From time to time I end up in a discussion (as often as not with myself) about the point at which something is so trivial that it doesn’t justify creating a unit test (or behaviour spec, in more BDD-like language).
Author: Kerry Buckley
I’ll get round to watching the whole thing eventually, but first, use the link underneath the video to skip to “What are some of the other principles of Lean?”
I never realised that Tom Poppendieck was such an accomplished ventriloquist!
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Out of step
More proof, as if it were needed, that I’m not up-to-date with the latest fashions.
Just as I’m teetering on the brink of switching from Safari to Firefox at home (mainly for all that plugin goodness), I read that Firefox’s market share is down, and Safari’s is up.
[tags]firefox, safari, browser wars[/tags]
Yesterday we saw how easy it is to send text messages using the SDK, so now let’s try making a phone call.
As I mentioned recently, I now work in the Web21C SDK team. The SDK provides a simple API for programmatically accessing various web services that BT provides, including SMS, conference calls and location services.
The SDK is in public beta, and is currently free (with daily usage limits). Up to now it’s only been available for those crazy .NET folks, but the next release (on Monday, all being well) will extend that to Java, PHP and Python. Rumour has it that Ruby’s in the works too.
I’ve been having a play with the Java version – here’s a sneak preview…
A recent article in the New York Times describes the issues of introducing ‘The Toyota Way’ to non-Japanese factories.
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Apple and DRM-free music
I’ve never quite understood the attitude of people who won’t buy an iPod for the sole reason that the iTunes music store uses DRM – after all, no-one forces iPod owners to buy music from iTunes, rather than ripping it from CDs they own or obtaining unprotected MP3s elsewhere. As DRM schemes go, FairPlay isn’t too bad (allowing you to burn the music to a CD, for example).
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The blog as online identity
In You Are Not a Username, Jason Kolb suggests that the blogosphere is really just a large, losely-coupled social network, and that your identity on that network is your blog’s URL, not a username.
I think this is an area that needs to be explored further because I really don’t like the concept of having a separate account at every site I belong to. It really should revolve around my personal Web site, wherever that may be, and that should be the end of it. It’s a simple matter of relabeling the blogosphere as a social network and layering some existing technology on top of it to add some more value.
This sounds very much like the type of thing you can do with OpenID. For instance, using the OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin, your blog becomes an OpenID server, and you can identify yourself on other OpenID-enabled sites simply by specifying your blog’s URI as the OpenID provider.
[tags]identity, openid, blogosphere, community[/tags]
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A gentle nudge
…to Alkesh “the one without a blog” Vaghmaria to get a real post up :-)
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I’m now on the SDK team
It looks like Paul Karsten has succeeded in making the case for more developers: Paul, Alkesh and I are now part of the Web21C SDK team (they assure us there’s plenty of Java as well as .net, and if we’re really good they might even let us play with Ruby).
This is good news on several fronts – Paul’s team seems to be one of the few remaining places in the company where in-house developers are still valued, they’re as keen all things XP and agile as we are, and as far as I know this is the first time anyone’s succeeded in moving an established team to a new project en masse since the new ‘resource management’ strategy was introduced.