A new Firefox plugin, “Geode”, supports location-based services, and an initial application recommends restaurants and other places to eat based on where you are and the type of food you would like to eat.
Firefox Geode: Web sites know where you are | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – CNET
I started to idly watch this video presentation, but quickly found that it describes a situation eerily close to our own, so I have decided to set some time aside to watch it in proper detail. I hope it pays off!
Setting up everything needed to get a new developer up to speed, or an old one going on a new workstation can be one of the most irritating aspects of working in software development. I currently use three separate PCs, two of which are now relatively old but largely stable, and one which is newer, faster, and has a slightly strange set of tools.
What I would dearly love is a low-impact (ideally just a single command) way of setting up a new machine to the latest set of agreed tools and configurations, with all repository connections, source code and dependencies in place ready to go. So far we do not have this, but we are working towards it.
A lot of writings about agile processes seem to assume that everyone comes with all the skills they need, but in the real world people sometimes need to gain new skills which cannot easily be learned “on the job”. Planning ahead enough to ensure team skills are available when needed, and dealing with the impact on development speed of people spending time on training or independent study rather than productive work seem like tricky problems.
Jooli Atkins has written a bit on this topic for the British Computer Society (BCS) Agile Training : Blogs : BCS
I’d be really interested to hear from anyone how they deal with this!
British Telecom (BT) caught a lot flames when they tried to secretly record and target user activity a while back. Now they are being more open and offering target ads together with phishing protection for selected broadband customers.
A short (and pretty old in internet terms) but solid article which, among other things, contains the key phrase:
The purpose is not to meet…it is to improve.
This is a really interesting idea. Games to help learn agile practices and get used to agile ways of working. I wonder if I can find an excuse to play any of these for work …
We don’t use scrum as such, but we still face the issue of team-member absence during fixed iterations. It’s a tricky one to deal with, especially as absence comes in both predictable and unpredictable forms.
InfoQ has a nice summary of some of these issues and some solutions. There is till no “silver bullet” for this, though. Losing staff will almost always mean losing productivity, which in turn means that iteration (“sprint”) commitments will need to be renegotiated, which works best if stakeholders are informed as soon as possible.
As software testing spreads out in scope from the old notion of manual exercising of a system into areas such as developer unit tests and automated acceptance tests, the issue of ownership becomes more important. In this short and pithy post Kristan Vingrys states his opinion.
More indication that mobile technology is continuing to change the process of education. This time students at a university are all issued with iPhone or iPod touch handsets so they can use specific collaboration software at university and outside course times.
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
