Patterns

An interesting book: Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development

Googley things

Google Desktop Search is very nice and very fast. No more slow windows searches for me.

For some reason it makes me think of those Janet and John books...
"Bill looks at the computer.
The computer runs quickly.
See the computer run, Bill.
It is quick..."

However, I am not so sure about the GMail Drive shell extension. Is that allowed? When a company gives you something for free I think you should stick to the intended use.

It *is* rocket science

An interesting article on agile development being used at Lockheed Martin by a flight software development team. I liked the following line:
"Essentially, team members rely on traditional processes until they get in the way. They use the capability maturity model and concepts such as ISO, for example, but only as benchmarks for comparison and team process improvement."
In my experience it doesn't take very long before CMM and ISO start to get in the way of any project.

ASP.NET Resource kit

It's free, from Microsoft. Just like a free lunch, or free beer or something that doesn't cost anything...

Green energy

Keep eating the spinach, these sites have some more practical solar power panels...

Solar Panels and more and the Solar Trade Association.

Green boilers (which might come in other colours) and comparisons of boiler efficiency.

The Centre for Alternative Technology

Bristol and Somerset Energy Advice and The Energy Saving Trust

Comparing electricity suppliers

Java Server Faces

Java Server Faces

Spinach will save the world

Spinach powered solar cells. Hang on, it's not April is it?

Another XP practice

Everyone should be proficient at Extreme Unicycling.

Any browser

Web sites should be viewable with any browser.

End of message. Move along folks...

FIT test framework

FIT is a testing framework developed by Ward Cunningham. It's available in a variety of flavours including .NET.

Extreme Conferences

Two Extreme Conferences taking place in the UK:
XP Day 4 &
XP2005

Extreme Hour

Extreme Hour

Not to be confused with extremely late hour... zzzzz

Web design tools

Fagan Finders URLInfo is a very useful site for web designers. It provides access to a number of tools including language translation, HTML validation, spelling, and accessibility.

TDD

Test Driven Development website

FireTweaker

"Emilsoft FireTweaker XP is the ultimate extension to your Mozilla Firefox browser.With more than 30 tweaks, it will make your browser act just the way you want it to. "

Not sure if this will make it act just the way I want it to or just like Internet Explorer? At least some of the tweaks seem to make it act like IE. I'm not planning to try it out, as maybe it will make the security act like IE's. Ok, I'm joking, I'm sure it is worth tweaking...

Cactus

The Cactus website says:
"Cactus is a simple test framework for unit testing server-side java code (Servlets, EJBs, Tag Libs, Filters, ...)."

It doesn't look entirely simple yet...

XP for CIO's

CIO.com has an article on on How to build an Agile IT department. It all looks very corporate and official. I'm not sure what the XP practices for a CIO are. Something to research...

Get FireFox now!

Get FireFox

Wal's Retreat

Wal has finally succumbed to pressure and started blogging. I'm not sure what he is retreating from, but Wal's Retreat looks as though it will be a very fine blog indeed, and an excellent resource for any stalkers who have been trying to keep an eye on Wal.

Various links

Extreme Programming for One

DBUnit is Unit Testing for databases

A list of C# tools

An introduction to C# Express