The ideas behind agile development methodologies are not new. They were more formally stated in The Agile Manifesto. The ideas behind more basic iterative development are even older, and have their own trade-offs. Both contain the idea that you can not know everything upfront. The agile methodology states this idea explicitely: Welcome changing requirements, even […]
Categories: programming
Tagged: agile, iterative, methodology, waterfall
Currently, I subscribe to just over 740 RSS/Atom feeds in Google Reader. This has replaced my old stand-by of NetNewsWire that I used forever. There’s two main reasons for this. First, it’s available and always synchronized, something NetNewsWire wasn’t at the time. More importantly, though, is the “social” aspect that it brings with sharing of links with […]
Categories: technology
Distributed version control systems (DVCS) are all the range right now in the geek community. It has been just over 5 years since Matt Mackall announced Mercurial to the world, and about the same since Linus Torvalds announced Git. In the interveening years, both have sprung up to be worthy competitors to one another, and more […]
Categories: technology
We are not, as Darwin proffered, descended from the “lower mammals”. We are not the product of millions of years of evolution. We are, instead, the unrelenting descendant of telephone sanitizers. This was made ever more clear over the last few weeks as I struggled to explain to a client why charging their customers for the simple […]
Categories: technology
Tagged: business, government
To truly understand the devolution of privacy that drove my decision to abandon Facebook, you need only look at this post by Matt McKeon, which leads in: However, Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or […]
Categories: technology
That’s it. After all the idiocy, incompetence, maliciousness and general suspicious behavior at Facebook, I’ve deleted my account. You too can delete yours. First, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between “suspending” your account and actually deleting it. The first will suddenly re-activate if you log back in, or do anything that might cause an […]
Categories: personal
For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a consolidated list of changes that are coming in version 1.2 of Django. An odd decision, but maybe it will be rectified prior to release. Until then, I’ve put together a non-prioritized list of what seems important to me. This is mostly based on the release notes. I put it […]
Categories: programming
Tagged: django, python, releasenotes
From a recent tweet by Tim Bray on Twitter: BREAKING: Large Air Spill at Wind Farm. No threats reported. Some claim to enjoy the breeze. That pretty much sums it all up right there. I realize that there are all sorts of issues with “green energy”, but I think many people fail to recognize how absolutely dirty and […]
Categories: asides