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Last week’s eXtreme Wednesday turned into more of a Geek Conference than a coding session. We had a chillout week with talk ranging from the virtues of XP, all the way through to why Star Trek Voyager seemed to become much more interesting when 7 of 9 suddenly appeared on the show… maybe the skin tight costume had something to do with it.

Hopefully next week will see a return to typing in code and contributing to the onset of Touchpad Tapping Syndrome!

RSL spent some time today attempting to get wireless broadband working for a customer. They had recently upgraded from AOL Dial-up to Broadband Silver at just under £20 per month. The immediate benefit was having the internet always on and still being able to use the telephone. This is the first occasion that we have used AOL Broadband, never mind installing and configuring it. As usual AOL’s proprietary systems and software ensured this wouldn’t be a simple operation.

Before going along to the customer site, some simple research on the Internet revealed very little about AOL Broadband. No one seemed to know anything or were placing comments with a pre-amble of, “I assume ….”. After a little trial and error, and taking the help information available to AOL subscribers we managed to work out how to get “home networking” working with Broadband Silver,but with a major contraindication!

Simple!

Here it is, the big BUT ….

AOL Broadband Silver does not support home networking. This means AOL will not offer support for any set-up using broadband routers. It also means you can’t have two outgoing connections on the same AOL account. Their systems spot when you attempt to use more than one instance of AOL and disconnects the older one! Fix for this is to pay an additional five pounds per month for AOL Broadband Gold. This allows the creation of multiple screen names and solves the issue of connections from various computers.

We had a great deal of trouble getting the DLink wireless kit to work. After uninstalling network drivers and all versions of AOL from the laptop, the install went much simpler. The wireless networking was set-up and tested before reinstalling AOL 9. Allowed Windows XP to manage the wireless networking to ensure it connects without any user intervention and the option were defined to ensure best practice wireless security.

If you only want to spend £20 per month on your broadband then don’t chose AOL, chose an alternative provider who uses the standard internet protocols. It will make your life much simpler. Try to chose a provider with a one month termination contract, not the 12 month term of many of the big boys. Think about why they might want to lock you into their service for 12 months!

Job done.

First off, a big thank you to all the people who have been commenting on the eXtreme Wednesday postings. I appreciate that you take the time to look at my little piece of cyberspace.

Due to the Edinburgh Festical currently being in full swing, it was decided to move our venue for the duration of the festival to the bar in Ocean Terminal. Feel free to come along to our temporary venue if this is more convenient.

We were depleted in numbers this week due to a variety of reasons or should that be various excuses! Abdel has indeed used the “getting married” and “on honeymoon” excuse for not turning up, Colin Mackay finds it difficult to get across Edinburgh to the temporary venue and Brian Swan is enjoying the festivities going on throughout Edinburgh. Jon Mountjoy is an occasional visitor, so we don’t count him as being an absentee when he doesn’t turn up! Although we were few in number, it was a brilliant session for a number of reasons.

We decided that we’d had enough of attempting to write tests for GUI type code and would do something different this week. However, we still would be doing something for use within the project. To put it simply it was decided upon to code up a list manager. A typical use for it could be a “To Do” list and a “Done” list that has “Do” and “Undo” actions attached.

The “ListManager” class was built up through a number of refactorings. We started with the ability to add items to the “to do” list, moved on to build functionality that could select / deselect an item and evolved into an action to transfer from the “to do” list to the “done” list. At this stage we only had tests and code that could do single selections. A major refactoring later we had multiselection all working and a green Junit bar.

The lines of code count for the session ended at:

92 lines of test code

80 lines of “real” code

We had an interesting discussion on how to reference (index) items in a list such as the one being built. Do we just use the item value and avoid duplicates? Or do we handle the possiblity of duplicates? Or do we have a unique indentifier for each list item?

Next week see us trying to implement this with some form of GUI front end. Oh no! Back to the world of GUI testing…

Throughout the night, we had a few occasions to prompt Andy, whom was so immersed in the art of writing lines of code, that he had missed some of the higher level thinking that is part of the test and code writing process. The key point to this is that Test Driven Development (TDD) isn’t easy and even experienced people require the support offered to them through pair (or threesome) programming buddies. Our combined talents ensured we had a comprehensive list manager and test suite at the end of the evening.

One of the most interesting discussions was on the use of the term “Index”. It has commonly come to mean anything that has 0 (zero) or 1 (one) starting base. Andy pointed out that in purist forms:

But, Java arrays are zero based and Sun have decided that all parameters refer to in the documentation are referred to as “index”. Shouldn’t they have used offset there? Does this now mean we should use offset correctly when programming in a language that doesn’t following the correct definition? Well this is a difficult one for us perfectionists, but in this case it is better to follow the convention being used in the language and project, so “index” it is for us!

Many of us use notebook computers on a regular basis. The majority of notebook users are happy to use the predominant mouse technology - the touchpad. However, during the eXtreme Wednesday gathering we got talking about this technological marvel.

Some developers hate the fact that the touchpad seems to generate mouse clicks at random while tapping on the keypad. This has led to them favouring a normal mouse and then having to find a surface big enough for both the notebook and a space for the mouse to move about on.

But all this talk got me thinking about how most users are happy to use the tap-tap technique on the touchpad membrane. Are we storing up a new illness for tomorrow? Will we soon be seeing new court actions being taken against touchpad makers for sufferers of:

“Touchpad Tapping Syndrome”

This story was started in jest but maybe there will be some truth as we move into the future …

After initially becoming certified nearly a year ago, I would always state CSM as “Certified Scrum Master”, but within a few months I became aware of more experienced CSMs and ControlChaos, the definitive source of information on Scrum, stating it as “Certified ScrumMaster” - no spaces inbetween the Scrum and Master.

However, today I noticed a topic on one of the Scrum mailing lists that showed the community of CSMs, and more importantly the Gurus of Scrum, stating it in the spaced form. A quick search on Google revealed both spellings in existence in the wild.

Mike Cohn has informed me that the non-spaced version is the pure form. Or should that be the spaced version is the incorrect spelling?

This is now an interesting dilemna! To get maximum coverage on search engines both forms will need to be used judiciously… so here goes ….

John A Thomson - CSM - Certified Scrum Master - Certified ScrumMaster - Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife, Scotland, UK

… and oh yes, “for hire”!