Blogs

Another book in O'Reilly's hacks series was published last month: Mind Performance Hacks gives some hacks for the scatter-brain. There is also a wiki to support the book that is worth at least a quick read.

I was beginning to think the word hacking was lost to the world of subverting computer systems. O'Reilly's hacker series does a lot to put the idea of hacking back where it was--- the combination of art and science to make something new. Mind Performance Hacks is true to its title. It reminds me of John Bentley's programming pearls articles. Some hacks fit right into an engineer’s day; Estimating Orders of Magnitude is one. Perl programmers will find this book interesting too: where there is code it is Perl. Which is fitting, some of the memory aid devices in the book were used by Larry in the early days of Perl in explaining the language to Shell or C programmers.

I don't know why but this just makes me laugh every time I look: The Museum of Bad Art.

I came across a good definition of Agile on Greg Vaughn's blog. Which sums up Agile Methods:

Agile methods are a response to Waterfall methods so that verification of decisions can happen sooner.

It's useful when you have to explain Agile, which I recently had to do with an Agent.

All set for April the 1st and the Waterfall 2006 Conference?

There are many gems on this site for those who've worked in a waterfall environment including:

From a testing workshop:

As it would happen, Firefox isn't really tuned for broadband. It is possible to tune your browser so it moves quicker: Make Firefox Faster.

I've never really understood why people rave about Ant, for me it only exists because of Java. A cross-platform build tool was needed. I understand this. To illustrate Ant Homepage it they say:

Makefiles are inherently evil as well. Anybody who has worked on them for any time has run into the dreaded tab problem. "Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!" said the original author of Ant way too many times. Tools like Jam took care of this to a great degree, but still have yet another format to use and remember.

A man from out of space
Said `I'm from a superior race.
You're all inferior
While I am superior'.
Then fell flat on his face. --- Spike Milligan