You are reading about GNU Emacs, the GNU incarnation of the advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible editor Emacs. (The `G' in `GNU' is not silent.)

We call Emacs advanced because it can do much more than simple insertion and deletion of text. It can control subprocesses, indent programs automatically, show multiple files at once, and more. Emacs editing commands operate in terms of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages, as well as expressions and comments in various programming languages.

Self-documenting means that at any time you can use special commands, known as help commands, to find out what your options are, or to find out what any command does, or to find all the commands that pertain to a given topic. See Help.

Customizable means that you can easily alter the behavior of Emacs commands in simple ways. For instance, if you use a programming language in which comments start with ‘<**’ and end with ‘**>’, you can tell the Emacs comment manipulation commands to use those strings (see Comments). To take another example, you can rebind the basic cursor motion commands (up, down, left and right) to any keys on the keyboard that you find comfortable. See Customization.

Extensible means that you can go beyond simple customization and create entirely new commands. New commands are simply programs written in the Lisp language, which are run by Emacs's own Lisp interpreter. Existing commands can even be redefined in the middle of an editing session, without having to restart Emacs. Most of the editing commands in Emacs are written in Lisp; the few exceptions could have been written in Lisp but use C instead for efficiency. Writing an extension is programming, but non-programmers can use it afterwards. See Emacs Lisp Intro, if you want to learn Emacs Lisp programming.

This is a collection of productivity tools I’ve been developing since 2005. You’ll find that they address a number of different needs. Pick the one that seems to fit your mindset and your needs and give it a try for a couple of weeks.

Adobe reversed course on its Flash strategy after a recent round of layoffs and restructuring, concluding that HTML5 is the future of rich Internet content on mobile devices. Adobe now says it doesn’t intend to develop new mobile ports of its Flash player browser plugin, though existing implementations will continue to be maintained.

Adobe’s withdrawal from the mobile browser space means that HTML5 is now the path forward for developers who want to reach everyone and deliver an experience that works across all screens. The strengths and limitations of existing standards will now have significant implications for content creators who want to deliver video content on the post-flash Web.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.”

I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules.

Think back to the last time you were in a crowded airport or bus terminal far from home. Did you consider that the person sitting next to you probably knew a friend of a friend of a friend of yours? In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” famously tested the idea that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections, arguably the first experimental study to reveal the surprising structure of social networks.

Rich Hickey's second, "philosophical" talk at the first Clojure Conj, in Durham, North Carolina on October 23rd, 2010. Many thanks to Matt Courtney, who graciously provided the equipment and expertise that made this recording possible.

Last year, NPR put together a serial on the mobile-office revolution. The second of the three-part series was titled “The End of 9-to-5,” a profile of workplaces that had adopted what’s called a Results-Only Work Environment—or ROWE—which “gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done.” Employees worked from their kitchen tables at midnight; they telecommuted from coffee shops; and they could manage their work lives to fit in with the daily routines of school drop-off and cooking dinner.

Is there a workers’ paradise on the horizon for the cubicle dwellers of the world, or is it just another utopian vision that will join the cubicle and other office innovations as the object of ridicule in Dilbert cartoons and derision by those on the receiving end of ROWE’s good intentions? Is the mobile office one of those rare free lunches that boost productivity and let employees lead happier lives?

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. It reminds me of the story about a man who comes across a drunk standing under a street lamp at night time, staring at the floor. The drunk says he’s looking for his lost keys, and the man says: well they are obviously not here under the lamp or we would see them. No, replies the drunk, I dropped them over there, but it’s dark over there so I decided to search over here instead.

As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video.

Recently clients have asked about the phenomenally successful casual computer game Angry Birds, designed for mobile phones, tablets and other platforms. For those who don’t have a clue what Angry Birds is all about, here is a quick synopsis. The game involves employing a sling shot to propel small cannonball-shaped birds with really bad attitudes at rather fragile glass and timber houses populated by basically catatonic green pigs. The basic thrust of the game is to bring about the demise of the pigs as quickly and expertly as possible by collapsing the pigs’ houses on top of their (sometimes) helmeted heads. Obviously, this sounds like a truly dumb concept. However, there is a catch.

One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair—only to be revived once again for reasons never made entirely clear. Each time it rolls out nationwide, people must again consider this strange and elusive product, whose unique form sets it deep in the Uncanny Valley—and exactly why its existence is so fleeting.

But the issue I want to highlight here is that of the ramp-up. You have a small team that's working well, but you want more software and you are prepared to spend the money to get it. You're happy to pay quadruple, even sextuple to double your rate of progress. An important, yet not well understood factor is the rate at which you can safely add people to a team.

Most HDTVs ship with default settings that are meant to look good in store showrooms, but more often than not, the default presets don't take into account how the TV will look in your home, how far away from it you'll sit, or what the normal lighting in your room will be like when you fire up a new movie or watch the big game. The result: A less-than-perfect picture from the device you spent hundreds of dollars on and spend hours in front of. Thankfully, with the right tools calibrating an HDTV to your viewing style is easy, and you can do it in less than a half-hour.

Kanban represents a unique way of catalyzing the application of Lean product development principles to software development, maintenance and operations. Being a method for driving change Kanban does not prescribe specific roles, practices or ceremonies but instead offers a series of principles to optimize value and flow in your software delivery system. As such, Kanban’s focus on context and adaptability has made it increasingly popular for teams working in contexts where traditional Agile methods are not an easy fit and mature Agile teams looking for ways to further optimize their development process.

I ran across an interesting Web page today: Agile @ 10: Ten Authors of The Agile Manifesto Celebrate its Tenth Anniversary. The editors at The Pragmatic Bookshelf contacted the 17 signers of the original Agile Manifesto and asked them to contribute their thoughts about developments in the Agile world over the succeeding 10 years. Ten of the 17 signers contributed publishable responses, which are collected in the article. The contributors – Andy Hunt, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Ken Schwaber, James Grenning, Arie van Bennekum, Stephen J. Mellor, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Thomas – shared reflections on the extent to which their bold statement changed the development world.

I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.

The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon (website / twitter) and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.

Learn more in the FAQ.

You may also enjoy marker/music, another music, video and spoken word project, produced in collaboration with NSU in South Dakota.

Going through almost any online design gallery, a majority of the sites are portfolios for design studios and freelancers. When I come across these sites I like to look at the other work done by the designer to see if there are other sites I can draw inspiration from. Rarely do I find any. This can’t just be a case of clients ruining the work of a designer, this seems more like a case of one hit wonders.

As a hybrid-functional language, Scala supports many of the same techniques as languages like Haskell and LISP.  One of the least used and most misunderstood of these is that of function currying.  Furthermore, there are many articles talking about the various ways to use currying within languages like Ruby, Groovy and similar, but very few which actually discuss why it’s useful.  To that end, I present a quick run-down on how to curry methods in Scala, along with some idea of why you would want to.

As many of my pair programming partners could tell you, I have the annoying habit of saying “Stop thinking” during refactoring. I’ve always known this isn’t exactly what I meant, because I can’t mean it literally, but I’ve never had a better explanation of what I meant until now. So, apologies y’all, here’s what I wished I had said.

One of the challenges of refactoring is succession–how to slice the work of a refactoring into safe steps and how to order those steps. The two factors complicating succession in refactoring are efficiency and uncertainty. Working in safe steps it’s imperative to take those steps as quickly as possible to achieve overall efficiency. At the same time, refactorings are frequently uncertain–”I think I can move this field over there, but I’m not sure”–and going down a dead-end at high speed is not actually efficient.

At the foundation of Amazon's cloud computing are infrastructure services such as Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service), SimpleDB, and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) that provide the resources for constructing Internet-scale computing platforms and a great variety of applications. The requirements placed on these infrastructure services are very strict; they need to score high marks in the areas of security, scalability, availability, performance, and cost effectiveness, and they need to meet these requirements while serving millions of customers around the globe, continuously.

W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points are the basis for transformation of industry. Adoption and action on the 14 points are a signal that the management intend to stay in business. aim to protect investors and jobs. Such a system formed the basis for lessons for top management in Japan in 1950 and in subsequent years.

The 14 points apply anywhere, to small organisations as well as to large ones, to the service industry as well as to manufacturing. They equally apply to any division within a company and to it’s suppliers.

As you read through each of the 14 points below, ask yourself if they still apply today, either within your current organisation, or within organisations you have recently worked for. The answers may be surprising.

The new bottom line of business is customer delight. If a firm isn’t delighting its customers, the prospects of its long-term survival in today’s highly competitive low-growth economy aren’t promising. Fortunately, as a result of almost three decades of research by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues at Bain, we have a robust methodology for measuring customer delight. It’s the Net Promoter Score discussed in the second edition of The Ultimate Question 2.0 published in September 2011.

Radio broadcaster Harold Camping predicted the world would end this past May. Since then, he has recalculated—and is now sure it will end this Friday. His followers are adjusting accordingly.

After a brief, failed experiment paying me to do chores, my dad tried something really neat. It clearly took a bit of legwork, but maybe there are some transferrable lessons for parents who want to lay an entrepreneurial foundation.

As I talk with companies around the world it’s clear that a significant number of them are still mired in the productivity, efficiency, and optimization mud. It’s easy to spot them because they are often maniacal about measuring velocity—team velocity, velocity across teams, rolling up velocity to an organizational level or even velocity per developer (yuck). Velocity is thereby killing agility. It’s the ultimate in applying a reasonable tool for the wrong reasons.

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”

Met wie zal Henk Bleker afgelopen weekend naar de voetbaltopper Twente-PSV zijn gegaan? Ik begreep dat hij minimaal drie kaartjes had. Mauro en zijn moeder wilden niet. Terecht niet. Henk schreef op het inmiddels even beroemde als gênante briefje bij Pauw & Witteman het woord moeder. Niet pleegmoeder, stiefmoeder of verzorgster. Nee, hij schreef moeder! Zo ziet hij die vrouw dus. Hij ziet haar als de moeder van Mauro. Dan ben je toch helemaal een nul met vingers als je die twee uit elkaar wilt halen. Al jaren krijsen CDA’ers dat het gezin de hoeksteen van de samenleving is!

The iPhone maker spends lavishly on all stages of the manufacturing process, giving it a huge operations advantage.

Agile’s been bouncing around in my head for a while given that it’s reached its tenth birthday, and a lot of people are talking Agile, but its not the agile I see in The Agile Manifesto. It’s a silver-bullet snake-oil leech that throws out agile words and terminology but without the guts to actually make agile work. It’s an agile that doesn’t challenge managers or clients, that sticks to deadlines and a list of features, but promises faster, cheaper development.

It doesn’t work.

And don’t call it agile.

If you’ve seen Louis C.K. do stand-up (and you should) or his FX show (and you should), the fact that he both employs and detests Twitter won’t surprise you. His summary, via his interview on Conan O’Brien Thursday night: “I kinda hate it. I think it’s awful. I have Twitter just so I can tell people what I want them to buy, and give me money.”

(Source: http://twitter.com/jurgenappelo/status/132196554076467200)

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

Richard Stallman is visiting the UK and he's looking for opportunities
to give a talk/lecture on November 2, 4 or 5. I guess he probably needs
no introduction but there is a biography at the end of this email.

The offer came about when he contacted me after
reading a letter published in the Guardian last Wednesday about the
Sociological Imagination. (This was following the death of Steve Jobs,
see letter here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/12/the-power-of-apple).

It's short notice, I know, but if you run a class, club or society or
simply wanted to organise a public meeting at short notice then you can
contact him or his assistant directly. Their details: Richard Stallman
rms at gnu.org and his assistant Jeanne Rasta rms-assist at gnu.org .

One group, led by Xbox godfather J Allard, was pushing for a sleek, two-screen tablet called the Courier that users controlled with their finger or a pen. But it had a problem: It was running a modified version of Windows.
That ran headlong into the vision of tablet computing laid out by Steven Sinofsky, the head of Microsoft's Windows division. Sinofsky was wary of any product--let alone one from inside Microsoft's walls--that threatened the foundation of Microsoft's flagship operating system. But Sinofsky's tablet-friendly version of Windows was more than two years away.
For Ballmer, it wasn't an easy call. Allard and Sinofsky were key executives at Microsoft, both tabbed as the next-generation brain trust. So Ballmer sought advice from the one tech visionary he's trusted more than any other over the decades--Bill Gates. Ballmer arranged for Microsoft's chairman and co-founder to meet for a few hours with Allard; his boss, Entertainment and Devices division President Robbie Bach; and two other Courier team members.

From the very beginning of when I started to talk and write about refactoring people have asked me how it should be incorporated into the wider software development process. Should there be refactoring phases in the software development lifecycle, what proportion of an iteration should be devoted to refactoring tasks, how should we figure out who should be assigned to refactoring duties? Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever.

I remember one summer day during World War II when my father, Harry, and I were discussing the water restrictions that had been imposed because of drought conditions. I was worried that we might run out of water, and my father said, “Yes, it could happen that we run out of water. Lots of things can run out – water, sugar, meat, gasoline, bread, even air. But there’s one thing that will never run out.”

“What’s that?” I asked, looking for reassurance.

“Reasons,” he said. “People will never run out of reasons.”

Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

On Friday 4th June 1976, in a small upstairs room away from the main concert auditorium, the Sex Pistols kicked off their first gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. There's some confusion as to who exactly was there in the audience that night, partly because there was another concert just six weeks later, but mostly because it's considered to be a gig that changed western music culture forever. So iconic and important has that appearance become that David Nolan wrote a book, I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World, investigating just whose claim to have been present was justified. Because the 4th of June is generally considered to be the genesis of punk rock6.

ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

It has been revealed that the Amazon e-book reader weighs more when it is fully loaded. How come?

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

This might be as close as we’re going to get to a time machine. Unless they’re working on that, too.
Microsoft this morning is premiering a new video that shows how the company believes technology is poised to evolve over the next five to 10 years, based on the trends its researchers and engineers are seeing in software, devices, displays, sensors, processors and intelligent systems.

We present here an empirical study comparing the accuracy rates of novices writing software in three programming languages: Quorum, Perl, and Randomo. The first language, Quorum, we call an evidence-based programming language, where the syntax, semantics, and API designs change in correspondence to the latest academic research and literature on programming language usability. Second, while Perl is well known, we call Randomo a Placebo-language, where some of the syntax was chosen with a random number generator and the ASCII table. We compared novices that were programming for the first time using each of these languages, testing how accurately they could write simple programs using common program constructs (e.g., loops, conditionals, functions, variables, parameters). Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.

Just one week after Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer, mourners took to social networks and message boards to note the passing of computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, an event that was largely overlooked by the mainstream press. Although Ritchie was hardly as high-profile a figure as Jobs, his work had a comparable impact on the computing industry. Now, with the death of John McCarthy earlier this week, we have lost two of the most important figures in the history of software development.

Thanks to the NoSQL movement, data storage solutions are no longer a solved problem. Many are working hard to build new storage solutions, and even more are willing to use them. On the flip side, if you are a programmer or a solution architect who wants a data storage solution for your application, you have to face the daunting task of weighing and understanding the tradeoffs associated with the application and make a decision. This article explores the data needs of end user applications and various tradeoffs. It provides guidelines on the criteria for selecting data storage choices enabling the architects and developers to make an informed decision.

Today, Instapaper is a profitable one-man operation, having garnered 1.8 million users. They include Jared Keller, an associate editor for TheAtlantic.com, who uses the service on his Droid Incredible during his 40-minute commute. "It's as close as I can get to print without lugging around a stack of magazines," says Keller. "It is one of those things I can't live without." And Instapaper is the perfect recession-proof business because the overhead is low and Arment, 29, has no employees to pay or investors to please. "Investors want to see growth and a return on the investment," he said. "It would lead to the kind of job that I don't want right now."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2094921_2094923_2094924,00.html #ixzz1bt5lFCsd

When one talks about Apple's design, one immediately thinks of Jony Ive's modernist, rational industrial designs for computers, peripherals, and of course the iPad and iPhone.

These devices have become increasingly simple and pared down, even as the power contained in them has increased. There is very little, if anything, extraneous on the Magic Trackpad or the MacBook Air. And of course the iPhones 4 and 4S are radically simple, yet well-constructed masterpieces of industrial design.

But there's something I've puzzled about for a long time in Apple's aesthetic. Inside these unsentimental, rational, economic designs, Apple has delivered an increasingly sacchirine series of software releases.

Even if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t been introduced to Spotify two years ago, it was probably inevitable that the two companies would hook up. The European music service had already won millions of fans, thanks to a business model that allowed music nuts to stream any song, instantly, for free. More important, it made it easy for people to share music with one another. This vision—of music as a social experience—fit perfectly with Facebook’s view of the world, which values sharing over all else. And that’s why, when former Facebook president and Napster cofounder Sean Parker discovered Spotify in 2009, he made a point of telling Zuckerberg about it.

“I’d never even heard of Spotify, but Sean mentioned it to me one day,” Zuckerberg says. “I was like, wow, this person has built a really cool music product and also understands how you can integrate social things in it.” Within a day, Zuckerberg had updated his Facebook status: Spotify is so good.

“You’re going to build a what?”

That’s what Tony Fadell’s wife, Dani, said to him in 2009 when he told her his idea for a new company. Fadell is one of the most sought-after talents in the world of gadgetry—he designed the hardware for the iPod, and headed Apple’s iPod and iPhone division before leaving his VP post to spend time with his wife and two young children, living an idyllic year in Paris.

But even before he moved back to the U.S. he was mulling over his next step. Many assumed that the 42-year old technologist would continue his brilliant career in consumer electronics. He might even become a contender to run an existing multi-billion dollar business—in electronics, in mobile, maybe even Apple.

Instead, he told Dani, he was going to build a thermostat.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘Perfect’ recently.

In our business there’s a lot of talk about self-improvement, excellence and similar concepts.
Often the discussion is lead by ‘agile coach’ types who can not program their way out of a paper bag, but that is another story for another day.
The ‘Perfect’ meme is used to promote Deliberate Practice, as perfection is elusive by design and so by aspiring to perfection we can continue to learn.
Personally I find it a lot clearer to strive for improvement rather then perfection. Improvements are easier to define and measure than an abstract concept like perfection.

Last week I accidentally posted an internal rant about service platforms to my public Google+ account (i.e. this one). It somehow went viral, which is nothing short of stupefying given that it was a massive Wall of Text. The whole thing still feels surreal.

Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history.

But they also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they’re already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that “Google does everything right”, I meant it. When they’re faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way.

Amazon recently announced that the new Kindle Fire tablet will ship with a brand new browser called Silk. The Silk browser works in “cloud acceleration” mode by routing most webpage requests through servers controlled by Amazon. The idea is to capitalize on Amazon’s powerful AWS cloud servers to parallelize and hence speed up downloading web page elements, and then pass that information back to the tablet through a persistent connection using the SPDY protocol. This protocol is generally faster than the standard HTTP protocol. This split-browser idea, not unique to Amazon, is a departure from the way major browsers work today.

Following the announcement, security experts as well as lawmakers have raised privacy questions and concerns about Silk. After all, while in cloud acceleration mode, the user is trusting Amazon with an incredible amount of information. This is because Amazon is sitting in the middle of most communications between a user's Fire tablet on the one hand, and the website she chooses to visit on the other. This puts Amazon in a position to track a user's browsing habits and possibly sensitive content. As there were a lot of questions that the Silk announcement left unresolved, we decided to follow up with Amazon to learn more about the privacy implications.

I’m sitting in an anonymous, fluorescently-lit office on the Google campus where the Android team is situated, a surprisingly bare setting that seems to clash with the rest of the company’s, multi-colored, neo-hippie aesthetic. I’m waiting for Matias Duarte — Android’s head of user experience — so that we can discuss the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system (dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich), and hopefully get a look at the smartphone the new OS will ship with.

I’ve just had a long, bad, and very early flight to San Francisco, and I’m a little weary, though one of Google’s PR reps has kindly given me a strong mug of coffee from a single-cup machine I’m told costs $10,000. The coffee isn’t bad.

When Matias gets to the meeting, he walks through the door like he’s in mid-sentence, as if he was handing off some direction to someone just outside the room. He comes in with a smile on his face wearing a loud, patterned shirt that looks perfect for a beach in Hawaii (where he’s incidentally headed the next day). Matias Duarte is not a big guy, but he’s got a room-filling personality. You can tell when he’s fired up, and he’s clearly fired up today.

Gilbert Wong, the mayor of Cupertino, California, calls his city council to order. "As you know, Cupertino is very famous for Apple Computer, and we're very honored to have Mr. Steve Jobs come here tonight to give a special presentation," the mayor says. "Mr. Jobs?" And there he is, in his black turtleneck and jeans, shuffling to the podium to the kind of uproarious applause absent from most city council meetings. It is a shock to see him here on ground level, a thin man amid other citizens, rather than on stage at San Francisco's Moscone Center with a larger-than-life projection screen behind him. He seems out of place, like a lion ambling through the mall.

You might consider yourself knowledgeable, but you’ve probably never heard of this powerful communication and design technique that I’m about to share. I’m sure you’ve seen it in practice but never knew it was working on you — that’s how good it is. I’m here to shed light on this technique so that you can use it as an approach to your design or writing.

See what I did there? I introduced you to dissonance by using the technique itself. If used correctly, it can enhance your approach to design and copywriting in certain projects. Welcome to designing with dissonance!

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

This is worth thinking about not so much because we'll actually get to use these languages as because, if we're lucky, we'll use languages on the path from this point to that.

Of all of Scala’s many features, this one has probably taken the most flack over the past year or so.  Not immutable data structures or even structural types, but rather a minor variation on a standard object-oriented construct.  This is more than a little surprising, especially considering how much work they can save when properly employed.

Scala runs on the JVM and can directly call and be called from Java, but source compatibility was not a goal. Scala has a lot of capabilities not in Java, and to help those new features work more nicely, there are a number of differences between Java and Scala syntax that can make reading Scala code a bit of a challenge for Java programmers when first encountering Scala. This primer attempts to explain those differences. It is aimed at Java programmers, so some details about syntax which are the same as Java are omitted.

In this part of the Learning Scala series we’ll take a quick look at what the Uniform Access Principle is and how Scala implements it. In the process we’ll also learn about how vals and vars are implemented behind the scenes.

This is a big update. (Impatient? App Store link.)

I’m waiting in line for a cappuccino. It’s gonna be a good one: short, intense, the foamed milk emulsified with the syrupy shot. I glance up from my phone and look around at the cafe. It is, for lack of a better adjective, a hipster joint. There are the artfully branded items for sale (T-shirts, espresso cups, etc.) and a long list of single varietal beans. Hot water is being poured out of sleek Japanese kettles; the baristas are wearing fedoras. And then I look at the other people in line. I notice their costumes: the slim dark jeans, flannel shirts, scuffed boots, designy glasses, mussed hair. Everyone is staring down at the gadget in their hands. They all look like me. I look like them. This is the definition of self-loathing.

I had a problem. While using and teaching agile practices like test-driven development (TDD) on projects in different environments, I kept coming across the same confusion and misunderstandings. Programmers wanted to know where to start, what to test and what not to test, how much to test in one go, what to call their tests, and how to understand why a test fails.

The deeper I got into TDD, the more I felt that my own journey had been less of a wax-on, wax-off process of gradual mastery than a series of blind alleys. I remember thinking “If only someone had told me that!” far more often than I thought “Wow, a door has opened.” I decided it must be possible to present TDD in a way that gets straight to the good stuff and avoids all the pitfalls.

My response is behaviour-driven development (BDD). It has evolved out of established agile practices and is designed to make them more accessible and effective for teams new to agile software delivery. Over time, BDD has grown to encompass the wider picture of agile analysis and automated acceptance testing.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was 4 years old when he first arrived at his grandfather's cattle ranch in Cotulla, Texas. The Lazy G is a sprawling 25,000-acre spread in the southwest part of the state—an unspoiled habitat of mesquite and oak trees, the home of whitetail deer (popular among local hunters), wild turkeys, doves, quail, feral hogs and sheep.

Behind the rise of Jeff Bezos and Amazon: Richard L. Brandt on the founder's Texas roots, the site's chaotic early days, why negative reviews are allowed and his increasing use of personal data.

Every so often I return to Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development. I honestly believe it to be one of the finest software development books ever written. What I love about the book is its simplicity. There is a sparseness to it that decieves, as though it were a lightweight exploration of the field. But continued reading as you progress with TDD reveals that it is fairly complete in its insights. Where later works have added pages and ideas, they have often lessened the technique, burdening it with complexity, born of misunderstandings of its power. I urge any of you who have practiced TDD for a while to re-read it regularly.

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here.

But as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated future. Apple isn't shy about cultivating the experience around their new iOS products and the App Store. There are unusually strict, often mysterious rules around what software developers can and cannot do -- at least if they want entry into the App Store. And once you're in, the rules can and will change at any time.

When the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. “Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again,” Mr. Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all with design work by Mr. Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself.

Our favorite way to keep your email inbox empty is a simple, three-folder system we call The Trusted Trio. However, if you're using Gmail and want to keep a clear inbox, it's actually a duo. Here's how to use two simple labels to consistently empty your Gmail inbox.

Managing the steady stream of email that gathers in your inbox every day can feel like an impossible task. Not long ago, I kept a lengthening list of folders in my email software to track messages by topic, sender, project, urgency and any other context that seemed relevant that hour. I'd spend lots of time carefully dragging and dropping every message from my inbox into the folder it seemed to belong in that day. After awhile I had so many folders the system was completely useless. Some of the folders - even after the work of creating and populating them - I barely ever opened again.

Each e-mail message in your inbox demands your time and attention. Filters and rules are great for reducing some of that demand, shunting easily defined mail such as e-newsletters and personal notes to their appropriate folders. But important e-mail messages are often hard to define and organize with automatic, rules-based management. They require filters and rules that reside only in your brain.

Use this tool to select the ten cards for your next Dominion game!

The iOS chief is a lot like his mentor Steve Jobs: brilliant, presents well, a tenacious infighter—arguably just the taskmaster Apple needs to stay on top

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.
And then some.

“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

Ubuntu received a major update today. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution released version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot. The update brings a wide range of improvements, including some much-needed enhancements to Ubuntu's Unity shell.

New Ubuntu releases are issued every six months in conformance with the distribution's time-based development cycle. The agenda for version 11.10 was announced back in March, shortly before the release of version 11.04. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth chose the codename Oneiric Ocelot to reflect the 11.10 cycle's dual emphasis on daydreams and discipline.
New Ubuntu releases are issued every six months in conformance with the distribution's time-based development cycle. The agenda for version 11.10 was announced back in March, shortly before the release of version 11.04. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth chose the codename Oneiric Ocelot to reflect the 11.10 cycle's dual emphasis on daydreams and discipline.

Regular expression generator.

This is the second of several posts in which I’d like to share some of the things we learned throughout more than 14 sprints of Agile development using Scrum. Some of them might appear as open doors, but I wish I knew or thought about those before I started that project. Just by looking back at the mistakes a team of 10 made in a period of 12 months, they apparently aren’t that obvious. So after having discussed requirements management, let’s talk about the sprint planning.

It seems like every time a major software revision comes along, it’s described as the “biggest ever.” In the case of iOS 5, though, that might not be hyperbole—there’s hardly a part of Apple’s mobile operating system that isn’t altered in some way by the latest update.

Don’t think that this is just change for change’s sake, however. By and large, iOS 5’s changes are for the better, spackling a number of shortcomings and gaps in functionality that have existed since day one.

Last night, high-profile Google engineer Steve Yegge mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, Yegge’s post focusses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is Yegge’s blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run.