• Mountain Goat Software - Selecting the Right Iteration Length for Your Software Development Process - Agile Development Training and Consulting
  "I find two-week iterations to be ideal. The overhead for planning and testing is much more manageable when amortized across two weeks. The first week of a two-week iteration may feel different from the second week, but the difference is not as dramatic a
  (tags: agile iterations software dev)
• Coding Horror: Dysfunctional Specifications
  "You have to strike some kind of balance between a one-page vision statement and an obsessively detailed five volume masterwork of a functional spec. "
  (tags: spec software dev functional documentation)
• A Set of Unit Testing Rules
  "Generally, unit tests are supposed to be small, they test a method or the interaction of a couple of methods. When you pull the database, sockets, or file system access into your unit tests, they aren’t really about those methods any more; they are abo
  (tags: agile dev software tests unittest)

Something was bothering me towards the end of 2006. I'd started receiving an awful lot of email which looked the same. It was something like this, with varying terms and percentages:

Hello dude

I don't care why your ramrod is so small, but 70% of women do.
They are pretty sure that bigger sausage will make their desire
stronger. You have the chance to change your life.

Now, I'm a sensitive guy and I respond poorly to criticism, so found this quite bothersome. From the tone of the email (sent to me by an altruistic stranger who I can only thank for bringing this to my attention) clearly a number of women have been talking about me behind my back and coming to what I feel were some unfair conclusions. I wanted to know more about what was going on here, so I started saving my spam in an attempt to determine some sort of pattern.

Two months and a 5-line Perl script later, a disturbing picture emerges. This graph plots the percentage of women who think I have a small ramrod, thing, prick, schlong or Johnson against the date emails were received alerting me to the fact:

What can I conclude from this?

1. There was a lot of what I gather is referred to in intelligence circles as "chatter" around my genitalia at the start of December. It was clearly a hot topic of discussion for women worldwide, and opinion swung back and forth wildly for about a week.
2. Something happened at 4:21 on Christmas day: women stopped talking about my old chap. Subliminal messages beamed to them worldwide during the Queens Speech? Distraction thanks to a Bond film? Too many mince pies?
3. Things were looking much better for me by the next time the issue was raised, on 12th January at 11:27am. During the intervening fortnight, 14% of women worldwide had decided that I met minimal physical standards for them. Ladies: I salute you.
4. 14% of women worldwide is 462 million women. Clearly, my powers of the communication with the opposite sex totally ROCK!
5. And on that note, my glass is half full: even at my lowest ebb, 10% of women worldwide still thought I was good enough for them. I platonically ruffle the hair of the 330m women who've stuck by me through thick and thin: thanks girls!

• Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials -- Smith and Pell 327 (7429): 1459 -- BMJ
  What is already known about this topic

  Parachutes are widely used to prevent death and major injury after gravitational challenge

  Parachute use is associated with adverse effects due to failure of the intervention and iatrogenic injury

  Studies of free

  
  
  (tags: amusing parachute)
  
  


• 
  
  Mobile Marketing Magazine: Orange and Voda to Share Networks
  
  
  Anyone out there whoe knows about radio planning for networks? Does this mean their coverage will be identical?
  
  
  
  (tags: orange vodafone network sharing)
  
  


• 
  
  James Hong: Understanding when Entrepreneurs step down as CEO
  
  
  "Most entrepreneurs not only suck at taking the company beyond that, they HATE having the responsibilities of running a growing organization too. Most entrepreneurs like things small, when they can have an idea and have it implented by the end of the day.
  
  
  (tags: biz)
  
  


• 
  
  Text to remind on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  
  
  (tags: reminder sms timeshifting ned)
  
  


• 
  
  AikiWeb Aikido Forums - Dobson and Arikawa Sensei
  
  
  "I can't really explain it, but he, I firmly believe, would have been someone I would have benefited from knowing in more depth - that I didn't had something to do, however, with his propinquity for burying his fist in your throat."
  
  
  (tags: arikawa aikido ma)
  
  

It's the day after LIFT finished, and I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Geneva, catching up with some work stuff and generally reflecting.

The conference has been fantastic. I think it's been the best conference I've ever attended; normally when I go to things like this, they're much more commercially biased: less thought-provoking and more sales pitch-y. With LIFT, there were 6 talks which I thought were absolutely excellent, and another 4 which were good. Normally I find 1 or 2 which enthuse me, so LIFT's strike rate is very high.

In particular I have to point to Jan-Christoph Zoels (who I was fortunate enough to get to chat to on the way to the Fondue), Adam Greenfield (who it was great to meet), Jan Chipchase and Fabien Girardin. If you get the chance to see any of these guys speak, I urge you to do so.

Other thoughts on the event? It was very metaphor-heavy; perhaps it's a consequence of the type of event I normally go to, or my lack of any formal design background, but I find it difficult to think in the softer terms that metaphor demands. Ben Cerveny's talk is still making my head spin (though I don't think this is an unusual reaction, judging from conversations with others): I'm not sure if I "get it" yet.

I also found there was a fair amount of the bleeding obvious and jargon in some of the talks I found less rewarding. I'm developing an aversion to the word "innovation" right now. It seems to be bandied around like the word "interactive" has been in the last 5-10 years: as something which is a priori A Good Thing, and is used to sprinkle magic pixie dust on otherwise bland ideas.

And I have to say that some of the talks - particularly the open stage ones and the panel discussions - got a bit salesy (though admittedly, some of the products being sold looked quite interesting); this generated ire on the backchannel and detracted from the exploratory feel of the event a little, I felt. That said, unless you're paying speakers to talk, I'm not sure how you avoid this. I know that if I was up there I'd be talking about some of the worthy stuff FP have been doing recently, but with one eye on how the company was being presented.

And on the subject of the backchannel... it was the first time I'd used one of these successfully during a conference, and a good and bad experience. It was interesting to chat to folks about what was being said whilst it was being said, but between IRC, blogging, and twitter, it was all definitely a distraction. Not necessarily an addiction (hey, I could stop any time!) mind...

But I don't want to end on a negative note. It was a fantastic event and I'm already looking forward to going again next year. Is there more stuff like this out there, anyone?

Something occurred to me in mid-conversation yesterday: have you ever been to a tech conference where the Wi-fi was well-spread, offered sufficient bandwidth, and worked solidly throughout the whole event?

Me neither. If we have such trouble doing it for a limited, tech-savvy audience in a limited area for a limited time, what does that suggest regarding the "Wi-fi is going to kill telcos" meme?