Posted by
Pete McBreen
20 Jan 2010 at 20:02
Since I was on the team that developed it, thought it was about time to install Tynt Insight on this blog, so I can now see what gets copied and the links will be a bit different when you copy from the site.
Based on this trend we will probably reach 400ppm in April or May 2015.
Read more: http://www.improvingwetware.com/#ixzz0dDTBA0Gp
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Share Alike
If Tynt Insight is working correctly, clicking on that link will take you to the CO2 blog post and highlight what was copies on that posting.
This link http://www.improvingwetware.com/2010/01/09/why-this-site-has-the-co2-badge#ixzz0dDTvtIq1 goes to the articles permanent page ans should always work even after there are more blog posts on the home page that have moved the CO2 article off the home page.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
17 Jan 2010 at 11:08
Interesting set on slideshare about the Netflix company culture. Process slide is number 61 - not quite figured out how to link directly to that slide - and the following slides…
Lesson: You don’t need detailed policies for everything
Posted by
Pete McBreen
17 Jan 2010 at 08:52
In Optimised to fail the authors start with a great quote…
The late Roger Needham once remarked that ‘optimisation is the process of taking something that works and replacing it with something that almost works, but is cheaper’. [emphasis added]
Although the technical details of the protocol are not public, the authors seem to have managed to replicate what happens, but the key part of their paper are the vulnerabilities that they reveal. These vulnerabilities coupled with the transfer of liability for fraudulent transactions from the banks to the customers means that this protocol and the associated hardware and banking cards should be withdrawn from use.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
14 Jan 2010 at 11:13
Justin Etheredge has an interesting rant about browsers and the compatibility with standards. The paragraph below should have rounded corners from CSS, but as he says…
And how about this? If you’re looking at this in Safari, Opera, Firefox, or Chrome, then you are seeing nice rounded corners which are created using only CSS. Guess what you’ll see in IE8… nothing. A square box.
Looks like jQuery might be the way to go rather than trying to deal with these browser issues.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
13 Jan 2010 at 22:12
After all the fun and games in the press over the climate models, some developers decided to rewrite the climate models in python. So far their graphs seem to track pretty well to the fortran original code, but these are early days in this implementation of the code.
Looks like I’m going to have to update my python implementation as it is too old to run their code… I’m back at 2.5.1 and the code needs 2.5.4
Posted by
Pete McBreen
13 Jan 2010 at 18:48
One of Zed’s earlier rants about why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics.
Finally, you should check out the R Project for the programming language used in this article. It is a great language for this, with some of the best plotting abilities in the world. Learning to use R will help you also learn statistics better.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
09 Jan 2010 at 18:39
Since the trends on global CO2 levels are not good, I decided that it would be useful to watch how they are changing, The historical trend has been that on average we are increasing CO2 levels by approx. 1.9ppm/year. Based on this trend we will probably reach 400ppm in April or May 2015.
But we will see fluctuations up and down over the course of the year
This is a feature of the way the climate relates to the overall earth systems, the CO2 level drops as vegetation grows in the northern hemisphere summer, and then rises during the northern hemisphere winter, peaking in the spring, and then starting to fall off again in June. On an annual basis this fluctuation is around 6 ppm, but year on year we are averaging nearly 2ppm higher - but this varies with the economy and the weather in any year, hot years tend to be associated with a higher rise.
Below is sample data extracted from CO2Now.org which is also the source of the badge.
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Average |
| 1959 | 315.62 | 316.38 | 316.71 | 317.72 | 318.29 | 318.16 | 316.55 | 314.80 | 313.84 | 313.26 | 314.80 | 315.59 | 315.98 |
| 1960 | 316.43 | 316.97 | 317.58 | 319.02 | 320.02 | 319.59 | 318.18 | 315.91 | 314.16 | 313.83 | 315.00 | 316.19 | 316.91 |
| 2008 | 385.42 | 385.72 | 385.96 | 387.18 | 388.50 | 387.88 | 386.38 | 384.15 | 383.07 | 382.98 | 384.11 | 385.54 | 385.57 |
| 2009 | 386.92 | 387.41 | 388.77 | 389.46 | 390.18 | 389.43 | 387.74 | 385.91 | 384.77 | 384.38 | 385.99 | 387.27 | 387.35 |
Overall this is a large scale experiment
How much CO2 can humans add to the atmosphere without adversely affecting the climate systems that we depend on?
Posted by
Pete McBreen
08 Jan 2010 at 22:21
A historical look at what makes the GPL useful. Best quote
All you’re doing by whining about how the GPL makes it impossible to make money off of someone else’s work is to convince me that you’re…
Yes, it is a rant, but understandable in view of the rants and opinions raging about the GPL due to Oracle’s impending purchase of MySQL. For other views Groklaw explains The GPL Barter Cycle, Stallman on selling exceptions to the GPL - a follow up to the letter to the EU Commission, GPL Works No Matter Who Owns the Copyrights, Groklaw’s - Reasons I Believe the Community Should Support the Oracle-Sun Deal. In the end Groklaw comes out against the plan to make money from Open Source code by getting the EU Commission force it to go proprietary.
My personal take on the MySQL deal is that the time to have the concerns was when it was first sold to Sun, not afterwards by trying to revise the deal that Sun made when it first acquired MySQL.
For more background on Software, GPL and Patents there is always Groklaw’s GPL Resources and the amazingly detailed
An Explanation of Computation Theory for Lawyers, and for the historically minded, the ongoing SCO GPL case.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
03 Jan 2010 at 14:37
After reading Mark Wilden’s tale of Why he doesn’t like Pair Programming I have spent some time reconsidering my Questions about Extreme Programming.
In the book I let Pair Programming off lightly, not fully addressing the dark side of pair programming that Mark addressed. Yes, chapter 9 is called Working at this intensity is hard, but I did not point out that after a full day of pair programming most developers are not in a fit state to do more work. XP requires a 40 hour work week so that the developers can recover from the pair programming.
Other problems I have noticed with Pair Programming
- Exploration of ideas is not encouraged, pairing makes a developer focus on writing the code, so unless there is time in the day for solo exploration the team gets a very superficial level of understanding of the code.
- Developers can come to rely too much on the unit tests, assuming that if the tests pass then the code is OK. (This follows on from the lack of exploration.)
- Corner cases and edge cases are not investigated in detail, especially if they are hard to write tests for.
- Code that requires detail thinking about the design is hard to do when pairing unless one partner completely dominates the session. With the usual tradeoff between partners, it is hard to build technically complex designs unless they have been already been worked out in a solo session.
- Personal styles matter when pairing, and not all pairings are as productive as others.
- Pairs with different typing skills and proficiencies often result in the better typist doing all of the coding with the other partner being purely passive.
Having said all of that, pairing is still a good way to show someone else around a codebase, and pairing is definitely useful when debugging code - the second pair of eyes definitely helps.
Questions about Extreme Programming that are still open
Overall I still see XP as a fairly niche methodology, as there are few projects that it is really suited for. The constraints of XP are fairly rigid, and although many projects have tried to replace the onsite customer with systems analysts, the decision cycle is definitely longer when the analyst is in the loop.
The key problem that XP projects face is that there is no real compelling case for using XP. Yes, some developers like it, but more for the Unit Testing rather than any other part, and the testing aspects can be replicated in any other approach to software development. I still think that the most useful parts of XP can be applied in other contexts.
Overall, although my questioning of XP was not well received at the time, I think it has stood the test of time well in that eight years on,XP is approaching the status of a footnote in software development history. Yes, it helped to motivate the Agile Alliance, but these days I see more projects trying Scrum than XP, and while some of the XP practices are here to stay, it is hard to point to any software that was developed using XP and state that it will stand the test of time.
Yes, many of the tools that supported XP practices will stand the test of time, but most (all?) were not developed as part of an XP project, instead they were solo projects undertaken to assist an XP team in one way or another.
In summary, although Questioning Extreme Programming is now outdated in that it refers to an earlier incarnation of XP, I still stand behind the claim that while it was an interesting approach to software development, it is not applicable to many projects, and the current versions of XP have similar problems. The ultra-light weight approach to software development that tries to put developers first does not work all that well in a corporate or entrepreneurial setting.
