Brand experiences and MOSS

All the video’s for the 2009 MIX conference are posted online (http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09) and they are interesting for anybody developing on the Microsoft platform. One of the session posted is about developing consumer facing brand sites, presented by Tony Jones, Technology Director for Razorfish. It touches on the unique challenges that an user experience driven company like Razorfish faces when leveraging MOSS for their web experiences, and outlines approaches on addressing these. Highly recommended. How Razorfish Lights Up Brand with Microsoft SharePoint

Tags: Microsoft, MOSS

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agile and pair programming

One of my favorite topics in agile and iterative development is pair programming.The question is can we make it happen more and do we want to try it more? I’ve typically seen it on the smaller and more isolated projects. It’s a fascinating concept and the research, while minimal that I have found, tend to say two developers get more high-quality work done than one independently.

I also found it interesting that it’s a core tenant of education in some circles today. When my wife was getting her master’s in education, pair learning was one of the approaches she was taught. Often it’s three or four, but two works. All her classrooms are broken into small groups and I guess there’s lots of educational research that backs up the fact that students learn more working in small groups than alone. I’ll ask her for some research links.

I ran across an Distributed Agile post today that dug up some more research backing up pair programming. Here’s what the post had to say

“Pairing is the most powerful tool they’ve ever had. Skills don’t matter as much as collaboration and asking questions. Goal for new hires is to get their partner hired. Airlines pair pilots… Lorie Williams at the University of North Carolina did an experiment and found that the paired team produced 15% less lines of code with much better quality”

Tags: Agile, Education, pair programming, research, University of North Carolina

Posted in General, Methodology, Technology | 6 Comments »

OpenCloud Manifesto = Skynet

Exciting to see folks pulling together some Cloud Computing standards to help us live seamlessly across the different cloud vendor offerings. I heard it first on the This Week in Tech podcast, it’s starting to sound a lot like the Terminator’s version of Skynet. Get it, clouds, skynet… Anyway, iIt seems like this should be a requirment for redundancy, not to mention the ability to move based on feature needs. Yes, sure, Cloud Computing is inherently redundant, but only across one vendor. It’ll also help us realize the best value and features quickly. I think the other thing it shows is that there is a lot of room for competition. It won’t just be the big players out there.

The manifesto itself was also interestingly absent of any of the big players. A quick glance at the manifesto and it’s refreshingly light, which is good. It seems to think more standards are on the way, which may or may not be a good thing. I think there are lots of lessons to be learned from standards like Corba or ws-deathstar. All in all good news and a recognition that the clouds are moving quickly.

Tags: Amazon, Cloud, Cloud computing, google, IBM, Microsoft, Skynet, Terminator

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So many authentication options

Twitter just announced they are supporting OAuth. Why is this cool? Well, now you can share applications  with Twitter without asking the user to log into twitter. Very cool indeed.

Tags: Application programming interface, OAuth, OpenID, Twitter

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Native thread support in Ruby’s latest version

It looks like Ruby version 1.9.1 supports native threads and fibers. Fibers are a ‘lightweight’ approach when you don’t need full threads. It sounds like fibers are not preemptive, so they have to yield to other fibers as opposed to threads that can run in parallel. Fibers on the other hand startup faster and use less memory.

I know when Java made the leap to support native threads, it seemed like it was a huge accelerator towards greater adoption. It looks like the performance numbers are already coming in and it’s much faster.

Tags: Java, language, Programming, Programming language, Ruby, Tools

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micro-blogging = micro-coding

There’s a new service out there, Snipt, for Twitter that enables folks to post code quickly. Basically, go to Snipt, cut and paste your code into the box and you get a small URL that people can go back to. Snipt takes your code and puts it into an image with a short URL. I did a quick search to see if anyone was using and found a couple of twits. Someone pointed out the incorrect usage of the alt image tech, I won’t mention on which site:). Here’s the test I threw up with some C# code. Looks like fun, especially if it helps clean up some code. I guess you can use it for more than code as well.

Tweetdeck is helping to identify how services like these could be more usefull, ell, the search feature on tweetdeck. For example, looking for some code to do x, setup a search in tweetdeck for x, go back to it everyone once in a while and wala, there’s your solution. Well, that’s the theory….

Tags: Online Communities, Social network, TweetDeck, Twitter, Web search engine

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Big CMS news

Interwoven has been purchased by Autonomy. Interwoven is definitely one of the most common CMS platforms we see at our enterprise 500 clients, interestingly much more than autonomy. Overall, this seems like a great opportunity for the two to grow market share. From a technology architecture perspective, there are a lot of great synergies that could come out of this merger. For example, publish content, update index. Or plug autonomy in to your content repository, interrogate your data and provide insights. I wonder how Metatagger fits in?

Tags: Autonomy, Content Management, Interwoven, Site Management, Technology

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live streaming crashes again

So, during the historic exciting inaugaration yesterday, many of the big folks seemed to ‘melt’ down as I like to put it. Poor quality video, audio not synced, etc. I am sure there were lots of folks rebooting servers to try and keep up, but it just didn’t seem to work. While Akamai and others streamed millions of streams, up to 5.4 million simultaneous viewers per minute, there were still poor experiences. It really feels like we need to do a better job of peer to peer streaming as a more efficient long term solution. Joost was heading down that route, but it sounds like they pulled their peer to peer when they went to the in browser player. I did watch some of the inaugaraion on Joost and it worked great by the way. I also read a mention of a new technology from a company called RayV which looks promising. The premise being, as more people watch the quality increases. Even though the company is called RayV I have no affiliation:)….

Tags: Akamai, Akamai Technologies, Barack Obama, Broadcasting, Business, Joost, Peer-to-peer, Streaming media

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zemanta wordpress plug-in

The zemanta wordpress plug-in rocks. It looks at what you are typing and suggest images, urls, related articles and tags.Through the Zemanta API, it will also automatically recommend RDF to go along with your text. Very cool. Sure does writing posts a lot faster.

Tags: Blog, Flickr, Plug-in, Weblogs, WordPress, Zemanta

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Oxite - Open Source blogging platform from Microsoft

Microsoft released an alpha version of Oxite, an open source CMS (Content Management System) that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large web sites.

Microsoft Oxite offers almost everything you need in a good blogging platform - anonymous or authenticated commenting, comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds, pingbacks, trackbacks, SEO optimized clean URLs, multiple blogs, group blogging and support for custom pages.

At first glance Oxite appears to compete with established blogging products including those from Six Apart.
Read more »

Tags: ASP.NET MVC based Blogging, Microsoft Blogging Platform, Microsoft Oxide

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