I’ve been mostly off-line for a couple of months: no blogs (reading or writing), no twitter, no open source (sorry, users), very little chat. That’s because Nat and I have been finishing up the copy editing of our book. We’re very much looking forward to it being done.

With that out of the way, I can start getting ready for Agile2009 in Chicago. I’ll be presenting two sessions on Wednesday:

• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests a tutorial/workshop based on material from the book. 09:00-12:30 in New Orleans.
• Test-Driven Development: Ten Years Later with Michael Feathers, an unscientific history of some of the things we’ve learned over the last ten years. 14:00-14:45 in Crystal B

I’ve already been making enquiries, so if you’re interested in getting together then please drop me a line.

B-persons has an inner day-and-night lasting 25-27 hours, whereas A-persons has one that runs through approximately 23 hours.

A B-person has a strive for staying awake untill late at night — for instance, to go to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. and then sleep a little longer in the morning.

If a B-person and an A-person goes to sleep at the same time, and rise at the same time early, the morning wil be experienced differently as the body-temperature of the A-person is higher than that of the B-person at this point. The B-person therefore has a very good reason for feeling drowsy, as it is still “night” (“time for sleep”) for the B-person.

15-25 percent of the population are B-persons, 10-15 percent are A-persons. The rest of the population are more or less either one or the other, or something in between.

I wonder whether there’s any bias amongst geeks towards being B-people?

The thing that really took up time was the effort to recover something from the disk. As John Cleese’s character said in the film Clockwise: the worst thing is hope, once that’s gone it’s not so bad.

Apple support has been good, once pushed, except that I can’t find a copy of the relevant version of Keynote to download. I might have to buy another copy, which is a bit rough. If I’d used Powerpoint, at least I’d be able to work with NeoOffice

And I’m so pleased I use IMAP for email.

Sign up before the end of the month to get the discount!

via Brian Foote

Another year to wait, then.

So, I finally scrambled up on the Ruby bandwagon and I’m intending to use it to demonstrate the benefits of scripting languages in an upcoming lecture. I’m developing the examples and gradually coming to terms with the corners of the syntax, when I find a showstopper.

I want to scrape a web page that includes tags that are not closed properly. All the Ruby HTML/XML parsers I can find fall over at this point. I’ve implemented the exercise in (gasp) Java, which is a worse tool (right?) but has fault-tolerant parsers available.

This has to be a really common scripting task, so I must be missing something. Can someone help me out?

P.S. and a Happy New Year.

We had a few changes to make on Monday, which we turned around within the day, and since then (touch wood) no show-stoppers. The changes have mainly been to do with discovering effects on downstream systems that we haven’t been able to spend enough time with. The really hard part about Enterprise Systems is finding the end in “end-to-end”.

We had to shed some ballast to make the date, but it works, is sufficient, is covered by unit and FIT tests, and we’re already working on enhancements. We got there without last-minute crises or desperate hacking.

Perhaps this XP stuff can get a bit dull sometimes…

The first session I went to was about how introverts and extroverts interact (badly) and how to mitigate that; of course, the IT industry is heavily biased towards introversion. It turns out that introverts and extroverts are actually wired differently in the brain, so it’s not just a matter of style. The very short version is that introverts prefer to sort things out in their head before speaking, whereas extroverts sort out their ideas by talking.

One of the better parts of the session was a pair of fishbowls where each side discussed in public their experience of interacting across the divide (of course, the extroverts interrupted more). What this made explicit was that the usual result of a conversation is that extroverts wonder if there’s anyone home since they don’t seem to get any feedback, whereas introverts want the extroverts to please shut up while they think things through. Also, extroverts tend to view interruptions as a sign of participation, whereas introverts view them as just rude. The possibilities for misunderstanding are endless.

During the initial discussion, I noticed that a lot of people talked in terms of their relationship with their spouse, so we took a show of hands and a good 3/4 of the group were hooked up with someone from the other side of the divide. This seems like a fundamental division to me.

My new company is Infelino which specializes in rss-based shopping via instant messaging.

via apophenia

• 2nd, Story testing with FIT, BCS SPA Event, London. With Mike Hill
• 18th, Responsibility-driven development, test-first. XP Day Benelux, Rotterdam
• 28th, Getting to know your customer, XP Day London. With Andy Pols
• 29th, Before Iteration Zero, XP Day London. With Nat Pryce
• 29th, Storytelling with FIT, XP Day London. With Mike Hill

So, right now I’m learning a lot about Apple’s Keynote software…

See you there.