Code Kata : Analyze A Hard Drive

This isn't computer forensics; it's something much simpler.

A colleague has been struck down with a disease (or won the lottery) and won't be back to work any time soon. Worse, they did not use SVN to do daily check-ins. Their laptop has the latest and greatest. As well as …

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Agile Methods and "Total Cost"

Many folks ask about Agile project planning and total cost. As our internal project managers wrestle with this, there are a lot of questions.

Mostly these questions are rejections of incremental delivery ("All or Nothing") or rejections of flexibility ("Total Total Cost"). We'll look at these rejections in detail.

Traditional …

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Agile Project Management

Got this question recently.

"Any suggestions on PM tools that meet the following considerations

  1. Planning
  2. Estimating
  3. Tracking (allowing both PM input and developer input)
  4. Reporting
  5. Support both Agile and Waterfall projects
  6. Releases
  7. Bug fixes (probably just another type of backlog)"

Agile PM requires far less planning than you're used to …

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Code Kata : Parse USPS ZIP3 table

Situation

The USPS ZIP codes have a multi-part structure. The first three digits are a prefix that defines a sectional center facility.

The USPS table L005 3-Digit ZIP Code Prefix Groups—SCF Sortation maps clusters of ZIP3 prefixes to Facility and State codes. The following URL has this table.

http …

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Code Kata : Merge Changes

The Situation

A co-worker has mistakenly cloned a directory tree rather than link to it. Then they made some number of changes to files in that directory.

Your Job

Your job is to compute a directory-level difference between an official copy and the changes they made. Sadly, you can't trivially …

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Innovation and Outsourcing

Good stuff in ComputerWorld: Partnerships can Go Too Far.

"Consider vendor innovation. As companies become large and entrenched, they typically become more risk-averse and less creative, often rejecting ideas that challenge conventional wisdom."

This is really only half the story.

First Things First

Programming is hard -- really hard. Read EWD …

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Fedora 11 and Python 2.6

Date Tags #python

Upgraded a VM to Fedora 11 recently.

This -- it turns out -- comes with Python 2.6 installed.

It is, however, an incomplete build. To do anything, I had to install a some additional Python packages. Specifically, the "libraries and header files needed for Python development". Also, IIRC, the tkinter package …

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