What is Nathan doing?
posted under category: General on June 18, 2008 by Nathan
My mother-in-law passed away last month, and I haven't really had anything to say here since then. I have some pre-written stuff, I just didn't really feel like posting it. We're still coping with the loss.
At work, I just got a major release out of the way. It was 6 months in the making, so my boss is prodding me to become "agile," as in, regular releases with smaller changes. I agree, so I'll be experimenting with it. A year or so ago we had a client who demanded us to work with their agile process, which was just a huge, uncomfortable time wasting disaster. It makes sense in development teams, not so much in a business end where you're paying developers in another company, halfway around the globe, by the 6-minute increment to sit in your daily hour-long "scrum" calls. That was just set up for failure from the start.
I had some thoughts on code coverage, but I'm still not sure how to word it. I think my current application's code coverage is around 15% - hey, it's better than zero!
Firefox 3 - I'm liking the new features, but I've had a few javascript-heavy pages that wouldn't render, such as the uTorrent WebUI that I have running on my media center box at home.
Alanda got a new notebook (dude, guess what brand). Great machine, but riddled with problems, and, for the record, the Intel X3100 is NOT a decent video card for ANY gaming whatsoever. We're returning it, free of charge. Would buy again. Instead, Alanda's letting me build her a PC. She'll take my old video card (GeForce 8600 GTX) and I'll get a new one (probably a 9600, waiting for the price drop once the new nVidia cards are out in a couple weeks).
We're taking her old tablet PC downstairs to stream media to the TV. The downstairs (it's just a single, small room/bomb shelter from the 60's) is being converted into a workout room.
Final note, we've gone 'N'. I upgraded my router to an 802.11N Linksys. This will make a huge difference with movement of video files and music to and from our media center / file server / backup server (via Mozy).
We have to tell our kids that most people don't have a computer on their TV. They're like "Wow, really? Why not?" They have no concept. It's adorable.
In summary, I'm sad, I'm busy with home PCs, and I'll keep blogging.