I think that to get a group to be agile, you have to get people to do something like one of these things:

1. Go in that room there and do all 12 XP practices until you actually do know better. (XP)
2. Go in that room there, don’t let anyone screw with you, work on whatever you think you can get done for a month. Keep doing that until everyone is happy. (Scrum)
3. Go in that room there, in peace love and understanding, ship software every month (*), and think about it. (Crystal Clear.)

There is a telling sameness to all of these, is there not? —> This is a wonderful summary of a summary! There’s not much to be removed (see Saint-Exupery, below). In Italian, the expresso of an espresso is called a "ristretto" (any Italians online?). This is the agile ristretto. It belongs on a Blog or something. "La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien a ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien a enlever." (Saint-Exupery)

How can software development productivity be increased? Through the same approaches used in operations: a focus on customer value, a short, effective supply chain, healthy discipline, and innovation. Mary will discuss techniques that businesses have used for decades to jump-start an increase productivity, and show how they can be used to increase software development productivity. pdf

I always enjoy reading his weblog.

DataVision is an Open Source reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports. Reports can be designed using a drag-and-drop GUI. They may be run, viewed, and printed from the application or exported as HTML, XML, PDF, LaTeX2e, DocBook, or tab- or comma-delimited text files. The output files produced by LaTeX2e and DocBook can in turn be used to produce PDF, text, HTML, PostScript, and more.

DataVision is written in Java and uses JRuby to add Ruby scripting.

Summertime .. so all we do is to ski-roller. High time for the snow to come back and cool it down a bit. I found that pic a long time ago on I have forgotten what website.

Been coding hard now on SW and CFaR. I would really need some good vodka now before getting up early tomorrow morning to catch the train.

Hope you all had a good weekend, -A.

This vodka bottle reminds me that I am way behind on Futurometer. We will kick ass there soonish!

 JR> Yes, those are the "certified" Linux releases, but Oracle versions prior to
 JR> 10g could be installed on other distros.  The screenshots seem to indicate
 JR> that the Installer now checks which Linux you're running, which leads me
 JR> back to the original question.

 I haven't tried it myself, but Wim Coekaerts once mentioned
 an "-ignoreSysPrereqs" installer option that would get you
 past that Linux distribution check.

Or suggested by DJ: edit the oraparam.ini file and edit the supported versions section.

Or: run

 runInstaller --help

and actually read it :-)

Welcome to the Open BEAGLE W3 page. Open BEAGLE is a C++ Evolutionary Computation (EC) framework. It provides an high-level software environment to do any kind of EC, with support for tree-based genetic programming, bit string and real-valued genetic algorithms, and evolution strategy.

The Open BEAGLE architecture follows strong principles of object oriented programming, where abstractions are represented by loosely coupled objects and where it is common and easy to reuse code. Open BEAGLE is designed to provide an EC environment that is generic, user friendly, portable, efficient, robust, elegant and free.

The Open BEAGLE code is compliant with the C++ ANSI/ISO 3 standard. It requires the Standard Template Library (STL). No specific call in the core libraries are made to the operating system nor to the hardware.

Make sure you also check out distributed BEAGLE. Distributed BEAGLE was created to distribute the evolutionary process using the EC framework Open BEAGLE. Its key features are robustness, fault tolerance, adaptability for heterogeneous networks, and transparency for the user. Distributed BEAGLE uses the Master-Slave model to distribute data over the network.

When doing an Open BEAGLE EC application, just 3 little modifications to your code are needed to enable Distributed BEAGLE. There's two types of program that can be executed by using different configuration files. The first one evolves the population over one generation by applying Darwinian selection and genetic operators. It usually runs on the same computer as the master. The second one evaluates the individuals's fitness. The slaves can be eventually used as screen savers.

The master is called DAGS for DAGS is an Agile Grid Scheduler. It is not specific for a given evolutionary algorithm. DAGS uses dynamic adjustment of the size of sets of individuals that are sent to the slaves based on the recent history of the evaluation clients. If an evaluation client lags to return results, the data is redistributed to another evaluation client. There's a database in the master that insures data persistency. link

The pics shows "history flow" from IBM research. Tons of other good links can be found in the c2-wiki.

Visualising is really interesting and up for a major change. I am totally sick of all these boring search-engines out there and yeah, grep -r is still my best friend. Another reason why I despise MS-Word, he, he and use LaTeX. It took me years to fall in love with that programming-language, which happens to be a word-processor, too.