May 31, 2006

Prehistoric ecosystem found in Israeli cave - Yahoo! News

Prehistoric ecosystem found in Israeli cave - Yahoo! News. Tough to see how creationism leads to a cave full of blind animals! "The cave was completely sealed off from the world, including from water and nutrients seeping through rock crevices above. Scientists who discovered the cave believe it has been intact for millions of years. 'Every species we examined had no eyes which means they lost their sight due to evolution,' said Dimantman."

May 25, 2006

Non-Genetic Trait Inheritance

In surprise, mice get trait without gene - Yahoo! News: "a gene's effect can be inherited without the gene itself. That phenomenon, called paramutation, was shown 50 years ago in corn and later in other plants. Similar findings have also been made in animals, but the new work is notable because it presents evidence for how it happens"

May 24, 2006

May 23, 2006

Five surprising facts about starvation that could change the international agenda | Science Blog

Five surprising facts about starvation that could change the international agenda | Science Blog: "Millions of children need immediate, life-saving attention coupled with coordinated longer-term investments that will help prevent repetitions of nutrition and health insults as they grow into adulthood. The world cannot afford to waste another decade talking about global targets, waiting for the macro-effects of economic and political development to reach children ignored by the development process"

May 19, 2006

Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy

Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy: "Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, 'If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.' Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time."

May 16, 2006

Skype to SIP Gateway

RSDevs.com - RS Development Group: "PSGw - Personal Skype to SIP and H.323 gateway technology is available for licensing for VoIP and SoftPhone vendors. PSGw can be integrated in already existing VoIP application (SoftPhone for example) and allows to place and accept Skype calls within VoIP application. PSGw can be customized and integrated as additional option or external plugin."

Document/literal-wrapped patatern

Which style of WSDL should I use?: "These are the basic characteristics of the document/literal wrapped pattern: * The input message has a single part. * The part is an element. * The element has the same name as the operation. * The element's complex type has no attributes."

Document/literal-wrapped patatern

Which style of WSDL should I use?: "These are the basic characteristics of the document/literal wrapped pattern: * The input message has a single part. * The part is an element. * The element has the same name as the operation. * The element's complex type has no attributes."

May 11, 2006

On Making Scrum Work

A few random thoughts on Scrum that I sent to an old friend:



My 2 cents based on what I've seen here, and what the process was like there when I left:

<soapbox>

Adding more pomp and circumstance to the monthly sprint meetings is important for everyone. I know some of the Scrum people talk about limiting prep time to 20 minutes for sprint reviews, but I think that allowing a 2-3 day transition period to complete a sprint, hold the review meeting and the retrospective, and then move into sprint planning is really important for sanity and productivity.

Make the success or failure of a sprint dependent on meeting the Goals, not completing Backlog Items (or work tasks!). It's all about using the right level of abstraction in each meeting (are we talking about goals, backlog items, or tasks right now?) The goals have to be discrete and clearly define their 'done' criteria (Goal: Complete the port to Postgres 8.1. Done when then installer can successfully perform an update to 8.1, and JBoss can successfully instantiate a connection in the connection pool.) I start the sprint review by reading the goals aloud, then everybody shows what they worked on, then I ask the project manager one by one if he thinks we've met each of the goals. If you're focused on the big picture in the sprint review, and not on individual backlog items that could have slipped, you're setting yourself up for success.

Make Rob (big boss) attend the sprint reviews, but don't allow Rob (big boss) OR Kris (dev. manager) to attend the retrospectives. Here, I've usually been able to consistently preach 'sustainable pace' and leaving at the same time every day. Just the pressure of having the other developers and the big boss present at the sprint review has almost always been enough to make people personally invested in meeting deadlines. Holding a formal retrospective, but only inviting Pigs was important here in creating a safe environment for people to be self-critical.

Have real sprint planning sessions. Everyone (Kris, Jon, developers AND qa) needs to sit around a table together and stay until it's done; individual estimates really have turned out to be less accurate than group estimates, even when the person to do the coding is known ahead of time. Ideally the ScrumMaster needs to show up with a prioritized list of backlog items, and the main focus of the meeting can be providing high level estimates and negotiating on which items will be put into the sprint. Definitely don't leave the room without story point assignments to every item in the new sprint, and have a good solid line between the last-priority item for the current sprint and the top-priority item for the next sprint. Developers can brake down story point estimates into hour estimates over the following hours or next couple days (preferably all together, definitely not all alone).

Have daily standups with a printout or poster or big monitor showing the current sprint where everyone can see it. The meetings are much more productive when centered around the TASK in the sprint backlog that someone was working on rather than just reiterating their own description of the backlog item every day. It isn't valuable to hear: Yesterday I was working on the Unicode conversion. More of the same today. More valuable is: Yesterday I spent 6 hours on the 'Get variable reporting to use unicode strings' task, and it's done now. I spent 2 hours on 'Convert variable reporting xml data in postgres from ASCII to Unicode; that's going fine, and the new estimate is 3 hours. This morning I'll finish that up, then move on to 'Write the JUnit test to validate the Unicode conversion' task. My impediment from yesterday is cleared because Jared is back in the office and showed me how to set up the new JUnit framework'

Here at xyz, just seeing that the scrum process get kick started and having 2 back to back sprint reviews where we exceeded expectations did more to change the heavy handed management than anything we could have negotiated ahead of time.

</soapbox>

May 10, 2006

Great Interview w/ Peter Singer

Salon.com Books | The practical ethicist: "In fact, there's a University of Chicago study that shows that if you switch from driving an American car to driving a Prius, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by one ton per year. But if you switch from a typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, to a vegan diet with the same number of calories, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 1.5 tons per year."

May 09, 2006

Cure for Cancer

I think these will be the people that actually cure cancer. Overview: "Further experiments showed that in these cases it was a massive infiltration of white blood cells that destroyed cancer cells in these mice without damaging normal, healthy cells."

May 08, 2006

Bush's best moment in office?

Reeling in a big perch: "President Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake."

May 03, 2006

There's ALWAYS Room for Jelly! - Prismiq Media Player / XviD & DivX Playback Help For Mere Mortals

There's ALWAYS Room for Jelly! - Prismiq Media Player / XviD & DivX Playback Help For Mere Mortals: "I have managed to figure out with the help of the people on this board and google how to get my video clips to play properly on the Prismiq Media Player. It's taken me over a year, and I'm going to try and help you get sorted out in about 15 minutes. "

Music on Demand

Music on Demand: "Music on Demand is a client/server application I wrote to control the PRISMIQ MediaPlayer. The server was written in ANSI C and Berkley Sockets. The client is a Java Applet which can run in any Java 1.1 enabled browser."

exertia � Setting up a Prismiq Media Player to show a VLC media stream

exertia � Setting up a Prismiq Media Player to show a VLC media stream: "I recently spent so many hours getting a video stream enabled from my PC to my Prismiq Media Player that I want to spare the agony for any of you who want to try it yourselves:"

myDigitalHome.info: PRISMIQ Information

myDigitalHome.info: PRISMIQ Information: "Using VideoLan Enable the remote media agent -Connect to the media agent by telneting to port 2253 -Setup the MP to listen for the multicast: open_dev set mcast_port 5000 <-- your port of choice set mcast_group 237.24.1.1 <-- your multicast address of choice set video_layer 1 play -Install VLC from videolan.org and fire it up -Put your DVD in the drive -Select File->Open Disc... -Select 'DVD' (not 'DVD menu support') -Select your drive, title, and chapter -Check 'Stream output' -Select 'Settings...' next to 'Stream output' -Check 'UDP' and set the IP and port (e.g. 237.24.1.1 5000) -Check 'MPEG TS' -Check 'Video codec' and select 'mpgv' and bitrate (e.g. 3000 kb/s) -Check 'Audio codec' and select 'mpga' and bitrate (e.g. 192 kb/s) -Click 'OK' and 'OK' to finish -Enjoy your video"

Only in America

May 02, 2006

Google Maps - olympia, WA "old school pizza"

Old School Pizzeria
108 Franklin St NE, Olympia, WA
(360) 786-9640

World Peace Herald

World Peace Herald: "Adult policy discussions are understandably avoided during election campaigns, but events on the ground have rudely refused to stand still. Early signs of a Hamas capacity for moderation could already be morphing into a 'we have nothing to lose' recidivism in the face of global stonewalling. "