What happen that year ?

You can discover what happen the year of your birth just by looking at wikipedia.
French events:http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977
English events: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977

Just replace the last part of the URL by the year you want:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/19??

I think Thomas might be interested since he's born the same year as me ;-)

Update: "John Travolta discoed in Saturday Night Fever" cool!

Kent is "severely embarrassed by the first edition" of XP

XP is a distillation of learning; a bunch of ideas that have proven helpful. Rather than telling someone "what to do", Kent now prefers to tell them "what I do" because the former undermines the person you are talking to. XP should not be thought of as a process like a computer program that you execute. In XP there's no one starting point, it depends upon your context. The XP practices help you work out things you can do to improve your software.

I deeply agree with the fact that no methodology is the silver bullet, solutions highly depend on context. You can only use those different methodologies as "advises" and see for yourself if your work gets done faster and better...

It was surprising to hear that Kent is "severely embarrassed by the first edition" of XP because it promotes a programmer-centric approach that suggests everyone else should change. Indeed, Kent is actually looking forward to the first edition going out of print because the message is so out of tune with his current thinking. This is somewhat sad as I think many XP practitioners have a soft spot for the first edition of "XP Explained" which was a call to arms to start writing code with "knobs turned up to 10".

May be it's time for me to buy the "holy bible" of XP: XP Explain 2nd edition...
But filling my week-ends with the reading of those kinds of books isn't something I'm enthousiaste with at the moment...
May be later then :)

Software is not as neat as it seems

Interesting article: "Painting the picture" from Rachel Davies.

I do think that even if we are engineer, our everyday's job is more like craftsman (just as the pragmatic programmers said it)

I also liked that picture because it makes me think of program I've encountered during my "short" working life and even program I made :(

Mind Map: A Strange Technic

Kent Beck seems to use this technic for his tutorial.
At first I thougth: "It must be a joke", it looks like a 3 year old boy did it...
But it seems serious, there's even a book about it!

Well I don't think I'll give it a try but it's nice to know such a thing exist...

The Rise of Open Source

Too bad that's not the rise of Ruby :(
But the best manuals for ruby are not edited by o'reilly but by the pragmatic programmers therefore they don't appear in this chart.
And Ruby is so simple, you don't even need a book... ;-)

Automated Java unit testing

I'm quite surprise by this product:

Parasoft Jtest® 7.0 with Test Case Sniffer?
Automates Java unit testing & code compliance. Auto-generates JUnit test cases from a running application. Tests individual classes or large, complex applications.

I can't see how a program can decide if a method that return false for example is the correct beheavior.
It can test if some part of the program throws exception but it seems to me it needs human interaction to decide which behavior is correct or not...

Java futur

Nice slides (a little too long may be...) about the futur of java.
.NET and Open Source greatly influenced the next releases and the new features in my opinion.

Geek's Gadgets

If you want a new keyboard or a bendable screen.

JSPWiki against Daisy

I might take a look at daisy after all...
Because of this post of Janne.

You know, seeing open source projects like Daisy make me just want to stop JSPWiki development altogether. It's simply just too good, and I feel like there's no way I can compete.

Looking at the daisy documentation:
required: a MySQL database: version 4.0.20 or higher, or version 4.1.7 or higher required

I really like the fact that I only need a JVM and Tomcat (which I always have already installed on my machine) to run a wiki.
For that JSPWiki is still my favorite...

I'll try daisy and post a blog entry one of this day.

Discovering the world througth I18N (the nerd way)

I found this page on http://www.openi18n.org with all standard language, the funny ones:

• ca_ ES Catalan SPAIN
• fo_ FO Faroese FAROE ISLANDS
• eu_ ES Basque SPAIN
• gv_ GB Manx Gaelic UNITED KINGDOM
• kl_ GL Greenlandic GREENLAND
• kn_ IN Kannada INDIA
• ps_ IN Pashto, Pushto INDIA

As you can see India is my favorite ;)