fuzzylizard

I think my computer is sick, or at least my install of Windows XP is sick. My first indication was that my shiny new USB flash drive would more or less crash Explorer. The second sign was that Firefox was just a little bit screwed up. In fact, I had to completely reinstall Firefox. Unfortunately, this didn’t work cause now when I try and launch the browser (from a freshly rebooted computer) I get an error box telling me that Firefox is already running. Hmm…

The strangest one yet happened in Fireworks. When I create a text box and start typing, if I use the letters rd in that sequence, it forces a newline between the ‘r’ and the ‘d’.

I think it’s time to reinstall Windows. Ugh

I read a very cool quote the other day in Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time by Marcia Bartusiak about teaching. In the book, she is quoting John Archibald Wheeler who more or less single handedly brought Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity back into the mainstream back in the 1960s.

bq. Much of the best teaching comes out of research, and much of the best research comes out of teaching. If the class hour doesn’t end with the teacher having learned something, he doesn’t know how to teach.

Ars Technica has written a “review of the new Mac Pro”:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macpro.ars. I am a little late in posting this, but I just found it this morning. So for anyone looking to get the Mac Pro who has not already read the review, enjoy. The summary is that they loved it.

I bought a new 2Gig “OCZ Rally2 usb flash drive”:http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_rally2_usb_2_0_dual_channel_flash_memory_drive. Every computer that I plug it into it works great. Windows recognizes what it is, loads the drivers, and brings up an explorer window showing the drives contents. Every computer except for my personal desktop computer running Windows. If I boot the computer using Knoppix, the flash drive works fine. I installed Ubuntu onto my computer and the drive works fine.

I am beginning to think that my Windows install is messed up. However, since I installed Ubuntu, I may stick with Linux and only use Windows for playing games.

I am a little late in posting this, but Yahoo! has created a “Ruby Developer Center”:http://developer.yahoo.com/ruby/.

Apparantly it isn’t just Japanese business men who have their notebook batteries blow up, “it happened to Alan Cox as well”:http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~telsa/boom/

There are two business, project management terms that I have come to hate. They are used all the time where I work by the business, requirements team and anyone higher up the chain then I am. The two terms are: “risk management” and “traceability matrix”. I personally hate them because they are what I will call “waterfall words”. They are indicators that agile development is light years away from being adopted.

I dislike the first term–risk management–because it means that something somewhere wasn’t signed off. Yep, where I work, risk management is a bad thing because it means that the client has not signed off some part of the project prior to working on that part of the project. As I said, this is pure waterfall.

The second term–traceability matrix–is all about documentation. *Everything* needs to be documented. And not only documented, but cross referenced, indexed, and numbered. In fact, they just spent $2,000/user to buy a tool that will help them with traceability. This term also means that the developers cannot do anything unless that something can be fully justified via some document somewhere.

The end result of both of these terms is that developers end up sitting around a lot until everything is signed off and documented. This is not agile development. The funny thing is that someone showed me a document that clearly stated that to implement Agile with a big team, all you needed where the right tools. And of course, the article was trying to sell some overpriced tool from IBM that could handle testing, integration, and documentation.