Google reader now has a search facility, which is nice. I can’t help wondering why it took so long though – I mean surely they have a little experience in the organisation of writing search tools?
[tags]google, reader, search[/tags]
As you may have noticed, I’m getting a little behind posting these. On the offchance that anyone’s actually reading, rest assured that I still have my scribbled notes, so they’ll be appearing here eventually.
Scott Miller (Atomic Object)
I was torn between this session and the one on Ruby metaprogramming, but it wasn’t clear who that one was pitched at, so I decided not to risk sitting through another basic tutorial. Alkesh went to the Ruby one, and apparently it was pretty good (if I’d noticed that David Chelimsky was presenting, I probably would have gone along). Anyway, as we all know Alkesh doesn’t have a blog (actually that’s not strictly true), so you won’t be able to read about it :-)
def duck? respond_to? :quack end
Susan Ershler
I’m not quite sure what to make of this keynote. Susan’s talk about achieving her twin goals of success in business and climbing the highest peaks on each continent (culminating in Everest) was interesting and well-presented, but came across to me as a motivational speech for business leaders, slightly tweaked to include a few agile themes. I’d have preferred to hear something more concrete from a thought leader in agile development (after all, there are a fair few of them here!)
FaceBook now provides an RSS feed for your friends’ statuses. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, rather than an exception – I’d be happy to eat my words.
[tags]FaceBook, RSS[/tags]
The first day of the conference didn’t get started until after lunch, so we took the opportunity to go up the Washington Monument in the morning (I’ve been posting some photos from the trip to Flickr, by the way).
Most of the slides from the conference are on the Agile2007 website, so I’m not going to go into great detail about any of the sessions here (not that I would have anyway!), but just mention the things I thought were interesting enough to specifically note down. This will probably mean that things are a bit jumbled, so sorry in advance.
There’s been a lot of comment about Apple removing the Apple symbol from the command key on the new iMac keyboard, and adding the word ‘command’. I tend to agree that it’s a good thing. It saves on those ever-popular Just hit command-S. No, the one with the cloverleaf on it. conversations, and it was never supposed to be called the Apple key anyway, as far as I know.
What puzzles me is why they seem to have removed the symbol from the option key (which I refuse to call ‘alt’) on all their recent keyboards. What are new Mac users going to think when they are presented with a shortcut description on a menu that looks like 
, and there’s no key with the 
symbol?
How do Londoners put up with the hordes of people that try to force a free paper into your hands every ten yards? It drives me mad every time I’m down there.
I think I might have to get a T-shirt made.
It seems like I’m far from being the only one who doesn’t like the walled garden nature of FaceBook. There’s now an article on Wired bemoaning the same thing.
Interestingly, they come to the same conclusion that I’d been meaning to blog about for a while: that we need massive adoption of XFN to start pulling all the various social networks together.
My All-Ett arrived today, and they weren’t joking about the (lack of) thickness! With the same contents, the new one is about a third of the thickness (less than 0.4 inches, compared to 1.1).
Here’s my old wallet:
And here’s the All-Ett, with exactly the same contents (13 cards, a couple of books of stamps, and some cash):
The picture below shows the empty old wallet next to the full All-Ett.
It only cost just over a tenner too, including postage from the US.