Ship It! LIVEShip It! LIVE
home about services writing contact

We develop, test, and create fine software products, and design creative solutions to your problems.
The development of software is an intrinsically creative process. We are dedicated to improving our mastery of the art.
Links · RSS Feed
Popular Pages

Jared Richardson’s talk titled “Build Teams, not Products,” in particular, was one of the best presentations I’ve ever witnessed. It was just one of those talks where all the points seem tautologic...
-Yev Bronshteyn
Even though our group was already following many of the practices outlined in Ship It!, I believe the book paid for itself within the first day of purchase. When one considers the burn rate of a ty...
-Steve Mitchell
I was amazed that these five chapters only take about 160 pages and yet tell you all you need to know about successful projects. I’ve experienced a lot of these problems myself, and so did/do you, ...
-Javaddicts.net

Career Survey (Jan 5)
The upcoming Career 2.0 book is in high gear, but we'd like to include more than our experiences. Over on the Career 2.0 blog we've posted a few questions about your career. Best moves, worst experience, etc.

Please drop by and let us know, or send Matt or me email. We're hoping to gather nuggets of wisdom for the book, but we won't quote you without permission. ;)

What's your strategy?

Category: Misc

Ruby Conference in North Carolina! Ruby RX (Dec 31)
We turned the website on for Ruby RX yesterday. It's a regional Ruby conference in North Carolina. We may still tinker with the speaker list a little (one person might bow out and be replaced). If all goes well we'll take this conference to several other cities next year, much like the Java/Agile No Fluff Just Stuff touring conference.

Here's the URL: RubyRX

From the website:

Ruby is a dynamic, open source language with a focus on simplicity. Since it's release in 1995, Ruby is now among most popular programing languages. The Ruby on Rails web framework has created a major shift in the web development space. If you haven't experienced the simplicity of ROR's Convention Over Confituration model, it is time to learn what all the buzz is about.

RubyRX will cover a lot more than just Ruby and Rails. Other languages will be covered including: Clojure, Erlang, Scala, and more. You will also have an opportunity to learn about tools, frameworks, and best practices including: Git, Sinatra, and testing techniques.

This event is an opportunity to learn from some of the best authors and developers in the industry and network with your Ruby user community. Whether you are brand new to Ruby or a long time community member, RubyRX offers a chance to master essential skills and gain exposure to the latest best practices.

Category: Ruby

Try What You Can't Do (Dec 18)
"Creative people should always try to do things they can't. That's when creativity is needed." -Marcel Wanders

When's the last time you tried something you didn't know how to do, just to stretch your brain a bit?

Marcel is a fashion designer (not a programmer), but his comments were very timely for our field. Think about software design when you read his next words.

"People think design is fluff, but it's a disciplined approach to something difficult. This is hard stuff that makes business better." and later "People who work in creative projects are excited to come to work. That's radical."

The really great projects are the ones we get excited about... recognizing the creative aspects of programming, including design, architecture, and implementation, is often neglected. How can we fix this?

If you're in management, recognize that an excited team works faster. Depressed teams work slowly. They come into work later. Leave earlier. Take longer coffee breaks and lunches. It's not intentional, it's just human nature. We chase what we enjoy.

Allow your teams some freedom to be creative in design, technology choices, even languages these days, and see what they give you back.

Category: Agile

MSI Wind: Kubuntu 8.10 (Dec 16)
It took me some time this evening, and some helping/shaming by Dan Hinojosa, but I got X running on 2 monitors nicely on the MSI Wind. So I'm posting the xorg.conf details so I can find it next time I need it. :)

First, to conserve memory, X caps itself at the maximum resolution of the monitors it sees when it's starting. You fix that by adding the "Virtual" section to your Display block.

And in the "Device" block I added a few performance tweaks I found on the web.

It's still not as snappy as I'd like (and as I'm sure it can be). Anyone spot anything else I can add? 


Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Option          "AccelMethod"   "exa"
        #Option         "AccelMethod"   "xaa"
        #Option         "MigrationHeuristic"    "greedy" # mess up systray
        Option          "FramebufferCompression"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        SubSection      "Display"
            Virtual     2464 1500
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I'm amazed at how small the config is these days. Nearly everything is autodetected. I'm running the external monitor at 1440x900 and the laptop at 1024x600. Once you get the Virtual setting in place, the packaged GUI works fine.

If you are having trouble, I suggest you try out xrandr. It provides the error messages the GUI tends to suppress.

Category: Misc

Ruby Conf Videos (Dec 15)
I spent a little time tonight watching some of the Ruby Conf 2008 videos. I especially liked Dave Thomas' keynote on forking Ruby. The parallel Ruby suggestions were very intriguing and looked very practical. Also, Nathaniel Talbot's Fear of Programming was great.

You can find them all at Ruby Conf 2008 at Confreaks

There are a number of others I'm going to try to catch this week. Looks like I missed some great topics!

Category: Ruby

Previous page Next page


© 2007 Agile Artisans.