magpiebrain

I’ve been interested in XP for a while now. Whilst many of the rules outlined in XP have always made perfect sense to me (simple design, frequent unit testing), the one that really made me sceptical was the notion of “Pair Programming(Extreme Rules – Pair Programming)”:http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/pair.html, which forms much of the focus of a recent “Wired article(Wired – The New X-Men)”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/xmen.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=. For the uninitiated, pair programming has two programmers working at the same desk – one programmer ‘drives’ whilst the other watches. The idea is that they can bounce ideas of each other, and while the coder doing the actual typing can be quite focused on a single line, the other can pick up simple mistakes such as missing semi-colons and the like. The net result is that despite the apparent upfront loss in productivity bugs occur less frequently, and when they do appear they are fixed more quickly.

Although the practice adds 15 percent per programmer to the time it takes to complete a task, the lost productivity is offset by having fewer bugs to fix. “Pre-XP,” says Kevin Yu, “an eight-hour debugging session wasn’t unusual. With XP we spend about half an hour.” Meanwhile, 90 percent of the 41 coders in the study enjoyed working together more than alone, and almost all were “more confident in their solutions.”

My main reservation concerning Pair Programming is the issue of finding someone compatible to work with – I often find it frustrating to try and explain my ideas to people who take longer to understand the concepts being discussed than I do. Likewise trying to reign the enthusiasm of a colleague who completely understands how their one line obfuscated beyond all recognition Perl script works long enough to work out whats going on can really make a dent in my patience. That said maybe I should follow Kent Beck’s (the father of XP programming) advice:

“Extreme programming is an emotional experience,” he maintains. “When you feel it, you understand.” Then he adds a typically cheeky metaphor. “Talking about XP and trying it are two different things – like reading The Joy of Sex versus losing your virginity.”

Perhaps when it comes to looking for my next job XP should be on my “would like to have” list along with reasonable working hours, time for training and decent pay!

web standards, noun

A large stick or cudgel, used by the slightly more anal-retentive to beat the slightly less anal-retentive.

Just a quote from “The Devils Dictionary”:http://www.eod.com/devil/, courtesy of Tom Coates’ “Plasticbag.org”:http://www.plasticbag.org. At least it was until the dictionary seemed to vanish – the domain homepage then being replaced with the following:

The difference between

find /local/www -print | grep error_log | xargs rm

and

find /local/www -print | xargs rm

is subtle,

but very, very important.

Another gem from the “oh sh*t” school of Unix administration!

Ben Hammersley, whose “blog(Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent)”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/004246.html I like despite the ads, is “off to Afghanistan(Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent – In which the plans are announced.)”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/004246.html. I wish him a safe journey, and the hope he sends back some good copy.

What is it with windows? When I tell it to kill a program, it should do what it says! Fine, bring up all the dialogs warning be that I might damage my data that you want, but when I say End Process it should end the process! When I kill -9 something on UNIX /Linux, it dies and stays dead. This problem seems to be indicitive of windows as a whole. Time and again it tries to do much for you. I wouldn’t mind if Windows was the Nanny State of operating systems, if it worked! If you are going to take control out of the users hands you’d better know what you are doing. Linux doesn’t try to do too much itself, but at least it works goddamit!

From a statement over at the “FSF(Free Software Foundation)”:http://www.fsf.org/

According to the Journal, Mr Heise announced that SCO would challenge the GPL’s “legality” on the ground that the GPL permits licensees to make unlimited copies of programs it covers, while copyright law only allows a single copy to be made. The GPL, the Journal quoted Mr Heise as saying, “is preempted by federal copyright law.”

This argument is frivolous, by which I mean that it would be a violation of professional obligation for Mr Heise or any other lawyer to submit it to a court. If it were true, no copyright license could permit the licensee to make multiple copies of the licensed program. That would make not just the GPL “illegal.” Mr Heise’s supposed theory would also invalidate the BSD, Apache, AFL, OSL, MIT/X11, and all other free software licenses. It would invalidate the Microsoft Shared Source license. It would also eliminate Microsoft’s method for the distribution of the Windows operating system, which is pre-loaded by hard drive manufacturers onto disk drives they deliver by the hundreds of thousands to PC manufacturers. The licenses under which the disk drive and PC manufacturers make multiple copies of Microsoft’s OS would also, according to Mr Heise, violate the law. Redmond will be surprised.

Not being one to blow my own trumpet (well, actually I am) but I made a “similar point(magpiebrain – SCO’s attack on the GPL)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000066.html a while back.