Try dried apricots.

This part of Brad Appleton's post in the Crystal Clear Yahoo! group grabbed my attention:

I've seen many teams that claim to be driven by "consensus", but they really aren't. They instead do a "majority rule" where, as long as say 75% or more agree, then the proposal is accepted. The minority gets silenced and their issues don't get discussed.

At first, it may seem like a good idea to follow the democratic vote -- after all, democracy is a Good Thing™, right? However, thinking about it further, going with the majority vote might not be the best way to go. Next time when you're voting on something among your team, spare a moment to think about whether a majority vote decision is your best option. It might be, or might not be. Your call.

The worst case? You might end up realizing later that it was indeed a step to the wrong direction when you've already eroded your team into a group of politicians.

Well, not really. But she did use the word "tablespace" yesterday while we were walking home from downtown (not all the way home -- too cold...), which kind of freaked me out.

She's a marketing manager. She's not supposed to say "tablespace".

Ok. You got me. She didn't really use the word "tablespace" but the Finnish translation, "taulualue". And she used it to refer to an area (alue) of paintings (taulu) on the wall...

I have recently read and reviewed Practical Subversion and Programming Ruby. The Subversion book was quite entertaining but the Ruby book was something you shouldn't live without if you have anything to do with the language!

Read both reviews at the 'ranch.

I just spotted this joint. They sell laptops packing SPARC processors and Solaris operating systems (as well as Linux and Windows)!

Be still, my heart.

For some odd reason, the stats for this blog jumped to an all time high of 2000 hits yesterday with no good reason. On a closer look, I realized that someone--or something--had apparently spidered through a huge number of historical pages dating back to the Dinosau... well, back to this summer, at least.

We went Karting with the project today. Loads of fun, as always. There's just something about racing...

In short, we dressed up for the main event, burned some rubber (no pics, sorry), and finished with a nice dinner at an Indian restaurant (notice the cool Matrix effect on the right-hand side!).

Oh, and I finished second :)

This was absolutely hilarious! Thanks, Carlos :)

Who would've thought. There actually was a session on test-driving Apache modules at this year's ApacheCon.

Brian Marick blogged about dealing with culture clash and listed some actions a project manager might want to take in order to help make things go smoother in the long run. Most of the suggestions are directly applicable to any software project.

After getting my share of exercise, I just wanted to sit down and relax a bit. So, what does a geek do to relax? Surf the net, of course.

Among the stuff I ended up reading was this story about the makings of Half-Life 2. It's weird, really, since I never really got into Half-Life 1 (actually I'm not even sure if I've ever seen the game). I did get quite hooked up to Raven Shield, though.

Phew. I helped move house this weekend. On Friday, I picked up a rental and headed off to IKEA. We came out approximately $1000 poorer in total from all sorts of new furniture and drove them to the new apartment. The 93-kilogram piece of a bookshelf was a piece of cake compared to the 67-kilogram dining room table, which we ended up ordering a home delivery for... I could've sworn there was a typo and it was really a 167-kilogram package :)

Come Saturday morning and it's time to go shopping for miscellaneous stuff like a couple of new bedsheets, a trimmer, a drill, some screws and bolts, a shaving machine, etc. I meant to buy loads of long underwear too because it's starting to get sub-zero up here in Finland but I forgot those. I'll be in deep remorse for that tomorrow morning when I step out to 0° Celsius and it's blowing at 50 feet per second... In the meanwhile, Kirsi, the one who was moving, started packing things at around 9am (too tired to do it on Friday).

The move itself went as usual. Lots of carrying boxes. Lots of small stuff. She's a she. You know the deal. She had a box full of cosmetics she didn't even remember having. Sigh. Finally, it was time to put together all that new furniture. It went easier than we expected (Kirsi's coworker had bought the same bookshelf and had told her it's "a real *itch" to put together...) but one standalone shelf didn't include the necessary screws so we had to leave it for some other time. I'll probably go and put it on the wall next weekend...

I should've done laundry today. I also should've vacuumed. I also should've eaten real food. I should've done lots of other things. I just wasn't up to it yet. For someone who rarely gets exercise, moving house is more than enough for one weekend.

Now, let's see if I still have enough energy to move this carcass of mine from this sofa over to the bedroom...

Not that it has ever crossed my mind (as a serious thought), but after reading this, I'm quite sure that my chances of becoming a game programmer for EA went from 0.000001% down to 0.000000045%.

Well, it certainly looks like our European colleagues are seeing growing interest towards XP. Both XP Day Benelux and XP Day London have been SOLD OUT.

If you'd like to go next year, better make the reservations now ;-)

For some reason, I had the image of a vast majority of .NET developers not being too much into object-relational mapping. You know, the old "build the whole application as stored procedures" type of stigma. Well, it seems that I might have been wrong about it -- at least if you look at the number of .NET ORM products/projects...

When you almost wet yourself just because someone walks past you at the office, it's time to look at the watch, go home, and get some sleep.

Now, I'll just do this one more fix and then I'll leave...

• Consider the use of freewriting for getting past the blank page.
• Consider playing with food at the office.
• Consider working out.

My copy of Crystal Clear has been on its way from Amazon for a few days now and I'm starting to get all anxious about it :)

There's also a Yahoo! group for discussion. We'll see if I can make time to post/read messages over there... (I've failed miserably to keep up with the XP list already so the Crystal Clear list might not be any different)

Oh, Alistair probably could've made a better choice for his methodology -- at least for the "Clear" version -- based on what kind of products his book gets listed with when searching for "Crystal Clear" at Amazon.com. Well, I guess people "get off" on different things. For some, it's a good book. For some, ... :)

Kent Beck has been posting snippets (I assume) from the 2nd edition of his book, Extreme Programming Explained, in the XP Yahoo! group lately. Here's one nugget of gold:

Work only as many hours as you can be productive and only as many hours as you can sustain. Burning yourself out unproductively today and spoiling the next two days' work isn't good for you or the team.

Where does this penchant for long hours come from? I'm often asked for "scientific" evidence for the practices in XP, as if science could somehow bear the responsibility for project success or failure. Work hours are one area where I wish I could turn this argument around. Where is the scientific evidence that members of a software team produce more value in 80-hour weeks than in 40-hour weeks? Software development is a game of insight, and insight comes to the prepared, relaxed mind.

...

You can make incremental improvements in work hours. Staying at work the same amount of time but managing that time better is an improvement. Declare a two-hour stretch each day as Code Time. Turn off the phones and email notification, and just program for two hours. That may be enough improvement for now and may set the stage for fewer hours at work later.

Kent Beck

ThoughtWorks has come up with a new open source project, Selenium, that develops a JavaScript-based browser-embedded test engine for running FIT-like tests in a browser. That's a very interesting idea, although I wonder how well their use of IFRAME fits with the goal of supporting such a wide array of non-IE browsers.

Anyway, kudos to the team, keep it up, and all that. There's always room for a good tool.

Last week, Kent Beck posted to the XP Yahoo! group (sorry, can't provide a link since the website is "temporarily unavailable") the "new" principles he's listed in Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd edition:

• Humanity
• Economics
• Mutual benefit
• Self-similarity
• Improvement
• Diversity
• Reflection
• Flow
• Opportunity
• Redundancy
• Failure
• Quality
• Baby steps
• Accepted responsibility

That list certainly does look "different" from what it was in the "1.0 era" books. Yet, it's not. I'm anxiously waiting for my copy...