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A colleague of mine pointed me to UPF’s reactable site:

http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?media

During my Masters year I was in a project with a team from UPF, and we worked on something a bit similar (but, which never got finished and wasn’t as cool as this).

This sort of intuitive interfaces make me think, maybe I should get myself a hobby-project involving audio again…!

I had a couple reports of people being unable to post comments on this blog. The root cause of the problem was a ill-configured anti-spam plugin (SpamKarma II). Something seems to be wrong with the captcha generator. A quick glance at the SpamKarma FAQ didn’t yield a solution, so for now I’ve disabled the plugin and I’ve recovered filtered messages. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yesterday evening we had a company session on the how and what of Scrum.

Scrum is an agile methodology and assumes that the software development process is complicated and unpredictable and treats it as a controlled black box instead of a theoretical, fully defined process. This is one of the biggest differences between Scrum and the Waterfall and Spiral methodologies, which view the software development process as a fully defined process.

Important problems with the Waterfall and Spiral methodologies are:

• Requirements are not fully understood at the beginning of the process.
• Requirements change during the process.

One of the first sheets contained these interesting (but questionable) numbers:

• Up to 35% of the requirements are subject to change in a typical project
• Up to 60% of the implemented features will not be used after delivery (wow?)

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes (often within thirty days) teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble.

The concept of working in iterations (an iteration is called ’sprint’ in Scrum) isn’t new at all, but delivering a working, fully documented and tested product at the end of each iteration is a small innovation.

After the presentation we had a discussion on the feasibility of using Scrum for projects managed by Finalist, most people where quite enthusiastic. But some good questions where asked:

• How do you sell a project without a fixed budget?
• How do you manage dependencies between different projects?
• Does Scrum work when the team is changed often?
• Is working without up-front design feasible for all sorts of projects?

Although we didn’t solve all those problems the general feeling was that the Scrum approach to development yields higher quality software which better fits the needs of the customer. Now we’ll just have to find a way to get the customer to think the same!

More information on scrum can be found here:

• Scrum in Development (wikipedia)
• Scrum in Management (wikipedia)
• About Scrum (controlled chaos)
• Scrum in five minutes

Yesterday Sun released Java under the GPLv2 license. Cinics will probable say ‘they only released a small part’, but hey, they released Java under the GPLv2 license!

Included in the relicensing are Javac, the Hotspot Virtual Machine and a ‘classpath exception’ which makes shure code written depending on the classpath doesn’t need to be GPL’ed itself.
And, also included in all this open sourcing madness… the Duke! I can now, finally, use his image on my website:

Rounding up my short holiday, during which my son turned 1 (which was almost entirely computer-free) I decided to take the JBB ‘Hibernate 3 – Core’ exam, and passed:

Hibernate 3 – Core

2006-11-12

exam page

5

just 8 points now to reach the magic ‘blackbelt’ level!