Garry Pilkington

Following on from the Summer of NHibernate, Stephen Bohlen is now treating us to an Autumn of Agile. The initial screen cast has been published, go check it out here :-

Now some of you out there know pressure when they experience it, but shed a thought for the NASA engineers fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. There has been a malfunction in the Science Data Formatter which is responsible for downloading data to Earth based stations, NASA want to switch over to the redundant unit which hasn't been used since pre-launch. Now if this doesn't go according to plan, then potentially the HST is useless. Add to that pressure because Atlantis is posed for launching to service the HST, albeit not this component therefore if it doesn't work that mission could be scrubbed. Then add to that more pressure as Atlantis is not able to get to the ISS in case of emergency, then Endeavour is also ready to launch as a rescue vehicle.

We are about to be audited here where I work. That is the IT department, not the company as a whole. As part of this we have to get all our IT documentation up to scratch. One problem being we don't know when they are coming and what exactly they are wanting to look at. So as far as we can see we have three areas of documentation:-

Following on from Justin Etheredge post about becoming a better developer, I would just like to add my nuggets of info.

This is a post that I had written a while back and never committed to it, I think it's because the title has the potential to kick up a storm. Well I have been reading the new http://stackoverflow.com web site for the past couple of hours (I know I should be doing some real work, but I would put it down to research). What a brilliant site, well done guys. Anyway the census I have come to is that re unit tests:

This is a very quick post outlining what you need to do to get NUnit results displayed in your CC.Net results window. There are two steps for this, step one; configure your NAnt build script to call NUnit and step two; get the results merged in CC.Net.

I love that phrase 'in the cloud' and am quite pleased that I have managed to get it into a post. If you are like me and use several different computers to go about your every day life you will know it is a pain making sure your notes and snippets of data are synchronised. Well go take a look at Evernote. It is both a standalone application and web site giving you the freedom to access your notes easily. It has built in functionality for Firefox and Outlook allowing you to either select text from a site and dump it in to a note, or copy the whole web page or e-mail. It is free for basic use, although you can pay for an upgrade in service (the basic package gives you 40meg of space per month cycle). So installing on all your machines will make sure your data is kept up to date and give you easy access.

A few weeks back I undertook a performance review (no don't worry, its an annual thing). In this review I was asked for my aspirations for the future within the company. My response was to be more agile. My manager initially looked at me as if I meant that I could bend over backwards and touch my nose with my left big toe. As I explained more and more about agile practices (and I am no way an expert, I am still learning about it myself), he became more and more interested, especially as I explained it is a good methodology for environments where there is constant change, which is definitely the organisation I am working in. I gave him a quick run down and demo of the Subversion and CC environment I have set up and explained the ideas behind TDD.