Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Martijn Faassen (whom apparently started EuroPython years back) did the funniest lightning talk at this year’s EuroPython, promoting his new web framework Grok, built on Zope:

Talking to him, he seemed very passionate to reinvigorate Zope through Grok. I must say I think both Zope 3 and Grok are quantum leaps forward compared to Zope 2.x, and I’m sure they’ll pick up more developers over time. It’s going to take some time for me, though, who got pretty burnt by the Zope/ZODB combination, to give it another try again. And I don’t think I’ll ever trust a database that doesn’t explicitly enforce a schema; it’s just a recipe for maintenance hell.

This is of course pretty controversial stuff, and in all honesty, Arlo only has his own data and the feedback of 6 teams that tried it as supporting evidence that it works. Of the 6 teams, all had productivity boosts. 4 teams continued, 2 stopped. The reasons why they stopped was interesting, though: they liked specializations, and were happy with slightly less productivity.

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The final practice Arlo described was team-owned tasks. Avoiding assigning tasks to people is very important to encourage team responsibility, which leads to team accountability, which is a necessary requisite to building strong self-organizing teams.

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Another question they had was:

• Who should do which tasks?

The normal approach is to put the most qualified implementor on a task. Naturally, that should ensure the task got done faster and better, right? Well, just to see how it worked, they once tried the exact opposite: putting the least qualified implementor on a task. Again, what they found was astonishing.

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Arlo’s team wanted to be extreme, and they started with one of the XP practices, pair programming. Going extreme meant that they would pair program all the time. No code produced by a single person was allowed to be checked into the repository.

But, pair programming is also a pretty new and relatively undefined practice. There were still a lot of questions open, among them:

• How long should each pairing session last?

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Via Simon Willison’s blog, SlideShare has an impressive list of slideshows about web application scalability.

Enough is enough.

Say no to Microsoft OOXML becoming an ISO standard by signing this petition.

ODF is a completely free and perfectly viable format for such information. Despite Microsoft attempts at stating otherwise, it has already been proven to be able to store any information MS Office needs to store; there’s not even any reason for OOXML to exist. It’s such an obvious attempt at confusing the public; let’s show we’re not confused.

In early May 2007 something amazing happened. Hollywood’s most guarded secret, the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, was found and released on the Internet, via the site digg.com. At first Kevin Rose, the Digg founder, felt pressured by Hollywood lawyers to take down the key, but this made Digg users go completely ballistic, and in the end Kevin posted the code himself saying something to the sort of “this may be the end for us, but at least we went down fighting” (see original post). The key in hex, in case you wonder, is:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Even the iphone didn’t generate this much attention, the blogsphere was flooded with reactions from the two factions: “digg surrenders to mob” and “the truth will not be silenced”. I’m afraid I, with most techies and new media people, belong with the last group that thinks DRM is the Next Big Evil.

People went out of their way to spread the code, to the point of creating songs. The first song wasn’t really that good, but then Geoff Smith created a song called “Digg the Code” that Cali Lewis of the GeekBrief.tv podcast put video on…. What can I say, it’s awesome:

There are currently more occurences of this “secret code” on the net than there are HD-DVD players in the world.

I caught this very interesting announcement on the Django Developer group:

I like Django, and my unique experience having grown up in a fishing village should make the ideal candidate! If it wasn’t for the fact that I hate cod…

I wasn’t expecting to see Google go so far as to branch into seafood. No industry is safe anymore…

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In liu of a real fulltext search engine for Django, you may just want to use the same simple search engine that Django’s admin uses. Unfortunately it’s not readily reusable, so you’ll have to pull it out of the ChangeList.getqueryset in django.contrib.admin.views.main.