Grouping "Friends" List on Facebook

One feature I especially like since the Facebook redesign is the ability to group your "Friends" list. If you have not noticed this feature yet, start by going to your "Friends" list. On the left side, click "Make a New List." Just as the instructions say, choose a name for your list, then hit the Enter key to save the name. You will be given a screen where you can type names or, even better, you can select multiple friends from a list of your entire Friends list.

Additionally, this feature allows you to do two other things I find helpful: 1) You can send a message to an entire group of friends and 2) You can select your group from the "Live Feed" on the dashboard. This allows you to get a quick update of information for a select group of people.

OpenCV on Fedora 8

Our team has just spent a bit of time configuring and running openCV on our Fedora 8 boxes. openCV is a very rich toolkit for applications that have computer vision requirements. After some bouncing around between various useful web sites with different installation processes, we assembled a complete set that works for us.

This install process includes the ffmpeg libraries, and takes you from a basic Fedora 8 box to running the facedetect example.

Install ffmpeg

Do this as root.

* yum install SDL-devel
* From ffmpeg, download a full checkout.
* tar xjf ffmpeg-checkout-snapshot.tar.bz2
* cd ffmpeg-checkout-2008-10-28 (or whatever release yours is)
* ./configure --enable-shared --enable-swscale --enable-gpl
* make (You'll have time to get coffee, maybe see a movie, while this runs.)
* make install
* echo "/usr/local/lib" >/etc/ld.so.conf.d/ffmpeg.conf
* ldconfig

Now, run ffplay and pass it the name of a local video file - flv, avi, whatever.

Install OpenCV

You're still root, yes?

* yum install gtk2-devel
* Download http://downloads.sourceforge.net/opencvlibrary/opencv-1.1pre1.tar.gz
* cd /tmp
* tar xzf opencv-1.1pre1.tar.gz
* cd /usr/local/include/
* mkdir ffmpeg
* cd ffmpeg
* find ../ -name "*.h" | xargs -n1 ln -s
* cd /tmp/opencv-1.1.0/
* ./configure --enable-apps --enable-shared --with-ffmpeg --with-gnu-ld --with-x --without-quicktime CXXFLAGS=-fno-strict-aliasing CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/ffmpeg CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/ffmpeg LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

You should see

...
Use gtk+ 2.x: yes
Use gthread: yes
...
Use ffmpeg: yes
...

* make
* make install

Now, to verify that everything's good.

facedetect

You can do this as an ordinary user in your home directory. You'll need an avi to use, in the place of /shared/public/videos/dove_hires.avi, but I'll leave it up to you to go find one.

* mkdir face
* cd face
* rsync -a /tmp/opencv-1.1.0/samples/c/ .
* g++ facedetect.c -o facedetect -I /usr/local/include/opencv/ -L /usr/local/lib/ -lm -lcv -lhighgui -lcvaux
* ./facedetect --cascade="/tmp/opencv-1.1.0/data/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml" /shared/public/videos/dove_hires.avi

You should see the video play, with facedetect drawing a red circle around anything it thinks is a face. Cool stuff!

Free Lean Software Development Course

Alan Shalloway (NetObjectives) is offering a free Lean Software Development Course starting Dec. 1. Here's some of the email that I saw posted on the XP-St. Louis list:

Lean-Thinking provides a framework from which to improve virtually any organization's software development process. While not a panacea, Lean provides clarity on what to look at and how to solve the problems that are often beyond other methods. For software development organizations, Lean provides several principles that provide guidance to Agile methods, particiularly Scrum. Lean will assist those organizations which have either had problems adopting Agile methods or those who have been successful at the team level and are now attempting to scale it to the Enterprise. See Alan Shalloway's blog Is Scrum Failing Us?  for some examples of the challenges Lean can give guidance to.

This Free on-line training is true training, including lectures, readings, exercises and question & answer periods. The intent of this training is:

• Provide the equivalent of a one-day Lean Software Development Overview course
  
• Promote Lean Software Development to many in the industry
  
• To improve the ability of participants to explain to their associates why Lean Software Development is useful
  
• Provide insights on how to scale Agile/Scrum to the enterprise
  

Session 1: Introduction to Lean Software Development

Session 2: Five Reasons for Agility

Session 3: Lean as a Guide for Agile Methods

Session 4: QA's role in Lean Agile Software Development

Session 5: How Business Analysts can help their teams

Session 6: Lean Anti-Patterns

Here's the link, if you're interested: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/NetObjectivesLeanOnlineTraining/ If you decide to take it, please let me know or post a comment here.

Adventures in testing (or user experience? or fraud?)

Let's hope that we don't have any job applicants from the Obama campaign anytime soon; their online work is a bit, shall we say, suspect. From Powerline blog, quoting a reader's experiment with Obama's web site:

I've read recent reports of the Obama campaign receiving donations from dubious names and foreign locales and it got me wondering: How is this possible?

I run a small Internet business and when I process credit cards I'm required to make sure the name on the card exactly matches the name of the customer making the purchase. Also, the purchaser's address must match that of the cardholders. If these don't match, then the payment isn't approved. Period. So how is it possible that the Obama campaign could receive donations from fictional people and places? Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the Obama campaign website and entered the following:

Name: John Galt
Address: 1957 Ayn Rand Lane
City: Galts Gulch
State: CO
Zip: 99999

Then I checked the box next to $15 and entered my actual credit card number and expiration date (it didn't ask for the 3-didgit code on the back of the card) and it took me to the next page and... "Your donation has been processed. Thank you for your generous gift."

This simply should not, and could not, happen in any business or any campaign that is honestly trying to vet it's donors. Also, I don't see how this could possibly happen without the collusion of the credit card companies. They simply wouldn't allow any business to process, potentially, hundreds of millions in credit card transactions where the name on the card doesn't match the purchasers name.

In short, with the system set up as it is by the Obama camp, an individual could donate unlimited amounts of money by simply making up fake names and addresses. And Obama is doing his best to facilitate this fraud. This is truly scandalous.

It would seem that the people running Obama's site either a) don't test their stuff very well, b) don't care much for user experience, c) intentionally engaged in fraud or d) all of the above. It's a lesson for all of us, whether we're programming web sites for high-profile political campaigns or simple apps for internal use. 

Oh, and the power of the blogosphere shows itself again: NRO's The Corner blog reports that the Obama camp, $600 million later, has fixed the problem.

For all your Kanban needs

Since at least two of our projects have dipped a figurative foot in the Kanban pool (aCe and kinda Mako and kinda MFKR), people who are interested in learning more (like me!) can join a Yahoo group for Kanban development, aptly titled "kanbandev."

Here are a few other Kanban links:

• Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards
  
• Kanban in action
  
• Worst to best in 9 months
• Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
  
• James Shore's Kanban overview

Cross-Location Teams: Stay Connected Via Co-Op

If you're anything like me, RSS feeds have significantly altered your reading habits.

So many options, so little time.

I skim, glance, peek, and ponder (alliteration, +2 blogging points) through countless options that are surface-level unique only through the negligible details.

Although the sophomoric tendencies of limiting my reading/downloading habits to items that immediately appeal to my interests is mindless at best, I've learned to appreciate 'simple' in addition to 'functionality'.

One such item I encountered over the weekend is the "Co-Op" web application.

Think Ace iteration planning...mixed with online to-do managers such as "Remember The Milk"...mixed with Twitter.



Co-Op is completely web-based, completely free, and completely simple. Yet, it encourages structure and organization across a group of people that are working tasks in parallel.

While morning stand-ups and the tight environments of a localized agile team can probably accomplish most of Co-Ops online features on its own, don't write off it's usefulness just yet.

As Asynchrony continues work in corporations with existing IT shops, off-site employees communicating with on-site employees is a growing concern. The need for a cross-location communication tool external to email is evident, and essential, to daily team performance.

Furthermore, although the Asynchrony sales team attempts to stay connected with daily standups, any number of individuals could be out of town or away from the office. And yet, there are proposals and projects that depend on the entire group.

Co-Op serves as a central meeting place for general team notes, important to-dos, and team member status updates. It's worth taking a brief look. I promise.

And yes, each team member can upload their own avatar.

Selenium tip of the day: assertXpathCount

For those of you (like me) learning some Selenium IDE commands, here's a tip that Ben showed me today: assertXpathCount. The other day, Abra and I were trying to assert that a certain column in a table contained the same value. Ben noted another way to specifically check the count of something in a page using assertXpathCount. So if I wanted to assert that Roger's name appears in a column (any cell with a particular class) three times, I'd use the assertXpathCount command and the following arguments:

• Target:

  //td[@class="presenter" and contains(text(),"Roger")]

• Value:

  3
  

Another published Asynchronite!

Some of you may have already heard: Shawn Sheldon is the latest Asynchronite to become a published author. Tate Publishing recently released his children's novel, Stranded, the first book of his Dragon Ship Series. From the site:

"That night was another restless one. Actually, it was the worst one of my life to that point. I knew I had better get some rest if I was to have any hope of managing the day that was coming for me the following morning. What kind of day you ask? Let’s review. Tomorrow I would need to secretly explore the Blue Goose site gathering intelligence information, lead my brother and sister and four other children in play, and rescue my dog Snowball—a pretty tall order for a twelve year old; I think anyone would have to agree! In Stranded, the first book in the all new series The Dragon Ship Series, written by Shawn Sheldon, follow a boy and his brother and sister on their unusual Christmas vacation. Their backyard adventure leads to both frightening and exciting encounters with intelligent dragons, Bigfoot, and ‘pet’ robots. A mystery begins to unravel as they discover that the common link involves an amazing space ship, hazardous waste, and even their own family history. Will they be smart enough and brave enough to meet the challenges they discover?

Congrats, Shawn! Bring your copy to the third floor, and he'll autograph it for you!

p.s. Yes, those are his kids on the book cover.

Customer tests breaking the build?

I was chatting with a team member about the possibility of his team moving toward ATDD (Acceptance-Test-Driven Development) in which they would write automated acceptance tests before development. He raised the concern that it would mean that they would be checking in tests that broke the build for unacceptably-long periods of time (a day or more). I turned to Brian Button and Ryan Tyer to see how they handle that. Their responses:

Brian: I ignore the ATs that aren't implemented yet so they don't show up as broken tests. (I mean ignore from a JUnit ignore point of view, not just ignoring by choosing not to look at their failures!) Once I start working on something, I unignore the tests.

The restriction on checking in code on broken tests goes for programmer tests, not customer tests. Customer tests go from ignored, to failing, to passing, and shouldn't ever regress.

Ryan: I'd add that with some testing frameworks (TestNG comes to mind) you can flag tests to ignore programatically (@Ignore if I remember correctly). These will not be run so they will not fail the build. You could have two suites of tests (all and all but ignored tests) for the frameworks that don't support this.

Brian: That idea is what I was talking about. In junit 3, you'd have to comment the test out or something, since it doesn't have a way to ignore tests. In Junit4, Nunit, Xunit.net, TestNg, you just mark the test as ignored.

In visual studio architect edition, team suite, or tester edition, you can use test lists to separate ignored ATs from those that should pass.

Google Chrome, Zimbra and you

I started using Google Chrome when it first came out but quickly reverted to Mozilla Firefox 3 because the advanced version of Zimbra didn't work on Chrome. When I polled the company about whether anyone else could get the two to work together, here's what I received:

"No. And it's really annoying. I believe they have some js in the page that looks for IE 6 or 7 and Firefox browsers and anything else gets the standard view."

"yes and no. I am using Chrome, but the Ajax version doesn't work. I am using it anyway, because I have run into issues with the Ajax version in Firefox."

"Last time I looked there were some issues with it and both google and zimbra were looking into it."

"I have been using Chrome for a while, and it always uses the standard version no matter what version you pick. I'm guessing here, but suspect that Zimbra doesn't recognize the browser so it doesn't understand whether or not it has AJAX support, so it launches the safest (standard) version no matter what you choose.

Another thing to note here is that Zimbra Standard has some things that don't work properly (and there are AI's already in ACE about them). For one thing you can't download e-mail attachments (it produces an invalid URL in the download link). For another, if you create a public calendar entry (i.e. "Out of Office") via Chrome, nobody else can see it but you. There are probably other limitations, but those are the only ones I've seen so far. Other than that Chrome & Zimbra seem to work together okay - albeit limited by what the HTML version can do."

"Elitist"

Finally-close your resources

You are a java programmer. Do you read from databases? Perhaps you write to files? If you aren't careful, you might be creating memory leaks and inadvertently leaving database connections open. Java is notorious for making simple things like file i/o complicated. Consider the try-catch block inside the finally block, which is necessary because the close() method throws an IOException; what is an application programmer supposed to do if the operating system won't allow him to close an open file? Witness the following code:

1 myFile.open();
2 contents = myFile.readContents();
3 myFile.close(); 

If an exception occurs while reading the file's contents on line 2, your program will skip over line 3 where the file is closed, as the exception interrupts normal execution flow and propagates up the stack, leaving the file ambiguously open. Fortunately, you can invoke this simple solution. Behold:

1 File file = new
File("/shared/home/richard.green/.bashrc");
2 BufferedReader reader = null;
try {
reader = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(file) );    
String line = reader.readLine();
// Deal with line
}
catch (IOException e){
// Deal with exception ...
}
finally {
try {
reader.close();
} catch (IOException e) { /* ignored */ }
} 

When execution leaves the try block (line 3), code inside the finally block (line 5) is executed under any circumstance. Therefore, in the above solution, if an exception occurs while reading the file's contents on line 3, the file will still be closed on line 5 before the exception propagates up the stack.

Frameworks like Commons IO from the Apache group ( http://commons/apache.org/io) take much of the pain out of dealing with Java I/O. Commons IO provides variety of utility classes which safely implement common I/O operations without dealing with the ugly Java Reader/Stream/Exception semantics.

Resource leaks due to exceptions are a problem in more-or-less every programming language. Each language has its own idioms for dealing with them. C++ coders wrap resources in their own classes and use the language's constructor-destructor semantics to allocate and de-allocate the resource. In Ruby, you use the IO::open method with a block; this automatically closes the resource when the block ends. Familiarize yourself with these idioms as part of learning a new language.

Coming soon: Selenium Grid

Coming soon to a project near you: The advantages of Selenium Grid. From the web site:

Selenium Grid transparently distribute [sic] your tests on multiple machines so that you can run your tests in parallel, cutting down the time required for running in-browser test suites. This will dramatically speeds up end-to-end web testing, giving you quick and accurate feedback you can rely on to improve your web application.

We've been using Grid for one of our customers and within the next few weeks will be setting up a hub for use in other projects. See Cornel, Dave M. or me for more details.

Agile2008 conference proceedings

The Agile2008 conference proceedings are now on the public drive at \Agile Conferences\Agile2008. You can find a lot of good presentations and material there. (The Agile Conferences directory also has Agile2006 and Starwest2007.)

Marcano on acceptance-test-driven development

When I met Antony Marcano, who runs the essential blog Testing Reflections, a year ago at STARWest in Anaheim, I immediately liked his views on agile testing. He published a very insightful article in Better Software this month on a topic that's been top-of-mind for me recently: Acceptance-Test-Driven Development (ATDD). I'll let him explain (emphases mine):

ATDD bridges the gap between an idea summarized in a user story and the implementation of that story. It helps elicit the detail behind the idea to make it better understood by both the customer with the idea and the cross-functional development team that will implement it. ...

Whenever we begin to discuss acceptance criteria, it’s safe to say the user story alone is not enough. To establish a shared understanding of a user story, the customer elaborates on the idea behind it by first outlining some acceptance criteria—often in terms of the new behaviors that the system will exhibit once the story is implemented. This is so that the team has a high-level view of the story’s real meaning. Programmers, testers, and the customer exchange examples of specific inputs and outputs that further clarify the scope of the user story. This results in refinements to existing acceptance criteria or additional criteria. During the iteration, programmers and testers work with the customer to draw out the detail required for them to expand outlined acceptance criteria into specific examples in the form of tests. From these tests, programmers infer the underlying rules that must be implemented. During this process, with the help of a variety of testing techniques, testers help to identify exception cases and reduce other example behaviors into equivalent cases. The result is a set of examples, expressed as automated acceptance tests. These tests are run and, since the feature isn’t implemented yet, they fail—as expected. For each of these automated acceptance tests, programmers implement enough of the software for the acceptance test to pass (ideally using TDD with unit tests). Once all the acceptance tests for a story pass, the story is done— almost.

(He goes on to note that the story's not "done" until exploratory testing -- another important practice -- happens.) It seems to me that ATDD goes a long way to solving many pains: knowing when "done" is, eliciting requirements, developing the right features first, etc.

Standups and communication

Communication is the first core value of XP. So how does your team communicate with each other? How well do you do it?

One way that our development teams communicate is via daily standup meetings. But what is a standup meeting, anyway? How about this definition: a self-organizing daily gathering to gain shared understanding of the state of our team, focus our day and remind ourselves that we're all in this together. As one comment on Ward Cunningham's wiki puts it, "Our aim is modest: to identify short-term obstacles. The agenda is minimalist: What does the day look like?" Some teams eschew standups because they’re not helpful; perhaps understanding the objectives can help you reshape your standup. How do you know if your standup meetings are effective? Here are some possible outcomes:

• Everyone knows what he or she is going to do -- and with whom -- as soon as the standup ends (rather than finding a pair partner or figuring out what to do after the meeting ends).
• Everyone understands where the team is on all the stories -- if an outsider were to ask you about any story, you could answer (rather than merely “the story I'm working on”).
• Everyone knows high-level problems facing the team for the day (rather than not knowing).
• Everyone has a sense of how complete the iteration is, and what needs to be done to "make it" (rather than being surprised on the last day).
• The team has decided to have breakout meetings to resolve specific problems (rather than try to solve bigger problems in the standup).
• Everyone knows what the team is pledging to accomplish for the day (rather than being unfocused).
  

If you're not accomplishing these, check out the standups article on Martin Fowler's site, which provides useful patterns and identifies "smells" for standups. Now for some best practices that we’ve seen around Asynchrony:

• Prompt start: The way a team starts its standup is indicative of the way the day will go; when everyone arrives on-time (or, heaven forbid, a minute early!) the meeting tends to have a snappier pace. Use a fun disincentive to cut down on lateness (e.g., tardy MFKR team members having to wear a PPE jumpsuit).
• Story-based: Rather than focusing on individual check-ins, the team talks about its progress in terms of stories. Facing the story posters on the board, the team talks about the unfinished stories in order of priority and how to complete them. The team can set a goal by determining which stories it will attempt to finish that day.
• Know what’s next: Before the standup meeting is over, know who your pair partner is (consult the pairing chart for help) and what task you’re going to work on, and go to it.

Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder

Wired Magazine has published an interview with a man about to stand trial for the murder of his separated wife. The article is written like a short story of sorts with bits of code dropped in for dramatic influence.

Strategic error doomed asynchrony.com

Nate just forwarded this email to a couple of us who've been around long enough to remember the revolutionary software incubator that was asynchrony.com:

From: "DevGalaxy Support"
Date: May 25, 2007 7:19:55 AM CDT
To: sales@asynchrony.com
Subject: Increased Odds "5 star award" from DevGalaxy.com

Hello,

Congratulations!

Due to the number of downloads that your product had from our users and based on our own review we decided to grant your product with the DevGalaxy "5 Stars Award". This means that "Increased Odds" is highly apreciated and already in the top of the searches.

You must be proud of this award and you should let all your users or potential users know about this by displaying it on your website, or on software boxes inside your product.

You can read more about your product's award on our website: http://www.devgalaxy.com/program-q-h-a-a-q.aspx.

For displaying your award use the following details:
Web site URL: http://www.devgalaxy.com/
Software URL: http://www.devgalaxy.com/program-q-h-a-a-q.aspx
Award Html Code:
========================


========================

If you have other software products that you want to get an evaluation for, feel free to request it by sending us an email at:
awards@devgalaxy.com


Best regards,
DevGalaxy.com Team
http://www.devgalaxy.com

I checked out the site -- a whopping 1068 downloads! And here we were spending all of our resources pushing PDA BombDefense. Man, we misjudged the market for lotto apps.

Rage in the Diebold Machine

Fortune Article "Rage in the Machine"

Why we never have to worry about job security while producing quality software.

Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.

First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.

Are flip-flops damaging your career?

I don't usually read or link to Reuters, but this story was so appropos (I just saw Dan) that I couldn't pass it up:

Style gurus warn that flip-flops, which are worn mainly by younger women, could be harmful to a career.

"Shoes convey the mood of a woman. Wearing flip-flops conveys the mood that you are relaxed and on vacation. That's not a good message in the office," said Meghan Cleary, a style commentator who wrote the book "The Perfect Fit: What Your Shoes Say About You."

Since when was feeling relaxed and on vacation not a good message in the office? Apparently, the writer didn't consult any studies on the correlation of companies' restrictive footwear policies and absenteeism... Come to Asynchrony, where every day is like a vacation!

Agile RSS feeds

I've put together a page with headlines from a wide variety of rss feeds on the topic of Agile development. You can find it here.