malvasia bianca

I spent this morning hanging out in open space. The first discussion was a followup to last year’s talk by Arlo Belshee on promiscuous pairing. It turns out that a couple of experience reports were presented here on teams’ experiments with the practice. The good news: both teams saw similar productivity/quality/etc. boosts to the team […]

I spent this morning at a talk by Mary Poppendieck on lean. It was billed as a tutorial, but there were too many people for that, so it ended up as just a talk. As far as I can tell, the main thing that I missed from its not being hands-on was a chance to […]

The first day of Agile 2006 is now more or less over. It was just a half-day, really: only afternoon talks, and I don’t think quite everybody is here. I went to a couple of presentations. The first wasn’t too good: it was billed as talking about how agile had changed since the manifesto, but […]

I’m off to Agile 2006 tomorrow. Should be interesting; many thanks to the powers that be at work for sending me there.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many of the […]

The previous owner of our house was quite a gardener. One of the things I liked about the place: out the back door, there’s a patio with a table and chairs, covered by a sort of trellis with jasmine growing over it (creating a nice, cool space). In the yard proper, many flowers, large, colorful […]

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes: Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before. It turns out that […]

I’ve got the unit test framework cleaned up a bit: its interface should be relatively stable now, there’s some amount of documentation, and doing ‘make install‘ should work. Still more stuff to do before I want to announce it more widely – at the very least, I should make a tar file available, but some […]

I’m in the middle of reading A New Theory of Urban Design. Not one of Alexander’s best (though it’s interesting enough); it’s hurt by problem that, as he comments, part of the theory that he’s discussing “remains unpublished. It will appear in a later volume of this series, “The Nature of Order”. Which turned into […]

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building: Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as […]

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses: This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69) It requires a system of communication in which the building is […]

I’ve gotten permission from Sun to release a C++ unit test framework that we (largely I, but with significant contributions from others) wrote. Here’s its web page; there’s still a significant amount of work to before I want to announce it more widely, but the source code that’s there works just fine. I’ll try to […]

Anybody have a favorite C++ XML parser? We might need to add an XML/HTTP interface next to an existing CORBA interface soon at work, and I’m not too familiar with the options out there. It’s a very simple interface – a few simple short requests, a few simple, short responses plus one simple, long response. […]

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a […]

These sound to me like desirable characteristics for open source decision makers.

My dbcdb pages now can have a list of external links attached to them. This is a feature that I’d been wanting to add for a while – until now, the links from within these blog entries probably served as more of an annoyance to my readers than anything else, since the information on those […]

I can now handle books with more than two authors. Yay. Nice to be able to spend ten or fifteen minutes making a change that actually affects what books I can handle instead of spending months making a change whose effects nobody else can see. Not that I’m done with the behind-the-scenes changes yet – […]

Up until a few months ago, the way I would, say, add a new book to the list of books I’d read was to edit a file (WriteDbc.java), compile it, and run its main, which would write out HTML pages directly from the Java data structures that it built up. Then, a few months ago, […]

Driven by my recent mania for all thing lean, I just finished Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck; I wish I’d read it a few years ago. I’d been aware of it for some time, but I passed it over when doing my initial tour of the agile literature. I had assumed that […]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends a […]