Posts by Dan

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

To anyone who thinks that there was not a legitimate complaint

People have been saying 'I found the link'.

Try clicking it then, you tools.

Program Names govern admin rights in Vista

I may upgrade after all

...but only if I can be sure that this 'feature' also includes 'heuristically' picking up files with "setup", "trojan", "worm", "virus", and "wga" in the filename. Otherwise I fail to see its usefulness...

What year is this? Is this article from the past?

Software is never done… Or is it?

If everyone knew it was the taps

...software development would be a whole lot easier.

As it stands, and to stretch the metaphor to breaking limit, what the client believes is a problem with the taps could be the pipes, corrosive water, or the sink.

Never mind using 'never done' as a smoke screen, how many times have contracts been used to insist that the client got 'what was specified' even if the system is a pile of junk? Stupid client for not knowing what they want! After all, you don't call out a plumber to fix your taps, find out that there is a hole in your feed pipe, and insist that they fix the problem, do you? No, you insist that they replace that perfectly good tap.

Agile projects can have deadlines - the only ones that wouldn't are those where something is continually developed and improved in-house, such as online retailing. That makes sense. I don't know of any Agile developer worth their salt who would begin a project without a clear idea of when it is expected to end.

The difference is that Agile, with that end date in sight, has mapped out a series of iterations with reasonable goals. This approach leaves room for changes in requirements, and provides reasonably tight, though not oppressive, checkpoints to follow the project's health and progress.

I wish I knew where this 'warm, fuzzy agile message' was. If you run an agile project as one of the poorly run agile projects Matt describes, you're not doing agile development. You're an idiot.

Agile development is Still Hard Work. You still have to graft, you have to think, and you have to be mentally on top of things. What you don't have to do is a lot of stuff that impacts your ability to deliver the software. What you must, absolutely _must_ do is manage the project properly, as Matt says.

Well, I say 'as Matt says', but I managed to pick this up from my interpretation of that 'warm and fuzzy message'. If you spend a day refactoring code to a better pattern design, you had better hope that this is in your 2-week plan, _and_ signed off at the morning meeting. If there is more important stuff than moving functionality around, I would be surprised to see something like that get past a morning meeting. Or are we talking about people who say 'agile looks good, but pair programming looks like it sucks, and I don't really like tests while coding, and morning meetings are no good, and there's no way we can deliver what we promised in a 40-hour week, and... and... and...'

That isn't agile. It's also not part of the agile message.

This is the kind of writing that I imagine would be pretty good if you wanted to convince people that you had written a book that 'fixed' agile. You know, finding 'problems' and then 'addressing' them, albeit with solutions that are 'already' part of the process you are 'refactoring'.

Hmm... Matt, haven't you written a book about this somewhere? Oh yes, there it is plugged again :)

Charity offers 'life size' virtual whale on web

Kill 'em all

I took a look, and got this message on a dark blue screen:

"no content for you

please install macromedia flash player 7"

I don't suppose that would be anything to do with the fact I am using Opera with flash player 9 on it?

I fired up IE (meh), which has the same flash version installed. Surprise, it 'works'.

By which I mean the thing loads, and I find I am now looking at a small picture of a whale, on a dark blue background, with a few floaty bits. Krill? Who can tell.

I have learned that whales don't know anything about browsers, are unable to provide useful error messages, and are also invisible up close. In short, ladies and gents, whales are pretty rubbish.

I for one will be murdering a whale tonight. The sooner they are gone the better.

Viacom sues Google for $1bn

Calculating damages is easy

... all that Viacom need to do is count the number of views of each infringing video (regardless of whether these views are for parts of an entire episode or film), and multiply that number by the average cost of a DVD.

That's the RIAA and MPAA way, isn't it? I am sure it will produce a figure close to what Viacom claim... because EVERY copyright infringer (sorry, CYBERTERRORIST) is a lost customer. And maybe these people are streaming YouTube videos to audiences on oil rigs, in schools, prisons, and other public places...

What’s Your Agile Value?

Extremely Ill Informed...

From agile to arthritic, Matt's take on the agile manifesto kills any sense of agility by willfully (surely?) missing the point, and misreading the manifesto in order to (try and) score points from 'corrections' of that misinterpretation, resulting in a confused, manacled approach to software development.

Every one above has made good points. All I have to add is that the qualifier “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more” allows any project to make liberal use of any right-column methods. To misrepresent the agile manifesto as anti-process, anti-tools, anti-documentation, anti-contract and anti-plan Matt must have either made an error in his reading, or, as seems more likely, intentionally misinterpreted the manifesto in order to create problems which he can then 'fix' with his book.

Poor analysis, poor software methodology, poor article.