Tomorrow is Shutdown Day.
Can you survive for 24 hours without switching on your computer?
[Update] I managed. Did you?
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Gratuitous rant
Why on earth do politicians and the media keep banging on about “carbon emissions,” “carbon trading,” “carbon-neutral” and so on, when they’re actually talking about carbon dioxide? It drives me mad!
There, that feels better. I’m going to relax now with a nice glass of hydrogen.
In case you missed it, those nice people at ThoughtWorks released CruiseControl.rb yesterday.
[Updated 14/3/07: corrected specify_attributes as per Paul’s comment]
[Updated 18/12/07: modified to avoid crazy RSpec errors]
A week or so ago I wrote about writing specs for simple pieces of functionality (particularly those that are arguably just configuration, like Rails validations). I argued that it’s important to test-drive even the simple things – however, the amount of test code can get out of hand.
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).
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!
Categories
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.