Category: General

Monday night’s talk at the Mid-MO XP User’s Group on Fitnesse and .NET was a great time. Some good questions and discussions came out of it. For those who were there, or those who weren’t and want to see it, I’ve put the presentation and code examples online. (Edit: I put the Fitnesse files below…

One of the great things about Extreme Programming is that the customers get to decide exactly how to spend their money. We as developers work with our customers to create a set of stories, prioritize them according to the business need, and then go to work, getting constant feedback and course corrections as we go….

I’ve been invited by the Mid-Missouri XP User’s Group to give a talk this Monday, April 10th on Fitnesse and .NET in Columbia, MO. We’ll be starting right at 6pm, and it should be a good time. Get all the details and RSVP info in Gary’s message.

The thing about being in the midwest is that everyone cares a *lot* about basketball. I more of a baseball or football guy myself, but since I have to hear all the time about basketball: Yay, Florida! for winning the 2006 NCAA championship last night.

An annoying – and silent – thing happened today. I was working on one Rails site, and switched to work on a second one. I fired up the WEBrick server, went to my site, and got…nothing but a blank page. Looking at the server logs, it was clearly having a 500 error of some sort,…

I stumbled across a link to Glen Alleman‘s blog from a post on the Agile Project Management list today. He has an excellent post describing the FBI’s virtual case file project, it’s spectacular failure, and rebuttals to a lot of posts over the past few days to several agile lists asking if agile processes could…

Fitnesse has a nifty feature where you can store the output of one test table in a symbol that you can then use in a subsequent table. The documentation does a good job explaining the concepts, but seems to be missing some code behind the scenes to make it work. So I’ve put together a…

Excellent advice on building frameworks and libraries from John Roth, via the XP mailing list: Reuse is an interesting issue. There’s a rule of thumb that you should write it three times, then you’re in a position to make a resuable library or framework the fourth, because you now know what you need; you’re not…

Microsoft employees are excited about OS X…, at least according to the comments (350 and growing!) on this blog entry entitlet Vista 2007 – Fire Leadership Now. This is what worries me about large companies. Microsoft used to be touted as the place to be. It doesn’t seem like that anymore – now Google might…

Something so simple, yet so seemingly undocumented… After struggling for about 10 minutes with trying to clear a TkCanvas from Ruby, and only finding what seemed to be one message discussing it (but not answering it), I stumbled across the answer – delete(‘all’). So, if I have a canvas like this: def initialize(parent)  @parent = parent  ph…