How to broadcast your Google Reader ’starred items’ to an RSS feed or widget on your blog
This post explains how to share your Favorite (starred) items in Google Reader via either an RSS feed or as a widget on your blog.  This is something I am  interested in, as these weekly linkage posts are essential a summary of my starred items in Google Reader for that week.  Although not all my Friday Linkage links come form Google Reader but it would cover most of the interesting blog posts.

Playing in Traffic
David’s well titled post on generating traffic on your website in a classy manner e.g. not through buzz word bingo is well worth a read.  Especially if you are interested in increasing your traffic while retaining your credibility.  His portfolio of photographs is also well worth a browse.

Unit Testing: One Test, One Assertion – Why It Works
This post makes the case for one assertion per unit test.  As relative beginner to unit testing and as someone who tends to have multiple assertions per test I find this an interesting idea which I think I will need to try out.

The Psychology of Passive Barriers: Why Your Friends Don’t Save Money, Eat Healthier, or Clean Their Garages
Ever wondered why people don’t do things that are clearly beneficial for themselves?  This post discusses some of the Psychology of this phenomenon.  Although this is not specifically about software engineering, it is talking about an important aspect of user interaction: motivating/compelling the user to do something.

Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques
This article on Web Analytics discusses four commonly used measurement techniques: averages, percentages, ratios and compound metrics and how they can actually hinder your understanding of your progress against your goals unless they are applied with some thought.

Design Patterns

Design patterns are recyclable solutions to a software design problems and are an essential way to share design experience between designers without each designer having to discover the patterns themselves.  Patterns are not however concrete implementations of solutions like a library they are higher level design concepts and whose implementation should be customised to fit the needs of the situation e.g. if you were to use the same pattern a hunderd times you may well end up with a hunderd different implementations.

Anti-Patterns

Anti-patterns are the opposite of design patterns they describe negative patterns in software design, programming, project management, organisational behavior and other areas of development.  The main focus of anti-patterns is their detection and removal, not their implementation!  Most anti-patterns consist of an definition of symptoms and a guide to refactoring or otherwise removing or reforming the anti-pattern into something more positive.

The Bad Apples: Group Posion

Jeff Atwood discusses the surprisingly dramatic effect that a ‘bad apple’ workers can have on their teams chances of success.  The research his post is based on is quite eye opening, the potential effects of a ‘bad apple’ on a team are much more dramatic than I would have expected.  It is especially interesting to find out that the rest of the team starts to mimic the traits of the ‘bad apple’ after prolonged exposure, which makes an even stronger case for reforming or removing the ‘bad apple’ as soon as they are identified.

NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G is a free NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and some other operating systems.  It allows these operating systems to both read and write to NTFS hard drive partitions used by Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008  systems.

MacFUSE

MacFUSE extends Mac OS X’s native file system to be able to use third party file systems written on top of MacFUSE’s SDK.  Combined with the NTFS-3G driver this allows Mac OS X to finally be able to read and write to NTFS file partitions.  This means that NTFS can finally be used for boot camp and VM ware installations on Macs.

Failure as an indication of progress
This post features a great video about Honda’s Indycar racing experience and how they have an attitude that you have to fail to push the envelope.  This is something I can understand, as I recently started learning to ice skate to play ice hockey.  I noticed quickly that there are two schools of thought about falling: the first is that it is a bad shameful thing and the second is that it is necessary to find out where your limits are.  Without regular failures it is very hard to continue to improve, nothing focuses the mind like working out what went wrong.

Stop bouncing: tips for website success
This post is a great introduction to using the Google Analytics service to guide improvements to your website with the aim of helping to retain visitors to your website.  If you find the article useful I would highly recommend the authors personal Analytics blog ‘Occam’s Razor‘.

Patterns & principles help me sleep!
David’s post about the effects of truely understanding and using design patterns and principles as opposed to memorising them for buzz word bingo purposes.  As I am currently swatting up on design patterns in preparation to teaching a short course about them in two weeks, I found this post fairly encouraging.

Are you throwing away readers by posting at the wrong time?
An interesting post on when to time your blog posting, as someone who already schedules their posts to publish at a certain time (01:00 PST) I found this a quite interesting read and something I will need to think about when I schedule my posts more.

World of Warcraft is the new ‘third place’
It is very interesting to see a computer game being listed as a ‘third place‘, with over ten million players I guess it really is a global community now.

ASP.Net MVC: Release Candidate One
This week Microsoft released an official release candidate for their ASP.Net MVC framework.  Check out this blog post for a list of whats has changed.  ASP.Net MVC has been in beta for a while and I’ve been trying to wait patiently for a more concrete release before trying it out myself.  Mostly so that if I do like it and use it for a project that I then don’t have to do much rewriting if the API changes between beta and release.  So I will hopefully get some time to try this framework out in the next month.

Apanta Studio
Apanta Studio is a web development IDE which is completely free and based on the Eclipse platform.  I was inquiring about a decent php and python editor and had this package recommended to me so it is also on my ever expanding list of things to try out.  It also supports AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS and HTML editing so unless I end up deciding to write my sites in ASP.Net I will most likely be spending a lot of time getting to know this package.

Read the Diffs
Eric makes an interesting suggestion about reading the diffs of the changes your co-workers made the day before every morning.  This sounds like a good way of keeping up with what your co-workers are doing, helping improve code consistency and you may well learn something cool as well.

Can you cure copy & paste disease?
I think any experienced programmer has encountered the horror of a code base that has massive amounts of code copy & pasted around inside it.  Mass usage of copy and paste is generally a bad idea: especially if the person doing it does not fully understand what the code they are copying actually does.  This post discusses the idea of disabling or limiting the usage of copy & paste and if it would improve code quality which is an interesting idea.

Winston Churchill’s Daily Routine
I found this really interesting given all that Churchill achieved during his life to see his daily routine.  Being British he is one of our national heroes for leading the country through the dark years of the Second World War.  I wonder if the routine mentioned in this post covers the years during World War One and Two?

Mentoring Other Developers

Mentoring is something we do not see enough of in this industry especially compared to other industries e.g. tradesmen where new workers have to serve under a master tradesmen till they learn their craft.  I personally find one on one sessions very valuable to my personal growth but only if I am having a one on one with the best people available: why learn from anyone else other than a master?

The definition of Done is Badly Named

I’ve written about what done looks like before as it is something software engineers get wrong a lot: every witnessed an engineer claiming they are 99% done on a tasks for days?  This brief article points out that we should not consider done as a concrete definition but as a flexible concept that will change and grow over time: evolving as the scrum team does.

Advanced Segments and E-Commerce

This post on the official Google Analytics blog provides an good overview and introduction to the segmentation features that were recently added to the Analytics service.  It also demonstrates their capabilities to create custom segments to help analyse and understand your websites traffic patterns.

Google Webmaster Tools

This Google service that lets you register your domain and then view GoogleBot’s view of your site.  You can upload sitemaps too to help GoogleBot index all the pages on your site correctly.  You can also check out statistics for your domain like top search queries, crawl statistics and subscriber statistics too.  The service also diagnoses common problems detected by GoogleBot like broken links, HTTP errors, times outs and unreachable URLs.  Very useful for anyone running their own website.

Quick Security Checklist for Web Masters

Another post from a Google Blog this time from the Webmaster Central blog.  It is an old post but still useful as it provides a short checklist of basic security checks to preform for your website.

Open plan offices make workers sick

The results of this research is no real surprise, as putting lots of people is a room is a fairly efficient germ distribution mechanism.  Yet it is another useful bit of information in the great debate on open office work spaces versus individual/group offices for productivity and worker happiness.

Rands in Repose: A disclosure

I must admit to being a bit of a Rands fan: I read his blog and own a copy of his book (its even in my recommended reading list).  His latest post is about scaling as a manager to allow yourself to grow, he also talks about skills managers need and the transition from developer to manager.

Perforce: P4V

I’ve been a long time user of Perforce at work and I’ve always preferred the original P4Win client application to the newer P4V client.  But I’ve recently discovered that as of release 2008.2 that P4V now has the features that were in P4Win that I could not live without!  P4V has the added bonus of being less demanding on the Perforce server you are connecting to than P4Win.

Vancouver in the Fog

We had some seriousally thick fog in Vancouver over the last week, this amazing shot was taken from Cypress a nearby mountain.  This has serious desktop wallpaper potential!

Our new wire haired Dachshund puppies Isla (left) and Morag (right) on our sofa.

We received two wire haired Dachshund puppies from our breeder on Thursday evening and I have taken Friday and today (Monday) off work to help settle them into their new home.  I knew that two puppies were going to be a lot of work but I had still foolishly thought I’d be able to grab some time to write a post on Friday!

The good news is they are settling in now, with the last big adjustment to come tomorrow when they come to EA with me tomorrow.  Having the puppies at work with me should be great for their socialisation and also means they don’t have to be left at home alone all day.  I have a large dalmatian sized crate/cage under my desk at work for the pups: as there is two of them I thought I’d try the largest cage that would fit underneath my side desk.  The crate has three purposes: to help the pups feel more secure in their ‘den’, to prevent them wondering off (its a big building) and to keep them away from all the tasty wires under my desk.

As this post is kind of a replacement for the missing links post on Friday here are some dog related links:

Laponderosa Kennels

After much searching for breeders of standard (size) wire haired Dachshund breeders in British Columbia, we finally settle on Estelle E. Laponder as our breeder.  And eight weeks and two puppies later I would heartily recommend Estelle to anyone in BC that is looking for Standard Wire Haired Dachshund or Beagle puppies.  She has been helpful, patient and cares for all the dogs in her cares deeply for all the dogs in her care.

Who’s your Dachshund?

I stumbled across this blog when I was looking for advice about getting one puppy or two and they were helpful enough to give both email advice and write a post about it to involve the blog community!  This is an excellent blog if you are at all interested in Dachshunds.

Dog Listener – Jen Fennell

I stumbled across Jen’s book about her dog training technique know as “Amichien Bonding” over five years ago.  I did not own a dog at the time I bought the book: only two cats and a horse.   It was the forward by Monty Roberts that convinced me to buy the book.  For those of you who have not heard of Monty Roberts he is also know as the ‘Horse Whisperer’ and is a pioneer in humane horse training and handling.  As someone who has worked with and owned a horse I was already a big fan of Monty’s work, so when I read his forward in her book that he thought Jen was his K9 equivalent I had to buy her book.

]]> http://www.endlesslycurious.com/2009/01/26/alternative-linkage/feed/ 1 http://www.endlesslycurious.com/2009/01/16/friday-linkage-160109/ http://www.endlesslycurious.com/2009/01/16/friday-linkage-160109/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:00:44 +0000 Daniel http://www.endlesslycurious.com/?p=910 The web sites that I’ve found most interesting this week are:

Remember the Milk

In my continuing quest for a decent To-Do list application I have signed up for ‘Remember the Milk’ an online To-Do list service and so far it seems pretty decent a distinct improvement over Microsoft Outlook’s task management anyway but that is not particularly hard.  The fact this is an online service originally put me off, as I find some web applications clunky and slow but that worry proved unfounded.  It also has the added bonus of being available from any computer with a web browser and an internet connection, without any need to install anything.

Overnight Success: It Takes Years

Jeff Atwood (‘Coding Horror’) wrote an post I found very encouraging about how real success takes years and that the concept of an overnight success really is a bit of a myth.  It is encouraging to me as this blog is a very public project of mine and currently the readership is tiny but that is what I expect, slow growth in readers and if I stick at this then at some point in the future quicker growth.  I also think the concept of an overnight success is really a case of confusing when a project reaches a certain critical mass in terms of public awareness with the duration of a project’s development.  The results of the project suddenly becoming general knowledge produces a feeling that the project has come from no where (an unknown) to be a success overnight: this is very misleading as work has usually been going on for a long time before critical mass is achieved.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

This excellent little PC game merges stylised graphics,sophisticated physics, cunning problems and addictive game play to produce a puzzle game possibly as addictive as the original Bridge Builder game, which seemed to bring game development to a halt world wide upon release.  If you have a PC I’d highly recommend downloading the demo and giving this truely innovative puzzle game a try.

25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

The MITRE Corporation released this weak a list it has compiled of the twenty five most dangerous programming errors, the report is well worth a read by all programmers who are interested in self improvement. If you find the length and depth of the report off putting then Jeff Atwood has written an excellent  summary of the report which you can find here.

LastFM

A friend tipped me off about this site which is an excellent music site, the feature I have been using most is their excellent (in browser) streaming music player: simply sign up for an account (its free), enter the name of a favorite band and press play.  Then the site will match your favorite band to other bands in its extensive database and play you a mix based on its results the more music you play and rate the better the matches become.

What interesting sites have you discovered this week?

• Ten Killer WordPress Hacks
  I was surprised to find that this article was interesting enough that I intend to experiment with implementing some of the suggestions.  This is unusual as I usually find lists of essential addons or plugins or hacks for WordPress uninspiring to say the least.
• Fruitful Time
  This is a personal productivity profiler, which also has a fairly rich feature set although unfortunately is PC only.   I especially like the fact it can show you the sites you spent the most time looking at as well as the programs and files.  I am both interested and a little scared of the potential findings of this tool, although I think curiosity is going to win out in the end!
• Drop Box
  Personal remote storage would seem to come of age with this service: its multi-platform, free, has slick syncing and recover features.  Rands also likes it, which is enough for me to try it out.  I intend to try this for syncing personal files between work and home and also between Vista and MacOS on my iMac at home.
• Learn Objective C
  I’m thinking about doing some Mac development, so learning objective C and Cocoa would seem to be required to achieve this.  This Objective C tutorial looks fairly decent: both in terms of content and presentation.
• World Of Warcraft – Patch notes 3.08
  I’ve started dabbling with World of Warcraft again and after two years I find my self rolling a druid again (I used to play one in the UK), mostly to PvP with mates.  New patch notes means it is time for more entertaining theorycrafting, on which classes are being buffed (improved) or nerfed (diminished).

What web pages have you found most interesting this week?