Mozammel’s Blog

This entry is note to me so that I can come back to it later on when needed.

1. Download git from: http://git.or.cz/
2. Uncompress it and go to the uncompressed git directory.
3. run: sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
4. run: sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
5. run: make configure
6. run: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
7. run: make all doc
8. run: sudo make install install-doc
done!!

I am fond of O’Reilly books since my college days. I’ve found their books to be practical and to the point. Do you know that they host a site called O’Reilly Open Books? I was looking forward to buying this book: “Free as in Freedom” and I found that they host the full content at their open book site! I recommend this book to any new hacker out there, it is fun to read and you get to know lot of insights behind the opensource movement.

An excerpt from Chapter 06 of that book which reflects the values of extreme pair programming:

Guy Steele expresses similar admiration. Currently a research scientist for Sun Microsystems, he remembers Stallman primarily as a “brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code.” Although their personalities didn’t exactly mesh, Steele and Stallman collaborated long enough for Steele to get a glimpse of Stallman’s intense coding style. He recalls a notable episode in the late 1970s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor’s “pretty print” feature. Originally conceived by Steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted Emacs’ source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program’s WYSIWIG qualities. The feature was strategic enough to attract Stallman’s active interest, and it wasn’t long before Steele wrote that he and Stallman were planning an improved version. “We sat down one morning,” recalls Steele. “I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow,” says Steele. “He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type. The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. “My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time,” Steele recalls, “but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it.” The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. “My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life.”

I’m excited to see this recent thread at TheServerSide.com. It says that Jetty is showing strong growth. Looking back one year down the road, I’m glad that we made the decision of using Jetty for both running the openfire chat server and also running our middle tire server which is responsible for routing the chats and filtering access restrictions. Since the first deployment of our applications on Jetty, it is living happily ever after with Jetty. Being very light weight and having a small foot print, jetty has proven to be one of the stablest containers I’ve used so far.

It seems that Jetty has already become a strong contender in the market which was mainly focused around Tomcat.

At Therap our scrum meetings used to grow longer than our expected time frame of 15 minutes. It was working as a deterrent for the module owners and other participants to actively participate in the daily scrums efficiently. So, to tame ourselves from swiveling away from core scrum topics, we have recently started to time our scrum meetings. This nifty little tool is coming quite handy:

Scrum Timer

Now we focus on keeping the core scrum meeting short and if any other issues come up during our scrum meeting, we keep it in a list of ad hoc issues. After the scrum only interested members remain for the ad hoc meeting which goes for another 15 minutes or so. And yes, we time that meeting too.