New words

/

Went to a mandatory AGILE methodology meeting session currently being pushed by the client.  Personally I consider myself already sold on Agile methodologies, so feels somewhat that it was going to be a gigantic waste of time.  But it was mandatory, so to keep everyone happy, I went.

I went with a notebook, and just moments before the session, I had a brilliant idea of noting down any new words I'm about to learn that day:

spike-solution

We call it a deep-slice, but it's slightly different.  A spike solution is a focused technical effort to explore whether a technical design is actually possible or feasible.  In the particular Agile session it seems the spike solution is also a throw-away solution.  But I can see it being documented on a dev-wiki until it's used in implementation.

A spike-solution is good because it reduces risk - if an approach can not work, it is better to know early rather than later (say, after all the UI, database, etc have been designed).

re-engineering

It's like re-factoring, but not re-factoring.  It's re-engineering.  You can't engineer a business process, because it's business and not engineering.  But you can re-engineer a business process (I guess by applying engineering processes to a business procedure).

I consider this word a "rubbish word thrown-in to confuse people".

Silverlight 1.1: Feels very raw

/

I've been playing with Silverlight for perhaps 2 weeks now.  Evaluating it for a business application, here are some findings:

Silverlight 1.0

It's just fantastic that Microsoft actually got this out of the door.  Programming with Javascript is simple.  More a Flash app than a business app, but stable and rock solid. 

Silverlight 1.1 (now renamed to 2.0) Alpha

Programming with managed code is awesome.  Lack of standard controls really sticks out at you, everybody is writing their own versions of TextBox, DropDownList, etc etc.  No Cross-Domain web service calls is annoying too.  Writing XAML in Blend is a lot easier than in VS.NET even with the Silverlight tools installed.

Silverlight 2.0 Beta

Apparently this will be released in a few more weeks' time, before MIX 2008.  It's got everything.  More controls, better network stack.  All for under 5mb download.  Go-live licence.

I'm somewhat annoyed they won't allow sockets - I want to write a game :-(.

jliu

Good by fish :-(

/

I went home last night and Wifey told me we've lost another fish.  This is our second fish that we've lost since we've taken custody of the fish tank of a dear friend.

We never named the fish.  My logic was that if you name the fish you became emotionally attached to him a lot more.  Given that fish have much shorter life-spans than other pets, and are not likely to respond to name commands (unlike say a dog), there was no good reason to name the fish.

Still it was a bit sad to wrap the fish up in a piece of tissue and put him away.  The fish was drying up very quickly once it's out of the water and already I can see decay claiming it.

That was the 2nd of our small fish to go.  Now there's only the larger fish left in the tank.  I'm debating about whether to buy more but currently I'm settling on "no", I think when our friend comes back we'll return this tank, and then go ahead and get ourselves a bigger tank and we'll fill it with more fish.

jliu