My review of Dr. Neil Roodyn's eXtreme .NET has been published at the 'ranch. I gave the book a 7/10 rating -- read the review for details.

(I'd be so happy if only people would stop writing "eXtreme"...)

What a great idea. Seriously. Using a medium like a colored pipe cleaner to give instant feedback to a speaker could do wonders in situations where the audience is culturally programmed not to say anything even though they're not getting anything out of the presentation -- just to be polite.

When I'm talking, I try to see hints about how I'm doing and how should I perhaps correct my direction. I want to see those hints.

The problem is that people tend to subconsciously tone down their visual cues and explicitly decide not to say something out of politeness. Using a silly tool like a pipe cleaner could indeed help -- handing out those pipe cleaners would be a clear sign that feedback is wanted and people wouldn't need to worry about formulating the feedback into a polite enough sentence.

Similar facilities are being used in some webcast products, for example, where the audience can switch themselves to red/yellow/green state to let the speaker know that he's going too slow/fast.

Heh. Just as I had given Ruby and other scripting languages a bit of a bash when talking about functional testing tools as part of this week's XP training, I noticed that they had released a 1.0 version of WTR. I should probably check it out and see if the tests have become less verbose than they used to be.

(PS. I didn't watch those Ruby/Rails .mov's last night)