Categories
Rants Software

Steven Fry’s call to arms

Steven Fry has written a detailed comparison of smartphones on his blog. It’s quite long, but very entertaining (as you would expect) and well worth a read.

As a ‘corporate software engineer’ myself, this in particular struck a chord:

Break free, all you corporate software engineers and designers: the excuse that you are under the rule of dullards, greedy share-price number crunchers and visually and ergonomically illiterate yahoos is not good enough. Persuade them. Otherwise we all get a digital environment that’s a vile as a 60s housing estate.

Amen to that.

Categories
General nonsense

Quoted in the Times!

So I was reading Jon’s post about Paul‘s SEO talk at Barcamp Brighton, and thought I’d give the tip for finding incoming links a whirl.

I searched Yahoo for linkdomain:www.kerrybuckley.com -site:www.kerrybuckley.com, and found pretty much what I expected – my blog comments, links from a couple of other blogs, links from my profiles on sites like Twitter.

Then I found this: Apple’s new iMac: blogger reaction – Times Online.

Of all the blog comments about the new iMac, I’m not sure why he chose mine.

[tags]times,imac[/tags]

Categories
Uncategorized

Barcamp Brighton

I was lucky enough to attend BarcampBrighton at the weekend, thanks to a tip-off from psd and the fact that I had to be down the road in Eastbourne today anyway for our release planning.

For those unfamiliar with the Barcamp concept (which until recently included me), no schedule is set in advance, but attendees turn up with either a prepared talk or some ideas of subjects they think people might be interested in. On Saturday morning after the introduction we each scribbled a quick description of our session on a slip of paper, and stuck it in a free slot on the agenda grids, creating an instant [un]conference with five half-hour talks happening at once for the two days.

I’m not going to try to describe everything, or I’d be here forever (after all, I still haven’t finished writing up Agile2007), but highlights included being taught how to do this card trick by nicepaul, an audience discussion (neatly driven from a tiddywiki) on whether someone should buy a Wii, and talks about subjects ranging from web site accessibility and internationalisation to geocaching. Oh, and of course the obligatory (and my first) games of Werewolf. I did a demo of Selenium, which seemed to go down well, albeit with an audience of four (it was the last session on Sunday, and I was competing with Powerpoint Karaoke).

All in all, one of the best conferences I’ve been to. Which isn’t bad for free (with food and beer thrown in)!

In some ways the event almost seemed to run itself, but obviously that was largely down to the incredible efforts of all the organisers and helpers (especially the hosts, Madgex, who gave up their offices to nearly a hundred messy geeks for the weekend). A huge thank-you to them, and to the various companies who provided mountains of food and drink during the weekend.

[tags]barcamp barcampbrighton barcampbrighton07[/tags]

Categories
Software

Search in Google Reader at last!

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]

Categories
Agile

Agile2007: Wednesday

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.

Presenter First: TDD for Large, Complex GUIs

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 :-)

Categories
General nonsense Ruby

Duck typing for dummies

def duck?
  respond_to? :quack
end
Categories
Agile

Agile2007: Tuesday

Keynote: Reaching New Heights: Learning to Adapt is Essential

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!)

Categories
Web 2.0

First chink in FaceBook’s garden wall?

FaceBook screenshot 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]

Categories
Agile

Agile2007: Monday

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.

Categories
Apple

Apple keyboard symbols

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 cmd-option-S, and there’s no key with the Option symbol?