Posts

The DeveloperSummitwas a free one day conference (in Japanese) for developers held in Kobe, Japan. It is nice to see more of these events taking place in Kansai rather than just in Tokyo.

StackOverflow just rescued me again from yet another Microsoft problem. It seems if you try to install Visual Studio 2012 when you already have a Visual Studio 2010 installation then the 2010 installation gets broken.

Most of my colleagues don’t read books. They are software developers in desparate need of improving their skills yet they try to get by with muddling through with what they already know or relying on the boss to provide the information they need.

Finally got a Windows 7 PC at work. Installing the Microsoft Platform SDK kept on failing with a not too helpful error message. Installation of the “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7” product has reported the following error: Please refer to Samples\Setup\HTML\ConfigDetails.

I really like my Kinesis Ergo Elan keyboard which I bought about 12 years ago. It is old enough to have a 5-pin DIN connector with PS-2 adapter, which is now plugged into a PS-2 to USB converter.

Despite the fact that the study of Japanese companies by Nonaka and Takeuchi in their seminal paper “The new new product development game” is credited with giving the name to Scrum I don’t see a widespread adoption of agile methods for software development in Japan.

I often need to do some geometric calculations involving rotation of a vector about an axis. However, not often enough to have the matrices for the rotation to hand. The calculation is not particulary difficult and is described in many places, but last time I needed this I found a very good write up by Glenn Murray:

Why are the printing functions from most IDEs so bad? OK so I have not really compared the printing function in many IDEs, but the ones that I have used hardly offer any control over the printing at all and print in a large font.

The Hard Choices board game from the Software Engineering Institute is a game designed to teach the effect of technical debt in software development. Players choose between taking a shortcut or taking the “long way” and gathering more tools.

I have wanted to build a monitor for our Cruise Control build server ever since I heard about the use of lava lamps to report the build status. The “easy” way seems to be to use an X10 automation system but unfortunately I have not been able to find that for sale in Japan.