Ian On The Red Dot

Government can possibly better drive innovation with procurement instead of tax credits. Tax credits can be gamed with creative accounting. Tax credits guarantees nothing. Procurement does – you get a product that meets your needs plus that little innovative bit.

Technical innovation is useless without marketing, selling and collection of money.

It isn’t about selecting winners but deselecting losers.

Business models is where money is made. Technology is the enabler.

Turn a cost into a revenue.

There is a difference between using the “fb:share-button” (XFBML) tag for a Facebook Connect site and using Facebook Share.

When using the “fb:share-button” tag on a Facebook Connect site, it is important that the site takes into account the Facebook login status of the user. When using Facebook Share, it is not necessary. If the user is not logged in, the user will be prompted to log into Facebook before sharing can occur.

First result for the search ‘Newspaper Jargon’:

takeout

A longer story that takes a step back from daily, breaking news stories to put a running story with frequent developments into context and perspective.

slug

An internal name for a story, usually just one word. Elex might be the slug for a story on school elections.

scoop

As a noun, a story no one else has; as a verb, to do it to the competition.

These two links were invaluable:

Selenium and HTTPS:

Create a new Firefox profile (firefox.exe -profileManager). In this case the name of the new profile is selenium-https-profile.

java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate

Dealing with self-signed SSL certificates when running Selenium server with Firefox:

Delete everything in the directory except for the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files.

Xvfb:

In the X Window System, Xvfb or X virtual framebuffer is an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory, not showing any screen output. From the point of view of the client, it acts exactly like any other server, serving requests and sending events and errors as appropriate. However, no output is shown. This virtual server does not require the computer it is running on to even have a screen or any input device.

Running Selenium on a Solaris server so that can run Cucumber tests via Hudson daily after each successful build. The problem was Selenium + Firefox had no display to output to.

The solution was to use xvfb and output to it.

Varargs:

As a client, you should take advantage of them whenever the API offers them. Important uses in core APIs include reflection, message formatting, and the new printf facility. As an API designer, you should use them sparingly, only when the benefit is truly compelling. Generally speaking, you should not overload a varargs method, or it will be difficult for programmers to figure out which overloading gets called.

Object[] args versus Object... args

find com -type f -exec md5sum {} \; >> out.txt

Copy the out.txt file to the other directory.

md5sum -c out.txt | grep -v OK

The reason why this was needed:

SmartSVN failed on me. The working copy was shown to be the same as the trunk copy, and while the trunk copy showed it was at the latest revision, the working copy wasn’t. So the wrong file was deployed. The solution was to re-checkout the code after nuking the whole directory. Only then would SmartSVN show the latest trunk copy (and working copy).

Dan North introduces BDD:

Story Template:

As a [X]
I want [Y]
so that [Z]

Story Acceptance Template:

Given some initial context (the givens),
When an event occurs,
then ensure some outcomes.

The fragments of the scenario – the givens, event, and outcomes – are fine-grained enough to be represented directly in code. JBehave defines an object model that enables us to directly map the scenario fragments to Java classes.

Dan North on stories:

It has to be a description of a requirement and its business benefit, and a set of criteria by which we all agree that it is “done”. This is a more rigorous definition than in other agile methodologies, where it is variously described as a “promise of a conversation” or a “description of a feature”. (A BDD story can just as easily describe a non-functional requirement, as long as the work can be scoped, estimated and agreed on.)

Via Nadnut who decided to deck up as a hot nerdy teacher:

The Glycemic index (also glycaemic index) or GI is a measure of the effects of carbohydrates on blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates that break down rapidly during digestion releasing glucose rapidly into the bloodstream have a high GI; carbohydrates that break down slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the bloodstream, have a low GI. For most people, foods with a low GI have significant health benefits.

more at Wikipedia

Emma Goldman on Anarchism:

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

I don’t care if a man’s theory for tomorrow is correct. I care if his spirit of today is correct.

On Capitalism:

The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.