Jeffrey Fredrick blogs about the "red" of a failing build being an intermittent reward. It's ok to smile a little when the adrenaline rush runs through your veins and it's ok to smile even more when your bubbles are green again but for god's sake do not turn off the lava lamp when it's red!

The flight display screens at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport are implemented using (drum roll, please) Java Applets in AppletViewer's fullscreen mode.

I only know this because one of those screens crashed recently...

I just uploaded some photos I took from last week's Agile Seminar. Here's a couple of select shots of our presenters.

F-Secure's Vasco Duarte talking about toothbrush holders:

Reaktor Innovations' Sebastian Nykopp demonstrating Wicket Bench:

Joseph Pelrine exploring complexity:

Damn! Speaking of geeky gatherings, I just learned that the upcoming RailsConf 2006 conference's selected talks have been published and after a quick scan through the talk descriptions, I'm happy that the conference sold out ages ago. Otherwise, I would've been tempted to do a little summer vacation trip to Chicago in June. And that would've cost muchos dolares...

On a side note, it's an interesting phenomenon that a conference sells out weeks before the program is made public? If my memory serves me correct, only the keynotes were known at the time registration opened :)

Holy index card, Batman!

We had registrations pouring in all the way until 3pm yesterday before the seminar, ending up at a rather amazing 184 registrations in total from 64 different companies or organizations. With a few cancellations, I'd wager that we had around 190 people on the registrations list at some point. I have yet to see statistics about how many of the 184 actually showed up but even taking into consideration the usual no-show percentages for free-of-charge events, what we have is a large and growing community of software professionals interested in agile methods.

I won't try to do a braindump right now (Jan Wikholm did that already) because I really should be packing up stuff (I'm moving house this weekend). Instead, I'd just like to thank everyone who came--while I enjoy the seminars myself, it's nothing compared to that feeling of accomplishment when someone comes up to say "thank you" for making the seminar happen. Also, thanks to Vasco, Sebastian, and Joseph for entertaining the rest of us with your presentations, and thanks to Timo and Johanna from Reaktor for helping out with the arrangements with Kiasma.

At the time of writing this, we have--count them--173 confirmed registrations for today's Agile Seminar in Helsinki. That's simply amazing!

In any case, we booked a theater big enough to accommodate over 200 participants so there's still some 30 seats available. If you dig things like working software and smooth team work, there's still time to register.

This blog post is superb news for those working on automated testing of web applications. It's not so much the ability to automate Firefox itself that's making me drool for the 1.0. It's the cross-platform thing that's the real meat around the bones. The Firefox support is implemented through the JavaScript Shell Server which I blogged about last October and it's all cross-platform, the technology being Mozilla's own JavaScript-based XPI API and a simple telnet interface for the remote shell.

I happen to be working on a little something with Pamie for a client right now and I can only say that Watir is lightyears ahead of Pamie in terms of the API. For example, who could've guessed that someone names the API functions as something like "linkGet()" rather than, say, "getLink()"? The biggest problem is, however, the fact that there's zero, zilch, zip documentation for the Pamie API. And it's damn difficult to figure out which methods the COM objects respond to when you can't get at the information with "dir()".

The third Agile Seminar in Helsinki takes place this Friday in the Kiasma museum of contemporary arts. There's still some 80 seats left, and a healthy bunch of people have registered already, anxiously waiting for presentations from F-Secure, Reaktor, and by our visiting speaker, Joseph Pelrine. With almost 130 registrations to date, it's starting to look like we're going to match or exceed last fall's numbers which is nice, of course.

If you haven't yet registered, now is your chance. Just do it!

Seth Godin suggests that we should consider just walking on stage, skipping the slideware stuff that most people aren't too good with, and doing the whole presentation in the form of Q&A (with at least the first question seeded in order to avoid a 45-minute awkward silence with you standing on stage thinking of ways to kill yourself quickly and painlessly using only a stack of business cards, a PDA, and the clothes you're wearing).

The idea is certainly intriguing and I'm sure it has and will work for some occasions and for some audiences. I'm just afraid it wouldn't work that well for a Finnish audience. I would, however, enjoy being in the audience... (hint, hint)

Just like thousands and thousands of bloggers around the world, every now and then, I browse through the referral/request logs of my blog to see where people are coming from and what are they looking for. A large proportion of the hits on my blog originate from search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Here's a small sampling of some of the, mmh, typical searches that lead to my blog.

First of all, as you're probably aware I'm a proponent of agile software development methods so it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone today landed at my blog while searching for synonyms for "Agility".

Along with my bias for agile methods comes a hefty bit of aggravation towards waterfall mentality and sometimes I simply lose my cool and start calling people names.

I'm also down with the gangsta shit ya'll and sometimes I gots to get my pimpin' on wit dem book reviews.

Like the true Hollywood star that I am, I'm also careful with what I eat. The beach season is coming, you know.

Ok. All that crap above might not be 100% serious stuff (closer to 0%...) but every now and then I feel like someone at Google is trying to tell me something... Who knows? Maybe some day.

Ok. Out of a hundred Rubyists reading project.ioni.st, how many went on to type "22**222222222" on an irb prompt after reading this?

I'd say "100" would be a good guess.

I know I did.

There's a recording of Seth Godin talking at Google about permission marketing, remarkable animals, storytelling, people with a flu, free prizes, and all that other Godin stuff over at Google Video. I highly recommend checking it out either for Godin's message or merely because of his engaging performance on stage.

(via Jason Yip)

This past week was a busy one, which is the main reason for me not blogging much. Lots of things happening at work, with the upcoming Agile Seminar, and the book project which is having its first birthday real soon...

As a small tribute to my late night stream of consciousness, congratulations and good luck to Priya for the you-know-what. And try to get some sleep now while it's still (I guess) easy.

I did my talk on building quality with agile methods at the Merito Forum on Wednesday, again with my Lessig/Takahashi-inspired style of presentation getting some (mostly positive) attention. This time, I wrote the handout in the form of an essay which I found to be extremely helpful in spotting deficiencies in the sequence of the presentation. I spend a lot of time rehearsing for my public appearances so it's a good thing I've got almost a full month before the next one. Can you believe they only put 24 hours into each day? Sometimes I feel like I could use a couple of extra...

Speaking of time, it's starting to look like I've also managed to stuff my calendar for the next couple of months with some exciting work engagements. I can't say much about them but I will say that two subsequent 8-hour days of developing a training course (significant portion of that time pair programming) is harder work than it might look like from outside the meeting room. It's the intensity that's the real drainer. But now we have a pink plotter. Oh, you didn't hear me say that. You don't know anything about the pink plotter, ok? You weren't here and this conversation never happened.

The Agile Seminar is going to take place on the Friday of March 17th. More on that in the next couple of days but when the registration is opened, it's all Rails baby! We had an email-based registration system for the Fall 2005 seminar and it turned out to be less than perfect. This time, we'll have a web-based system with email confirmation and I'm really happy about how easy Rails has made putting together something like what I'm talking about. I also saw the venue for the first time with my own eyes on Friday morning and I think it really rocks. We've once again got a good line-up and I have a hunch that the seminar will again kick some serious ass.

On the topic of kicking serious ass, I also received the first batch of feedback from the 2/3 review of the manuscript for my book. Very encouraging feedback at that. It's time to start a final push to get the remaining third sorted out and on paper... Not that the last third would be any easier than the first two. In fact, based on what I've seen and heard of the book writing business I'd wager it's quite the opposite.

Alright. It's time to close() this stream, catch any IOExceptions, and hit the bed. As you can sense from the pathetic attempt at humor, I really need the sleep :)