Mozex is an extension which allows the user to use external programs for these actions:

• view page source
• edit content of textareas (possibly utilizing a spell-checker in the text editor)
• handle mailto, news, telnet and FTP links
• download files

link

• Both ssh or telnet into the same (remote) Unix machine and account.
• One enters screen, [space], vim, then the other enters screen -x.
• ctrl-d to exit screen)

I asked David Guembel, one of the fathers of the software to email me a short describtion:

 On an abstract level, the idea behind our ganymede system is simple: To make
 an application run under Wine (a free Win32-API layer and Windows
 executable loader), it is neccessary to know what parts of the Windows API
 are actually required by that particular piece of software. Software has a
 modular structure - in this context, a module is a Windows executable
 (.DLL, .EXE, .OCX etc.) - and every module provides (exports) certain
 functionality and requires (imports) functionality from other modules.
 Thus, ganymede internally creates a dependency graph of an application's
 binaries. This method is static and does not require anything but a fresh
 installation of the software to be analyzed.

 Before x-raying a Windows application, ganymede parses and stores an
 analysis of the soure code of one or more Wine versions. It automagically
 determines the implementation state of the APIs provided by Wine. During a
 software analysis, the functionality required by the Windows application is
 compared to what Wine provides, and missing or incomplete APIs are
 reported. By storing Wine versions and the dependency structure of the
 analyzed applications in a database, automatic or manual re-analysis with
 different Wine versions is possible. Via the API ganymede itself provides,
 the collected data is accessible in several ways. One application of that
 API is our tool named sysiphus, which uses ganymede and a GUI-based
 approach to semi-automatically determine the best possible Wine
 configuration while providing for the possibility to re-use already
 licensed Windows DLLs to fill the gaps Wine still leaves.

• Both ssh or telnet into the same (remote) Unix machine and account.
• One enters screen, then starts vim, then the other enters screen -x.
• ctrl-d to exit screen)

Linux Gazette article about screen

Are you a slacker? So am I. Do you browse the Web, read the news, and write email all day in stead of working? So do I. Does it make you feel miserable and apathetic? Do you tell yourself to stop browsing the fucking Web and get some bloody work done? Do you have absolutely no discipline? I know your pain.

But recent technological advancements have made it possible… There is a cure for your disease!

Years of slacking at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology have resulted in a brilliant 461-line Perl script (which includes 130 lines of comments for free!) that makes it all possible! Your productivity will dramatically increase!

Today, I present Lockout: The Self-imposed, Computer-aided Work Enforcer. This program will help you get some work done by not allowing you to browse the Web. It won’t allow you to do anything but work. It’s a miracle! Your colleagues will respect you, your Ph.D. adviser will compliment you, and your boss, if you have one, will probably not notice the difference! It’s amazing! Scroll down! Read more!

Get the program

"The Linux Incompatibility list is a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open drivers."

• Skolelinux is a network architecture tailored for use in schools.
• Skolelinux is designed to be easy and cheap to maintain.
• Skolelinux gives the students their own usernames, home directories and services.
• Skolelinux includes OpenOffice.org

 In years past, we have implemented some extremely complicated databases in
 Forth.  The first was done in the mid 1970's for the company Cybek in NJ,
 and it was used in some extremely complex applications.  FORTH, Inc. also
 did some very complex databases for other companies, one of which was still
 in use last time I checked, at www.calmuni.com.  That one was a
 2-dimensional database, with a huge bit matrix in the center used to
 calculate overlapping bonded indebtedness.  A few years ago my contact  there
 told me that a state agency had just spent several million $$ trying to
 replicate it using modern database tools, but the result was too large and
 too slow to be usable.

 In the late 1980's we added class-based techniques to it, which many people
 liked (although I personally preferred the earlier, simpler version).

 It's hard to describe the whole approach in a newsgroup post, though.  It
 certainly didn't resemble SQL!

 >>Which brings me to an excellent 'forthism' I once read in a
 >> newsletter.  It stated:
 >>
 >>     "You can do anything in Forth - but you must be prepared
 >>     to do it yourself."
 In a recent discussion in c.l.functional, about why popular languages
 are popular, I summarized the relationship between Lisp and Forth
 more-or-less as follows:
 "From the Lisper's perspective, every other language is a cute subset
 of lisp; whereas from the Forther's perspective, every other language
 is a cute extension of Forth."

  >>Here is a version of Forth that runs under Windows, written in Whitespace:
  >
  >>
  >>I can't get it to run.  Do you think my browser has clobbered the code?
  Hmmm. I did exactly as the web page[1] suggests: "What do you do? Simply
  print it out and delete the file, ready to type in at a later date.
  Nobody will know that your blank piece of paper is actually vital
  computer code!"  I sure hope that I didn't mistake my only copy of the
  source code for an ordinary blank page!

  Perhaps writing my Befunge[2] compiler in Malborge[3] and then making it
  to a Forth[4] compiler written in Whitespace[1] wasn't such a good idea...

 References:
 1 http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/
 2 http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Befunge/
 3 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=28147
 4 http://www.cbel.com/forth_programming_language/

This from a lean manufacturing consultant:

Find the simple path to what works and follow it, always looking for a simpler path.

Patrick D. Smith

(Source: XP-mailinglist; thoughtful post by Ken Schwaber) Scrum is purely a project/product management process that can be applied to software projects, hardware projects, marketing projects, and any mix of the above. It does not contain engineering practices or any specific work practices. It is instead a way to maximize the ROI of work.

People who use Scrum in software development environment often adopt one or more of the XP practices to improve the engineering practices of the develpment organization. Scrum calls for an increment of potentially shippable product functionality every iteration. This means a fully cleaned up, refactored, tested, documented ready to go increment. Many organizations are incapable of this. It is easy to bring in XP practices because they are excellent and both Scrum and XP are pretty radically agile.

Project managers using Scrum are called ScrumMasters to differentiate the type of work they do ... they facilitate, manage the process, and optimize the team's productivity. They don't tell the team what to do, nor do they set of pairs of programmers, or parse out user stories. During the iteration, the team is entirely self- organizing ... whether it is doing software development or anything else related to the increment of functionality they are building.

XP seems to focus on team productivity... doing something the right way and as productively as possible. Scrum does this some, but instead focuses more on doing the right thing, getting ROI from building the 20% of the functionality that is necessary to get the value and maybe not building the rest.

We've implemented Scrum without telling the customer, users, or stakeholders. We've done this in one day. We seduce them into iterative, incremental development where they collaborate with us on what to do next. XP seems to require a steeper implementation curve with less acceptance from the users and customers. Scrum can't keep the customers away.

Estimating is a subtle diffrence that points out the XP and Scrum dividing point. XP works hard to estimate very finely defined stories, and to measure and improve these estimates. Scrum keeps the requirements more broad, more in general user terms that are analyzed during the iteration. Estimating isn't as important. The team does what it can, and gets better and better at figuring out how much it can do each iteration as it learns each other, the business domain, and the technology - iteration by iteration. We care more about delivering business value that having defensible estimates, which become meaningless in a collaborative setting.

Scrum also has a formal methodology that lays out how to scale Scrum to any sort of project with any number of people in any number of locations ... all based on the optimized 7 person team. This is an important mangement requirement, but not so important to an engineering discipline like XP.

I feel we are blessed to have such compatible practices and processes to apply to our software engineering projects.

1) Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.

2) Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.

3) Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.

4) Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

When an organization wants more than the Agile process requires, it is easy to show the additional cost each iteration, and as the team builds credibility the customer/stakeholder(s) might be less inclined to want to spend money each iteration producing documentation.

So have some courage, tell your stakeholders that they can have it (whatever "it" is) if they want it and then make sure you follow up with giving them a good picture of the cost and value they get from "it". It’s their money - let them blow it if they want to. Let them slow the velocity by asking for non-code related items. All you can do is make it visible and help them down the path of figuring it out.

The sooner you start delivering some working code, the sooner you’ll have the credibility to address their real process issues. "It" will become less important the more iterations you deliver working tested code.

The hard part is getting code started, right? Maybe you can disguise the first few iterations as "prototyping" and use TDD as the process for your prototyping? :-)

 But anyway, when I last asked Kent what XP is, he said
 "XP is a community of software development practices based on
 values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage".
 That was about two or three years ago.

 I look forward to seeing the second edition as well.
 I'm sure it will be enlightening ...

 "Without test-first and refactoring, clients think
 they must assemble as many program requirements as
 they can afford to have written. This effort snarls
 all relative business priorities together, making
 Scope Control impossible. It obscures opportunities
 for simplification. Designing and implementing many
 features all at once is very hard, leading to our
 industry's reputation for very large failures. Putting
 tests in front of development's inner cycle permits an
 outer cycle of incremental feature growth. That
 relieves the Customer of the responsibility to predict
 the future and guess which complete set of features
 will maximize productivity."

.. Juergens answer:

 Nice description.
 Sometimes I try to explain that to non technical people
 with the following picture:

 If you have only one chance to get your wishes on a
 list, it is like Christmas for a child. You make sure
 you get every little wish on that list and hope for the best.

 If you are sure that you can get your wishes on the list
 at any time. You will just put the most important ones
 there which come to your mind easily.

Sabre Airline Solutions had many years of experience with its AirFlite Profit Manager, a big modeling and forecasting package that many airlines use to wring more income out of flight schedules. Even so, Release 8 of the software was four months late in 2000 after final system testing turned up 300 bugs. The first customer found 26 more bugs in the first three days of its acceptance testing, and subsequent joint testing by Sabre and the customer uncovered an additional 200 defects. www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,91646,00.html