My friend Keith is living out my dream: He and his family moved from Seattle to Taiwan last year. He is a developer and working for a US company, but has effectively outsourced himself.

He started a web site where he and others post photos. Subscribed.

The most recent photo of the day has a funny sign, the kind of thing you often see in other countries:

There are also lots of beautiful pictures of Taiwan on fotozon. Check it out.

 

I've been a big fan of most of the practices I learn from Agile for a long time. I've never been a big fan of zealotry, though. To me, the core of agile is about continuous self-improvement and everything else comes from that. If you adopt a couple of good practices just because some guru told you to, and you haven't really learned how to evaluate your own situation and discover ways to improve your self or your team, you're missing it.

On that note, I'd like to thank jrwren for these hilarious agile videos. We've had lots of intense agile-buzzword-flying-around action at work and it's nice to see the human side and smile again.

 

c2.com has a wiki page with weird developer dreams.

I have this one weird developer dream that I have been trying to explain for years. I have told various people parts of it, but never really figured the whole thing out. I will try and keep this short.

Basic Theme: Information Encoded in Beer.

Background: As many of my friends know, I am a home brewer (ale). There are lots of chemical processes that occur in the production of ale. My interest in information science often makes me consciously wonder how much information could be encoded in a batch of beer.

I've had this dream, or some variation of it, maybe 10~20 times since I was in my early twenties (when it probably first occurred - maybe 10~12 years ago). It usually happens when I am very busy and near my breaking point at work.

The Dream: In the dream, I am writing/testing/debugging code, but instead of the source code / data / data base / network I/O being on a hard disk / ethernet, the information is stored/transferred via beer that I am also brewing at the same time: programming and brewing are one activity in this dream.

During the dream, I do things like set a breakpoint to just before I pitch yeast, so I can see what I am doing wrong in that step. In the debugger, I can see exact measurements of amounts of liquids, exact chemical (and germ) contents of things, etc., in the watch window. I even remember going to look in the beer to find the temporary .cs file generated by the XML Serializer.

In the memory window, I can scroll through the batch of beer to see exactly what's in there. Each "cell"/molecule is a memory location. This part is kind of abstract. Some of the materials in beer making (yeast, bacteria) are living things, which you work with at the cellular level, whereas others (maltose, water, cleaning agents, starch, enzymes) are molecules.

What the Heck Does That Mean? Who knows. I certainly don't. I think it's a neat idea - information encoded in beer.

During real brewing, measurements are a source of frustration for me. You can follow the steps you have learned, but you can't tell exactly how clean something is, how much protein sediment is left after a stage, or various other things it would be nice to measure. Some things you could measure, but you would risk contamination. Some things, it would just be impractical to measure. This may also be what I find so appealing about brewing - you can't use measurement and science to control everything - somethings you just have to know and do.

Source: Weird Developer Dreams
Originally published on Sun, 10 Sep 2006 16:51:58 GMT

 

I mentioned this video to my sister when she was here last week for Allie's birthday, so wanted to link to it. It's pretty disgraceful that not only do we have all these lies, but the president can't even keep them straight. No wonder 43% of the public still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11. 

Brian Williams Interviews a pretty incoherent Bush

 

Since the Code Camp session I attended Saturday, I find myself surrounded by poker references. I knew I worked in a poker rich environment (most of the people I work with play alot.) The other day, while discussing a serious business issue with three other people, they made a poker analogy that everyone got but me.

Now I keep seeing media references. I have a subscription to wired (exclsuively for reading while waiting for coffee to brew - I keep it next to the coffee machine just for when I am too lazy to bring my latop downstairs), and noticed this article right away, when I first cracked open the August addition this morning. Today, while looking for something completely different, I found this and this.

I am feeling really left out (but probably not as broke) being a poker illiterate.

 

Facts:

• I live in Washington.
• It is illegal to post links to online poker sites in Washington.
• If someone comment spams me (see below image) with links to illegal poker sites, am I going to get in trouble?

I hope the answer is that the above mentioned law is struck down by something like this happening to someone, or the state turns it's infinite internet montioring powers to good by stopping comment spammers.

Neither outcome is likely, but one can hope.

Update: I've already gotten my first illegal comment to this post! It contains hundreds of links to illegal (in washington) gambling sites. I wonder if I should alert the authorities. Hmm...