Author: Kerry Buckley

Agile

Agile2007: Tuesday

Keynote: Reaching New Heights: Learning to Adapt is Essential

Susan Ershler

I’m not quite sure what to make of this keynote. Susan’s talk about achieving her twin goals of success in business and climbing the highest peaks on each continent (culminating in Everest) was interesting and well-presented, but came across to me as a motivational speech for business leaders, slightly tweaked to include a few agile themes. I’d have preferred to hear something more concrete from a thought leader in agile development (after all, there are a fair few of them here!)

Web 2.0

First chink in FaceBook’s garden wall?

Post author By Kerry Buckley
Post date 14 August 2007
No Comments on First chink in FaceBook’s garden wall?

FaceBook screenshot FaceBook now provides an RSS feed for your friends’ statuses. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, rather than an exception – I’d be happy to eat my words.

[tags]FaceBook, RSS[/tags]

Agile

Agile2007: Monday

The first day of the conference didn’t get started until after lunch, so we took the opportunity to go up the Washington Monument in the morning (I’ve been posting some photos from the trip to Flickr, by the way).

Most of the slides from the conference are on the Agile2007 website, so I’m not going to go into great detail about any of the sessions here (not that I would have anyway!), but just mention the things I thought were interesting enough to specifically note down. This will probably mean that things are a bit jumbled, so sorry in advance.

Apple

Apple keyboard symbols

There’s been a lot of comment about Apple removing the Apple symbol from the command key on the new iMac keyboard, and adding the word ‘command’. I tend to agree that it’s a good thing. It saves on those ever-popular Just hit command-S. No, the one with the cloverleaf on it. conversations, and it was never supposed to be called the Apple key anyway, as far as I know.

What puzzles me is why they seem to have removed the symbol from the option key (which I refuse to call ‘alt’) on all their recent keyboards. What are new Mac users going to think when they are presented with a shortcut description on a menu that looks like cmd-option-S , and there’s no key with the Option symbol?

General nonsense Rants

Free papers

T-shirt How do Londoners put up with the hordes of people that try to force a free paper into your hands every ten yards? It drives me mad every time I’m down there.

I think I might have to get a T-shirt made.

Web 2.0

Wired on opening FaceBook

It seems like I’m far from being the only one who doesn’t like the walled garden nature of FaceBook. There’s now an article on Wired bemoaning the same thing.

Interestingly, they come to the same conclusion that I’d been meaning to blog about for a while: that we need massive adoption of XFN to start pulling all the various social networks together.

General nonsense

Super-thin wallet

My All-Ett arrived today, and they weren’t joking about the (lack of) thickness! With the same contents, the new one is about a third of the thickness (less than 0.4 inches, compared to 1.1).

Here’s my old wallet:

Old wallet

And here’s the All-Ett, with exactly the same contents (13 cards, a couple of books of stamps, and some cash):

All-Ett

The picture below shows the empty old wallet next to the full All-Ett.

Empty Animal wallet next to full All-Ett

It only cost just over a tenner too, including postage from the US.

General nonsense

Big Visible Belly

Firstly, acknowledgment to Brian Marick, from whom this idea is blatantly stolen.

In an attempt to shame myself into losing a bit of weight, I’m adopting the XP Big Visible Chart approach, with the ‘Big Visible Belly’ graph that now appears at the top of my blog.

The graph is generated by a simple Rails app (here’s the source), using the Sparklines library. The red area above the line represents weights above the top of my ideal weight range, and the green areas below the line indicate a healthy weight. The scales are one pixel per week on the x-axis, and one per pound on the y-axis.

[UPDATE] After posting the initial version I realised that something was wrong, as there ought to have been a tiny bit of green on the graph, and it was all red. After playing with the sparklines library for a while I decided that either it had a bug or I was completely misunderstanding something. I’ve now given up on it, and implemented the graph using raw RMagick calls.

Ruby

Unimplemented specs in RSpec

Post author By Kerry Buckley
Post date 29 July 2007
2 Comments on Unimplemented specs in RSpec

One of RSpec‘s many neat features is the ability to insert placeholder specs. These allow you to list a whole bunch of expected behaviour up front, without having to implement either the specs or the code, and without creating a huge swath of failing specs. All you need to do is omit the body of the specify or it block. Here’s a trivial example:

describe "The string 'foo'" do
  before do
    @foo = 'foo'
  end
  
  it "should be three characters long" do
    @foo.size.should == 3
  end
  
  it "should be capitalised to 'Foo'"
end

$ spec -f s foo_spec.rb                     

The string 'foo'
- should be three characters long
- should be capitalised to 'Foo' (NOT IMPLEMENTED)

Finished in 0.011201 seconds

2 examples, 0 failures, 1 not implemented

[tags]ruby,rspec[/tags]

Web 2.0

Facebook

I signed up to FaceBook a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss was about, and I’m still not sure I really understand.

OK, so it’s yet another social networking site, and it’s probably better than most of the rest. You can use it to store your photos (like Flickr) or videos (like YouTube), or to post regular status updates (like Twitter) And it’s got lots of ‘fun’ little applications, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s got an API too, so it seems to have gained something of a reputation for being an open platform.

But how open is it?

I can show my Flickr photos on FaceBook, but as far as I can tell if I posted my photos directly onto FaceBook I couldn’t share them with the world at large. I can show my Twitter status on FaceBook, but I can’t just make it use that for my FaceBook status (or at least not without a lot of work). I could use the site like a blog, but then only a tiny invited audience would get to see my ramblings (big loss, I know). The whole site needs login, so it’s not externally searchable.

All the FaceBook applications seem to either exist solely within the site itself, or to just be a window onto somewhere else. There’s no real interaction going on. There are no APIs to allow other applications to access FaceBook data – it’s all one-way traffic. There aren’t even any RSS feeds.

It seems like FaceBook are making a play to become the Microsoft Windows of the social networking world – the common interface to everyone’s applications. Maybe it’s because I’m a long-time Mac user, but that makes me really nervous.