Mobile applications by the numbers

July 20, 2010
Here’s a breakdown of mobile applications; by market-share and price courtesy of Fast Company magazine:

Symbian dominates the mobile market followed by Blackberry event though Blackberry’s app-store launched 11 months after Apple’s app-store. The indicator here is that app-store sales are driven by the number of mobile devices sold.

Where do Symbian users buy applications? How many apps are downloaded from Google’s app-store?

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Demystifying the black art of the BBQ

July 8, 2010

When engineering meets the problem of building a better BBQ this is what you get:

http://bit.ly/cyNWZ7

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Which famous boss are you?

July 7, 2010

Take Bob Sutton’s test and find out http://bit.ly/9pPqny

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Posted by robertmacgregor

A streamlined way to log Cocoa events

June 21, 2010
Apple’s Cocoa framework logging uses a simple function call and omits fine-grained log-message classification like info and debug . Here’s a more object-oriented way to log events.

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Don’t trash that unsolicited resume

June 21, 2010
Before you consign that resume to your trash, think again. The person who sent their resume to you must have taken some time to select your company and email you. Maybe you can use the opportunity of an unsolicited resume to your advantage.

More …

http://bit.ly/bsk7T8

http://www.koyanainc.com/company/people/robert-macgregor/blog/donttrashthatun…

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Confessions of an Agile Project Manager

June 16, 2010
PMI’s Agile Community of Practice held a competition for ‘Confessions of an Agile project Manager’. Bill Baffy’s winning entry is entertaining and insightful as Bill describes his organization adoption of Scrum. More …

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Data networking – Back to basics

June 16, 2010
In our Modern Age of social networks and cloud computing it’s easy to forget that we rely on data networks. Twitter has been suffering severe outages recently and it’s interesting to note this extract from Mashable:

“What happened that caused this week’s Twitter issues, wrote engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti, is that the engineering team made three critical mistakes:

  • The team put two important, fast-growing, high-bandwith components on the same segment of Twitter’s internal network.
  • The network wasn’t being monitored the way it should have been.
  • The internal network was also temporarily misconfigured.

To ensure the same mistakes aren’t repeated, Cozzatti continued to outline what Twitter will be doing to fix the problem. He wrote that the company has doubled the capacity of its internal network, improved how it’s monitored and rebalanced its traffic.“

It’s always good to remember with advanced web applications correct configuration and monitoring of data networks is essential.

Robert

 MacGregor

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Posted by robertmacgregor

A gentle introduction to Mercurial source control management

June 13, 2010
I love Mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/) distributed source control management! Recently I found an entertaining tutorial describing why Subversion users should move to Mercurial and detailing usage scenarios and Mercurial commands:

The tutorial is written by Joel Spolsky from Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek have a product, named Kiln, built on top of Mercurial:

Kiln is similar to BitBucket (http://bitbucket.org/) with a more polished UI.

Now, if someone could write a similarly styled tutorial on Mercurial queue patch management ….. :-)

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Posted by robertmacgregor

Koyana – research activity added

June 12, 2010
During the course of a project we’ll have to break new ground and produce something innovative; a solution to a problem or provide a new product or service. All of our investigative work is focussed on application to real-world problems with a strong pragmatic approach.

I’ve added some our project work to our website to provide a showcase to what we work on. If you want more information any area of work please contact me at the email address below.

Basecamp is a very successful online task-management tool. Project data accumulates in Basecamp; how do you get your data out?

Software development is polarized over development methodology. Agile, lean, waterfall; which is best and when?

Millions of lines of code are written every day. Is there any underlying description of how our code behaves? How can we describe our code?  What constitutes a software pattern? What could make our code better?

I’ve added some our project work to our website to provide a showcase to what we work on. If you want more information any area of work please contact me at the email address below.

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Posted by robertmacgregor

The Mikado method – refactoring complex code

June 2, 2010
Refactoring code can be hard because of dependencies. Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund have written a useful article, ‘The Mikado Method’, describing a robust technique for refactoring complex code-bases.

I found Mikado appealing because it could be used in an agile environment. Here’s a quote that resonated:

“Instead, analyze the situation just about enough to decide on immediate actions that would resolve the errors. Draw those as dependent sub-goals, or prerequisites, in your newly created Mikado Graph. After creating that memento you must revert your (broken) changes. Then you try to implement each of the prerequisites in the same way.”

The article is published by Pragmatic Programmer in the PragPub magazine and you can find it here:

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Posted by robertmacgregor

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