… mature artists steal, as someone said. How would you classify this page then?
I’m sure you’ve already seen the original:
Archive for September, 2006
Steve Yegge: “Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called ‘Agile’ programming, namely that it’s an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who’ve never read ‘No Silver Bullet’, the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don’t know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier.”
You’re not pulling any punches, eh Stevey? I’m glad that your workplace at Google is like heaven on earth, but you must realize that not all the world can be like Google.
Googlers are in the fortunate situation of being able to milk the profits coming from the incredibly smart mix of search and text ads, but honestly most of their recent launches look like the outcome of a process based on throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Open source projects and grad school projects are probably even less constrained than Google projects, but most of us are working in startups, or as consultants, or—god forbid—are employees of mammoth corporations based on the old command-and-control system.
For the those of us that are in one of these situations, many agile practices make a lot of sense. Apart from the emphasis on rigorous testing practices, what I like about agile is the realization that estimates must be the result of a process of continuos refinement based on feedback and the emphasis on people over processes.
I think all this can be classified as “good” agile. As for making a religion out of Agile, (with a capital ‘A’), I think I’ve been so lucky to never meet one of those overpriced and overzealous Agile Consultants, so we can probably agree on labeling it “bad agile”, but it doesn’t bother me that much.
I also very much like the idea of a queue-based system. Wouldn’t it be great if Google released that software as Open Source, so we all could use it? It would probably much easier for me to sell this kind of process to customers who are still slaves of the “tyranny of the calendar” if I had a tool like that to manage my queue.
Kathy Sierra: “So, what kind of genius are YOU?
(Whatever type you are–conceptual or experimental–note the computer both David and Doc are using in the pictures. I’m just sayin’…)”
Like Kathy, I think I’m unfortunately too old to be in the “young/conceptual” camp, so maybe I can be a “late bloomer”. Of course, there’s the possibility that I’m not a genius at all, but the fact that I use the same computer as Dave and Doc (see the picture on Kathy’s blog) might well mean something.
I just realized that I only posted nine new articles to this blog in the month of September. So I’m writing this just to avoid equalizing a negative record. At least, you get a free photo.
Second World Conference on the Future of Science - Seconda Conferenza Mondiale sul Futuro della Scienza - Venezia, September 20-23 2006: “Evolution is a central concept in many spheres of human endeavour, ranging from astrophysics and genetics to philosophy and psychology. Reflection about evolution is reflection about ourselves, our future and our place in the universe…”
This would have been an interesting event to attend. Originally they listed Richard Dawkins—whose latest book The God Delusion just came out—among the speakers, but later dropped his name from the list. However, Daniel Dennett is there and there are no priests talking about reconciling religion and science and other similarly inane issues, which is good.
This is old news, but still funny. Old Joe Ratzi managed to enrage a whole bunch of intolerant camel herders by not being careful in his utterances about Islam. Then he had to backpedal a bit, but still not enough to calm the rage. This was not helpful, of course, since all of those who pretend to be outraged were just looking for a pretext. And if I were a Catholic I’d be supremely pissed off that my shepherd had to bow to stupid intolerance from a miscreant crowd. So in the end, no one is happy.
Personally, I could be happy, were it not for the fact that said camel herders might decide to react a bit too harshly towards us who are unfortunate enough to live in the same country where Ratzi resides. Possibly they already have.
I could be happy, I was about to say, because this episode just goes to show how much better we’d be without any kind of religion. But I’m afraid this lesson is falling on dead ears.
Meanwhile, an atheist writer who wasted no occasion to lay shame on those same camel herders, just died. Many thought she was a xenophobic racist, but that’s not my opinion.
Going back to the bozo in a funny hat and a white dress (can’t you at least wear a decent clergyman and stop looking like the bozo you are?), in the same occasion he also managed to say something incredibly ignorant and stupid on the subject of evolution, and science in general:
Text Homily, Mass in Regensburg 12 September, 2006: “So we end up with two alternatives. What came first? Creative Reason, the Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, yet somehow brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless.”
Talk about a false dichotomy! And a straw man, all in the same sentence. For one thing, many things are the result of chance, not the least of which our genetic makeup, which determines much of our individuality, without them being meaningless. So why pick on evolution specifically? And let’s not even begin talking about the mischaracterization of evolution as pure chance. You’d think a learned, old man would know better, but maybe he has an axe to grind.
Second, even if ascribing our existence to mere natural processes made it meaningless (according to which definition of “meaning”, by the way?), why should we prefer this conclusion to a lie? The fact that we don’t like an option does not automatically make the other option true.
(Via Evolving Thoughts.)
Technorati Tags: pope, ratzinger, evolution, islam, regensburg.
This post is to the benefit of the attendees of my RailsConf talk of today. I’ll try to post more about RailsConf when the pace of things slows down a bit. In the meanwhile, you can download “Ruby for Java Programmers” slides here.
Update: Some photos here.
While I’m waiting to board my (delayed, once again) flight to London, I am doing some blog surfing and just came upon this quote from DHH:
“The era of islands is over for most development scenarios. You don’t have to make one definitive choice. Instead, you get to hog all the productivity you can for the common cases, then outsource the bottlenecks to existing packages in faster languages or build your own tiny extension when it’s needed.”
Well, the era of islands did never actually begin for pragmatic developers, to be honest, but anyway I think this sentence, and all of David’s piece, could very well be taken as an endorsement of the work I’ve been doing: investigating the integration between the Ruby and Java worlds.
I like is so much that I’ve just added a slide with the above sentence to my presentation for tomorrow.
And no, I don’t even want to touch the “language wars” thread with a pole. Use the right tool for the job and to each his own.
I was pretty sure I had modified the Atom feed for this blog to output Atom 1.0, using James Snell’s templates for Wordpress. I was certainly serving Atom 1.0, because I remember I validated it and even proudly displayed the badge.
Then my certainties were shattered when I tried running some tests with Abdera on my feed and, to my surpirse, discovered I was still producing Atom 0.3. *Blush*. Something must have happened in the meantime and the Atom 1.0 template has apparently been replaced by the original one. Maybe it was the system crash the other day, I really don’t know.
Wanting to fix the issue once and forever and with the minimum amount of manual intervention, I remembered reading on Sam Ruby’s blog about a Wordpress plugin. In a couple of minutes I downloaded, installed and activated it and now I’m proudly serving Atom 1.0 again.
As a side effect, all RSS feeds are gone (OK, if you really want an RSS 2.0 feed, look here). I can’t say that I’m sad to see them go: Atom is so much better.
Wednesday I’m flying to London, where I’ll be speaking at the European Rails conference. I’ll be presenting on the same subject I did at OSCON: Ruby for Java Programmers.
At OSCON I demoed installing and running Rails on JRuby during the second half of the talk, but for EuroRails I’m trying to think of something different, mostly because I don’t want to steal the scene from Charles, who will be demoing exactly that. My backup plan involves demoing an installation of camping, following Ola Bini’s tutorial.
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to talk at a Rails conference about something else than Rails. In any case, I’m not even sure I can make it, since I cannot even get camping to install using either JRuby 0.9.0 or the latest code from svn:
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
ERROR: While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
undefined method `rubygems_version' for 0.9.7:Gem::Version
I’ve opened a new issue about this, but I doubt it’ll get fixed by tomorrow. So I probably need to find a backup plan to my backup plan.
Looks like our old 28″ CRT TV is toast. I will probably bring it in for repair, but this might be the occasion to get one of the new flat panels that would look gorgeous stuck to the wall that is now behind the defunct set.
As anyone wanting to buy a new TV set nowadays, I am confronted with the usual conundrum: LCD or Plasma?
Even after perusing the top 10 Google results for “what is better lcd or plasma”, I am still undecided, as I’ve read lots of contradictory information. However, I think it might be leaning slightly in the LCD direction, since it seems plasmas really shine over LCDs when you go over 40″ and I don’t want to go there, mainly for price reasons (we don’t watch that much TV after all, no satellite, no cable and an occasional DVD). LCDs promise to be slimmer and lighter, and consume much less, which I like. Plus, they have better resolution, which might be useful if I wanted to attach one of my Macs to it.
With all the things I have to do these days, I was really looking forward to waste some more time (not to mention the money) doing comparison shopping… NOT!
Whenever someone tries to convince you that his particular brand of religion can be accepted on rational grounds, just show them this video:
Actually I was surprised that such an open satire of religion can be broadcasted on mainstream TV in the US nowadays. I figure there will be hordes of fanatics wanting to burn down Comedy Central’s headquarters and countless mails being sent demanding the head of Jon Stewart on a silver platter. Or maybe not.
Anyway, thanks for YouTube. It would be impossible for us here to watch The Daily Show if it weren’t for YouTube.
Via Pharyngula.
Technorati Tags: youtube, daily show, comedy central, jon stewart, steven colbert.
For the second time in less than two months, my Transavia flight back from Amsterdam is heavily delayed, this time by 2:40 hours, at the least. Add to that the discomfort of having to drive to and from Bergamo (I left home yesterday with enough advance that I could have almost got to Amsterdam by car) and it really makes you want to just say no and tell the customer that next time they’ll have to pay the price of a KLM flight, no matter how high.
The problem is that KLM prices flights into Amsterdam with only a night out and reserved on short notice at levels that would be appropriate for a transcontinental flight. And we’re talking coach class here; I don’t even have the stomach to check what business class would cost. Alitalia, belonging to the same group as KLM, is no better in this respect.
Technorati Tags: traveling, transavia, klm, schiphol, amsterdam, alitalia, flying.
