Today I stumbled over two new(?) techniques to produce energy for the world. One large scale the other one tiny scale but both quite interesting:
I think, the jet-type is the cooler one but the Stirling type is the more interesting one. You also can
But both are nothing compared to my homemade nuclear reactor, har har!
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On Lawrence Lessigs blog I found a link to some nice Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results.
The first images on that page are the type of images you find all over in the press, indicating that Republicans have large support all over the US.
But below them you find the maps corrected accordingly to population in the different states and counties and these present a much more event picture.
I also support lessings call to make the exit poll data public so that professionals could take a deeper look into that exit poll vs. election result irregularity in counties where electronic voting machines have been used.
Last Thursday I finally finished a feature in our product which I’ve been working on for two weeks.
It was a bit frustrating because the automatic testcases for the product had to be corrected for the new situation but when I fixed the testdata for one case another test freaked out. Back and forward all the time; change data, compile, run 390+ tests (~12 minutes), evaluate error messages and back to the beginning…
But finally I finished it somehow and for my own surprise I only had to adapt the testcases; my implementation of the feature had worked all the time.
Next thing on friday was that I implemented another feature, which I approximated to need five days to develop, full featured (including testcases) before noon. Four hours instead five days. I was very surprised again when I found out that it worked and nothing was left to do for it.
These two things increased my personal motivation quite a bit.
Another thing last week: I saw that several of our quality assurance people had a long talk with our development manager. I have no idea what exactly was talked about but I have a good feeling because recently I often talked to them about our development processes, structure and quality measures. We all quite agree that the current structure and processes are not suitable for development. Our alignment on projects instead of products constrains us more than it aids us.
Along with that thoughts I found a project called GForge which is like the Sourceforge environment. GForge is based on an earlier CVS snapshot of Sourceforge but has been development independly since that time. I thought about if this could assist us in our development and played around a bit with a test-install of GForge, but I’m still unsure… Have to talk to our Quality Assurance people about that. It surely would be neccessary to integrate our installations of TaskZilla and TWiki with it.