Vincent Massol writes (and presents) about his experiences using agile methods with offshore development.
I read through the presentation and I think he's dead right. I forwarded it to my boss and my boss's boss. Here's hoping they read it. On the one hand, I hope against hope that we won't actually end up offshoring. But if we're forced to it, I hope that we're smart enough to actually follow the guidelines that Agile gives us.
Well, that was easy. I'll use this new software for a bit and see how I like it. The interface is a good one, though. Very promising.
The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God.
So Google announced that they are going to start scanning the contents of some of the worlds' best libraries. It's just a beginning, but it's a good beginning.
Two unconnected thoughts:
- It would be really, really cool if Google decided to do high quality, graphical scans of the really important books. Take a look at what Octavo is doing. This is brilliant, and hugely important. Civilization's most important books should be available in their original format. But since not everyone has access to the Yale Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, they can have this instead. I know people who would say that this is simply not good enough, and that it can't possibly compare to holding the real, physical book in your hand. But an Octavo version gets 90% of the way there. And that's 90% closer to a Gutenberg Bible than 99.99% of us will ever be.
- Amazon is in the middle of their own book-scanning project. Someone said a couple of days ago that Amazon and Google would, of course, never collaborate on this kind of effort. I was forced to ask, "why not?" Google sells advertising on webpages. Amazon sells books. It would be in Amazon's interest to contribute their scanning efforts. The more books that are searchable, the more books people will buy. The Long Tail tells us so. It would be in Google's interest to make more search results webpages available no which to sell advertising. And the two companies already have a semi-friendly relationship — see A9, results provided by Google. [Aside I have yet to see any additional value in A9.]
Also, Scoble points to a great article trying to guess at Google's strategy over the next few years, and at what's going to happen when Google and Microsoft really throw down. (How can they not?) The best quote:
So what should Google do? Given Microsoft’s ferocity in the past, panic might be a productive first step.
Every time I read JoelOnSoftware, I am reminded what a brilliant writer this guy is. He's dead on about most things. Occasionally, he gets it spectacularly wrong, like here:
So tomorrow night I'm hosting Pub Quiz for the first time. (Jason, the regular m.c. is vacationing in Italy — I'll pause for a moment while we all quietly hate him.) can you think of any good questions to ask? I need to come up with about 40 new questions by lunchtime tomorrow.
It's funny — it was totally easy writing questions during the first two months we ran Trivia Night. But inventing new questions has started to get awfully hard lately. It's particularly difficult to ask questions that suit a wide range of ages and appeal to both guys and girls. If we're not careful, the questions all focus around geek trivia (80s cartoons, computers, sci-fi movies, indie rock, etc.). It was totally worth it that week that we asked the question about Strawberry Shortcake.
Got any more like that?
All my friends from Dawson are getting together for dinner at La Paz over the Christmas holdiay. We've done this for the past two years and it's been a blast. If you're going to be in Birmingham after Christmas and I somehow neglected to invite you — go add yourself to this evite. See you there!
Friday night I saw Blade Trinity. Now, in general, I will give a great deal of leeway to a comicbook movie. This one was directed by the guy who wrote the last two Blade movies, which were OK. So I went in hoping for the best. But this one was really awful. I'm almost sorry I saw it. The only thing that kept the movie from total failure was Ryan Reynolds. He was pretty much hilarious every time he was on screen. Most of his dialog was so much better than everyone else's that I wondered if he had just ad lib'd it.
On Saturday, I got some great news: Kirk and Pam are moving back to SB. They just bought a house on the mesa and they move in January 10th. They've been in Pacific Pallisades for about 2 years, but they've decided to open up a new business in this area, so they're coming home.
We went to dinner last night to celebrate their return. We ended up at Nu, the same restaurant where we had had their going away dinner two years ago. Great meal, lots of fun. Had some really great wine: Patz & Hall 2003 Durell Vinyard Chardonnay and Siduri 2001 Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir. Both recommended.
Today, I spent most of the afternoon putting together a website for Jason & Kim's wedding. I don't know what their hosting situation is yet, so there's nothing to see. In any case, it's all Kim's design work. I'm just implementing. But it's very simple and elegant. I think it works well. I did a website for another set of friends last summer (http://www.ianandsheena.com/). It's still up. This one I did design, mostly. These kinds of sites are pretty easy to do, and I'm happy to help out.
Tonight I may see Ocean's Twelve, which is likely no more socially redeeming than Blade, but at least is supposed to be entertaining. We'll see. Probably going to hang out with David and talk over tech another idea we've been brewing. I'll let you know if it goes anywhere.
We've been evaluating new development tool-suites at my day job. On Tuesday, I attended a demo of SourceForge Enterprise Edition from VA Software. Someday soon I'm probably going to post about our development toolsuite because we've put a great deal of effort into getting it right. So why are we switching? That's a Shakesperian tragedy in itself, but the short version is simply "politics."
So Neko Case and The Sadies pretty well rocked. Had a great time at the show. Fabulous performance on all counts. And Neko is just adorable. They concentrated on mostly new material. I just got The Tigers Have Spoken yesterday and haven't even listened to it yet, so I couldn't even tell the off-the-new-record songs from the acutally-new-new songs. And they didn't play a whole lot of tracks from Blacklisted, which is the only record I really know all that well. Though she did play "Outro with Bees," which I thought was an odd choice, but really beautiful.
The Sadies played an entire opening set by themselves before Neko came on stage, which was definitely worth hearing. Reminded me some of The Old 97s — not as good, but similar in style. Lots of two-part vocal harmony from the two brothers who are the frontmen. I do think I'll try to pick up some of their records — they appear to have quite a few.
We ended up going to dinner before the concert rather than after. Turned out to be a smart decision, since the concert ran much later that we were thinking (almost 1:00am, which was great — concerts that end at eleven are just lame). Minibar was as cool as promised. Excellent food. Every one of the meat dishes was just superb: venison, lamb, steak, all perfect. The interior was well done (with some caveats). Cool art on the walls (Margaret Keane). And the restaurant was packed with a reasonably hip crowd.
Really, the only serious downside was a totally incompetent bartender. The waiter kept pushing these noxious, fruity, drink specials. When we tried to order more complicated drinks the waiter claimed that they couldn't make them, though they clearly had the ingredients behind the bar. Frustrating. I ended up with a mediocre martini in once of those obnoxious stemless glasses (see here).
The other thing I would have changed was the lighting. Much of the overhead lighting was from 60s-style translucent white plastic globes, with blue light in them. It made everyone look cadaverous. If they had changed those lights to orange (the other color in the restaurant's palette) it would have been much better. Ah well, maybe someday I'll get to design my own place and I can fix all those problems.
Jonathan Nolen 
