It’s not about tools; it’s about people

Last week a collegue of mine did an introductory talk about RUP (Rational Unified Process). It was an interesting talk about how RUP can be applied in projects, what the philosophy is behind RUP, and lessons learned during her first RUP workshop.

After the talk, we discussed how RUP looked a lot like DSDM, Agile and XP. In all these methods, developers are arrogant enough to “demand” customers to conform to their process. Sure there is a lot to be said for consulting the customer often, and having lots of pre-releases, but the customer is still the customer, not your in-house QA department.

DOCTYPE is a myth…

… and other wisdom from Joel. Finally, after weeks of slightly boring posts about travel, speeches and FogBugz, Joel has an article on his blog he was so famous for: Martian Headsets.

The article discusses the problems with the HTML spec, and numerous other problems developers are facing these days. That, and the Martians’ strange fascination for all kinds and shades of red.

At times, the article remembered me of some thoughts I have during my dayjob:

• Minimize. (also known as the KISS principle)
• Have a contract early in the process. Make it testable. Find a way to handle problems in the contract.
• Be strict and transparent. Fail early and explain.
• Using a standard and conforming to it are two different things.
• Communicate.

Although all are true to some degree, they aren’t going to solve all problems, because everybody has their own set of thoughts and rules. For every problem there is a nice, clean, simple, cheap, wrong answer.

Now go read the article, it’s much better than my writing…

Nokia 6300 and Apple’s iSync

Last week, my trusty Sony Ericsson T610 became a bit awkward to use. The “down” function of the joystick finally gave up on me, after intermitting failures the past month. The only way to select the next menu item was to go “up” through all menu items. It became a pain to use, so I needed a new one.

OSX 10.5.2 Solved SMB problems (for me)

In a previous post on this blog, I indicated that the 10.5.1. update of Apple’s OSX did not fix my network and SMB problems with my Iomega drive. In the comments underneath, some readers kindly pointed out that Iomega’s K104w11 Firmware update is available for the Iomega drive I have. Now that 10.5.2 is out, I reconnected the Iomega drive to my network. And suddenly the world changed…

Drachten open for Dragracing in 2008!

After a lot of discussions about the tarmac, who has done what and why, and who has to solve which problems and who is to pay for it all, a “…declaration of Intent has been signed by Dragrace club eXplosion and Stichting Vliegveld Drachten, which means for the next five years, dragracing can be held again on the airstrip in Drachten.”

For more info, see the press release at the eXplosion dragracing site. The work on the airstrip has already started, eXplosion posted some of them on their website. Enjoy.