There are sand sculptures in Brighton apparently as part of a summer-long sand sculpture festival. I think we’ll have to head off down and take a look later in the week.
Update – found some better photos.
Kevan posted link to
Kevan posted a link to an interesting MSG article from the Observer If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?. This is interesting, because I didn’t know that headaches are claimed to be a common symptom of eating MSG. I do get headaches when I’ve eaten too much (whatever, too much is) but a recent work meal at Cosmos, Tunbridge Wells left me with a headache and a slightly drunk feeling – and I hadn’t drank anything other than lemonade and water.
From the article: “Some of the names MSG goes under are:
monopotassium glutamate, glutavene, glutacyl, glutamic acid, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates), Ajinomoto, Ac’cent, Gourmet Powder.”
I’ve spotted E621 on a few things recently, and wondered if that was MSG as well…
ve just booked us
I’ve just booked us tickets to see Stomp in Brighton in October. I booked the tickets online, and it took me 4 attempts to buy the damn things… and then they charged me £1.50 for booking over their “easy internet booking”. Worst online purchasing for a LONG time… Bah!
don really have anything
I don’t really have anything to add to yesterday’s explosions in London. Neither Richard nor I were anywhere near the city yesterday but instead were safe and well in Sussex. At work we had Radio 5 streaming through the internet and like Jonathan we watched slow-loading news pages arrive through our browsers whilst emailing/texting friends and relatives to ensure their safety. Another day that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
ve blogged before that
I’ve blogged before that I was supporting the London bid for the Olympics, so I’m amazed and delighted that London has won the 2012 olympics. How cool is that!
From del icio us
ve recently started listening
I’ve recently started listening to podcasts on my iPod Shuffle. I’ve been using iPodder to manage and download them, but the most recent version of iTunes manages them as well.
iPodder – is a separate application, but integrates with iTunes and creates a new playlist for each feed within iTunes. I can then just open up the playlist, and pick out the ones I want and move them onto the Shuffle.
iTunes – has a new option for podcasts, and has listed a lot on the music store. Subscribing is easy, and if you have a podcast you like but can’t find on the store, subscribing is as simple as copying the url into a browser window, and then dragging the url into the podcasts window (it took a while to work that out). iTunes doesn’t seem to put them into the main library, so instead I pick up the broadcast I want, and copy it onto the Shuffle.
For the moment, I’ll run with both and see which one works out better for me in the long run.
went along to the
I went along to the Brighton Bloggers meetup last night at the Earth and Stars (yum, organic bitter). There were some new faces, some familiar faces, and one face I hadn’t seen in a while. All in all a most pleasant evening.
This morning attended an
This morning I attended an agile development seminar in London hosted by Agitar Software and Exoftware and featuring Kent Beck and Mary Poppendieck. I’m pleased to say I’ve taken away some great ideas from all of the speakers.
Kent Beck concentrated on developer testing (a podcast from a previous talk can be found here and a webcast here). He has a great view on quality – quality is an instantaneous measure, it isn’t an ongoing measure. Instead he prefers the idea of the health of the software – how does it perform under stress and respond to changes in stress (increased load, increased usage, team changes, requirements change, business focus change etc). Going a stage further, if individuals within a team can’t respond to stress well, then their software won’t either.
Agitar demonstrated two of their tools – Agitator and Dashboard – both of which are very java focussed, but gave a few ideas to take away. One great quote was “Good QA people are devious – in a good way”.
Mary Poppendieck talked about lean software development. How lessons can be learnt from the comparison with the lean manufacturing processes introduced by companies like Toyota. She has 7 principles, and obviously explained those. I felt that she was a bit rushed, and didn’t really get enough time for her material. I’d be interested to hear/read more, so maybe I’ll take a look at her book at some point. I was particularly interested in hearing about one of the vicious circles relating to QA testing. So, the problem is that the QA team are overloaded with things to test, the result is that QA aren’t available to look at development code early, which results in development getting delayed feedback (and potentially making a problem worse), which results in there being more bugs introduced, which results in QA having more releases to test…
Exoftware talked about user stories, and it was interesting to see the detail they go to, the fact that they produce imaginer users for the various roles in the system, and role play to work out the requirements – this seemed like a great, and very simple idea. He pointed out that a good use story should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small and Testable (INVEST for those who like mnemonics). Some of their presentations are available online.
If you need to
If you need to know things about the world, such as the countries with most cardinals, or the richest countries, or … well there are quite a few things you might want to know… then have a look at Aneki. It’s a festering cesspool of advertising, but the information is there.