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Filipe Gomes Esperandio: This is annoying

Thu, 23 May 2013 02:01:00 +0000

You can read the title as “How to make your recently created android app’s file visible”.

I am recetly playing around with Android Platform and around goods and bads this is just annoying. Android has an complex user mode mecanism to segregate application namespace. It is based on linux user mode and each application has its own, well, user. It is OK and brings up a good security policy but has some trade offs as well.

Going specific to what I want to say about files: You do have many ways to write a file with your app to the external storage media. External media being the same place you see your files when you download any the browser.
Once you have your file writen it doesn’t mean that you gonna find it through any file explorer when naviagting to your phone storage using your computer. You find the file using a android file manager within the phone though.

So, tell me what is annoying, damn!

This is annoying: to make your file let’s say ‘visible’, you have to run this code:

MediaScannerConnection.scanFile(context, new String[] {filePath}, null, null);

Why? I don’t know! It is the way it was thought. I think this is stupid! I didn’t want to dig further so I stopped here!

Just one more tip, for easy file handling, use apache commons-io. Add this to your pom.xml if using maven:

<dependency>
<groupId>commons-io</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
<version>2.4</version>
</dependency>

Than you are able to use it like this:

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

FileUtils.readFileToString(new File(filePath));

FileUtils.write(file, txt);

Paulo Caroli- Agileretroactivities: PMI - Plus, Minus, Interesting

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:27:00 +0000

PMI (plus, minus, interesting) is a retrospective activity that encourages participants in a discussion to look at an idea from more than one viewpoint.

Running the activity:

1. Split the canvas into 3 areas: plus, minus, interesting.

2. Ask participants to add notes to each area

So, in the context of this retrospective, please share with us what you consider: positive (Plus), negative (Minus), or Interesting. Please write each note on a post-it, and place them on the respective canvas area.

3. Group conversation about the notes

The PMI thinking activity was developed by Dr. Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking and creativity.

I first came across this activity on Margaret Rouse great post on PMI.

You should also read Naomi Karten on PMI at StickyMinds.com

Martin Fowler: May 2013 edition of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:35:00 +0000

The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board (TAB) has released the latest edition of our technology radar. This is where we highlight some of the technologies that are currently attracting our attention and that we feel are worth you taking a look at. In this edition our themes include my long term interest in breaking down boundaries between people and groups, lightweight option for analytics, infrastructure as code, and applying the practices that have worked well for us in development to places that are missing them.

Lindsay Ratcliffe: Panic not over yet - one click from you can help Amnesty (no commitment or payment required)

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:58:00 +0000

Exciting news! Further to a previous post about the success of the Makeathon, some of my colleagues have continued the great work on the Panic Button app. Amnesty International has just been chosen as a finalist in Google's Global Impact Challenge for the work on a mobile alert system ("panic button"). The app enables human rights activists to trigger rapid response from their network in an emergency. Four out of ten projects will win £500,000. Public voting open now and until the 31st May. Please watch and vote at http://bit.ly/13KtuEl. Please vote and help share this widely with your colleagues, networks, friends and families!

Sriram Narayan - Go: Users write/talk about Go

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:29:14 +0000

This is a compilation of user authored material that references Go. I expect to keep growing this list. Feel free to submit links via comments.

And here is slightly more official content co-authored by ThoughtWorks and customers.

Patrick Kua : Making jade and mustache templating work together

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:34:03 +0000

One our frustrations using jade and icanhaz (a javascript front end mustache implementation) was that when we were trying things that were obvious to us, jade would simply fail to template and we weren’t sure what was causing it.

Fortunately small TDD cycles and experimentation made us realise that it was the combination of new line characters and mustache code made jade work/break.

We would try something like this:

script(type="text/html", id="my_checkbox", class="partial")
  li 
    label(for="{{code}}")
      {{name}} 
    input(id="{{code}}", checked="checked", name="{{code}}", type="checkbox")

The set of statements above would be valid mustache (once converted to HTML) but jade complains because the {{name}} is on its own line. The fix was to use the pipe (|) character to force jade to recognise a line break. It looks like this now

script(type="text/html", id="my_checkbox", class="partial")
  li 
    label(for="{{code}}")
      | {{name}} 
      input(id="{{code}}", checked="checked", name="{{code}}", type="checkbox")

Simple, but not particularly obvious from the examples in their documentation.

Jez Humble – Continuous Delivery: Announcing FlowCon

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:32:42 +0000

I spend quite a lot of time at conferences, and it consistently bothers me that they are so often focused on one particular function: development, testing, UX, systems administration. The point of continuous delivery is to accelerate the rate at which we can learn from each other – and from our customers. That requires everyone involved in the delivery process (including users, product owners and entrepreneurs) to collaborate throughout. So why isn’t there a conference which focuses on flow – the emergent property of great teams?

So I got together with a bunch of like-minded folks – Elisabeth Hendrickson, Gene Kim, John Esser and Lane Halley – and now there is a conference about creating flow: FlowCon. It’s on Friday November 1 in San Francisco, and it’s produced by ThoughtWorks and Trifork (creators of the GOTO conferences).

The conference is based around four values:

Learning: Our goal is to provide the best possible conference forum for practitioners to learn from each other how to build great products and services.

Open Information: We aim to uncover how great products and services are built in real life and make this information freely available to the widest audience possible.

Diversity: We believe the technology community – and thus the conference speakers and participants – should reflect the demographics of our customers and the wider world.

Spanning boundaries: We believe that the best products and services are created collaboratively by people with a range of skills and experiences.

We have put together nearly half of the program, and we’re delighted to announce that Adrian Cockcroft, Catherine Courage, Jeff Gothelf and Linda Rising will be giving keynotes. The program is still a work in process (a minimum viable product, if you will). In particular, the after lunch sessions are empty – for a good reason: we want you to speak in those slots. We’re looking for people working to create flow in their organization – especially those who:

Span multiple roles and work across organizational silos.
Work in any of the following areas: a highly regulated environment; a large, traditional enterprise; in the pursuit of social and economic justice.
Are willing to share obstacles encountered or mistakes made and how you overcame them – whether cultural or technological.
Offer actionable advice “the rest of us” can apply today (even if we don’t have the resources of Etsy / Amazon / Google).

Your talk could be about culture, technology, design, process – the only really important criterion is that it draws on what you’ve learned about helping to create flow in your organization.

If that sounds like you, please submit your proposal. If you know someone who would do a great job, please encourage them to submit. Our submission process is designed to be entirely merit-based, which means that the first round is anonymous. The deadline is midnight Pacific time, Sunday June 23, 2013.

Tickets for the conference are now on sale – at $350 if you register before July 31, or $500 if you register afterwards. Whatever your role or domain, you’re sure to find inspirational, disruptive thinking that will make you better at creating great products and services. I hope to see you there!

ThoughtWorks Studios: Agile and User centred design

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:22:02 +0000

Can they work together?

ThoughtWorks Studios: Agile and User centred design

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:22:00 +0000

Can they work together?

ThoughtWorks Studios: Creating automated test scripts with Ruby and WATIR

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:16:11 +0000

To document the general process of creating automated test scripts for web applications with Ruby and the WATIR testing module. The intended audience of this document is QA engineers/testers that are going to be either creating automated test cases for their applications or testers that are going to be running and maintaining already created tests. This document assumes that the reader is already familiar with the basic methods and syntax of the Ruby language and the components of an HTML based application (links, forms, JavaScript, etc..)