From a friend of mine in the spirit of Bastille Day, and dedicated to Dr Jim…
Be aware that the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from Run to Hide.
The only two higher levels in France are Surrender and Collaborate.
The rise was precipitated by a recent fire which destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralysing their military.
ROFLMAO
A long weekend in Sydney spend trawling the net, checked out TSS and looked again at JSR-170 (Content Repository). While there started branching off to various other sites, which leads me to the title of this entry.
The good: http://www.jetbrains.com/company/people/Smirnova_Olesya.html. Olesya Smirnova. I like the tool, really like the namesake Vodka, and really really like the biography (her picture ain’t too shabby either, grrrrarrrr).
The bad: JSR-170. Why in the name of all that’s holy do we let the same vendors who write aweful software anywhere near the standards related to that software?
The ugly: BileBlog http://www.jroller.com/page/fate/ Hani Suleiman. Would be easy to take offence if it wasn’t coming from someone involved in writing OpenSymphony. ROFLMAO.
Last night at the SyXPAC, my new colleagues at ThoughtWorks facilitated an XP Game in which we used balloons, cards, numbers and die as props.
Customer interviews, estimation, story cards, iterations, business value, and velocity were the features of the game.
It was a very fun experience and highlighted the fundamentals of planning and implementation.
We had three teams of four participants, with three TW coaches and a couple of TW observers. It was great to have some of the XP core concepts driven through non-development tasks – it made drawing parallels to coding quite easy.
I’ve just cobbled together a little Excel template to help the coaches and facilitators record the results for each team.
I’m predicting this XP Game will become very popular with our clients and agilists in general as it becomes more refined.
Only two weeks left at Optus now, and things are heating up.
Must finish one niggling thing before I go but really needing to handover to others.
Had a bo-peep at the Selenium web-based testing tool from ThoughtWorks. Very clever. Thinking that there’s some things that can be enhanced to protect it from muppet browser developers who can’t follow a W3C standard to save their lives. Well I’ll be able to spend time thinking about that, now, won’t I.
Go the Waratahs tonight!
The initial blog.
I’ve resigned from Optus after getting some amazing enterprise-class web infrastructure in and the new corporate web site is about to be launched. Long live the Lazarus and Strategic Web Channel Launch programmes.
After many months of discussion, I’ve joined ThoughtWorks. I’ll be joining some of my new colleagues and other clever developers at the SyXPAC tonight. I notice that Adam Cogan, an old associate is a member. Hope he’s there to catch up on old times.
I’m using iBurst mobile broadband at the moment and I’m quite happy indeed. Sure, it’s not as blistering as low-contention Cable, or higher speed DSL, but heck it’s fast enough for me and it works on the bus, the ferry, and gets good reception pretty much anywhere in Sydney.
