Table or Booth?

TortoiseGit 1.6.3.0 Caching Errors

Git on Windows is like using a machine gun to paint a Peace poster.  It just seems wrong.  

Git was designed to support better configuration management of the Linux operating system open source project.  

But, so what?

Maybe the real point is that Git's success in areas far beyond its original intent just reiterates how highly it's regarded.  Or, better yet - that nothing is ever used as its intended.

I digress.  

The real point of this post was simply to catalog an issue Google search results haven't yet found a good hit for:

If you see red 'X' overlay icons on folders in your local git tree, on Windows, and there's NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO GET RID OF THEM, it's likely your git cache is corrupt and needs to be reset.  Either restart your machine or kill the TGitCache.exe process.  Then relaunch your Explorer window.  Red 'X's should dissappear.

Happy painting.

Product Owners Should Be Engineers

To regain competitive foothold, Steve Ballmer is putting engineering leaders into product managment roles.  I think this is wise.  

"You see the engineering team ascending because Steve is realizing that there is a need to execute on a vision and in order to do that you have to actually understand how software is built,” said Wes Miller, an analyst at the Kirkland, Washington-based research firm Directions on Microsoft. “It’s a whole other thing to be able to say, ‘I’ve been at Microsoft, I understand software, and what you are saying will or will not work.'"

It's a well known mantra that IT should align to the needs of the business.  This is a given.  But good product owners must also use their technical strength to let emerging innovation to shape the company's business.  

In today's software world, much of this innovation is licensed freely in the open source community.  If you're not paying attention or if your attitude is "not invented here", you'll be overrun in only a few short years.  

In short, great product owners bridge the constantly shifting gap between tech state-of-the-art and the competitive business world.  Ballmer deserves credit for recognizing this.

Needed: New Option for Conditional Assignments in Ruby

In the next version of Ruby I'd like to be able to have @number in this:

What Makes a Great Product Owner?

A friend of mine is working with scrum.org and was asking questions about product ownership.  This got me thinking.  So, I threw together this quick list of things that, I think, make a great Product Owner.

The Real Value of Money

Investment advisors like to talk about about inflation these days in terms of raw money supply/purchasing power.  But there's more to this.

Going Nowhere

In Notepad++, Control+G pops up:

Cracks me up.

Today's Scarcity: Reputation

In the recent InfoQ article about free Test Driven Development classes in our new 'Gift Economy', there is a misguided notion that fundamental economics have somehow evolved to such an extent that scarcity isn't an economic driver any more:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/agile-training-gift;jsessionid=0E73B11FC39B86C6019D0CE4B3DD1307

I disagree.  As I state in my comment to the article,  I suspect the people pushing this gimmick do so more to attack capitalism as a whole than for any other reason.

Will Your Project Succeed?

Ultimately group success of any kind is determined by good people doing good work.  Period.  A good sponsor, designer, and developer can build great software, no matter what the process or team structure – should they care enough to do it.

Dribble

The road to hell is paved with Waterfall.

Why then is there fire you ask?

Good question. I think, because, although the falls may be spectacular, in the end, often all that's left is a dribble.

Going Back to Hell

"I want us to get into the mode of planning and stop just doing stuff." - Waterfall Czar I know of throwing out Scrum babies with bathwater.

ThoughtWorks' Cruise now 'Go'

We use ThoughtWork's (TW) products to manage development on our project, including Cruise. Cruise was often confused with CruiseControl - an entirely different thing.

After a good start with Cruise, TW has released a new version of it with a new look and a new name,'Go':

Knowing Why

I think certain kinds of people - people who like to understand the depths of 'why' seek out tension. The tension drives them to resolve and normalize concepts. They do this because the act of resolving and normalizing is actually intellectually satisfying, in and of itself. They hope they never reach of the end of it.

WACD Anti-Pattern: Putting Your Development Approach on Wiki

I saw something on a team wiki the other day.  Btw, why I was reading awiki is still a mystery me. 

SOA, May You REST in Pieces.

Save your valuable time and don't watch this attempt to pump blood into a cadaver: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Reincarnation-SOA-Anne-Thomas-Manes.  This presentation was so staggeringly ineffective and useless that I felt moved to write yet another SOA epitaph.

Ruby 1.9.1 RDoc No Memory Error

When running:

gem install wxruby-ruby19

I got the following RDoc error:

No thanks, God

I'll trust that it was well intended, but President Obama's letter to his followers this Thanksgiving completely omits any mention of the one thing that still holds our country together: God. 

Continuous Integration Server Review: CruiseControl, Hudson, TeamCity and Cruise

Comparison of two open source and two paid continuous integration servers:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhkskk4s_54f749s7dc

Flow Control In Scrum (Or Any Development Process)

"We spend between 15% - 30% of our time dealing with customer or support issues, so we have no concept of uninterrupted development time."

I was told this in a recent email plea from a former developer-colleague-turned manager.  He wanted suggestions on how to role out Scrum in a such a scenario. 

My answer?

No 'Team' in 'I': Going Solo with WACD

To continue from an earlier post on the WACD methodology, here are some tips for keeping the pesky 'team' concept from eroding your development sovereignty.

Solution to Windows Bug: "The file name is too long"

I couldn't delete a set of files on an old Windows OS because "The file name is too long". After fruitless Google searching, I found the solution and so, posting here for posterity.