Martin Fowler has an article about Incremental migration. Just goes to show that by dividing problems into smaller increments you will get benefits in most situations. It is important to have the mindset to always look at how you can break a task into simpler parts. Not as easy always, but important.
I went on a trip with three mates to see the western part of Norway this summer. You know, where the fjords and the mountains are. On one of the ferries I came across a poster with the Viking Laws on it. The authenticity could probably be disputed, but they fit nicely into agile software development. Agile isn’t all that new I guess. 😉 Here they are:
Be brave and aggressive
Be prepared
Be a good merchant
Keep the camp in order
So now we can feel a bit rutheless and barbaric when trying to be agile. A good poster in any agile team’s room. 🙂
Ever since I upgraded to Firefox 3 I have been missing the good old Google browser sync extenstion for Firefox. Google decided to discontinue development of it, so there will never be a version that supports F3.
Enter Mozilla Weave. It basically does the same as Google Browser Sync, but is especially useful in F3 because of the search in history, bookmarks and bookmark tags. I can now usually get back to somewhere I have been through searching in the location bar.
Initially it worked just fine, but after the word spread their servers has had way too much load. This has resulted in syncs just hanging or in best case taking a loooong time. So after a little mess I started doing some research and found that you can configure your own weave server. All it takes is basically WebDAV and password protection.
With Dreamhost being my primary provider it was really easy. The following steps were taken:
That’s just about all it took and my syncs are againg working with a much better speed. Because of the loads they’re not taking on new users, so setting up your own server is also a way to test the extension for new users.
Update: The newest version of Weave tries to do some sort of bookmark/link exchange between users. This fails as it requires some kind of script on the server, which I naturally don’t have. It manifests itself as a warning on the lower bar, but can safely be ignored. To get completely rid of it, just create an empty file under api/share/get.php . It won’t enable the feature, but at least you get rid of the warnings.
