DownThemAll! is a very useful Firefox extension that lets you download all the links or images contained in a web page, with powerful filters and stuff.
After some months of use I almost accidentally found that you can also specify patterns for downloads using batch descriptors, e.g. if you want to download all pictures from #10 to #25 from your gallery you would use the following URL:
http://your.domain/path/to/gallery/picture[10:25].jpg
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Detailed requirements: a never ending story
In an article about selling your IT Projects to Executives the author quotes a former managing director and global CIO:
While I think that it is perfectly true for big companies like Credit Suisse First Boston, where he worked for 18 years, I still am persuaded that it doesn't apply to every situation, though I hope my bank gives very detailed requirements to developers and that they have a very deep QA process in act (I also read from Symantec that banks spend about 10% of their IT budget in security).
But... where's the point of having 600 sheets of paper and 0 lines of code? Surely the requirements eliciting process can provide customers with real breakthroughs and give them a much clearer view of their processes and needs, but it all seems to end with that...
User requirements, no matter what the development style, must be rigorously developed, detailed and documented.
While I think that it is perfectly true for big companies like Credit Suisse First Boston, where he worked for 18 years, I still am persuaded that it doesn't apply to every situation, though I hope my bank gives very detailed requirements to developers and that they have a very deep QA process in act (I also read from Symantec that banks spend about 10% of their IT budget in security).
But... where's the point of having 600 sheets of paper and 0 lines of code? Surely the requirements eliciting process can provide customers with real breakthroughs and give them a much clearer view of their processes and needs, but it all seems to end with that...
Iceberg approaching?
According to this article Sun is going to face the same adventure Titanic did a long time ago. The worst thing is that everything seems unavoidable, despite what Sun says. To quote from the article:
I heartly hope for the former...
Do [they] know something we don't? Or do we know something they don't?
I heartly hope for the former...
Just Another WordPress Weblog
I finally gave up... surrounded by tons of WordPress addicted, I decided to give it a try myself, so I downloaded, installed and configured Apache, php and mySQL (with some pain in the b...ack trying to persuade Windows that extensions really are in the c:/php/ext dir).Finally I got my installation working, as the picture clearly shows. Now what? well a tour in the administrative pages is due, so... hey there's an import feature! Will I manage to get a local copy of my blog on Blogger? The system says it's supported, so I won't spend time with anything, just gotta try this one. Everything seems fine, wp tells me that I must tell Blogger to authorize my local installation, I do it and... well...
Unable to find the socket transport "ssl"- did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (0)
I think you can say you forgot to something when you knew you had to, but no time for details... let's go to php.ini... decomment extension=php_openssl.dll... argh it does not work... stop service, start service... yuck! 0 post out of 146, 0 comments out of 10... Import? Import! Importing... importing... importing... (I got a 44k dial-up, no ADSL on the whole territory)... 14 out of 146... I also get the feeling that the download stops every 5-10 posts or so, but maybe it's my wonderful (...) Internet connection. No need to wait till the end, let's go check the first posts.
Everything seems ok, pictures are imported as well. For some strange reasons Blogger tags are called Categories in WordPress, while WordPress tags seem to have no correspondence in Blogger, but more or less my local backup is growing into shape.
Obviously I won't get Blogger Widgets, but as most of them are javascript supplied by other parties (e.g. the Italian Agile Day Banner) it shouldn't be very difficult to fit them into WordPress.
More on this will follow.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Star Wars revisited
Hey this guy is a genius...
Well, as matter of fact all musical credits go to moosebutter, but the video version really adds that extra bit.
And, after the elections in the USA, some spots for the elections in the galaxy:
Well, as matter of fact all musical credits go to moosebutter, but the video version really adds that extra bit.
And, after the elections in the USA, some spots for the elections in the galaxy:
See more funny videos at Funny or Die
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Is software quality expendable?
This is one of tose questions that has been around for a very long time. A recent study from Original Software shows that it will probably stick around in the next years, as the world of CIOs appears splitted in two: 46% of CIOs think that quality has a very important role, while 41% sees it as a "nice to have quality" or even as a necessary cost.
I'm not a CIO (yet) but I have a very clear opinion on the matter.
Many CIOs have a special bend for asking "low cost working software, ready for yesterday". The problem is that the real cost associated with software is not writing it, but - even after a considerable amount of time - reading it for further modifications, bug fixing, evolutions, refactorings, etc. Leave that mess now and it'll cost you much more tomorrow. Software becomes kippleized (read this book for more infos on the term), someone says this happens even if you're not touching it and, mostly, when you're not watching. Bad quality software makes your technical debt increase, thus increasing the cost of software. Add the fact that most of the time you're modifying existing software rather than creating fresh new applications and you'll have an idea about the huge impact this debt can have.
And... is that low cost software really working? The forces involved in software development are intertwined, so you can't modify one without affecting the others. Literature normally refers to time, scope, cost and quality. Cut time and cost and guess what happens.
Another very important aspect, albeit disregarded by CIOs, is that developers love their job (well most of them do). We try to do our best, and we are proud of it. We are not satisfied when time is cut and cost and scope are kept fixed, as quality necessarily drops. Nobody wants to produce sloppy code. Nobody wants to be forced to produce sloppy code. Somebody might even think to move to another company, which, again, means a non neglectable cost. That could even start a trend, and you can see a company slowly transforming into a sinking boat. I'm probably going too far, but it is just for the sake of clarity.
The whole study can be downloaded here (some informations required).
I'm not a CIO (yet) but I have a very clear opinion on the matter.
Many CIOs have a special bend for asking "low cost working software, ready for yesterday". The problem is that the real cost associated with software is not writing it, but - even after a considerable amount of time - reading it for further modifications, bug fixing, evolutions, refactorings, etc. Leave that mess now and it'll cost you much more tomorrow. Software becomes kippleized (read this book for more infos on the term), someone says this happens even if you're not touching it and, mostly, when you're not watching. Bad quality software makes your technical debt increase, thus increasing the cost of software. Add the fact that most of the time you're modifying existing software rather than creating fresh new applications and you'll have an idea about the huge impact this debt can have.
And... is that low cost software really working? The forces involved in software development are intertwined, so you can't modify one without affecting the others. Literature normally refers to time, scope, cost and quality. Cut time and cost and guess what happens.
Another very important aspect, albeit disregarded by CIOs, is that developers love their job (well most of them do). We try to do our best, and we are proud of it. We are not satisfied when time is cut and cost and scope are kept fixed, as quality necessarily drops. Nobody wants to produce sloppy code. Nobody wants to be forced to produce sloppy code. Somebody might even think to move to another company, which, again, means a non neglectable cost. That could even start a trend, and you can see a company slowly transforming into a sinking boat. I'm probably going too far, but it is just for the sake of clarity.
The whole study can be downloaded here (some informations required).
Scrum Mind Maps
These are the mind maps we produced during our Scrum Master Certification Course (thanks to Pietro for posting the original photos).
They have been drawn iteratively, i.e. after our initial draft we started circulating between tables and inspecting the work of other groups. They are a very clean example of how a small set of simple techniques like Scrum can be perceived and represented in very different ways.
They have been drawn iteratively, i.e. after our initial draft we started circulating between tables and inspecting the work of other groups. They are a very clean example of how a small set of simple techniques like Scrum can be perceived and represented in very different ways.
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