Rizwan's Blog -Developer's hangout!

Guns n' Roses - Slash - Godfather Theme .mp3 Found at bee mp3 search engine

I just attended Test-Driven Development presentation which represents everything that is wrong about the way Agile advocates are trying to evangelize their practices.  I don’t have anything against the presenter in particular, but it’s really time for Agilists to rethink the way they communicate with the real world. Here are a few comments on his presentation. One of the first slides that deeply troubled me claimed the following: Tests are (executable) specs. If it’s not testable, it’s useless. First of all, tests are not specs.  Not even close.  Somebody in the audience was quick to give a counter-example to this absurd claim by using a numeric example ("how do you specify an exponentiation function with a test?") but my objection to this claim is much broader than that.  Relying on tests as a design specification is lazy and unprofessional because you are only testing a very small portion of the solution space of your application (and of course, your...

I made this earlier this afternoon.  I can’t wait to try it.  It smells heavenly. Pineapple Soufflé 1 stick butter, softened 1 cup white sugar 6 pieces of bread torn into pieces 4 eggs 20-oz can crushed pineapple, drained 1/4 cup brown sugar Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spray an 8 x 8 pan with cooking spray or coat with butter.  Cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer until smooth.  Add eggs one at a time and beat between additions.  Mix in torn bread and drained pineapple by hand.  Pour into prepared pan, sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake uncovered 45 minutes or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Let cool and serve at room temperature. Slow progress…

In my experience, there are many ways to use automation to assist people with work, and reduce the load needed, but ultimately we always need a human in the loop. Someone should be available to check that the calculation or the change in process is the correct one. Someone also has to be able deviate from what seems to be the rule for some process and override it. I've seen this in the past in a few places. Once where I worked with a chef trying to automate his ordering process. He was sure that he could input recipes, make guesses about usage, and then inventory constantly, adjusting his predictions and a well designed inventory system would calculate purchase orders for him. I don't know if his predictions were poor, or if the logic wasn't correct, but he didn't ever seem to have as good a hand on his inventory as he needed. I used that as a basis for a liquor inventory system when I was bartending, but took the "recommendations" from the system and adju...

 I will start with a question, if you have a spare £400 in your development budget do you A) Reward your star programmer with a £400 bonus or B) Buy him a 24 Inch 1920x1200 LCD screen? If you answered 'A' then you need to read on. If you answered 'B' then you understand what motivates programmers but I suggest you still read on and comment later if you have any ideas beyond what I cover. One of the things that they never teach non-programmer managers is how to motivate programmers. You may think the programmers are motivated by the same things as the rest of your staff, you are WRONG. Programmers tend to be counted within the higher IQ brackets and are therefore harder typically to second guess. The average programmer may be projecting an image of superiority but non-programmers miss-read this and think it is aimed at them. It is not. You have to understand that programmers rate themselves against other programmers not against anyone else. This is impor...

After reading a question on HN, I started thinking again about programming languages. Does it matter if you know one or plenty? Can you know 5 languages equally well? Or even well enough to claim that you actually know them?.. What's the actual difference? If we're talking just of statically-typed, object-oriented languages, there's not much difference. Only thing you should always be aware of, is memory management. If there's a garbage collector, you don't really care about pointers and disposing objects yourself. You also sacrifice part of performance and memory (not always true, for certain, since Garbage Collection most of time allows you to avoid memory fragmentation / segmentation, and you always get single slice of allocated data, and free memory for further allocations). Although, better understanding of heap and stack, pointers, values, passing messages comes from languages, where GC is not available by default. Hence, in c++ you still can use Boehm...

Ramadan   is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar , and the month in which the Qur'an was revealed. Ramadan is the holiest of months in the Islamic calendar. Fasting in the month of Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam . The month is spent by Muslims fasting during the daylight hours from dawn to sunset. The name came from the time before the Islamic calendar, when the month of Ramadan fell in the summer. Fasting during this month is often thought figuratively to burn away all sins. Muslims believe that the Qur'an was sent down to the lowest heaven during this month thus being prepared for gradual revelation by angel Gibril (Gabriel) to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him)told his followers that the gates of Heaven would be open all the month and the gates of Hell would be closed. The first day of the next month is spent in celebrations and is observed as the ‘Festival of Breaking Fast’ or `Eid ul-Fitr ...