Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

There's always a lot of debate in the various agile groups about what BDUF is, why you should avoid it, when you should avoid it, and why is it bad (or good) for you. I just thought I'd outline my own opinions here.

A very interesting article, originally published in 1992, on Code as Design. Yet more proof that there isn't anything new about Agile (and that's it's best part! ;)

Tony Obermeit posted a question to the AJUG-QLD mailing list asking for help with a problem reading XML snippets. So, I thought I'd help him out, and this is the answer I gave.

Update: As pointed out by Pepijn Schmitz, Sun already provided the same solution: java.io.SequenceInputStream

Another update: I raised an RFE with Sun for the vararg support. Vote early, vote often!

From the JUnit mailing list, courtesy of J.B "JUnit Recipies" Rainsberger

JBR's postulate 1. For every testable design that requires exposing elements "just for testing", there exists an equivalent testable design that does not require exposing elements "just for testing".

Saw this as a comment on Russel Beattie's blog: dozens of buses flooded out in New Orleans.

This is just bloody ridiculous. There's probably close to a hundred buses there. Why weren't they used in the pre-hurricane evacuation? Why weren't they moved to higher ground if they weren't used in the evacuation? Those buses represent 10,000 people per round trip who could have been taken out.

Frankly, the US government (both state and federal) obviously have no ability to cope with disaster planning.

To quote the New York Times

This week's census report showed that income inequality was near all-time highs in 2004, with 50.1 percent of income going to the top 20 percent of households. And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling.

From Ron Jeffries, courtesty of the XP Mailing list:

"YAGNI is about coding, not about thinking"

Grr... Somewhere in the universe there is a special place put aside for people who think it's sensible to pass XML data aroun in a Web Service as an unstructured string.

An off-hand statement in the editorial of The Australian today went like this:

Even after the threshold changes in the May budget, the top 5 per cent of taxpayers are going to be paying a quarter of Australia's net income tax

(Look in the section about Peter Costello)

Well, that makes it official: Wotif is the third company I've worked in that's decided to go public. Hope it goes better than the last two... the first misread the market badly and went into a several year downturn, while the other managed to burn through nearly all their VC finance, nearly went bankrupt, and got bought out by one of their venture partners.

Sigh... how could anyone make a living by killing pension plans? I mean, really.

You work in an airconditioned office. The thermostat for the airconditioner is set to 23.5C. The thermometer gauge says that it is currently 24.2C. Do you:

A) Ignore it;
B) Close the door to the stairwell that all the cold air is escaping down;
C) Set the thermostat to 21C so that it gets colder. After all, it should go down to 21.7C, right?

A bloody excellent IT Conversation podcast by Jason Fried of 37signals, taken from O'Reilly ETech 2005.

Jason covers a lot of issues that are at the heart of Agile Development, particularly when it comes to keeping your codebase lean-and-mean, and the YAGNI principle.

Seriously: everyone should listen to this.

Ahhh... that's the first production release of my latest project at work out the door today. I can't talk too much about specifics, but it's not a big secret that Wotif is enabling various B2B aspects of our web site, mainly with the registred hotels. Today saw the first big step in that direction. :) And it feels great to see a new project go out and get used.