Bruce Eckel wrote an interesting article on the shortcomings in Java, and how much he likes Flex as a platform for future app development.

I think he’s exactly right - Flex apps will run in browsers on all of the major operating systems, and there’s no reason they can’t run on the desktop using a runtime of some sort.   Other than 3d games and CAD rendering there are few applications that need direct access to the video card and the CPU.

If Flex does succeed here, it will represent the triumph of JavaScript over Java, Flash over HTML and Adobe over Sun.   Microsoft may have a response with Atlas, but unless Atlas is fully cross-platform, I’m not sure it’s going to win.

I’m a pretty wired guy, and I have internet access pretty much everywhere I got except planes.

I’m going to try to write my third novel via Google Docs, instead of in Open Office and Office 2003, like I did my previous two. (You can read a serialized version of the first one here: Stone Magic)

This will be interesting, both for the potential for hassle factor w/an online-only book, as well as the lack of macros and other shortcuts I’ve grown used to.

On the other hand, the price is right, and it may just be “good enough.”

Update:  5900 words so far (much of that is infrastructure)

more here 

As a writer, this resonated with me.

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.â€� (Anton Chekhov)

This headline blew me away:

11 Reasons to give Microsoft Vista a chance

Think about that for a second.  When have people ever had to attempt to justify or cajole people into trying a new Microsoft OS?    And then there’s Office 07. It’s even worse - people aren’t even trying to justify why you should “give it a chance”.  As far as I can tell, Office 2007 is DOA, in terms of excitement, buzz or anything.
First - kudos to Microsoft on Windows XP and Office 2003.  Clearly, those are two very effective and well done systems if people don’t feel any need to upgrade.

Second - what does this mean?  It seems quite ominous, in relative terms.  There’s no doubt that they’ll continue to make plenty of money, but it could be that the upgrade cycle is going to slow down considerably.  We shall see.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• How do you run your daily standups? Mark Levison summarizes the forum discussion on Daily Scrum: Sitting or Standing?
• More sitting - Jason Yip discusses the Patterns of Daily Standup Meetings.
• Michael Hugos posts on CIO Magazine about C-Level agility - Leadership for the Agile Organization (hat tip: Mishkin Berteig)

Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Delay making a decision until the last possible moment. Isn’t that the agile way? Kevin Rutherford talks about an interesting and thought-provoking approach: Set-based Design with Agile.
• End of January and you’re already exhausted? Frank Patrick riffs on Jeffrey Phillips’ article: Slow down to get more done.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Reg Braithwaite wrote a two-part series on Selling Agile (part 1, part 2). Kurt Christensen follows up and adds his own two cents.

Responding to change over following a plan

• Infrastructure - is it the bane of agile development? Simon Baker discusses.
• David J Anderson says that there are only two questions you need to ask to see if you’re ready to be agile.

Agile Resources

• Rachel Davies is looking for interesting agile project experiences for the Agile 2007 conference.
• Brad Appleton has a definitive list of Lean Development Resources
• Mishkin Berteig is looking for new authors to help him at Agile Advice.
• Dan Bunea discusses Test First Web Applications in C#, with source code.

Agile Fun

• Sir Mix-a-lot redux: I like Refactoring and I cannot lie

Previous Editions
All previous editions of the Carnival are referenced at the Agile Alliance website.

Join in the Fun!
Have something that you think is worth sharing? Don’t be shy! We love new ideas and insights. Send us a link to your post at agilists.carnival@gmail.com.

New Addition

I’m pleased to announce that Mark Levinson will be joining us as one of the editors of the Carnival of the Agilists. Look for his contribution on February 15th, 2007.
Future editions will be on the first and third Thursday of each month. If you would like to participate, please send us a link to your post at agilists.carnival@gmail.com

Note: Don’t use the BlogCarnival link anymore. It appears to lose messages.

I tried to get the index template for the blog to load the center column first…  no joy.   I’ll have to experiment with a completely new stylesheet.     joy of joys 

 

I should have linked to Pete Behren’s fine edition of the Carnival of the Agilists nearly 10 days ago when he published it. Sorry Pete!

(On the other hand, I had my dates confused, and thought I was supposed to deliver a new edition on the 18th, but cold-and-flu season had another plan for me. So I am actually ahead of schedule for this week’s Carnival)

Oh, and if anyone out there is interested, we are looking for new blood to help with the carnivals. Roughly 90 minutes of effort every 2 months is all we ask!

(If you’re interested, let me know (in comments or email johnbr@gmail.com)

Update: Mark Levinson pointed out that I had the link wrong. Fixed now. Thanks Mark!

Robin Hanson, economist-philosopher talks about bias at Overcoming Bias.   This post, in particular, caught my eye:

A working paper by Ilan Yaniv says we do listen to others, but we weigh our opinion 70% and someone else’s equally qualified opinion 30%:

(There’s a lot more, but this is enough for me to make my observation)

When you talk with another, equally qualified individual, I think it’s not only unsurprising, but in fact appropriate to value your opinion higher than theirs.  After all, you have to live with the consequences of your decisions far more than some random other person.    If the other person had to face the same consequences as you did (for example a business partner) then I could see the two opinions being of equal value - and in fact, I’ve lived that exact scenario.

For me, evaluating the opinions of others is a combination of evaluating their knowledge, relative to mine, but also their effort expended in coming to their conclusion relative to mine, and the costs of error, relative to mine.

Jesus saves but only Buddha makes incremental backups.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about myself is that I discount the complexity of computers and software, relative to the complexity of engines and carpentry.  Anyone can figure out how to set up windows shares, I think, butI feel stupid because I don’t know much about car engines.

Lately I’ve been trying to remind myself that most people, even those who know a lot about car engines, are not computer experts, and get confused and bewildered by the subtlety involved in connecting and communicating between machines, or in retrieving lost files, etc.   Let alone the tremendous complexity involved in setting up a real, working web application or software program.

to turn on syntax highlighting in macos:

echo “syntax on” >> ~/.vimrc

Update: I changed the command - a commentor pointed out that my previous example was incorrect in most cases.

Yakov Fain asks Should Java Developers Care About Flex?

Basically, this question could be re-phrased like this “Should I invest my time in learning this technology, are there any real (billable) projects going on in Flex?”, or like this: “I am a Java developer, and do not have too much time in my hands - do you recommend me learning Flex”…

We are using Flex, for a commercial product to be delivered later this year.  It will be B2B, it will run inside a browser, and it will be awesome.

The comments on this article are very amusing - Flash? How gauche! - the kind of elitist distaste that used to permeate the C++ crowd in 1995 when someone mentioned “java”

If I have the opportunity to choose between writing a front-end in Flex or HTML/JSP/JavaScript, I’ll generally prefer Flex.  It looks very nice, all of the animation and rich interactions are built-in (not assembled from a frankensteinian mess of JavaScript libraries), the language is generally compatible with JavaScript, which makes learning it easier, and it doesn’t have any cross-browser issues as far as I’m aware.

My favorite computer game of all time is Rome Total War, and I must announce to the world that I have uninstalled Medieval II after just a couple of weeks. It is a fine game, but it crashes constantly, and the support forums basically consist of well-meaning unpaid volunteers saying “It’s your hardware, or you have a conflict with another game.”
Well, I installed it on a brand new MacBook Pro (in Windows), with no other games at all installed. It’s hard to imagine a more clean, stable environment for a game, and it has been terribly frustrating to find M2TW so very fragile.

Update - I’ve had two commenters say “Get a new PC.”  I have a brand new MacBook Pro, Core2Duo 2.16 GHz machine, that runs other games beautifully.    If that’s not enough to play this game well, then the developers are fools.

A list of the worst game endings:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=153510

The recentness of Neverwinter Nights II is probably why it did not get included in this list. 

Game:  Rich graphics, exciting animated scenes using the real-time player rendering and high quality voice actors.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of monsters of a huge variety of types and capabilities.
End: Tedious fight against the end boss, and then a slideshow with a very flat voiceover by someone I suspect was one of the developers.

Can you say “We have to get this out the door, to Hell with the fancy ending!“

The surge of traffic coming from my Six Word Stories post has led to a decent payout from Hidden Network, which, in turn, allowed me to buy this:

Woot!

(This is the first money I’ve ever made from my blog… Sweet!)

It’s time for another JB explains how to solve a frustrating problem so you can find the answer on Google

Problem:

I’m writing a Flex 2.0 app, and I need to propogate an event from a low level class back to the top level app.

1. I create a new Event subclass, and add a listener for the appropriate type in my app
2. I set up a button so it fires the event.
3. I run the app and click the button.
4. Nothing happens

I sigh, and look at the Flex examples.  Right there, in the help/tutorials, they show how you can fire a MouseEvent and catch it, exactly how I want to do it.

1. In a fit of inspiration, I change my custom event into a MouseEvent, leaving everything else unchanged
2. It works!

Well, let’s try again with a plain vanilla Event.  No Joy.

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, I set up the debugger and inspect the contents of a regular Event and a MouseEvent.   Sure enough, in MouseEvent, bubbles == true.

1. Curious, I modify the plain Vanilla event, and make sure that bubbles == true.
2. It works

Ah hah! I update my custom event, set bubbles = true in the constructor, and put it back into the code.  Everything works.  Boo Yah.

The moral of the story:  Your event needs to set bubbles == true if you want to catch it in a separate class from where you fire it.
Note: I have no idea what the negative side effects of setting bubbles == true are.   But it seems to work well for what I need.

Laurent Bossavit talks about his experience switching to a MacBook.

I was surprised by his first issue - my MacBook Pro makes no noise at all much of the time.  I practically have to press my ear against the case to hear it.  It may be an airflow issue for him, mine has a lot of clearance.  To be sure, when it is hot, the fan is fairly loud.

I have similar issues with the keyboard, but since I typically plug a mouse and keyboard into my laptop, it hasn’t been an issue.

I do love the fact that there’s BSD Unix (the one true Unix, IMO) underneath the hood.  It made me all giddy inside to be able to open a terminal and look at the /etc files and the /var/db config, etc.

I have Parallels running for my email (Outlook).  It works quite well.  The new version of Parallels looks like it will be even better.

And as for me, change has been great.  I enjoy the challenge of learning the tricks and secrets of a new OS, and I’ve found some blogs that help with mac-specific tips and tricks - SilverMac is my favorite thus far.

And as far as reliability/stability, it’s been rock solid.   Much more so than my woeful experience with Bootcamp, Windows XP and Medieval II : Total War (which is a disaster of instability, lockups and reboots.   A pity, too, because Rome : Total War is my favorite game of all time.)

One of the things that works for me in terms of keeping up w/my resolutions is putting them out in the public view.  Here are mine:

1. Perform at least 1 Million pounds of weightlifting exercise (not all at once)
2. Run 300 miles
3. Lose 14 pounds
4. Run at least 1 sprint triathlon
5. Release one open source project
6. Finish writing book 3 of my paleo-fantasy trilogy
   
7. Attend at least 12 networking/tech meetings
8. Spend at least 100 hours on personal s/w projects
9. Get at least 2 characters to level 12 in Dungeons and Dragons Online (this way, I’m obliged to have some fun too!)

And, since I wrote it, I’ll use Bellygraph to track my progress, for the ones where it makes sense.