The Boss is in town!

Great show! Probably the best I have seen in years. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have played at the - almost full - Emirate Stadium in London a 3 hours gig with a mixture of old and new stuff. You won't believe how that 62 years old man was able to excite the crowd running up and down the stage shouting and playing Badlands, Born To Run, Thunder road (my favourite), Rosalita, Lonesome Day and so on.
He also had time to pass on to us a couple of (silly) jokes about English stereotypes: the weather - today was a sunny day after a miserable week of clouds and rain - and T time. Anyway... I took two pictures with my mobile, one before the start of the concert when the stadium was filling up, the other when it was dark already so the quality is pitiful, so you'll have to guess.

Fighting cot death and side effects

It's today's news that some cases of cot death may be caused by bacterial infections.

If you have a child it's likely that a pediatrician (or equivalent) has told you about cot death - the death of an infant that is apparently inexplicable.

When my son Jacopo was born (19 months ago) we were told when we left the hospital just after he was born. We were also told few things to do to minimise the chances that this horrible situation may occur to us: don't smoke nearby your newborn, don't let him sleep in our bed and - above all - put him to sleep on his back (an not on his tummy, as commonly practiced until about 15 years ago).

All nice and easy. But...

But nobody told us of a naughty side effect of one of these simple practices. If your child always stays on his back (and most of his time he/she does as babies sleep more than 12h a day - also, our one actually disliked being put on his tummy even when he was awake) he/she may develop the flat head syndrome. This is a cosmetic syndrome whereby the soft skull of the baby flattens. It's - clearly - caused by the fact that the baby lies face up with the back of his head on a not so soft surface (soft pillows should not be used with newborns).

As said we weren't told and Jacopo developed a minor flat head on the right side of his skull. We were told by the pediatrician, after we realised it when he was 9 months old, not to worry, that it'll normalise by the time he's two (it hasn't yet, and we're 5 months away from his second birthday) and that this might have happened. We were told of tricks to play to encourage him to turn his head more frequently - move toys from one side of the bed to the other - and optionally to buy a specially made pillow. In the most extreme cases an helmet may be required but it wasn't our case.

Well, to the point... why nobody told us of what might have happened? Obviously preventing cot death is of highest priority, but making parents aware of side effects of having the baby sleep on his back is also important. So, if you're in the same situation we were a year and a half ago, invent something and have your baby move the head when he's awake. He'll be grateful when he'll grow up.

Agile 2008 - we'll be there!

We are finalising our work for Agile 2008. I led two teams that submitted two sessions at the conference this August in Toronto, Canada. We had them accepted and the two papers will be published in the proceedings. We're now in the process of writing a summary of the sessions for the conference agenda. Here they follow

What's in the toolbox of a successful software craftsman?
Have you ever wanted to know which tools a big distributed team of successful software craftsman use to implement their user stories? How they configure them to support agile development based on XP and Scrum and deliver to the agreed plan? This session will answer these questions and more. Three representatives of this team will tell you what’s in their toolbox and how the toolbox supports four core agile practices that the team adopts to succeed: maximum project status visibility, effective communication, immediate feedback and ruthless automation.

Pushing the boundaries of testing and Continuous Integration
In this session, three representatives of an agile team will show how an automated build that executes robustness, scalability and performance tests helped them drastically improve the quality of their highly concurrent application server. They will also show how the team configured such builds in their continuous integration environment as well as what performance and robustness metrics they monitored. Finally, the team will show how valuable and effective this investment has been for capturing bugs and performance-related issues very early in their development process.

I look forward to get there: I'll hopefully meet people I already had the chance to talk to in the past (Kent Beck and JB) and people I only recently had the honour to collaborate with (Ron Jeffries and Manfred Lange - who reviewed our papers for the conference).

I'll keep you posted!

And now a public blog

Subtitle: do I really need to do this?

Hello reader! Welcome to YAUB (yet another useless blog). I have decided to join the public blogsphere. The more obvious reasons are that I hope to practice my writing and use this tool to "remember" and "share" stuff (scripta manent, after all). Specifically things that I happen to be doing during my life. About the real motivation, don't ask, I am still looking for it: I suppose it all has to do with the fact that humans are social animals and that they achieve well being by participating to social life and the like. We'll see how it goes...

Actually, I have been publishing posts in a blog in the intranet of my company for few months; now that I am doing the leap I'll migrate my old posts soon so you can enjoy them too. So you'll eventually see posts that are older than this one once I finish my copy and paste job.

Cya!

Microsoft and Open Source

It's very interesting to note the Microsoft's involvment in the Open Source (or open source) arena.
I came across this presentation held by Sam Ramji - director of the Open Source Lab at Microsoft - at the latest EclipseCon. It shows how Microsoft and Eclipse Foundation are working together on making Higgins and CardSpace interoperable and on building SWT on top of WPF (to let Eclipse shine on Vista).

One thought coming on my mind: how long is it going to take to have Visual Studio as an Eclipse plug-in.

Planning in Cork and Cyclomatic Complexity

I am in charge of prepping the Day0 happening in Cork, for the next Release Planning of the Web21C SDK Team.

A bit of background: Day0 tradition started a year ago (at the Dublin Release Planning) as an opportunity for the whole team members (located between London, Ipswich, Denver in US) to meet and share knowledge. It happens the day before Release Planning - hence the name - and involves technical presentations and discussions on topics selected by a small number of members and presented to the whole team in - typically - two or three streams.

The process is quite interesting as we're organising the event as a mix of Open Space and Unconference. I have asked people to sign up for sessions to present and for topics to discuss at the Gold Fish Bowl at the end of the day. (Yeah, I know that a preset agenda is not truly Open Space, but it'll help me to manage the hotel resources and keep people focussed, whilst having the attendee to comment and provide feedback to the presenters - and whoever has something to say on the day can book his session at the start of the day on a properly prepared sheet)

I am confident that the event will be as successful as the one I organised in Glasgow last January.

I am even attempting to present two sessions although I have the feeling it's going to be too much, being now involved on preparing the two papers for Agile 2008 the release of the Messaging capability at the back of the Web21C SDK next 28th of April and the Brown Bag at the end of May.

Anyway, one of the sessions I was thinking to present is on software metrics and refactoring complexity out of code. The goods the bads and the evils of metrics and how they work as triggering alarms on spotting complexity in the design and implementation. I am thinking how to best make use of those numbers without being too mental on making them nice and round. Especially the Cyclomatic Complexity, which I find quite useful as an indication of the complexity of the code. In fact with Eclipse and the Checkstyle plugin, it's possible to get the number on the fly. Another useful application of the McCabe number (the other alias of the CC) is to get an indication on how many tests are required to fully cover untested code - useful clearly when you inherit untested code.

I'll think of writing a more extensive post once I finish the presentation

Euro and Pound signs in Java

Never use € (euro) and £ (pound) symbols in a Java src file. If you do you're asking for trouble. Rather use their unicode prepresentation (and possibly a comment telling readers what that unicode represents), that is:

public static final char EURO = '\u20AC';

public static final char POUND = '\u00A3';

The main problem occurs when your src is meant to be managed in a windows platform (where encoding is by default Cp1252) and in a Linux platform (where encoding is by default UTF-8).
Unless you have to, then, don't use them. If you really have to, the option is to share between the platforms the same encoding.

You may need to consider

1. -Dfile.encoding

2. Use the same encoding in both platforms by passing to the ant the encoding attribute
3. Change the default workspace encoding in eclipse (windows/general/workspace) and set it to UTF-8 (bear in mind that then your € and £ wont be visible anyway)

Obviously this happens for any other outside US-ASCII char that is not represented in UTF-8  

Sacrificing quality?

Not compromising on quality is not only your professional obligation but it is also important for your own joy of work and is critical for the company. (Ken Schwaber)

My take on this is that compromising by skimming on test-dev-refactor loop (by eliminating refactor and/or test) is BAD. But working with the customer and negotiate a delivery of a Fiat 126 rather than an F430 at the end of the current release is something to encourage if resources and time are tight, in the spirit of the pure iterative approach. After all, if the business problem is "I need to drive from home to work", that is a perfectly valid solution to it.

This is what Jeff Patton was talking about at the last XPDay in London when he was talking about sacrificing quality if time/resources are scarce.

Babylon IT

Interesting page on computer languages. It shows a (maybe) complete list of existing computer languages (alive and dead) and their main features. Quite unsurprisingly there are languages I have never heard of. And also some with amusing names, like Pizza. Also a good source for links to external websites.

Java top 5 technologies to learn during 2008

I receive regularly emails from several technology sites. This time one carried an interesting link to a blog entry describing the top 5 technologies to learn in 2008. Some interesting ones, a side the usual web 2.0 ones, are OSGI (at #5) and Cloud computing (at #1). I have been exposed recently to cloud computing and grid computing doing scalability work for SpringRing (now Aloha). But, I must admit, I was not aware of OSGI.
Oh dear, something else on the stack.