Author: Cory Foy

After some great comments in my last post and some judicious refactoring, I now present an entire binary clock in Ruby in less than 55 lines of code using Shoes: Shoes.app {@width = 40@left = 10@margin = 10@top = 180@offset = @width + @margin@fill = red@images = [[],[0],[1],[0,1],[2],[0,2],[1,2],[0,1,2],[3],[0,3]] def gen_recs(num)  return stack {    fill @fill    num.times do |i|      rect…

When Shoes – a “tiny graphics toolkit for Ruby” – first came out a month or two ago, I was excited, but didn’t really have much to do with it. Then it hit me – I love my Binary Clock on my iGoogle home page – why not build one? The first thing to learn…

This topic has come up in several of my readings today. While I’ve seen several strategies for what to do when your planning game is going too long, the best one is perhaps the simplest, and comes from none other than Ron Jeffries on the Scrum Development mailing list: I suspect you’re going into way…

One of my more read books in my library is the very excellent Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. The book is a great resource when you are plopped down in front of a bunch of legacy code, and need to figure out just how to move forward. This evening I was writing…

Glen Alleman has a great post on the differences between project versus program management. Some of the highlights: * The project manager tries to keep change to a minimum while Program managers expect change and even embrace it * Success is measured by budget, on time, and products delivered to specification versus Success is measured…

Over on the Agile Project Managers list, Jonathan House proposes the following: I think that it’s high time that a new school of management emerges that uses Dilbert as it’s cautionary statement – if what you are proposing as a manager has ever appeared in a Dilbert cartoon, you need to re-think your proposal. Of…

I’m working on a project where we are automating the notification of a project management system. The storage mechanism is all XML files, so we’re using the FileSystemWatcher. Since I wear a green Test-First wrist band I wanted to find a way to write this test-first. The logic that we are working with is that…

At the Agile 2008 conference this year, I had the chance to run into Keith Braithwaite after Ron and Chet’s talk about agile practices. One of the things we talked about was Brian Marick’s examples (a.k.a. “An Example Would be Handy Right About Now”). I’ve given lots of thought about examples over the past couple…

If you are using CoRD to connect from OSX to a Windows machine over RDP, you may initially be confused as to how to do a “Right-Click” – especially if you are on a MacBook like I am. Have no fear – do a “Shift-Ctrl-Click” to access all the Right-Click goodness.

Last night I presented at the Agile Tampa meeting at the new Microsoft office here in Tampa. We covered adopting agile practices in an organization. The important take away was that you don’t want to just adopt practices blindly. You have to take into consideration things like the adoption model (from Crossing the Chasm), the…