Category: General

There is a great thread on the XP list right now discussing Metaphors in the context of XP. Metaphors are basically a common language of how a system works, ideally based on domain terms. However, I found the following post by Kent Beck to be particularly enlightning: Teams work more effectively when members have personal…

If anyone is going to NFJS, or will be in the St. Louis area on Friday, March 3rd, the St. Louis Ruby User’s Group is putting together a dinner during the Friday night dinner slot at NFJS. Here’s the announcement: We are going to have a dinner gathering of Rubyists in St. Louis during the…

I’ve been working with the great Ruby Eclipse project (which if you haven’t played with, download and then go through the tutorial. It’s been working flawlessly on my XP Laptop, but I hadn’t been able to get it to work on my Linux box. Basically, with both 0.6 and 0.7 versions, I would go to…

I had gotten this several months back from Kelly Anderson, but since he’s posted it for the world to see I’m going to pass it along: The FrAgile Manifesto (Version 2.2) We are uncovering more profitable ways of developing software by doing it fast and making lots of money. Through this work we have come…

In a recent post, I showed you how to create a basic Fitnesse ColumnFixture test using C#. However, ColumnFixtures are but one test table style available in Fitnesse. I was asked in the comments of my last post to do a tutorial around another style – the ActionFixture. What is an ActionFixture? Let’s say you…

I subscribe to an excellent magazine from O’Reilly called MAKE Magazine. It is aimed at DIY hobbiests, and includes things such as how to build your own portable Atari system, and how to build a digital camera for kite flying. It also includes articles that can cause more harm if you don’t know the basics…

My Beyond Java review finally got posted to Slashdot (only two months after I submitted it ;). I was pleasantly surprised at the conversation it sparked about various languages (even Lisp!), dynamic typing, and a host of other things. I’d recommend popping over to it (with the threshold on 4) and checking it out for…

One of the things I miss in going from .NET back to the Java world is .NET properties. Yes, it was just a code hack that was really rewritten as setters in the CLR, but it was a /nice/ hack. ;) In other words, I could get and set what appeared to everything to be…

Ron Jeffries just announced that he will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Waterfall 2006 conference with an intriguing keynote entitled Extreme Programming Uninstalled. From the conference page: Feedback, we now see, is the problem, not the solution. How is it possible to get anything done if all the time you’re looking for, listening…

A break from development a bit here, but in getting settled down into the new place, one of the things I decided to go ahead and do was use a Monowall box as my primary firewall. For years I’ve been using a Linksys Wireless router, and it’s still serving it’s purpose in Charlotte until we…