Frank Carver's musings about software and life
A while ago I spent some time banging my head against the needless inconsistencies between US mobile carriers for a project which remained at the prototype stage. If we ever pick up such a project again, the following list of email-to-SMS/MMS addresses could well be useful.
How to Send Picture Mail via SMS / MMS on the iPhone at JAW Speak
An excellent and detailed review of what looks to be a very interesting book. I definitely need to up my reviewing game if I want to keep up with the likes of Mark Needham.
Pragmatic Learning and Thinking: Book Review at Mark Needham
Not something I had ever thought of, but apparently it’s more healthy and productive to stand at desks rather than sit!
We are currently struggling with how to integrate work on refactoring/simplifying/cleaning our product codebase with existing streams of stories and bugs. One of the tricky aspects of this is how to estimate and prioritise the cleanup work: how much is it worth, and how much time should we spend on it this iteration?
Martin Fowler has written about extending the idea of “technical debt” by including the concept of “interest”. Extra time spent on completing any given task compared with the time which would/might have been spent implementing that outcome on a cleaner system is effectively an “interest payment” on the “technical debt”. Noting an estimate of such an amount along with the elapsed time on each piece of work allows a relatively simple calculation of the total “interest payments”, and helps inform any decision to “pay off” the debt by refactoring, simplification, etc.
One of my older Windows boxes at home is only used sporadically, and for a very small number of specific tasks. I’m thinking that it makes sense to try and “virtualise” the machine and run it in a VM on one of the other more-powerful ones.
With that in mind I wanted to take note of a fix for Windows Update not working in a VM, in case I find I need it.
This makes me smile every time. It’s especially appropriate as our sales team keep bidding for deployment projects which are likely to require massive internationalisation and localisation of or product. How can we avoid this sort of problem.
My personal preference is almost always to deal with a database at a fairly direct level. I have built up a bunch of Java code which largely removes the pain of database access, but it is certainly not any kind of ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool. I rely on understanding both the structure and efficiency of the database, and the clarity and effectiveness of the code.
This article recounts one development team’s problems with using too high a level of abstraction for data persistence, and forgetting that there is a database at the bottom of their pile of software.
No New Ideas: ActiveRecord lessons learnt: #1 Never forget there’s a database
This is an absolutely fascinating article for anyone interested in business process and improvement. Read it and you’ll see what I mean!
Evolving Excellence: JKE Day 2: Saishunkan Cosmetics – Customer Care Trumps a Factory
Not rocket science, but a good list of tips none the less.
10 Tips for Better Audio in Digital Video Production | B&H Photo Video Pro Audio
I’m still keeping an eye on the dichotomy between the process of traditional, journal and conference-based, academic debate and the way that discussion, ideas and learning flow in the connected world of the internet. Others are observing this too.
elearnspace: Social media is changing the shape of scientific debate
Even though i have only ever dipped my toes into the water of podcasting, I still have a strong urge to do it. From time to time I take another spin around the audio technology web sites and stores, and always keep an eye out for how other folks do it. Here’s the setup used by Joel Spolsky for the popular Stack Overflow podcast he makes with Jeff Atwood.
How the StackOverflow Podcast is produced – Joel on Software
This looks like a neat tool for generating application user interface mockups (a.k.a UI prototypes), something we don’t really do much of here, but maybe we should.
Interesting thoughts from Mana at “Geek Diva”
Two solid articles of the subject recently:
Pair Programming: Driving quickly at Mark Needham
Pair Programming: Benefits of the pair switch mid story at Mark Needham
Funny, in an old-school computer-geek sort of way 
This looks like an interesting project. I’m slightly worried by the way that it seems to embody the one class === one test assumption, but if that doesn’t get in the way of other forms of unit testing it could be useful.
SMIL is an interesting “sleeper” technology. A way of scripting the interaction and relationship between multimedia objects such as videos. I have seen some interesting Quicktime experiments based on SMIL, but so far it has remained inaccessible to casual web users and relatively difficult to use from familiar programming environments.
However, it seems that a new XML-based version is being proposed as a W3C standard, with the intention of driving adoption and support.
What a great idea! a schema definition for JSON, in JSON. I’m really tempted to build a validator for this format using my Stringtree JSON code.