fuzzylizard

You can get it from “Mozilla’s ftp site”:ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0b2/. I will post my impressions as soon as I try it out (hopefully this weekend).

There is an excellent discussion on TSS about the value of “pair programming and how much is cost effective”:http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=41876. I highly suggest anyone who is interested in the topic to check out both the “original quoted blog entry”:http://beyondng.com/weblog/?p=6 and the resulting discussion. Amazingly, both sides of the debate present some very well thought out arguments and raised some very good questions. In addition, the discussion also links to some “studies”:http://www.simula.no/departments/engineering/publications/Arisholm.2006.2 done on the value of pair programming and “other”:http://www.jroller.com/page/ccnelson/20060731 “blog”:http://www.hacknot.info/hacknot/action/showEntry?eid=50 entries discussing the issue. I am also including a link to a “pdf study detailing one team’s experiences”:http://www.agile2005.org/XR4.pdf#search=%22Promiscuous%20Pairing%22.

The BlogJoint.com has posted an article listing the “top 20 WordPress plug-ins”:http://theblogjoint.com/2006/08/29/top-wordpress-plugins/. I use, or have used, several of the plug-ins listed on this page and will probably be adopting more of them in the next little while.

I decided I was a little bored with the old design, so I am trying something new. This is not my design, just something I liked on another website and decided to borrow (thankfully the theme is freely available:-)). I am not totally sure I will stick with it, but I do like it for now.

I have seen the following quote on several “different”:http://www.estherderby.com/weblog/archive/2006_08_01_archive.html#115680247111782128 “websites”:http://brainscrum.wordpress.com/2006/08/28/the-importance-of-agile/. I found it interesting enought that I am going to repeat it here.

bq. Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, rewarded for the top, punished for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.

The quote is attributed to the father of Japanese post-war industrialism, “Edward Deming”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming.

I am not entirely sure that I agree with it, however, with no personal knowledge to base a real opinion on, I can’t really comment any further except to say that it seems to completely go against anything Darwinian. Personally, I find a little competition to be a good thing, not a stiffling, ambition killing thing. On the other hand, I do agree that modern management leaves a lot to be desired.

I found this article listing “disk wiping utilities”:http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/08/disk-wiping-utilities-how-to-get-rid.html on the Geeks are Sexy website. This is something that everyone should do when giving away a computer or hard drive. I am always amazed at the articles that come out where someone buys a hard drive online and finds data on it. For some reason, that data always seems to have come from a financial institution of some kind. Go figure.

At work, we are transitioning all of our servers from “Red Hat”:http://www.redhat.com (old versions like 7.2 and 8.0) to “Debian”:http://www.debian.org/. Part of my job has been to move all of the services from the old Red Hat server to the new Debian server. This has entailed setting up things like NIS and our Jabber server.

On Red Hat, this would involve trying to find the right packages, trying to install them, searching for dependencies, trying to install them again, and so on. On Debian, it is dead simple. For NIS, it is just apt-get install nis and for Jabber, apt-get install jabber. Would could be simpler then that.

In addition, for both apps, I have been able to find a nice little “tutorial page”:http://www.debian-administration.org/ on the Debian website that shows how to fully setup “each”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/36 “one”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/42. Very cool.