That is an excellent question!

Something to laugh about

Damian — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:05:27 +0000

If you are in need of some laughter, I highly recommend reading the MSF for Agile Software Development Process Guidance. It is comical!
Some of my favourites:

Project Managers estimate scenarios (stories?)
Project Manager breaks scenario into development tasks
Project Manager creates test tasks
A developer writes a test, then some code, only then does he/she bother to worry about the business rules!
Not recommended that developers be involved in testing
Of course you always write the test AFTER you have fixed the bug

Cool Threads

Damian — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:49:52 +0000

The first servers based on Sun's Cool Threads Technology have been released. For those interested, some ex-colleagues (and extremely clever and great guys) have written up some useful information:

Sun is giving companies the opportunity to try one of these servers for 60 days. Wish they would extend that to "people who just want to play"

Niagra

Damian — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:26:55 +0000

New chip from Sun sounds quite good Niagra.
8 cores, 4 threads per core. Wouldn't mind a couple of them for my mac!

RoR

Damian — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:01:49 +0000

As everyone is no doubt aware, there has been loads of hype about Ruby on Rails. A number of my ex-colleague got very excited about it some months ago. The hype however, IMO, was over the top, so much that it turned me off. I did have a look at it, but had made my mind up before hand that it was overhyped web-app rubbish!

'Tis a great day

Damian — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:44:20 +0000

Australia made the 2006 world cup and England lost to Pakistan in the cricket! Marvelous!

Infiniflow

Damian — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:01:46 +0000

Infiniflow by Paremus has finally been released. I have been wanting to get my hands on this product for about 9 months.
What is it? It is supposedly a next generation grid solution, moving beyond the traditional compute farm approach. It apparently has built in support for distributed workflows and dataflows and all in a Transactional environment. The underlying infrastructure is built on top of Jini, Blitz, Jxta etc.
Going through the install process now, hopefully it will live up to expectations.

TDD in the world of Grid Computing

Damian — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:54:30 +0000

Well it has been about seven months since my last post! I never have been much good at keeping up appearances.

A question i have been asked a lot over the past 9 months: How do you do TDD in the world of Grid Computing

Jini and JavaSpaces

Damian — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 10:44:55 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post on Grid Computing, I have been looking at and using JavaSpaces; I have not had so much fun with a technology in quite some time. I am currently trying to work out why I haven't used it sooner.

Grid Computing

Damian — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:16:50 +0000

For the past couple of months I have been working in an Investment Bank helping them to evaluate and choose a Grid computing solution for some of their strategic applications. It has been quite an interesting couple of months, we have seen grid products of all shapes and sizes.

So, what is a Grid? That is an excellent question! Unfortunately there is no one size fits all definition for what a Grid is, it has a slightly different meaning depending on who you talk to. In its most basic form, a Grid is just a batch scheduler with a bunch of compute resources. Not very exciting I know!

4th time lucky

Damian — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 18:56:03 +0000

Will it last for longer than a week? Doubt it!