Another Hume is a-blogging. My cousin Dan's recently ended a painful relationship, and has decided to write about his experiences online. I applaud this openness and I hope it brings him the catharsis he clearly needs.

• Why do release planning? "A release plan helps a team avoid finishing a series of sprints and feeling that, while they always worked on the highest priority items, the collection of work completed does not add up to a satisfying whole."
• Built to Learn: "No marketing team. No engineering team. You need a problem team and a solution team."
• I'm really enjoying reading Steve Blank at the moment, particularly his war stories of understanding the customers and building the marketing department of a US startup in the early 80s.
• Large-scale software engineering and kanban, touching on branching-by-feature, something we're gradually leaning (ho ho) towards at FP...
• Matt Wynne on automated acceptance testing: "prioritising the tests with the highest chance of failure seems to be the key here: The reason write automated tests is because we want rapid reliable feedback about any mistakes we’ve made. Fail fast has long been a motto of XP teams, but perhaps we’ve forgotten how it can relate to our build."
• The Fog Creek Professional Ladder; I plotted us on this, and was pleasantly surprised to see we have - broadly, but not exactly, and certainly more by luck than judgement so far - achieved a similar mapping.
• The Pomorodo Technique for personal time management. I tried this today, and will be continuing it throughout the week to see if it makes any difference. Nike+ proved to me that monitoring my own behaviour modifies it (for the better, in that case). Let's see...
• We tried baseball, and it didn't work. Heh.
• Five whys. NEVER USE THIS IN PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS.

• The Guardian runs a piece of iPhone apps, sensibly pointing out that not everyone developing apps is a millionaire just yet.
• That said, apps seems to be selling faster than songs did: "It took Apple more than two years to sell 1 billion songs on iTunes, so it's going to hit 1 billion apps about three times faster."
• Lovely if frightening piece on the Register about the mobile as self-inflicted surveillance: "There are already two documented cases in Europe where not carrying a mobile phone was considered one of the grounds for arrest"
• The panopticon ain't all bad, depending on who's doing the watching;
• Some fairly obvious video chat patents for the iPhone;
• US mobile carriers want fewer OSs, film at 11, though why any carrier wants to get involved with supplying "a unified development environment" to provide cross-device consistency is beyond me. Developer support is probably the one thing operators have been worse at than being media companies (with a few exceptions I won't go into now, so everyone I know at operators thinks I'm talking about them).
• Sulake are doing a mobile virtual world, and about time too.
• Nokia have launched the Ovi store, though please god don't let them use "location sensing and social networks" to start recommending applications.
• Android went priced, and about time too. We've had surprisingly high download figures for some simple Android apps - hmm, I need to write a piece about that....

• Twitter on Scala: "the production issues that led them to consider Scala in the first place, what issues they ran into using Scala in production, and how Scala affected their programming style". Disclaimer: I know *nothing* about Scala, though it sounds like enforcement of functional programming (and its effect wrt concurrency) was the big win here...
• Google App Engine got Java - wooo! Very exciting, I've been playing with this over the weekend and the tools look decent (though, ahem, my first real GAE project won't bloody deploy). I think this'll make a big difference to how we build and host server-side products long-term...
• Mock objects for threading tests;

• 10 graphic design paradoxes - though I can't see anything here which only applies to graphic design, all good stuff
• dominant UI metaphors and how we might escape them: "It seems a bit fatalistic, but I can’t think of a way that the entire desktop metaphor can be overhauled without either everyone in the world switching over at once (which won’t happen), or becoming a “data island” like the Newton or Classic Mac OS.". I've just read Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson, who's wonderfully annoyed at the universal adoption of UIs from Xerox PARC: more metaphors, now!
• Design considerations for touch UI