While reading the book The Real Frank Zappa Book by Frank Zappa, I came across the following quote that is probably the coolest one I’ve ever heard. “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible”. I’ll be posting a review of the book sometime soon, but I definitely wanted to write this quote down to remember it. There’s a whole slew of other quotes here.
Category Archives: Notes to Myself
The Truth about 911 – A Video
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A one hour analysis of 9/11 and how it is more likely than not that the government was actually behind the attacks. I heard about this on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. This is a really well done documentary. No matter what you believe, you’ll be fully engaged by watching this video. This one is going to cause me to leave the house an hour after I scheduled myself to leave for work this morning. I’m totally sucked in.
Free Scrum Process Automation Tool
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Nalla pointed me to ScrumWorks, a Scrum automation tool available at danube.com. Apparently its free with site registration. I haven’t looked into it in any semblence of detail, but thought it was worth a note to myself and a later look into the details.
Turning WordPress into a tag-based blogging application
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Turning WordPress into a tag-based blogging application. This is something I’m definitely going to have to look at.
Recording skype to MP3 – How to
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Recording skype to MP3 – How to – A note to myself to try this later.
Audio Books and the iPOD
Another note to myself:
Currently I have three books going at once. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth all recommended to me by Tom the Architect and all really interesting books — as a matter of fact, probably the most interesting stuff I’ve read this year.
The problem is, I’m over extending myself again on the reading and really need to get my act together and get to audible.com (also recommended by Tom the Architect) and get me some audio books for the iPod, since I have over an hour commute to work. A friend said he got through the audio book of The Innovator’s Dilemma pretty quickly using audio books. It took me a couple weeks of on and off reading.
So I’m going to try it out — eventually — and see if it increases the velocity of information getting into my head. Maybe I can clean up the reading queue and get some more books from my amazon wish list out of the queue as well.
The DoJo Toolkit
There is a new project (currently in .01 status) called The Dojo Toolkit. From their site, the goal is to “create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers”.
There is also an Introduction to Dojo on the site that explains what they are trying to accomplish.
The project is in it’s really early stages, but it looks interesting.
Also interesting is that this is another project using Trac for their project management software, something I had written a note to myself about previously (3 months ago to be exact), but still haven’t made the time to get it installed.
Publishing CruiseControl Automated Build Results on a Weblog
Lasse Koskela has implemented a CruiseControl Publisher that supports the Weblog API.
This is an interesting concept. Managing your build system through weblog software. I’m interested in seeing how this would work and what effect blogging software could have on the productivity / mind sharing activities in a development team. This might be something I need to prototype somewhere.
We already use Wiki software as a documentation tool, and home grown build management software for the rest of the system, however I’m kind of interested in how WordPress could be used in the same environment. Using “prepackaged” open source software for the activities surrounding a build / development team could cut out a lot of cost in software maintenance related to internal systems.
Some additional benefits I see from using this type of software as the central development hub “intranet”:
- Ability to post system notifications for hardware / patch maintenance
- One place to go for build notifications (get them out of email!)
- Ability to automagically post system upgrades or software deployments to the central site
- Ability for individual developers to post ideas or links to proof of concept software prototypes
- … I know there are more, but I have to dwell on it some more
Cobertura – Java Test Coverage Tool
As a note to myself, I found a reference to Cobertura this morning as I was reading through the CruiseControl mailing list. Cobertura is a tool to calculate the percentage of code accessed by tests (test coverage).
According to the FAQ, this is a fork of the jcoverage tool, with “prettier reports” and a more open development process.
A sample report is also provided on their web site. It does look pretty cool, and would be a nice addition to an automated build system.
As an aside, a developer from the project has also developed a PHP based reporting front end for CruiseControl. The developer states that the “ugly” source code can be found in his CVS repository in the web module.
Whether the code is ugly or not, it’s definitely a start on integrating PHP based build management systems like SourceForge with CruiseControl.
Ruby on Rails gets Ajax Support?
I found an article on Dougal Campbells weblog about how Ruby On Rails now has built in Ajax support.
While we’re on the subject, there is also the Simple Ajax Toolkit for PHP that deserves a look as well.
These are two things I definitely need carve out some time to look at, and are hereby assigned to my ‘Notes to Myself’ category.
Update 3/25/2005
A friend shot me this System Login Demo written using AJAX. This is also worth taking a few minutes to look at.
Bieber Labs 