Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

Danny Ayers writes about a global internet tsunami warning system. He missed the point; the SE-Asian Tsunami was detected in minutes by research centers in Hawaii. But there was no way to get the message out.

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague this afternoon. It centered around what was more important: expressing intent (which I was advocating) vs. removing duplication.

A common feature of many IDE are templates, which greatly speed writing code. People often create their own "cut-and-paste" templates as well.

An important rule to remember here is that no template should ever "work" out of the box. This way, if (for whatever reason!) you don't fill it in, you know it will fail fast. This helps avoid bugs that can be quite subtle: template code which fails slowly. :)

Interesting article in the New York Times on how GW Bush is looking to reshape the American tax break.

On the XP mailing list, a discussion has been going on recently on how a student at a presentation commented that XP seemed to be fairly heavy. Now, I know that "heavy" and "light" are rather passe terms for describing methodologies these days, but you know, the student was right - for a certain point of view. In the immortal words of Ben Kenobi, "many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view."

Some changes to how this blog is set up:

Using a build server (such as CruiseControl) doesn't mean developers shouldn't run local builds (even though broken builds aren't really as serious as a lot of people make them out to be). So this raises the question: if developers run their build locally, what's the build server for?

Apparently, next Monday will be the worst day of the year. Naturally, that's the day I start at Wotif.

Fortunately, the formula is based on such variables as the weather, and thus it is only the worst day in the Northern hemisphere. phew.

A deterministic methodology is one where you lay out all the steps, then following them religiously. An empirical methodology is one where you layout guidelines, and expect people to adapt as circumstances suit.