Say it aint so...

Simon just put me onto this article on Slashdot... let us all give a prayer to hope it isn't so, if not today, then in the long run...

Stevan knows about buying undies....

"...well for me really but my wife will be wearing it..."

I met Steve through Simon... good bloke... and he has "man buying underwear for his wife" rather succinctly accurate I'd say...

Bluehorses

Bluehorses are probably the only folk-rock-celtic-heavy-metal-goth band around. www.bbc.co.uk

My mate Steve put me on to these guys;

Bluehorses - The UK's top Celtic rock band featuring Welsh/Irish gothess Liz Prendergast on vocals, electric violin and electric Celtic harp.

Just downloaded everything I could, and it's great.
So he was right :-)

I don't know much about them, but to me there were elements of other stuff I like - Levellers, early Hart (circa 1972 - 76), misc 60's and 70's rock, the eclectic list goes on.
Fun stuff, I'll be after some more :-)

Nerd Tattoos

Your tattoo is weird old man...

My mate glen at work just put me onto this posting on Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds... crikey, that's dedication for you :-)

Brunning's 1st Law of System Hassle

Our Simons 1st Law of System Hassle... maybe it's some weird karma for The Duff Fairy and it's more accurate Revision?

More XP Resources

That's 'andy 'ary... bung it over 'ere...

A few more sites I just came across reading up on some of the threads in extremeprogramming@yahoogroups.com and scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com

http://www.xp123.com/
and
http://www.xpdeveloper.com/
and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XPlorations/?yguid=245047439
which is the announcement group for the above xp123.com, and which includes a link to the handy article Scrum Development on a Page by William C. Wake.

Geek Toys

Faster than a speeding bullet...

Crikey. I ordered one of these from Dabs yesterday, in the afternoon, and it had arrived by the time I got to work this morning. Very impressive - Dabs come up trumps again, so I'll give them a plug.

Of course, I only got it for this, (or this or this (or even this)), which is sad but true, but that's me, so what can I say.

Make Poverty History -

I have a dream...

To add a Make Poverty History "White-band" to your site like Simon has, go to this page and copy some of their sample html into your page.

I'm not as involved in all this as we should be, but it's a start.

Pong Clock

The Pong Clock - a work of beautiful geek simplicity.

London 2.0rc1

Rhetorical Q: How many geeks does it take to have a separate party in the front room, back room and kitchen?

Don't miss - well I won't - the Dec London Java Meetup organised, as ever by Jez (Java) and Sam (Ruby, Rails, etc) and Simon (Python et al)

The title is a link to Simon's comment on it - like he says, there will be many different geek groups there - I wonder how many factions we can split into?


{Edit - A few mods coz of my tough-crowd audience ;-) }

XP Day comments by Steve Tooke

Steve, who I worked with during Sam's Lego game, has some good comments on what he took away from the day, and what other people were saying about their efforts to implement Agile/XP practices...

Simon still hasn't found my site

hehe :-)

New RSS feed in Squishdot site

This is the DTML (Zope markup language) we use at our place to exend
the RSS feed;
<rss version="2.0" dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<channel>
<title><dtml-var></title>
<link><dtml-var></link>
<description><dtml-var></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<dtml-if>
<image>
<title><dtml-var></title>
<url><dtml-var>/<dtml-var></url>
<link><dtml-var></link>
</image>
</dtml-if>
<dtml-in sort="date" size="100">
<dtml-with>
<item>
<title>
<dtml-var>
</title>
<link>
<dtml-var><dtml-var>/<dtml-var>
</link>
<description>
<dtml-if meta_type ="="">
(New Reply)
<dtml-else>
(New Topic)&lt;br>
</dtml-if meta_type>
<dtml-if meta_type ="="">
<dtml-var>&lt;br>
<dtml-else>
<dtml-var>&lt;br>
</dtml-if meta_type>
</description>
<dc:creator><dtml-var></dc:creator>
<dc:date><dtml-var></dc:date>
</item>
</dtml-with>
</dtml-in>
</channel>
</rss>

Internal Web Sites (Squishdot, ZWikki and Zope)

At the XP day, a couple of the guys there asked me about the Intranet stuff we have set up, as we use this to keep ourselves up to date on all sorts of things in the company.

Using Python, there is a web server called Zope.
Under Zope (download page here) we set up a Squishdot site (downloaded from here; you need the TinyTable zope product as well), which is inspired by Slashdot, and we also installed a Wikki using the built-in ZWikki application.
We then customised some of the Squishdot installation to include Anonymous browsing and Logins for posting - this info can be found in the Squishdot site, as above.

I ended up so involved with Squishdot that I help moderate the site from time to time - I'm glad to help with any queries. I guess it's one of the few ways I've contributed back for all the help the open-source community has given me over the years.

We changed the RSS feed on the Squishdot site to be more complex, so that we can have our feed demons/etc picking up all the latest posts and information, as a way of broadcasting it round the whole company.