OPML and Grazr!

I migrated the feed/rss/podcast list on the right side of the blog to use a neat new ajax widget (http://grazr.com) which is backed by an opml (aggregation of rss/links) file. Scroll down a bit and check it out!

I chose http://www.opmlmanager.com for my opml hosting. That allows me to store the raw opml on the web here: http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mpstx.opml. Then just point the Grazr widget generator at it, and wah la! An ajax opml/rss browser embedded in blogger blog.

Great Talk from Ken Schwaber - Father of Scrum

Check out this great talk from Ken Schwaber (father of scrum)

Some things I took away from the talk:

1. Concept of a 'Design dead product' -- that is to say the gradual cutting of code quality over time (to satisfy deadlines) which backs a a team into a corner of design debt and steadily slows achievable velocity per iteration/sprint.
2. "Scrum master also known as 'the prick'"
3. QA is apparently a great source of people who can be an effective scrum master -- because they know what a true 'done' is ...

I picked this up from reading Xavier Warzee's blog.


It looks like Google has speakers in regularly and publishes them as Google Tech Talks on Google Video. These are worth keeping an eye on if they can get speakers of this quality on a regular basis.

Scrum and XP from the trenches

90-page document on one person's experience implementing scrum/xp with 40 people -- what worked and what didn't.

http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf

Saccades and the like

Entry on new research regarding saccades, and more importantly a statistic on how often people blink (15 times a minute). Fifteen times a second seems like an excessive amount of times to pop-up a reminder to remind someone staring at a computer screen to blink. I wonder how I can do that effectively in http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/Blinky . . .


http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/index.php?p=407

Java - Infrequently asked questions

http://www.norvig.com/java-iaq.html