Mindless missives of a .NET developer from the North
Pardon the dust as we move things around. I’m currently transitioning from MojoPortal to WordPress. It will probably be a painful process. Drink scotch. It helps.
Update: Slowly adding some of my older posts as I find them, and have the time and inclination. Thankfully Windows Live Writer keeps a copy of old posts, which makes getting some of the more recent content easier.
At the end of my talk on Git at the Edmonton Code Camp, somebody asked if I would put the links to the various git resources up on my website. Here they are:
There you go, enjoy, and be distributed.
Thinking it might be time to change things up around here, namely moving off of MojoPortal and on to something else (probably WordPress). This largely stems from my desire to simplify things to free up time to pursue other interests. I got started in MojoPortal about 5 years ago when I wanted to learn more about Mono, and figure that the best way to that was to use it.
These days I find myself wandering over to the Android stack and am dipping my toe into Ruby/Ruby on Rails as well, so the whole point to using MojoPortal, for me, isn’t as relevant anymore. WordPress seems pretty capable and looks like it has Windows Live Writer support, so seems like a logical choice for me.
I’m hoping that I will be able to export my blog content from MojoPortal and over to WordPress, and hopefully set up some 301 redirects to manage things, but I’m not 100% sure I’ll have the time and inclination to pull that off.
When will I do this? Not sure, but I’m thinking by the end of September 2009.
One question that has been bouncing around in my mind is what, exactly, does one have to do to be considered Agile? Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Sounds pretty simple. I notice that there are twelve Agile principles:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer’s competitive advantage.Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done–is essential.The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behaviour accordingly.
The agile principles are interesting, because in a lot of ways I can see advocates of other methodologies (BDUF) saying the believe in the same thing.
Asking amongst some peers, and there didn’t really seem to be a concise definition of Agile and what you need to do to call yourself. I’ve seen some places that will suggest that they are Agile because they stand up at meetings (or a manager wanders around once a day), avoid documentation, and have a meeting every three or four weeks that they call a “retrospective”. So, does anybody care to offer up their thoughts on what one needs to do to be considered Agile? I have my own thoughts, but figured I’d save them for a later blog post.
After a bit of tinkering, I managed to provision my ADP1 setup without a SIM card. A bit of google, and here is what I did
Once all that is done, you should be enable to use your ADP1 as if you had a SIM card in it (we’ll except for the phoning part).
Useful link: FAQ: Unlocking/Activating a G1 or ADP1 Without A Sim Card.
Every developer, no matter how experienced, has to dig in and fix bugs. This is, in my experience, the typical cycle:
Now, even if you aren’t into the whole Lean Software development philosophy (i.e. eliminating waste), you can probably appreciate that it can be pretty wasteful of time and patience every time that #6 happens, so please indulge me as I elaborate on some of the finer points of bug reporting. Now, where I say “bug reporter”, I typically mean somebody who is in a QA role – their job is to find bugs and report them. This doesn’t always have to be the case though.
If you check out most open source projects, you will often find rules/guidelines for reporting bugs. In the case that doesn’t exist then perhaps the following might be of use: When you log a bug, be explicit, and give lots of details. Don’t be lazy. If it’s hard to duplicate your bug, then odds are it either won’t get looked at, or won’t be fixed properly. And when it doesn’t get fixed properly, there will be a lot of churn.
At the very least, when reporting a bug you should provide:
When the developer flags the bug as resolved and it turns out not to be fixed, don’t just re-open the bug with curt “This is still broken”.
Ah, but now aren’t I the smug developer – shifting my inability to quickly resolve a bug to the poor reporting capabilities of my tester. I’m pretty ungrateful too. I mean, somebody took the time to test out my application, and then enter a bug like “I tried to calculate the new date and it didn’t work. Please fix”. Well, fear not – there is a lot developers should be doing as well, but that is the subject of a later post.
Of course, the key part in all of this is COMMUNICATION. Don’t be afraid, as someone reporting a bug, to actually talk to the developer. Nothing really beats face-to-face communication (or a phone call) if things seem unclear. Odds are you won’t have an empty whisky bottle thrown at you. Most likely the personal grooming standards of the developer will be higher than that of a middle age serf during the Black Plague. In theory, as a tester, you’re on the same side as the developer trying to fix the bug.
Well, it’s coming up on fall, which is traditionally the time of year for the Edmonton Code Camp. It seems that there is still a spot or two left for speakers, so if you’re in Edmonton why not think of something programmy and give a talk. Doesn’t have to be .NET – anything that is related to software development will do.
Anyway, I’ve put my name down for a talk at ECC. There are several options available for me and I’m not sure which one to go with. So, I figured that perhaps a straw poll would help me decide. Feel free to add a comment about which topic you’d prefer:
Personally, I’m leaning more towards #2 or maybe #3. What do you think?
(Note: this article is pretty dated, and used IntelliJ 8. I plan a follow-up covering IntelliJ 9)
So I have this semi-fancy Google Android Dev Phone 1. Lately I’ve been devoting part of my spare time to learning about programming for Android (the OS of the phone). Google (probably because they didn’t ask for my opinion and/or input) decided to use Java as the lingua franca for Android programming. If you ask me – and I know you will – they should have used C# and Mono (I might be a bit biased here). Luckily, years ago I had done Java programming, so I wasn’t that intimidated by the use of Java on Android.
The first big question that every developer faces is which IDE? There are a few Java IDE’s out there, but if you ask me the only ones worth considering are Eclipse and IntelliJ. The documentation for Android points you to using Eclipse. Eclipse is a good IDE. However, back in the day when I was getting paid for Java development, my employer got us all copies of IntelliJ, from JetBrains. I liked it. I like it enough that if I landed a contract tomorrow that involved Java, I’d buy me a copy of IntelliJ.
So, all that being said, I figured I’d give IntelliJ a spin as I travelled down the stack-trace of Android programming. Here are my observations, in general:
So, my conclusion at the end of the day, is that I’m going to stick with Eclipse for my Android development. There just seems to be less friction at the moment if you’re using Eclipse. In a couple of months maybe I revisit IntelliJ and see what’s new with it and Android development. However, at this time, I’d like to really concentrate on learning the Android SDK, and it seems simplest to me right now with Eclipse.
Over the Easter long weekend, I experience my own resurrection of sorts. On Thursday just before Easter I noticed that my NAS, a Thecus N3200 Pro with three Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in a RAID5 array, was beeping and displaying a “RAID degraded” message. I didn’t worry about it to much, as it was late on Thursday, and I figured I was safe/okay with three drives in a RAID5 array.
So, the next morning I check things out. Turns out all was not well in Whoville. While check the RAID config, I saw that two of the three drives had “warnings” associated with them. This was Not Good. Two out of three failing HDD in a RAID5 array is A Bad Thing. A bit of Googling and conversing with the vendor who sold me the NAS (note- I’ve got no problems with them, Hard Data has always been great for me for the past six or seven years) and it seems that there is a firmware upgrade for my particular trio of NAS drives. Luckily, I managed to get all my critical stuff off the NAS, so I’m not to worried about data loss.
So, I pull the drives, apply the firmware update, and try to rebuild. The NAS will not let me create a RAID5 array. So, I pull the drives one by one, and then proceed to check them out in a computer. Turns out that the two drives that had the warnings were okay, but the third drive, that was “warning-less” is toast. What is wrong with it I’m not sure, but the BIOS on the computer won’t recognize the drive after boot up. Had to RMA the drive back to Seagate.
So, now I sit, alone in my room, without my NAS.
Figured I was due to spend some time setting up a Linux VM and learning how to program my Android Dev Phone 1. Eclipse is what is recommended, so I thought I’d give that a try first. So, with the help of Suse Studio, I quick built myself a VM with Java 1.6 (Aside: I love Suse Studio, I can provision a VM in minutes). I figured it would be pretty straight forward. The docs on the Android Developer site for installing ADT plug-in seem pretty straight forward and simple, and I remember Eclipse having a very rich ecosystem of plug-ins that were easy to install (something I wish Visual Studio had – hint, hint Microsoft).
However, I ran into some hiccups with the provided documentation.
The first annoying one was item #4 in the list for Eclipse 3.4. You’re directed to enter the location https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ for the location of the ADT plug in. This did not work for me. The location I had to use was https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/site.xml. There is a chance https might not work for you, then use http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/site.xml.
After overcoming that hurdle, I tried to do the Hello World sample. This did not work out so well – Eclipse crashed. Turns out that the default packages for Eclipse provided by OpenSUSE doesn’t have the Web Standard Tools, which is a requirement for using ADT. So, I went back and uninstalled Eclipse, and download the tarball from the Eclipse website. Then I installed and setup the ADT plug.