Category: Technology

  • Explore chaotic agility at next month’s Agile RTP meetup

    I’ll be speaking about chaotic agility at the Agile RTP meetup in August.

    Chaotic agility is a phrase describing why I believe agility works: the science behind it models an amazingly accurate picture of a typical development project. Most of us will agree that agile teams produce better software on time and for less money. But few of us question why agility works. By better understanding the science behind agility, we will stop trying to manufacture and control software and instead allow it to emerge on its own.

    Note that August’s meetup won’t be at Frankie’s. We’re trying out a new location at Misys Healthcare on Six Forks Road. Visit the meetup site for directions and a more detailed overview of the talk. See you there!

  • Create a mesh network in your neighborhood

    Creating mesh networks sounds like a really cool idea. The free software released by CUWiN is supposed to make it easy to do just that. Theoretically, if enough people were doing this, I could drop my Road Runner service. I wonder how long it will take for wireless networking to become so ubiquitous that we no longer need to use ISPs?

    Hmm. Probably quite a while, come to think of it!

  • Social bookmarking with BlinkList

    I admit it: I’ve been rather slow getting on the social networking bandwagon. When it comes to things that other people like, I just don’t care. If someone in my circle of friends or colleagues recommends something (through the joy that is Soapadoo, for example) then I’ll take notice, but advice from total strangers just doesn’t strike me as being very trustworthy.

    That being said, I discovered de.licio.us and BlinkList over the weekend and was immediately hooked. On BlinkList, that is. Why not de.liciou.us?

    1. Multi-word tags aren’t supported.
    2. It’s drop-dead ugly.
    3. Typing the URL is torturous.

    I imported my existing bookmarks (about a bazillion of ’em) into BlinkList on Monday. I’ve been shocked at how useful the service has been since then.

    • Pages can be bookmarked instantly. Whenever I see a page I want to keep, I hit my “Blink It!” button, type in a few tags, hit submit, and I’m back to the original page and surfing away. The entry barrier for creating a bookmark just got a lot lower for me. (I haven’t yet decided if this is good or bad.)
    • Bookmarks can be tagged. This allows me to esentially store bookmarks in multiple folders. This makes sense because any given bookmark can’t be narrowed down into a single category.
    • I can exchange bookmarks with my friends. Odds are that if one of my friends has a site bookmarked, I’ll probably want that site bookmarked too. One click and it’s done.
    • I can access my bookmarks anywhere. Whether I’m hanging upside down off a cliff in New Zealand or fleeing a grizzly bear in the Canadian Rockies (not that I’ve ever done either of those things)… I can still view and edit my bookmarks.

    Want to see BlinkList in action? Check out my bookmarks. If you’re a stranger then I can’t promise they’ll be interesting, but at least you’ll be able to check your stocks before you lose your grip on that cliff edge.

  • Audible frequencies and cell phones

    Some of my co-workers were chatting at lunch yesterday about the highest audible frequencies that can be heard by people of various ages. Apparently, teens these days are programming their cell phones to use high frequency ring tones while in class. The frequencies are so high that adults can’t hear them, only teens can. One of my co-workers located a web site that has links to sounds at various frequencies. What’s the highest frequency you can hear? I got up to 18k using my headphones, but only 17k on my speakers. Anything higher than that makes me physically uncomfortable even though I can’t hear anything.

  • Excerpts from NFJS Anthology

    No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS for short) is a symposium / conference / geekfest that began touring a few years ago. This year, an NFJS Anthology containing articles from many of the top speakers is being published by the Prag Prog guys. A couple of sample articles have been published as free PDFs.

    The first article is by Stuart Halloway and covers how Spring uses Dependency Injection and Aspect Oriented Programming in a delightful marriage of DRY-bashing goodness.

    The second article is by Glenn Vanderburg and is called “Buried Treasure.” Why is the software development field going backwards? Glenn explains why in this excellent treatise on why old is not bad.

    I highly recommend reading both of these samplers because they contain a lot of useful information in their own right. Not having reviewed the entire Anthology yet I can’t vouch for the other articles, but given some of the names listed here (Eitan Suez, Venkat Subramaniam, Neal Ford, Jared Richardson) there probably isn’t much of a question over whether it’s good material or not!

  • Table saw won’t cut off your finger

    Noticed this digg today and immediately thought of a software parallel. The saw constantly monitors its electrical state for changes and shuts down when one is detected. Isn’t this just like Continuous Integration?

  • Wireless broadband hits Greensboro this year

    A friend pointed me to Clearwire a couple of days ago. They currently offer wireless broadband for much of the West Coast and a few other areas of the United States, but what excited me was that they plan to start offering service in Greensboro sometime this year. I wonder when Raleigh might get coverage?

    Clearwire uses cell towers to provide Internet service to devices throughout metropolitan areas. This sounds very similar to what Nextel tried a year or so ago. Does anyone else have news on other wireless service providers who may be setting up camp in North Carolina soon?

  • If you want to cut a bolt, use a bolt cutter

    I saw an EDS ad in Forbes today which had what I thought was an interesting tagline:

    You can talk about it.
    You can think about it.
    You can hope for it.
    But if you actually want to cut a bolt, use a bolt cutter.

    This is so true. Yet as a software developer, this is something I tend to forget. I can blog all day about how wonderful Ruby is, but if I really want to prove its worth I should be willing to do something with it. Likewise, if I haven’t actually created something in C#, I have no basis for commenting on the language, either negatively or positively. Experience breeds credibility and authority.

    Don’t just talk about cutting a bolt. Get out that bolt cutter and use it!

  • Reconstructing web sites from cached data

    This paper written by a quartet of guys from the CS department at Old Dominion is quite fascinating. They present a software solution for recovering and reconstructing web sites from various Internet archive sources and cached search engine data. The tool is called Warrick and, while I expect I’ll never have to use it, it’s nice to know it’s there if needed.

    If nothing else, the paper gives a good overview of how web site caching actually works. And their description of the tool is quite intriguing. They must have spent a good deal of time on it.

  • Cleaning up on the web with AJAX

    Forbes.com hops on the AJAX bandwagon with a brief overview of what some new businesses are using it for. I found the point at the end about AJAX impacting Nielsen/NetRatings statistics particularly interesting.