Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Russian Game Consoles

When I was a kid the coolest gadget (in '86-89) were the Russian clones of Nintendo handheld consoles.
I have just stumbled on a site that resurrects those in the form of flash games.
Here is the link http://www.pica-pic.com/

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Endurance

Repair the ceiling lamp in a room with a crying baby.

You have to be fast,somehow deaf and fast.... really fast.

Agility...

I think that an agile is the enterprise where everybody think and act agile. If an eterprise praises just its champions, paladins of the 'best practices' but does nothing in changing the mentality of its management and process staff that is a non-agile enterprise

It is really not enough to have best practices posted in some obscure wiki inside the company, the best practices should become habits of every developer. It is not enough to make web casts 'bout the wonderful agile techniques, scrum and TDD but those concepts should be built in in the MANAGEMENT style.

Why agile managers? Because engineering is ever taken seriously when they propose process improvements and reduction of paperwork. Management should realize that agility is finally about money. Reducing the tasks that are not revenue generating means that the productive ones will increase and the work will be more
productive.

Finally the customer does not give a shit about waterfall/agile but it expects quality and commitment - the same virtues in a project that every PM is looking for. Agile methods (especially XP) have this by design and they produce onlythe exact quantity of results for a successful project.

Further more an agile corporation has people that train themselves, it encourages self training and the adoption of new technologies from ground up. It is totally wrong to use the 'champions' for preaching. Evangelization is not preaching. It is nice to have evangelists - they are gifted, smart, well read and inspired. Preachers are just annoying screaming dorks who know a subject by approximation. Developers inside an agile company learn 7 languages in 7 days because they want it, because they are interested in their craft. Non agile ones stick to one technology, to one language. They might be very good ones, but  they are like dinosaurs, they will fear change. They will flock for secure change opportunities with lots of trainings and coaching and then, after mastering the subject again they will stick there again in the same immobility and fear... Agile ones will learn Lisp or Erlang by themselves in order to simplify some annoying tasks in their project and will be able to advocate and evangelize that among peers.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Xubuntu

After more than 6 years with Ubuntu as my main OS, having Kubuntu or Fedora episodes I finally settled for Xubuntu.
Why? Because Ubuntu lacks Gnome 3 and the new Unity interface is an usability nightmare. I was almost there choosing Kubuntu as I like it's neat look but I felt quite helpless with KDE - as I said before I was unable to add an icon to desktop.
Xubuntu on the other hand is minimalist and all the GUI idioms I know from GTK are there. It takes less resources on my computer and with minimal customizations it has all the features of its Ubuntu/Kubuntu brothers.
Linux Mint - might have also been an alternative but I do not feel that it can keep up with the major distros.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

VoceOnline

DISCLAIMER: this is not publicity

Romtelecom created one of the most innovative and hackable(not crackable) services in the telecom market. It is called VoceOnline and basically it is a SIP service providing a Romanian number (+4037xyyyyyy) both as prepaid or postpaid solutions.

This awesome as I could connect Asterisk/Yate with this number and experiment with my little VXML toy.
Another awesome thing is that I can use a Romanian number wherever in the world and my folks can call me
at local rates an I can call back at the same rates.

I wished that Romtelecom would launch more services as this one.