I think it's important to have structured feedback moments, and one of the most important and central tools I found to agile development (but it probably applies to all development) is using retrospectives (retros). In the company I work at, we do them after each code sprint, every two weeks.
In a good retro, you find about what is hurting your ability to work and define actions against those blocks. An easy to run retro which usually yields some useful results is the Mad/Sad/Glad retro:
Create a big area with three columns: what makes you mad, what makes you sad, what makes you glad. This can be on a big sheet of paper, a whiteboard, virtually (like Google Docs),... Every team member creates as many small notes as they want and put them on the right column. This is more useful if everyone has to think for themselves and is not influenced by others (eg: create post-its on yourself, then hang them in the right column), and/or if it's done anonymously (eg via some software tool). When everyone posted his/her things, every team member casts votes on what they want to discuss. You discuss the most voted-on items, and try to formulate one action for each to improve on it. You typically want SMART actions: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound - aka well-defined with a clear goal.
Retros should be time-boxed, there should be a neutral "facilitator", everyone should be able to participate, no-one should have to hold back his opinion. A few people who try to discuss for the sake of discussion can be a good thing if it's not overdone: try to use every technique to get people talking and spouting the unhappiness, acknowledge it, and fix it.
In the last few months, we've splitted our team, installed new tools, decided to start reading groups, and brought more candy, all out of retros.
Probably not installed by default on most OSes, but it should be! First thing I install on a new machine myself.
I (as student) once argued with our university IT staff that this was essential software for any self-respecting computer science lab, and they agreed and installed it on all machines.:)
Here is one: Leslie Hawthorn. She organizes Google's Summer Of Code, which has brought thousands of students (myself included) in an active role of participating in various open source projects. It's an absurdly hard task to coordinate thousands of students and mentors each year, to make sure all information, payments, shirts,... are sent out in time, to organize the mentor summit, and meanwhile try to solve all problems that come up underway. She does it extremely well and I think the open source community can't thank her enough. I honestly don't think there's much more you could do to influence open source.
I like this. Why not? It can be expected that web browsers use decent security practices, 3D drivers are already doing a fairly good job of providing a stable API via OpenGL, and everything is floating towards web browsers as new deployment platform, also for games and 3D applications. Better have an open 3D standard than a need of all sorts of plugins where everyone comes up with his own half-working solution. This is the indie game developer's wet dream coming true.
Of course, that's the best scenario. How it plays out in practice, we will have to see.
Genetic algorithms however have a very effective strategy against this: crossover. By keeping a large pool and combining entries from everywhere in the search space, it is hoped that one does not get stuck in local optima.
It's in this thing, but not in the Mona Lisa example though. I wonder why it doesn't get stuck in a local optimum, really. On the other hand, it needed a million generations, which is kind of much really.
Most of the documentation can be found on techbase. About usability, take a look on the project page and a specific example on label alignment. Of course, there are also the doxygen API docs.
I can't say it's as good or complete as MSDN, but don't forget we also have mailing lists and IRC to complement that.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert myself, I never made a KDE GUI. But I think that the fact that we have people who focus this alone means that we will make advancements in usability which will create a better "desktop experience", for users and developers. And their moms.
Definitely. I have attended part of a talk on Akademy about Human-Computer Interaction, and there are massive improvements made in usability. IIRC, for 2 years now, we've had summer of usability students looking at KDE to see where it can be improved. A series of usability guidelines was developed, along with the codebase to make it easier for developers to keep to them.
These are the things that don't get much attention, but really, KDE4 is constantly evaluated in terms of usability.
Interesting, except science once again gets in the way. We cannot even figure out whether a particular (5,2) Turing machine will ever end (see: non-computable function, busy beaver), let alone an extremely more complex program of a few kb.
It's hard to imagine the space of all computer programs, but it is big. Really, really big. And we have no way to explore a significant portion of it in a structured manner.
I'm not up to date on algorithms, so perhaps this isn't really tractable for large values of n.
Yeah, you could say that.
Believe me, if this ever gets tractable for large values of n, you won't need to be up to date on algorithms to hear about it.
It certainly seems like the distribution of the red dots is different from the others from a graphical impression.. But can someone remind me on what the correct statistical procedure is to 'determine fraud' here? Nonparametric ANOVA, comparing the groups? I mean, noting that the correlation coefficient is 0.9 doesn't really prove anything, does it...
I've had some statistics but I was never really good at it... I developed a radar for lousy statistics, though. Hard numbers please.
Sounds like the perfect job for an AI system to figure out. A Bayesian net or a hidden Markov model should be right up to this. Less complaining, more coding!
No. Color and state play very different roles. Colors ("symbols" are also used) decide the input and output strings that can be generated (the colors make up the alphabet), states are internal parts of the machine.
As such, you're using a different alphabet to write on your tape. Which means that the strings that will be accepted/rejected by one machine will definitely be different from those accepted by the other machine, and as such they are not equivalent. By definition, machines are equivalent if they decide the same language.
Hmm, let me be the 10%... Shit games? Have you played some of the 'classics' of the new wave of IFs? Things like Photopia, All Things Devours, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Metamorphoses, Shade or Vespers? Or whatever the latest IF competition is going to yield?
Seriously, these things are worth your time. Not as big and time-consuming as the old Infocom classics, I agree. But they do what they have to do (entertain you for a few hours) and the price is right. Damn better than most of the commercial games these days.
Sorry to be pedantic here, but there is no such thing as 'degree kelvin'. 10 degrees Celsius = 50 degrees Fahrenheit = 283.15 Kelvin. It's minor, but important to know in some circles.
We had C during our Computer Architecture classes. The fact that it translates easily into assembly and machine code can be a benefit.
One of the coolest things we did was to write an asm method, write a C program that uses it, compile them with -O0 and debugging info, and then link them together manually, load them in a debugger and see what exactly happens. Not something you should do in your everyday life, but a fantastic experience.
However, I agree that it's not a language to teach day-to-day programming with, or to start learning to program. There are a lot of better languages for that.
Spoilerish... (outdated version, though)
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/nethack/ways_to _die.html
Also, thinking about my own stuff, I especially liked 'killed by elementary chemistry'. Never add water to acid, people, always the other way around...
it was important that the machine stay powered on all the time, so it was designed to operate in a low-power mode that would turn off the fan when it was not being used to play games.
I always wondered... If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power? I've often hear people say that it's better to unplug your tv, stereo,... when not in use for 'longer periods' (say, the night) because even the smallest of control lights still uses power for no gain. Anyone who has ever done some tests with those power consumption meters? Anyone planning to do it for the Wii?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's important to have structured feedback moments, and one of the most important and central tools I found to agile development (but it probably applies to all development) is using retrospectives (retros). In the company I work at, we do them after each code sprint, every two weeks.
In a good retro, you find about what is hurting your ability to work and define actions against those blocks. An easy to run retro which usually yields some useful results is the Mad/Sad/Glad retro:
Create a big area with three columns: what makes you mad, what makes you sad, what makes you glad. This can be on a big sheet of paper, a whiteboard, virtually (like Google Docs), ... Every team member creates as many small notes as they want and put them on the right column. This is more useful if everyone has to think for themselves and is not influenced by others (eg: create post-its on yourself, then hang them in the right column), and/or if it's done anonymously (eg via some software tool). When everyone posted his/her things, every team member casts votes on what they want to discuss. You discuss the most voted-on items, and try to formulate one action for each to improve on it. You typically want SMART actions: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound - aka well-defined with a clear goal.
Retros should be time-boxed, there should be a neutral "facilitator", everyone should be able to participate, no-one should have to hold back his opinion. A few people who try to discuss for the sake of discussion can be a good thing if it's not overdone: try to use every technique to get people talking and spouting the unhappiness, acknowledge it, and fix it.
In the last few months, we've splitted our team, installed new tools, decided to start reading groups, and brought more candy, all out of retros.
Probably not installed by default on most OSes, but it should be! First thing I install on a new machine myself.
I (as student) once argued with our university IT staff that this was essential software for any self-respecting computer science lab, and they agreed and installed it on all machines. :)
Unless the wifi network is at a Starbucks, a university or a corporation.
That creepy guy sitting two tables from you at the coffee shop? He can now read your e-mail.
Here is one: Leslie Hawthorn. She organizes Google's Summer Of Code, which has brought thousands of students (myself included) in an active role of participating in various open source projects. It's an absurdly hard task to coordinate thousands of students and mentors each year, to make sure all information, payments, shirts, ... are sent out in time, to organize the mentor summit, and meanwhile try to solve all problems that come up underway. She does it extremely well and I think the open source community can't thank her enough. I honestly don't think there's much more you could do to influence open source.
Go Leslie!
And let us not forget this lovely bit from the interview.
Cue "this is why we don't have women around" debate in 3.. 2.. 1...
I like this. Why not? It can be expected that web browsers use decent security practices, 3D drivers are already doing a fairly good job of providing a stable API via OpenGL, and everything is floating towards web browsers as new deployment platform, also for games and 3D applications. Better have an open 3D standard than a need of all sorts of plugins where everyone comes up with his own half-working solution. This is the indie game developer's wet dream coming true.
Of course, that's the best scenario. How it plays out in practice, we will have to see.
I do the same, but just with mathematicians. I currently have Euler, Erdos and Lebesgue (which was an upgrade from Riemann :).
Genetic algorithms however have a very effective strategy against this: crossover. By keeping a large pool and combining entries from everywhere in the search space, it is hoped that one does not get stuck in local optima.
It's in this thing, but not in the Mona Lisa example though. I wonder why it doesn't get stuck in a local optimum, really. On the other hand, it needed a million generations, which is kind of much really.
Most of the documentation can be found on techbase. About usability, take a look on the project page and a specific example on label alignment. Of course, there are also the doxygen API docs.
I can't say it's as good or complete as MSDN, but don't forget we also have mailing lists and IRC to complement that.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert myself, I never made a KDE GUI. But I think that the fact that we have people who focus this alone means that we will make advancements in usability which will create a better "desktop experience", for users and developers. And their moms.
Definitely. I have attended part of a talk on Akademy about Human-Computer Interaction, and there are massive improvements made in usability. IIRC, for 2 years now, we've had summer of usability students looking at KDE to see where it can be improved. A series of usability guidelines was developed, along with the codebase to make it easier for developers to keep to them.
These are the things that don't get much attention, but really, KDE4 is constantly evaluated in terms of usability.
It's hard to imagine the space of all computer programs, but it is big. Really, really big. And we have no way to explore a significant portion of it in a structured manner.
It certainly seems like the distribution of the red dots is different from the others from a graphical impression.. But can someone remind me on what the correct statistical procedure is to 'determine fraud' here? Nonparametric ANOVA, comparing the groups? I mean, noting that the correlation coefficient is 0.9 doesn't really prove anything, does it...
I've had some statistics but I was never really good at it... I developed a radar for lousy statistics, though. Hard numbers please.
Sounds like the perfect job for an AI system to figure out. A Bayesian net or a hidden Markov model should be right up to this. Less complaining, more coding!
No. Color and state play very different roles. Colors ("symbols" are also used) decide the input and output strings that can be generated (the colors make up the alphabet), states are internal parts of the machine.
As such, you're using a different alphabet to write on your tape. Which means that the strings that will be accepted/rejected by one machine will definitely be different from those accepted by the other machine, and as such they are not equivalent. By definition, machines are equivalent if they decide the same language.
Hmm, let me be the 10%... Shit games? Have you played some of the 'classics' of the new wave of IFs? Things like Photopia, All Things Devours, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Metamorphoses, Shade or Vespers? Or whatever the latest IF competition is going to yield?
Seriously, these things are worth your time. Not as big and time-consuming as the old Infocom classics, I agree. But they do what they have to do (entertain you for a few hours) and the price is right. Damn better than most of the commercial games these days.
So... The demotion of Pluto has finally reached Jupiter?
Slashdot-tit reads BOOBIES!
Payment method: 1 $ on day one, 1/2 $ on day two, 1/3 $ on day three, ...
Sorry to be pedantic here, but there is no such thing as 'degree kelvin'. 10 degrees Celsius = 50 degrees Fahrenheit = 283.15 Kelvin. It's minor, but important to know in some circles.
Not exactly next-gen, but hey, there are people around DOING something about the lack of Ghostbuster games...
We had C during our Computer Architecture classes. The fact that it translates easily into assembly and machine code can be a benefit.
One of the coolest things we did was to write an asm method, write a C program that uses it, compile them with -O0 and debugging info, and then link them together manually, load them in a debugger and see what exactly happens. Not something you should do in your everyday life, but a fantastic experience.
However, I agree that it's not a language to teach day-to-day programming with, or to start learning to program. There are a lot of better languages for that.
Spoilerish... (outdated version, though) http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/nethack/ways_to _die.html
Also, thinking about my own stuff, I especially liked 'killed by elementary chemistry'. Never add water to acid, people, always the other way around...
I always wondered... If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power? I've often hear people say that it's better to unplug your tv, stereo, ... when not in use for 'longer periods' (say, the night) because even the smallest of control lights still uses power for no gain. Anyone who has ever done some tests with those power consumption meters? Anyone planning to do it for the Wii?