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We’ve just posted details of the next Scottish Developers mini-conference to be held in Edinburgh on the 3rd August 2006.
See HERE for the full details.
Scottish Developers and BCS Tayside are holding a joint seminar about AJAX on Thursday 4th May 2006, at 7pm. The speaker for the evening will be Gary Short.
An abstract and bio are available on both the BCS and SDWC websites. The venue will be Dundee University, Department of Applied Computing - again details and directions are available from either website.
This event is as always free and open to all. Hope to see some of you there.
Yesterday (31st March 2006) saw the formation of a completely new multi-disciplinary engineering institution: The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which has been formed by the getting together of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Incorporated Engineers. It is worth reiterating this is not a merger, but is the formation of a completely new institution, with all the possibilities that brings for improvements in member services. Over the coming months we’ll keep you updated on the local (South - East of Scotland), regional (Scotland), national (UK) and international ramifications and developments.
The IET website has just been launched for the benefit of members and the general public alike. One of the best resources we’ve discovered so far is IET.TV. The use of modern podcasting technologies is an extremely important innovative for the professional institutions. The joint BCS - IEE Turing Lecture of 2006 is a must see for anyone interested in accessibility and disability.
All technicians and engineers should checkout this new institutions and evaluate if it is worth joining. Remember that you get tax relief on subscriptions, so it doesn’t cost as much as you think!
A few weeks ago we presented a session on wireless networking security to the Institute of Electrical Engineers in Edinburgh. We thank everyone who turned up on the night to support the talk.
A pdf version of the presentation is now available. As part of our continuous improvement programme, and based on feedback from some members of the audience, we have added additional resources and refined the presentation that was delivered. You have our permission to print and use this document for personal, non-commercial use.
Last year we did a similar session for Lothian Radio Society. Sorry for not getting this presentation available earlier for the ham radio enthusiasts. We’re sure the additional content will be useful for your researches.
Feel free to contact the presenter. Details are at the end of the presentation.
p.s. A special mention to “atmosphere” - you really made the talk, ensuring the general point of it came sharply into focus.
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!
You may recall the card game of the 70’s and 80’s called “Trumps”. We played a version of it last night!
Abdel pulled out the Refactoring bible. I also have a copy, but mine has been signed by the man himself - Martin Fowler. John trumps Abdel. But Andy trumps John with a signed copy of Kent Beck’s White book.
Damn! Kent! Oh Kent! Would you mind …..
I see there is an online car version of this classic game.
NOTE: As always use the links at your own risk.
During this week’s eXtreme Wednesday get together we got into an analysis of pair programming, or more correctly how to be disciplined with TDD when you are a lone developer.
Without developing multiple personality disorder and having a pairing session with your alter ego, a possible solution was to explain the code to an inanimate object. Brian told us the story of a developer who would talk through the code with a rubber duck that sat on his monitor. Ducky, the pair programming buddy for all occasions!
By explaining the code, rather than just looking it over, the developer had to structure his thought processes as if he was informing a peer how everything worked. This process caught many more issues than a quick glance over the code could do alone.
Developer [to Duckie]: “What ya think?”
Duckie: “Are you serious? That quacks me up! Wait till you get my bill for this session!”
[Sorry folks but I couldn't resist it]
Usual weekly update on the activities of the eXtreme Wednesday Club. This week was going to be a short one due to other commitments, well it WAS until I started to write it up!
Mr Roundtrip was fashionably late, as usual one of the last to arrive. The group welcomed a new member Colin Mackay, aka “The Hard Rock Cafe” T-shirt man. Obviously he had been reading the blog entry from last week, and not wanting to have the same stood up look as Jon Mountjoy he describe himself in advance:
“I’ll be the one in the Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt standing at the bar. My colleagues comment on how I always wear these T-shirts!”
Which got me to thinking, I wonder if he has more than one? I guess so. So how many would you need…
One: not enough.
Two: danger of yesterday’s T-shirt not being dry yet after being washed.
Three: just right. One on the back, one in the wash and one drying.
I must ask him how many T-shirts it takes to work on a daily Hard Rock rotation.
The usual introduction done, we got talking about XP and TDD. Colin told us how his team were doing TDD, but on further examination we discovered they are infact only using NUnit for testing: they write the application code and then the tests. We agreed this was an excellent idea for development houses not doing it eXtreme. Better to have an efficient test suite that can be called upon at a moments notice, which can be run time and time again, than relying on developers doing “some form” of testing post-changes.
For those people who know Andy Swan the following tale may be hard reading. There are a number of things in Andy’s value system, on the minus column stands the notion of using Mock Objects in any code, anywhere, at anytime! I’ll need to para-phrase here, but statements Andy is likely to say about them may look something like:
“Most developers just use them as stubs. The Mock Object guys will tell you they are much more! But in most cases they are just stubs.”
“Its the lazy man’s way of doing TDD!”
“Mock objects are a code smell that something else is wrong with your design!”
Having not looked too much at mock objects I’m still undecided. However, Andy and Brian are usually pretty close to the mark. One of their mates, Rich (welcome to Rich), showed up a little later on. Did I hear Andy fumbly apologising for using mock graphic objects or did my ears deceive me? So how did we use them? I’ll try to describe this, but the lack of code on hand may well hamper my feeble attempts. Actually the code may not help me out here! Surely Andy will blog about it. Andy blog about it please!
We watched as Andy created a MockGraphic class that would track graphic (and text) objects drawn on the MindMap canvas e.g. drawing a central idea saw two objects being tracked: a circle (actually make that an arc in Java terms) and some text. The tests would then check that the MockGraphic log contained the expected details about the GUI element. Later on the mock graphic class and its tests can hopefully be replaced with real tests that will actually look at what is happening on the screen. Result, we had some tests for graphics.
Alas, our feelings of elation turned to dismay when it was discovered that resizing the frame resulted in multiple central ideas, but only when resizing the frame to be smaller. Strange! Suggestions flew fast and furious on how to adapt the code to fix this “feature”. I nearly wrote refactor instead of adapt, but it wasn’t refactoring, it was more like controlled hacking. We had a laugh about being nothing more than hacks! [Note to oneself: must remember to revisit the whole topic of XP coding and when it turns to hacking out lines of code]
After a few minutes we abandoned Andy and Rich to figure out the problem, latching onto Brian and his eXactor automated acceptance testing framework. When I say his, I do mean his! He and one other developer from exoftware are working on its development. Even although it is still “under development” it already looks to be very useful. We were all well impressed, especially Abdel who is currently looking for that one panacea that can see the whole concept of XP being adopted within his organisation. Perhaps he has found it. Only time will tell.
It was just about this time that Andy was starting to tidy the laptop away! Hold on one god, damn minute! “Did you get it fixed?”, was the call from me. Oh yeah of little faith, of course he and Rich had figured it out. The resizing problem had been due to using JComponent. Perhaps this is a problem with JComponent? They had replaced JComponent usage with JFrame (or was it something else - only a few hours and already the memories are fading). Kudos again to Andy and to Rich.
Laptops away, we got the chance to chill-out and relax. Talk turned to Agile books worth reading, which led onto a discussion on version control systems.
Rich gave us the low down on Perforce, which incidently has a two developer free license model. Let me see if I can get this correct:
“It is an atomic transactional VCS systems that allows developers to link to any version, blah, blah, blah!”
Go see their site, it is all there!
We had a wee discussion on how we should use the Wiki, since I don’t want to see it becoming a mess from day one. Abdel did try to impart the notion that this is what they are for, but I negated his line of argument by the following, simple statement:
“But we don’t want to see it just becoming ssspluuurp!”
[It was actually more of a morning after a good curry and a drinking session noise!]
Talk turned once again to one of our favourite blogs, The Bile Blog. Andy informed us of the advice Hani once gave on increasing traffic to your blog. It went something along the lines of take someone or something and take the exact opposite view to what ever the community thinks. Did I mention that we are really lucky to have Andy and Brian as our mentors. They just know so, so much :-).
We played a game of “trumps” but that’s another story for another posting…. see the next posting.
Abdel attempted to make a few exits over the course of the next hour, but our banter and joviality where just too much of a draw. Almost sure that I heard Abdel saying something along the lines of,
“I keep trying to get out, but they keep PULLING me back in!”
or was that Al Pacino in Godfather III?
Good job done, it was up to Mr Roundtrip to act as chaffeur for Abdel and Colin. Dumped Abdel off in the middle of Stockbridge. Wonder if we can try ejecting him while the car is still moving? This could make it interesting! Maybe we’ll let him get married before try it.
Colin and I then discussed how he had found the evening. Now he is a pretty smart guy, but even his head was hurting attempting to get to grips with the paradigm shift called “eXtreme Programming”. The first steps had been taken down the road to enlightenment and he seemed to have a new glow! We have a new convert my friends, long live the revolution!
This weeks lesson: Mock Objects do have a place and time.
Feel like your missing out? Like to come along? Come on you know you want to! We’d love to see more people coming along.
A few weeks ago Scottish Developers was heavily featured at the Microsoft MSDN/Technet Roadshow in Edinburgh. The two days were a completely new format for Microsoft UK - three tracks per day, focussing on different disciplines and technologies. They had a really nice post day one pizza and beer party until 7pm.
Come 7pm and Microsoft were kind enough to pay for a post event meal for the core members of Scottish Developers. You can see our very own John Thomson sitting back right.
Thank you Microsoft for an excellent few days, a brilliant evening and a fabulous meal.
Photographs courtesy of Barry Carr of Ixian Software.
There must be something in the air today! It would appear that the world has gone SPAM crazy - well that’s big news! You may already have read the Fife SPAMMERS story. Well I also had to do more I.T. policing this morning: I found myself having to delete a user from Scottish Developers only minutes after they had registered.
The individual represents a “company” who have in the past abused the terms and conditions, ignored request from the support team and generally been totally unprofessional in their SPAM like activities. We even gave them opportunities and options to get their product featured on Scottish Developers, but they didn’t seem to want to take us up. Perhaps their product is junk and would be found out under more intensive scrutiny of real world developers. Perhaps they don’t want developers to have a real review of the product. Perhaps … perhaps …
On this occasion they posted their usual advertisement onto the forums for it to be immediately removed before anyone could read it, the account was deleted, the IP address banned, the company name banned from being used as an account name in the future and a word censoring rule defined so their company name will be featured as #XOOPS#! But I doubt this will be enough. They will just find another computer with a different IP address, re-register and attempt to post the same advertisement again and again, all in the vain hope of reaching a few developers.
However, the team at Scottish Developers are vigilant and will continue to stop their immoral business practices.
