Have you every wondered what the acronym UTC stood for? I came across this little gem in the Javadocs for Solr today:
In 1970 the Coordinated Universal Time system was devised by an international advisory group of technical experts within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. Since unanimous agreement could not be achieved on using either the English word order, CUT, or the French word order, TUC, the acronym UTC was chosen as a compromise.
We were so lucky to get Dave Snowden as an XPDay keynote back in 2004. One of the memorable moments was when he used the metaphor of organising a childrens party to explain the various approches to managing complexity. It certainly resonated with the audience (based on the conversation in pub afterwards – a wonderful XP day tradition!).
Dave’s now uploaded a version to YouTube… Fantastic stuff. I love the deadpan humour.
The old bambinos made me laugh with this suggestion.
An improvement on XP’s stand-up meeting, or scrum’s daily scrum is the New Bamboo Hang Up Meeting. You are only allowed to talk while performing pull ups from a steel girder. Not only does this keep the meeting short, but ensures the team reamins physically fit
I know that journalists use pseudonyms on facebook to research a community, but the BBC is reporting that busy people are paying someone to represent themselves online as they need a presence, but don’t have the time.
I met somebody the other day who told me that online networking was so important, and he didn’t have the time, he was paying somebody to be him online. To blog, network, post etc . £1,000 a month too.
“This guy is a busy entrepreneur and he says that wherever he goes, people marvel at the energy he still manages to put into blogging and networking – and he then tells them it is all being done by a guy he pays to do it.”
Writing build tools is a nightmare these days. As the recent post on mockobjects.com points out, there are just sooooo many different java test frameworks to choose form (Junit 3, Junit4, TestNG, EasyMock, JMock1, and JMock2…).
Thankfully there will soon be a solution at hand…. The post explains that commons.testing and commons.mocking will provide a common, framework-agnostic API for writing tests and using mock objects.
Developers will be able to write to a single API and then select a test framework and mock object library to execute the tests at runtime by annotating their tests with the commons.testing annotations, writing a few dozen lines of XML configuration.
Furthermore, commons.testing can run tests that are defined entirely by XML configuration files instead of complex Java code. This will enable IT departments to greatly reduce the cost of pair programming and test driven development by having lower-cost, non-technical staff author the test cases that specify what the developers must implement in Java.
I think this is a little simplistic. The commons team have missed a trick. It’s not just testing frameworks that vary. There’s also a plethora of development tools that need to support commons.testing before developers can start using it in anger. What we really need is a commons.plugin framework.
With this, a cool new open-source project would automatically work on all development tools (IDEA, Eclipse, Bamboo, Cruise Control, Ant, Maven…). Now we’re talking…
Michael Thorpe told me about this wonderful explanation of two stage commits (from the book Transaction Processing : Concepts and Techniques):
The chapter on two phase commit compared it to a wedding with the minister being the commit point. “do you take this man” (vote to commit) – yes, then PREPARE to commit, “do you take this woman” (vote to commit) – yes, then PREPARE to commit. “Anyone out there have a good reason not to do this?” no, then “I pronounce you man and wife” – transaction is committed.
