My Life, My Universe, My Everything

This is just a thought I want to keep: Investigate differences and similarities of Test Driven Development and Formal Specification. There is also a history of executable specifications - does this mean “tests”? Not sure I mix up a few things right now but I think it is worth to consider it a bit further. Also, recently Microsoft Research publishes more about SpecSharp (Spec#).

I am an active Google Reader user and today I thought ‘What does the “Discover” button do?’. Rather than thinking about it for too long I just pressed the button and guess what, it discovered a few really interesting blogs based on my reading habits. There you go…

On Monday I changed departments. After three years of working with telecommunications and enter-/infotainment products I thought it is time to move on and learn something different. I will be working as an internal project management consultant. My first major job is to lead the introduction of agile software development in our organisation. I guess, I will post more about agile development in the future.

Despite using Gmail for my personal communication, I have to use Outlook at work. Mostly, I can deal with it pretty well but I still look for some extra productivity through some extra tool support. Today I read about Xobni, an outlook add-in that I will try once I have an invitation. The video on their home page looks promising.

On Saturday, I went to the store to finally buy a new external drive. For 150€ I got a 500GB Sungoo NASD. While being there, I also picked up the new cat in town - Mac OS 10.5 named Leopard.

Back home I installed the drive first. I connected it to my Mac and Win machines. All worked well and I was pretty satisfied.

Then I installed Leopard. About 1h later I had the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death”. Reboot - BSOD - Reboot … Search the Internet … I found out that some applications don’t seem to run under Leopard but I haven’t had installed any of them. Reboot - quickly before the BSOD I managed to start the install again. This time I didn’t upgrade but choose “Archive and Install” (note the little options button on the “Select the drive” screen).

1h later and I had a stable system again. Only my NASD disappeared - so I tried to reinstall the drivers - ok - set up the drive - it stalls. After searching the net again, I learned that the NASD software is from Ximeta and their drivers don’t work with Leopard. On their support website you learn that a new driver is planned for Q1/2008.

I’m a bit frustrated as I wanted to use the drive for the new Time Machine feature. I hope Ximeta will bring out the new driver sooner due to public demand.

Martin (a friend and colleague) invited me to join him to a couple of concerts. His taste of music is a bit different from mine so I was quite curious.

On July 30th we went to see Front Line Assembly in the Arena. Martin introduced them as “industrial” and it was. Frankly, I enjoyed it very much. We also met two nice people from Klagenfurt. The only downside of that evening was that the band finished after only one hour of play.

Last week (August 8th) we went to see Skinny Puppy in the WUK. The show was great and the band played a bit longer too though not long enough.

I had a good time and I look forward to more concerts in the future.

It took a while but recently I wrote a small column as part of an article by Jutta Eckstein published in the Cutter IT Journal. Jutta Eckstein looks at “Agile Development in the Face of Global Software Projects” and I wrote a short reflection on “Distributed Reviews, Retrospectives, and Planning in a global Agile team”. It is an experience report on how we adopted the agile methodology Scrum to work in our distributed environment.

Finally, I managed to put up new pictures

1. USA September 2006
2. Kenya May 2007

I’m sorry that I have not added any comments yet.

Enjoy

This is a Channel 4 program about the “real” Iraq which I found rather insightful. (Links broken - visit video.stumbleupon.com and search for “Iraq: The hidden story”)

Yesterday I tried to upgrade the site to WordPress 2.1.1 but I failed. I followed the upgrade to the letter but all I receive is a blank “upgrade.php”. Does anyone have experienced the same problem and found a solution for it? I won’t give up and I will post a comment once I managed to upgrade.

UPDATE: Apparently v2.1.1 has been compromised and it is recommended to upgrade to 2.1.2 quickly.