Interesting article about using scrum to manage game development. Many of the pitfalls are true beyond games development. The article is well balanced and has advice for how to overcome the pitfalls. I don't agree with all of the advice, but it is thought...

When my wife was expecting our daughter, someone gave me this advice, "When you have your first child, you lose all your free time.  When you have your second, you lose all the free time you didn't realize you still had."  Becoming...

I was about to write this article anyway when XKCD posted this comic which reinforces my point.  People act differently in email than they do in person.  Everyone knows this to be the case, but they often don't act like it.  Usually when...

.vimrc is the config file for Vim. It can be stored in the Vim directory or in your user directory. With greater protection of the Program Files directory on Vista, I've gotten into the habit of keeping it in my user directory (c:\users\steverowe on most...

By popular demand (seriously), here is an update of the netcasts I'm listening to on a regular basis. Audio: This Week In Tech - Round table discussion of technology topics. Sometimes should be known as This Week in Twitter. This Week In Media - Round...

At long last, there is a preliminary fix for the corruption issue that has dogged WHS since its release. The WHS team released the fix with its Power Pack 1 beta. See their blog post for details and a link to download it. In addition to the corruption...

Two things I discovered about searching: * will search forward for the word under the cursor. No longer do I have to type /WordUnderTheCursor. # does the same thing, but goes backwards. It's like ?WordUnderTheCursor. g* will search for any...

The Manager Tools podcast has an interesting series on better writing. This isn't a management-specific topic. Rather it is something everyone can benefit from. In a day and age where so much communication is via e-mail, having the ability to communicate...

We recently went through a round of test spec reviews on my team. Having read a good number of test specs in a short period of time, I came to a realization. It is imperative to know the failure condition in order to write a good test case. This is at...

A friend of mine just posted an interesting anecdote about the difference in the world we grew up in and the one our kids are growing up in. In his case, his son didn't know what a stereo was. He'd never seen one. Music in his world comes from an iPod...

Jeremy Miller gives his reasons for refactoring . He gives two over-arching reasons. The first is "To remedy a deficiency in code, design, or architectural quality" and the second, "To make a forthcoming change to the code easier." I'm very much in agreement...

Once you have mastered using Vim to replace Notepad.exe , it is time to starting taking advantage of what Vim has to offer. Doing so can increase your productivity. Below are most of the commands I use most frequently. It is important to note that Vim...

Testing started simply. Developers would run their code after they wrote it to make sure it worked. When teams became larger and code more complex, it became apparent that developers could spend more time coding if they left much of the testing to someone...

When I first encountered Unix in the early 1990s, I needed a text editor. I tried Emacs but the meta key and double control keys struck me as wrong. I tried Vi but couldn't figure out how to type anything. I came across Pico and for years used that as...

This article says that they are. More importantly, it says that people do not care as much about their music or the quality of their music-listening experience as much as they once did. That's very interesting if true. I wonder if this is a permanent...

A while ago I took a class on Scrum and Agile Project Management. During the discussion on Scrum, it became apparent to me that there are several unchallenged assumptions in many peoples' minds that make accepting Scrum difficult. People assume that Scrum...

Interesting article over at Ars Technica discussing the CISC nature of the Atom processor and how that affects its performance compared to other embedded processors. Does CISC have more liabilities in the mobile space than it did in the desktop space...

For most programming, I use Vim as my text editor of choice. It has a steep learning curve, but is very efficient once you get accustomed to it. I'm far from an expert on Vim and I'm always learning new things. From time to time I will endeavor to post...

There's a design principle I neglected to mention in my initial list but which certainly merits attention. That principle is this: whenever possible, don't repeat yourself (DRY). Put another way, do things one time, in one place rather than having the...

We recently went through mid-year reviews and I found myself repeating similar advice several times. Here it is: Be very clear about what your goal is and continuously reassess whether you are on track to get there. To make this more concrete, consider...

Marc Andreessen has a great blog post today laying out the possibilities in the Microsoft-Yahoo talks. Unlike most posts on the subject, this one isn't trying to guess what might happen. Instead, it lays out the options and the forces affecting those...

It's probably about time to bring my "Design Principles To Live By" series to a close. This is the last scheduled topic although I have one or two more I may post. Let's begin with some definitions: Composition - Functionality of an object is made up...

Ars Technica has a very interesting article about the history of filesystems . They cover all the major systems including FAT (MS-DOS), HFS (Mac), NTFS (NT), Ext2/3 (Linux), and many others like the Amiga. They also cover upcoming systems like ZFS. If...

Someone recently related to me his experience using the new Microsoft Robotics Studio . He loaded it up and proceeded through one of the tutorials. To make sure he understood, he typed everything in instead of cutting and pasting the sample code. After...

I apologize for the very light blogging of late. I've been busy working on the project for my latest class at the University of Illinois. CS classes really take a lot of time at the end of the semester. At the beginning you just have reading, homework...