Comments for A Thought Adrift...

Comment on Introducing the “Nimble” Software Methodology by Andy

Andy — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:30:48 +0000

I remember a particularly ‘nimble’ project I was part of once, but in my case it was the upper management who didn’t care much for process. The development team however, were eagerly trying to do it right. I remember being with the QA manager and project manager for a week working out the development schedule, using our use cases through function point analysis. It worked quite well and we calculated that the project was to take some 4 – 5 years (it was dependent on people’s experience level and numbers). The project manager said that 4 years was too long a time and would never be accepted by the board, so I said we could reduce the functionality for the first delivery to the most important features and then add more functionality after the first delivery. This was agreed and using a reduced feature set we recalculated the schedule to 1.5 – 2 years for the live delivery. A couple of days later after the project manager had presented the schedule to the IT Director she told us that the IT Director had rejected the schedule – I went to see him asking why, and he said “because we have already agreed with the client to deliver the full system in 6 months”. Of course I let him know what he should now expect that he was driving an unrealistic schedule. I left the company a couple of (horrendous) years after that discussion – needless to say the project did not make the first delivery date, nor the second, or third. I met up with one of my ex-colleagues who was still working on the project, it was now well over 5 years from project start, where he informed me that the system had only just gone live and was riddled with problems. We both just laughed when I said that’s just what I told the IT Director would happen.

The project nevertheless was nimble, not because of changing requirements, but because no one had time to think things through – just code like hell. So it frolicked happily from one deadline to the next without a care in the world, like a new born lamb in spring.

Comment on “Agile” considered redundant by gemmell

gemmell — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:42:45 +0000

Well said.

I don’t really have anything against the processes themselves, but it seems like it’s now a brand. A massive marketing exercise or something. Who’s making the money out of this? Consultants teach agile methodologies? Authors selling books? Let’s drop the term Agile!

Your comment spurned me to write a blog about “nimble” software processes, so for that I thank you.

Comment on “Agile” considered redundant by Andy

Andy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:02:39 +0000

Agile to me means two things ‘plagiarism’ and ‘politics’. Plagiarism because there is nothing new in many of the ‘agile’ processes, they simply have taken ideas from ‘traditional’ processes and renamed them with some fuzzy terms, without acknowledging the people who they have stole their ideas from. Politics in that they use political spin in the deliberate misrepresentation of traditional methods in order to deceive people, particularly businesses, into thinking agile is something fresh and new. The classic of course is the misrepresentation of the ‘waterfall’ model to give the impression it is not an iterative approach, and that traditional means ‘big upfront (detailed) design’ – yes it is of course big upfront ‘contextual’ design, but never big upfront ‘detailed’ design, otherwise how else can you ever hope to begin to plan anything – a distinction however the agile spin doctors happily ignore. And then there is the hypocrisy of limiting the amount of documentation – yet they write book upon book on the subject of what is agile – but cannot seem to recognise that for the very same reasons they write books about how and why to use agile, developer need to document their systems to describe how and why is was built, but for a variety of stakeholders with differing levels of knowledge and ability.

According to IEEE research politics is the main reason software projects fail – therefore the politics practiced by agile evangelists can only be contributing to this problem, and have I mentioned, I hate politics?

Comment on Aquaponics in Space by gemmell

gemmell — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:38:11 +0000

Good idea – if the seed bomb had some kind of technology which “knitted” a shell around the asteroid (self replicating nano tech style) then we can then have fully processed water ‘modules’ for when we arrive in space.

Getting the ice to melt might be complicated, but it might not. I get the feeling that the suns rays are pretty harsh, and that if you start to contain the heat via our knitted shell then it will start to melt of it’s own accord. i.e. we’ve knitted a kind of greenhouse around it. Like you say, the side on the “dark side” (facing away from the sun) could have some kind of black absorbent material, the side on the light side could be thermally efficient glass or something.

Give the iceteroid some spin and the water will come off as it melts and collect around the edges. So what I’m imagining is a shell a fair bit bigger than the asteroid, with a lake around the outside of it (because it’s spinning, so like a washing machine it’s all being “flung” to the outsides) with a spinning iceteroid in the middle. When the iceteroid is melted, you get a volume of water smeared around the outside and a kind of void in the middle. Maybe you can grow your plants in there?

I dunno about vegetables or anything in this style of thing, but definitely bacteria to process. And algae to consume. Then maybe when we get up there we have a biofuel source and drinkable water… or maybe you put some fish in the mix which eat the algae…

I wonder how much carbon is in those iceteroids. Maybe we need to smash a carbon dioxide ice asteroid into it to get enough carbon dioxide for the algae to start producing oxygen. Anyway, the key components seem to be up there…

Comment on Aquaponics in Space by BayouFilter

BayouFilter — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:00:40 +0000

The first Aquaponicist in space will probably be an Australian. But I volunteer Right Now to tend the aquaponic garden on the first city-ship to be launched. And I’ll be training my grandkids for the job ’cause it’ll probably take a few generations to get it built!
That said, I’d like to dig my teeth into an idea sparked by your article, some *pre-processing* of *ice-teroids* done in advance (maybe waay in advance) of humans getting close to said ice. The goal would be to use a “seed bomb” to begin work on transforming a chunk of ammoniated water into a floating pond of liquid H20 plus some life in it.
Seed bomb might, as its first step, stick to the target and coat one hemisphere of the ice with something dark on the outside and it could be reflective on the inside. This would start to absorb heat and when the coated side faces away from the sun, bounces light around the inside.
Stage two is where nitrifying bacteria thaw out (or their spores do) and begin chowing down on that yummy yummy ammonia. Three, some seeds emerge from their time-release coating and germinate. Let’s brainstorm about what series of plants we want to establish! We will want oxygenation, shading, heat absorption (+ some diffusion?) and some plants will be grown in order to die off and rot and produce more ammonia. So this little pond / biosphere will be just hanging there when the motile meatbags (US) arrive and stick a straw in it.
Do we want some higher organisms involved? I’m leaning toward doing the whole thing with plants and bacteria… Critters might evolve while waiting for us and if we take too long, we’d meet someone smarter than us!

Comment on A blog about trout and bacteria by gemmell

gemmell — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:35:25 +0000

Yep “nitrification” – usually heard in a bad context as in “nitrification of our streams” which is where the fertilisers used on farms run off into the streams and causes algae to grow like crazy (algae is a plant after all!) which stuffs up O2, pH and blocks light to the other macrophytes.

In the scientifically controlled little eco system called aquaponics we work really hard to keep the algae in check by having the veg suck up the nitrates, and keeping direct sunlight off the tank.

Comment on A blog about trout and bacteria by Garth

Garth — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:55:44 +0000

Ah, nitrification – I just had an exam question on that. I have been absolutely blown away by learning how plants work, and how much humans understand of the processes. And I thought computers were cool!

Comment on An Aquaponics Update by gemmell

gemmell — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:45:24 +0000

Slaters – they like dark quiet, damp places. Because my growbeds don’t get flooded to above the level of the rocks, the slaters live in amongst it, nice and close to the water, with food nearby too.

I also haven’t used any sprays – i flooded, and squished. After 2 days of flooding to above the medium the number of slaters coming up is heaps less. So might be ontop of them, fingers crossed.

Comment on An Aquaponics Update by Garth Coghlan

Garth Coghlan — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 05:53:26 +0000

Norwegian fjords?! Woohoo! They look amazing.

Bummer about the slaters. I wonder where they are living and what ought to be eating them? Down here, I have slugs to contend with. Last spring, we killed 4000 of the buggers by hand (my housemate doesn’t like slug bait). Not so wet this year, so things are better.

Comment on Canberra Aquaponics: Trout season ends in December by Paul Nock

Paul Nock — Mon, 17 May 2010 08:56:48 +0000

Hi Gemmell nice site, found it through your Link at BYAP, I will read more when things slow down