ddate

Due to my amazingly bad typing skills I discovered a new unix command today:

$ ddate
Today is Setting Orange, the 53rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3174

Google leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

Learn something new, although maybe not useful, every day.

The most important Agile tool

Having just completed a review of our latest release, a lot of the team complained about the lack of some of the tools and processes that we've become used to in recent times. These shortfalls were mainly due to the fact that we're integrating with a new team but it led me to think about which single tool I'd hate to be without.

The answer is Continuous Integration, we use CruiseControl by the way.

We get a lot of spin-offs for doing this, especially as we're a distributed team, the main one being an implicit communication tool, everyone is using it, so we can all see who's doing what. Other benefits are that we also using several build metrics, so I believe the quality level is kept high, which gives a much warmer feeling, especially when the pressure is on.

Which Agile tool or process would you hate to be without?

Ubuntu and me - the story so far

I've been using Ubuntu in quite a big way for the last 2-4 months and I thought I'd just write down a few points, good and bad.

Good

1. Speed - massive improvement over Windows for day to day use, especially wireless networking and boot up times. The only bad part is using Firefox to upload photos to flickr which seems to cripple firefox. I have now overcome this by using F-spot photo manager instead.
2. Viruses - not come across any yet!
3. VirtualBox - can be used when you really must have Windows
4. Really cool for a lot of development, especially having the command line so handy.
   

Bad

1. Suspend and Hibernate seem impossible to get working on either of my HP laptops and believe me, I've tried.
2. Can't seem to get the microphone working either.
3. I do miss Outlook
4. No Livemeeting which can be a pain in a mostly Microsoft company. But Yuuguu is cool for simple sharing.
   
5. Screen properties are a bit flakey.
6. I'd like to share a printer with other Windows machines on my LAN, but I've still to crack getting CUPS to do this for me.
   

Good Interweb customer service

After quite a long break over the Summer, I recently started to use my Phoenix flight sim again. Checking their site I noticed I was quite a few releases behind, so decided to download the updates and upgrade my installation.

Although the installs all went OK, the results were very disappointing, with dodgy shadows and very clunky slow graphics. As the latest release was Beta, I decided to send off an email to the support address, not really expecting much from what is surely a pretty niche product. To my pleasant surprise, I got an almost instant response, and after a fairly lengthly, but rapid, exchange of emails, my issues were resolved with an upgrade to my Nvidia drivers and also Directx.

Thanks guys!

Cedric's coding challenge

So, the latest little problem buzzing around is Cedric's coding challenge. I took Raghav's solution as a base, and just simplified it somewhat I think:

package com.bt.test;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

public class CedricCodingChallenge {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    CedricCodingChallenge codingChallenge = new CedricCodingChallenge();
    
    int max = 10000;

    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    List<String> list = codingChallenge.populateList(1, max);
    long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(list.toArray()));
    System.out.println(String.format("Size of list: %d", list.size()));
    System.out.println(String.format("Biggest jump: %d", 
      codingChallenge.getBiggestJump(list, max)));
    System.out.println(String.format("Total time: %d", endTime - startTime));
  }

  private List<String> populateList(int start, int end) {
    List<String> whiteList = new ArrayList<String>();
    for (int i = start; i < end; i++)
      whiteList.add(String.format("%d", i));

    for (int i = 0; i <= 9; i++)
      whiteList = removeDuplicatesFromWhiteList(whiteList, i);

    return whiteList;
  }

  private List<String> removeDuplicatesFromWhiteList(List<String> whiteList, int i) {
    List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>(whiteList.size());
    for (String item: whiteList) {
      String c = String.format("%d", i);
      int f = item.indexOf(c);
      if (f < 0) {
        result.add(item);
        continue;
      }
      int l = item.lastIndexOf(c);
      if (f == l) {
        result.add(item);
        continue;
      }
    }
    return result;
  }

  private int getBiggestJump(List<String> list, int max) {
    int result = 0;
    int last = 0;
    for (String item: list){
      int i = Integer.parseInt(item);
      int jump = i - last;
      if (jump > result)
        result = jump;
      last = i;
    }
    if ((max - last) > result)
      result = max - last;
    return result;
  }
}

My solution took 722ms.

Wimbledon

After 45 years on the planet, most of them living near enough to Wimbledon, I finally went to the tennis on Thursday after work. Certainly an experience I'm glad I made the effort for.

But what an effort it was! 90 minutes queuing for about 2 hours tennis on the outside courts.

Isn't Wimbledon just another "Ballet" or "Opera"? Seems like the Centre and No.1 courts are for the "haves" and the "have-nots" make do with the outside courts. The whole place if full of pompousness, loads of uniformed official telling you what you can and can't do and they even give you a "guide to queuing" to make it seems like it's all part of the experience.

Joan A

Just watching a bit of Glastonbury on the TV, I never realised that Joan Armatrading was such a cool guitar player. Also related, and in the news, it turns out that all those rumours about her and Valarie Singleton are just a pack of lies!