Nat Pryce says, "Tell, Don't Log", and I agree that there's a solid pattern in there. Now I'm left wondering what would be the best way to implement such an event-based monitoring (logging, in most cases) setup. I suppose it would be some sort of an observer thing which would definitely be more verbose than the C# native concept of events and delegates.

Jason Yip asks, "is it in or out?" I've recently noticed that certain project managers tend to focus too much on the past and not in the future. I suppose that could lead back to the good old saying that had something to do with learning and history. Anyway, one should not forget that the future is more important than the past. You can't do anything about the past but you can do something about the future. Focus on that. Make it so.

On a related note, I've also observed that it's far too common for a project manager's "pep talk" to become nothing more than talk simply because the communication is not involving the people present. Saying "we must now start doing this and give our full attention to that" doesn't help much if nobody commits to it. You don't get commitment by saying "we must". It's you who should start making that commitment and take the lead. The others will follow.

This past weekend, I listened to Scott Ambler on IT Conversations. A great talk, once again, and in between bashing Accenture, EDS, IBM, etc. ("Accenture comes and says 'we can do it for 2 million dollars a year'" type of stuff...), Scott delivers a high quality talk. Well worth streaming it to the loudspeakers while reading some lame weblog ;)

In other news, Michael Harmer has made an observation: The triangle is bent. A short but powerful argument that I'm bound to steal from Michael.

Speaking of bent, take a look at this. A textbook example of a prescriptive process in action.

In Thoughtworkerland, the head honcho himself talks about the importance of rotation for TW. I know for sure that having next to zero rotation at Accenture is one of the things I least like about my current position and has almost driven me out twice already (not that the situation has improved much since). Then again, when that little bit of occasional semi-rotation happens, it's usually pretty cool stuff. Like running the first XP training in 2005. ...and since we're talking about TW again, I'll mention that here is a two-year retrospective of one of the better known TWers and Bouncycastle developer, Jon Eaves, who also recently (re)coined the term Kryptonite for the software development community.

On the tool front, it looks like M7 is giving out some sort of a freebie JSP editor plugin for Eclipse. I've tried it for a couple of days and it's ok. The only thing that bothers me is that I'm not sure whether "free" means a 15-day trial or indefinitely. Oh, well.

Gradually moving from tools in general to testing, here's a nice-looking little web testing tool that uses Perl. In the other end of the gradient, Brian Marick has found an aspect of his domain name that he'd rather live without. That's a bit like having the aisle seat on a plane or the email address foo@bar.com... Hang in there, pal.

If you haven't noticed by now, I have a bunch of .NETers on my blogroll -- even though I'm all Java these days, I enjoy reading up on how people are doing things elsewhere with other tools. The past week, a number of very interesting blog entries popped up from that part of the blogosphere and got my attention more so than some others:

• Mike Roberts of Thoughtworks has written up a nice kickstart series of blog entries on setting up a .NET development tree. He has also blogged about NVelocity, which caught my eye since just yesterday we ended up replacing a JSP with a trivial search-and-replace style templating engine in order to tackle a weird character encoding issue. I still haven't really tried out Velocity. I probably should. Another scribble on a loooong list, obviously.
• Also, Darrell posted links to a series of blog entries talking about a project at Microsoft that has adopted Scrum.
• Steve Eichert, in turn linked to an article talking about DDD.
• Steve also expressed that he's not too fond of TestDriven.NET not providing that red/green bar. My thoughts exactly. I actually asked about this recently in the XP Yahoo! group. I ended up using the NUnit GUI as well. That colorful bar is hard to beat. Talking of the power of a good illustration, what's wrong with whoever designed this site? Maybe it's just me but I can hardly see the text.