I _Really_ Don't Know

Ward Cunningham has been using automated speech to monitor activity on his wiki...

I've been taking photos since I was little. I started with my Dad's camera and my first photo was a great holiday snap in which our family dog, Honey, takes centre-stage and my dad appears alongside her in full 70s kodacolor... less his head.

My technique has improved little since then, but with advent of cameras smarter than I am and, more recently, affordable digital SLRs my luck has changed a little. My camera allows me to take several hundred photos on a card, virtually cost free, So I'm now able to apply the monkeys & typewriters approach.

Busy times, child number three on the way, due at the end of next month; along with trying to buy and sell houses and work has been great fun. I want to blog about some of the technicalities of what we've been building, and will try to get around to that, but in the meantime we're talking about some of it at:

http://silkworm.talis.com

I had the great fortune of being reminded of Nizlopi today. I've got the album already, I've had a while and it's brilliant.

They're just releasing their first single and you must buy it! Why? because it's brilliant. A wonderful blend of sounds and memories; that's why the album's called "Half these songs are about you..."

I've been a Christian for 4 and-a-half years now; although my involvement with Christian friends and my interest in knowing more about God has been much longer. Well, today I became baptised; a very interesting and beneficial experience...

Well, I disappeared for a while. Things are very busy and very interesting at my place of work currently. We're running two projects with tight deadlines, both of which are now going quite nicely and we're trying to adopt more agile approaches.

A few of us are blogging on our experiences introducing new agile practices - as we go. Learning such lessons as... don't introduce refactoring until after you've introduced developer testing. Andy (colleague) is attempting to procure some lava lamps for the LLPDCA (Lava-Lamp Powered Developer Conscience Alerting) aka CruiseControl.

We had a retrospective today, just a small one post iteration. Sam Tunnicliffe (a very smart cookie, picking up .Net far faster than I did) suggested that this Agile approach, with its focus on communication, doing the next most important thing, relying on your team mates for pairing in order to write better code and checking in and our frequently doesn't gel with flexible working and home working.

I agree with him, but I find it interesting that the two companies I've worked for in an Agile way both have a strong focus on other "great place to work" concerns.

Building on the successes of larger complimentary and competitive organisations has to be a sound strategy. Leveraging other people?s investment to make money yourself has to be a good move. This is so often referred to as Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.

But what?s the best way to do that with software? The mental image of a normal person like you or I standing, one foot on each shoulder of some gargantuan Neanderthal, is evocative and illustrative, but can be interpreted too literally.

previously I wrote about The Hum of The Machine, an idea I'd like to see^H^H^Hhear much more of.

Seems PragDave has picked up on people doing it for real and even has it 'by default' on his Apple G5.

I've always kept comments switched off on my online ramblings due to the threat of abuse. Now, it appears, Six Apart (writers of Movable Type which powers my blog and TypePad, the hosted blog service) have introduced TypeKey. TypeKey is an online identity specifically designed for commenting on blogs and is integrated with Movable Type.

Great - now I just have to work out how to install it and how to edit all the comment templates to make them fruity.