Ingredients

For 8 servings:
- 1 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot.
- 2 tablespoons brandy
- 2 onions, thinly sliced
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 1 sprig fresh parsley
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 clove garlic, crushed
- 10 whole black peppercorns
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 pounds cubed beef chuck roast
- 4 Tablespoon of Olive oil
- 1/4 pound bacon, cubed
- 2 onions, chopped
- 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 1 tablespoon tomato paste
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1 (10.5 ounce) can beef broth
- salt and pepper to taste
- 4 tablespoons butter
- 1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced

Directions

1. In a large bowl, combine the wine, cognac, onions, carrots, parsley, bay leaf, garlic, peppercorns and salt. Mix well and add the cubed beef. Cover and marinate in the refrigerator overnight.
2. The next day, strain the meat from the vegetables and marinade; reserve marinade. Dry meat with paper towels. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large tall pot over medium high heat. Add the meat and saute for 10 minutes, or until browned on all sides. Transfer meat to a separate medium bowl with a slotted spoon and set aside.
3. In the same pot, add the bacon and saute until lightly browned. Transfer the bacon to the bowl with the meat. Drain the pot and return it to the heat. Pour a cup of marinade into the pot to deglaze the pot, scraping the bottom to loosen up all the little bits. Return this liquid to the reserved marinade.
4. Heat some olive oil in the pot. Add the onion and carrot from the marinade, along with the additional onion that you’ve chopped, and saute for 5 minutes, or until tender. Transfer this mixture to the bowl with the meat and bacon, again using a slotted spoon, and return pot to the heat. Add the flour to the pot, combining with the oil and stir until well mixed and brown, about 2 minutes.
5. Now add the tomato paste, garlic, beef broth, reserved marinade and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil and whisk to remove any flour lumps.
6. Now pour the meat and vegetable mixture into the pot and cook for 6 to 8 hours on low heat, stirring occasionally and adding water as needed. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
7. About 15 minutes before meat is done baking, melt butter in a skillet over medium high heat. Add the mushrooms and saute for 5 to 10 minutes, or until lightly browned. When meat is done, add the mushrooms to the meat mixture, stir well and let sit for about 15 minutes.

You can reheat the stew if you don’t finish in one sitting. It only gets better over time.

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My favorite mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot died at age 85. He was quite an inspiration and part of the reason why I am doing what I am doing today. In the video below, Professor Mandelbrot, discuss some of his work.

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I am not into documentaries, and even less into babies. This is a departure from my usual movie watching habits. I am not a parent and this child thingy is really foreign to me. However, it is amazing to see four babies observe and discover their body, and the world around them from the time they are born to the time they reach their first birthday. It is also fascinating, to see, from a toddler perspective, four very different places on the planet: Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and the United States of America.

Living in Houston, it is easy to forget that not every Homo sapiens have access to running water, sanitation, medicine, and all the commodities I generally take for granted.

Babies is a very refreshing documentary that does not focus, as it is too often the case, on a problem in our societies, but more on the common thread that links all members of our species.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vupEpNjCuY

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This is perfectly reasonable and most developers I worked with don’t have any issue with unit testing as defined by Wikipedia as long as the level of automation is low or non-existent. The Wikipedia article on unit testing explains that “[unit testing] implementation can vary from being very manual (pencil and paper) to being formalized as part of build automation.”

However, a major gap exists between exercising the code through manual or semi-automatic tests and writing automatic tests to verify continuous integration builds. Of course the latter produce higher quality software in the long run but this gap prevents some teams from reaching a higher level of code quality while minimizing rework (i.e. higher productivity).

Implementing automated unit tests is not simply a technical exercise. It is also a complex problem that requires a sophisticated and coordinated effort among developers accompanied by a culture change where developers and other stakeholders:

• treat unit testing code with the same level of respect as the rest of the application (this code may not end up on the server or the user’s desk put it is an essential element in minimizing defect escape rate);
• accept that an automated build is successful, if and only if, all the associated unit tests passed.

This combination of cultural and technical changes is essential to a successful and full-scale automated unit testing implementation.

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• Five things to think about before stand-up
• Five things to think about after stand-up

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Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

This is a dangerous bias that can bite you when you are estimating tasks or stories in an Agile environment. I am even wondering if this plays a role when you are poker planning, and how much this influences your decisions from the get go.

Anyway, this article goes into detailing the anchoring effect and the “You are not so smart” blog is providing insights on common human behavior that plays an important role in software development.

While the phenomenon is well-known, I am wondering what a team can do about it. How can you overcome its nefarious effect and also how do you measure its effect in the long run.

[via You are not so smart]

Original photo by Plbmak

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This article take a different approach and shows how a well lubricated and performing Scrum team can benefit from Kanban.

This is food for thought.

[via AvailAgility]

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However, as this article demonstrates, the price gap between using the Cloud and maintaining your own servers is narrowing.

[via High Scalability]

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This article describe an innovative retrospective process that one can use to help focus a Scrum team on the items they can control or influence.

This is a nice idea.

[via Partnership & Possibilities]

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You may also want to view the slides for this presentation.

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Mike Griffiths posted a short and sweet article on this subject that he entitled Agile anti-patterns. He classifies those anti-patterns as follow:

1. Agile as a silver bullet
2. Agile as an excuse for no discipline
3. Agile without explanation
4. Shallow Feedback

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The presentation describes the different processes that take place during drilling and the barriers that are inherent part of any well.

Make sure to listen to the Q&A session after the end of the presentation. It provides additional insight on this terrible incident.

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Quickly, the service representative diagnosed that the car had a firmware issue and ordered a reprogramming.

The problem is that the PC that was reprogramming the firmware crashed in the middle of the operation and now the car is FUBAR. I was even unable to open the truck by pushing the corresponding button. We are now waiting for a technician to show up with a laptop and fix the car.

This shows how dependent we are on computers and software in so many unconscious ways. Here, we have a computer crashing in the shop, that in turn renders another computer, the on-board CPU, inoperable.

This is nothing original. I am sure that it is a common occurrence and the news stories on different Toyota models illustrates how software bugs can be life threatening in some instances.

Where will we be in ten years from now? What can we expect from our cars, or other common devices that have existed for decades before the birth of computers?

I am certainly a Luddite but I sometimes wonder about this love-hate relationship I have with computers. I cannot live without them and they like to remind me.

This also reminds me that I need to pay more attention to QA on my day job. :-)

Original photo by oskay.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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Here are some personal rules I follow when using the tool:

1. Don’t collect connections
2. Only Connect with people you discussed or corresponded with and whom you feel are professionals
3. Connect with co-workers and former colleagues
4. Ignore invites from people you don’t know
5. Import your list of contacts to reconnect with former business partners
6. Recommend former colleagues but not current colleagues
7. Rarely ask for a recommendation and only if you already gave one some time before
8. Use a personal e-mail address for logging in, not a work e-mail address
9. Register any new e-mail address that you expect people to use now or in the future
10. Provide a summary and complete profile. Vendors, customers, former colleagues, future colleagues, and prospective recruits are likely to examine it before engaging in business with you.

I don’t see much value in groups or discussions. Unfortunately, signal to noise ratio is very low in those forums.

I religiously follow my connections’ updates and their new connections. This is great to find common colleagues or out of touch friends.

Please share with me your personal rules for Linkedin. I am always interested in learning new tricks.

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You will learn about what impacts performance today and how Donald Knuth was right all along. :-)

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil” — Donald Knuth

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I also, and very importantly, realized that some individuals, even though I am rarely in contact with them, were taking care of me in ways I was not expecting. I am so grateful.

I am looking forward to 2010, to see what this new year has in store for all of us. I also hope that 2009 was great for you, and I wish you the best in the new year.

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As it should be, he has high expectations of his students.

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1. Complexity
2. People
3. Tools and Techniques
4. Quality
5. Reliability
6. Efficiency
7. Maintenance
8. Requirements and design
9. Reviews and inspections
10. Reuse
11. Estimation
12. Research

I encourage you to read this article regardless if you are new to the field of software engineering or a long timer. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded of the “law of physics’ regimenting our discipline.

[via IEEE]

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