May 4, 2009 – Ooh yeah. This is either going to be the most awesome explosion fest ever, or really, really bad. But with the guy behind The Mummy directing it, I’m tipping the former. Piooo piooo *KABOOM*! Time to get out your old action figures.
Tips on the London Eye
May 06th, 2009
Pretty much everyone who comes to London goes on to the London Eye. If you want to save yourself some time and money, book tickets online at their website to get a 10% discount, and you get to skip the ticket queue when you turn up to collect your tickets. Great way to save yourself 15 minutes.
A Peek Under Intentional’s Skirt
May 04th, 2009
The guys from Intentional Software did a presentation on their Domain Workbench at the DSL DevCon which is now available at the Oslo Developer Center. The company was started by Charles Simoyi (of MS Word and multiple space trips fame), who has used the squillions he made from his work at Microsoft to try to come up with a who new way of developing software. The idea is that programmers work on the heavy lifting of software while the business users do the business logic. The idea is a bit “ho-hum, we’ve heard all this before”, but when you see complex maths, and circuit diagrams sitting alongside code you have to sit up and take notice. The first couple of versions of the grand idea were scrapped when they ran into dead ends, and they just started again from scratch – that’s conviction! I’ve been keeping an ear to the ground for a while to see what comes out of their shop and I am really impressed. Just watch it.
Shared Items – May 1, 2009
May 01st, 2009
- Guardian Viral Video Chart: Facebook manners, the man who will fry anything and yes – Susan Boyle
- Get Excited and Make (Useful) Things
- Apache Mahout: Highly Scalable Machine Learning Algorithms
- Writing Software is Like … Writing
- Do Stand-ups Stand Up for Larger Teams?
- Amazing Rube Goldberg Machine
- Security flouted to ‘get the job done’
- Opinion: What if our tech is good enough?
- A Word Processor That Keeps Track
- In Depth: How casual gaming silently swept the world
- In Depth: 7 ways to make your Vista desktop look like Windows 7
- Investigative journalism under threat from new regulations
- Peter Noorlander: Free speech suffers for ancient precedent
- A cuckoo in the stock market?
- Father of Use Cases Says Agile Needs to Get Smarter
- Ask [GAS]: Tokyoflash Concept Clock Designs
- Electronic Health Records: Lessons from the iPhone
- Presentation: Amazon Web Services: Building Blocks for True Internet Applications
- Russell Brand: interview
- Apache Camel switching from Java to BPEL, WSDL and RDF XML (with some XSLT)!
April 24, 2009
April 23, 2009
April 23, 2009 – This one’s big news. Plug-in intelligence into your applications without the need for a Phd in AI.
April 23, 2009 – I think this is one of my favourite analogies for software development. Right up there with gardening.
April 22, 2009 – Working on a substantially larger project than the standard agile team, you can very much see these dynamics going on. We have tried both scrum of scrums and large scrums, and neither work particularly well. There’s a few interesting alternatives described here.
April 22, 2009 – The Incredible Machine on steroids.
April 20, 2009 – Duh.
April 18, 2009
April 14, 2009
April 12, 2009
April 13, 2009
April 14, 2009
April 8, 2009 – Be very careful what you blog about. It may well bite you in the future.
April 6, 2009
April 4, 2009 – Very insightful.
April 3, 2009
April 3, 2009 – This has substantial potential to work as a model for large scale government projects. Contrast this with the public health records system (being?) developed in the UK, and it starts to make a lot of sense.
April 1, 2009
April 1, 2009 – Actually seems like quite a grounded guy.
April 1, 2009 – Another 01/04 gem.
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