My band's next album

someone else is driving
Originally uploaded by flurdy

This could be my band's next album.

Except I don't sing nor can I play an instrument, therefore I do not play in a band...


But the "My band's next album" gimmick is cool. I got it from Henrik Tandberg on Facebook.

For this I used a photo by daliborlev: www.flickr.com/photos/mr_gonzales and a quote by David Letterman.


For your own album follow these guidelines:

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1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 - Post it to Facebook with this text in the "caption" and TAG the friends you want to join in. (you can untag yourself if you don't want this photo up)


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My, flurdy, changes to these rules are:

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3 - Follow the 3rd step, but make sure the photo has a license which allow reproduction. I would suggest looking at flickr.com/creativecommons.

4 - Instead of photoshop, I se picnik.com. Its free and online, and with the firefox extension links directly from flickr.

5 - I posted mine back to flickr and now to my blog.

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The picture by daliborlev was licensed under CC-by-sa-nc, while my normal flickr work is CC-by-sa, so I had to add nc to this album photo.

Don't like Scrum. But will not use anything else! Part 3

I like ranting I do.... :)

Now to my third instalment(1,2) on this subject, which will regurgitate a lot that has been said before.

As mentioned before I have major issues with the Scrum methodology. BUT it is also the only methodology I would use! (At the moment).

Scrum and XP, which are being advocated by developers as the new messiah. But I think developers fail to see it will have a derogatory affect on themselves.



First of all: Stress: The constant status demands every morning, all the time on notes or JIRA tasks etc. The constant planning of your day and defending every minute used. Mostly due to the stand-ups.

By iterative development, you minimise the stress at the end of a major release, but introduce others.

True, for business, this means more effective developers in the short run. For managers, it is a good way of keeping oversight of how things are proceeding, and a good whip to keep people in line.

But for developers, yes you are more effective, but eventually you are also getting very stressed. The need to perform at your maximum all day every day will wear and grind your psyche. If you had a bad day, where not much was actually done on a specific task, you have to defend that the next morning, or simply lie. You can not cover the slack by concentrating a bit more for the next few days.

For the perfect A4 cubical worker, ala German, Norwegian, Japanese (anyone else I can offend by stereotyping?), then this rigid life will work well, but for more creative, individualistic, "agile" worker this can cause friction.

(Not sure I've mentioned I don't like the standing up in "standups"...)

But again, I can not see how you can not have morning stand up meetings, as the benefits outweighs the eventual stressed programmers....



Second: Pair programming.

Unless you are the A4 type programmer without a personality, I can not think any self respecting programmer would welcome pair programming? It is intrusive, violates your personal space, stops any creativity, lack of trust and is just smelly.

The benefits of sharing of code knowledge, the idea bouncing while creating classes and methods are great. The banter if personalities match can be good. And also distracting?

The smirks as girlfriend/wife sends embarrasing emails/IMs that pop up in the previews...

The concentration of working on only one specific sub task can be good for velocity. But also sometimes you are stuck and switching context, briefly or for longer periods can also help enormously. But can you with someone sitting next to you? Or just drag that awful day further by staring at the screen?


But again, the benefits outweighs the violation of the individual. But I'd much prefer a more limited pairing, shorter periods, perhaps not always sharing desks, etc.


Also forgetting/ditching all knowledge learning from previous methodologies seems quite frivolous. RUP may be tedious and over extended, but many bits can assist and enhance your project. Don't just ditch everything , because you have converted religiously to something else, something "new" and "exciting".


But again. Scrum works well, brings a lot of benefits, and I recommend it!

Snow? Oh my god!

So England was and is again shut down due to snow. I don't get it.

I do however get people looking for an excuse to have the day off to go sledging!

The reason/excuse for the chaos, with people not going to work, buses not running, schools shut, etc, is that they are not used to snow. Bollox. Really, having lived 15 years in England, I know they get snow every year, and many times a year. Not meters of it, but a few inches. And every few years they sometimes get nearly a foot of snow.

Off course the amount depends on where you live. I lived in Manchester and we had snow frequently. Not loads and usually melted quickly, but the hills around was always snow capped winter time.

They should follow BBC's 10 ways to cope with snow.

With the amounts lost business hours, they could afford a few more snow plows and snow socks for the tires. It seems some places are less affected as they are prepared, parts of Scotland, hills in North England etc.


I did live a few years in the Peak District, an area with snow every year, and people are more used to snow than others. But even there people make basic mistakes.

I remember one time my dad and I was going to Manchester I think, and it had snowed. And people were sliding all over the place. When we came to the hill at Winnats Pass, police was out trying to slow people going uphill down! Insane. So we simple overtook everyone that was stuck and strewn across the hill and got up in no time. Wonder how many of the others actually made it up the hill... I do remember the angry looks and hand gestures from the other cars. :) Not our problem they can't drive.

Then again, not to be a hypacrite, there is snow chaos here in Norway on the day of the first significant snow fall usually in November. But the result is only people being delayed getting to work. The next day everything is back to normal as people have quickly swapped to winter tyres and snow plow and gritting people are on active duty.


Oh well, at least it is ammusing.