Computer Uptime

Well I had to start my Mac today so my Uptime is now at 13:08, 2 users, load averages: 0.14 0.19 0.15

The best I had it at was 75 days. I had to reset it because I moved to my new house.

If you’re running OS X or linux you can get your uptime by opening up Terminal and typing in uptime.

Blogger now has a Word Add-in

Looks like blogger created an Add-in to word where you can post to blogger. Well I stopped using Blogger and started using WordPress about a month ago and have not looked back. To me this seems like a bit much to use word as your blogging tool. But then again it seems everyone using Windows has Word open and you’ll look like your actually doing work at work!!!

Agile development vs BDUF

My old pal Phil has whipped up a storm again! This time he is taking on Joel Spolsky.

Joel believes in using BDUF (Big Design Up Front) software development where Phil believes in using Agile Development. While for the most part I agree with Phil, but there are times where BDUF totally makes sense.

What we’ve done at our company with great success is take a bit from both and add our own jelly on top. Before any development is done, we create a throw away prototype that the user can get their hands on. Once they agree to the basic design, we’ll go ahead and spec it out and create the database. We rarely do UML unless the project is HUGE.

The one thing that we did when I worked at a company with Phil was UML the hell out of everything. I hated this and I swear we wasted more time on this then actually developing the application. That’s probably why I ended up leaving. (Besides a few other thing that I really don’t want to go into. And no, Phil has nothing to do with me leaving!!)

One of the features we are beginning to use while in development is to create up a wiki for the team to leave documentation, notes, connection strings and who knows what else. So far this has been a huge sucess. I want to take this to the next level with the project management aspect and put our weekly status notes in there or better yet create a blog for this. There is has to be some real value in using a blog!!!