I can’t believe I made it 6 months without my linux desktop. I thought the hard drive had gone bad because windows was loading (it was a dual boot w/ two hard drives) rather than grub loading. Today I finally opened it up and tightened all the cables and grub came right up. It’s so nice to have samba again. Well…I guess it would be if I had wireless for it. I’ve always had it hard wired in the past. At least my music, old plone site, music i wrote, etc is safe and sound.

I will probably get my ssh server up and running so I can use it as a proxy to by pass the filters at work.

I finally am free of blogger’s bugs and got this new blog. Now I will hopefully have a few more postings.

Often times I find myself wanting to write something technical in this blog, but realize that I cannot include any markup of any kind. This is because switching from compose and edit html unescapes my html. This truely sucks and thus I will be moving to a different blog that can be found here http://whatiwriteabout.wordpress.com

Many people know that I have been on the hunt for new jobs and landed a number of exceptional opportunities. Today I am pleased to say that Cerner countered all my offers with an offer I could not refuse. I plan to stick it out in Kansas City with Cerner for a number of years now.

Agile Methods

Agile methods realize dynamic requirements cannot be addressed by a traditional planned process. Instead, they focus on ensuring that teams are able to produce results quickly and adapt to new and changing requirements. This is done through short, iterative development using small cross functional teams. Each iteration results in software that can be delivered to a client. Delivery is based upon the benefit of the functionality vs the cost of delivery. Upon completion of an iteration, the team reevaluates project priorities.

Agile Methodologies are a collection of practices that conform to a set of principles as outlines in the Agile Manifesto. It is these principles that outline how a process should be defined. Some of the principles mentioned are:

• Working software is the primary measurement of success
• Adaptation to changes, even late changes are welcome
• Deliveries are frequent (2-4 weeks)
• Face to face communication is valued over written documentation
• Teams are to be trusted and self-organizing

Swarm Behavior

Out of all the principles that the Agile Manifesto describes, I think that the self-0rganizing quality is the most interesting. A look into Swarm Intelligence states that individuals are not smart, but the collective as a whole is.

After reading a National Geographic article I realized how much benefit a self-organization provides. Below is a summary of the article that is relevant to this blog. I would, however, encourage reading the entire article because I found it to be very interesting.

National Geographic – Swarm Behavior

Simple observations of a single ant will demonstrate how incapable the individual is. If the individual ant is so inept, how can they perform such complicated tasks? The colony is intelligent as a whole. Self organization is one of the major contributors to acting as a whole; no single ant is in charge (despite common belief the queen only lays eggs, she does not provide any governing function). An example helps to clarify.

Forager ants are not managed by other ants. Instead they react to simple rules of their environment. When patroller ants enter the colony at a sufficient rate it triggers the forgers to leave. If the patrollers are not entering rapidly enough, it may signal danger (a creditor, poor weather, etc.). It is a group of patrollers that decides for the foragers that it is safe to exit. Foragers will not return before the food is found. The foragers leave a hormone trail on their way back to lead to the food. The stronger the scent the more trips that have been made and thus the more food that is there. When a forager is gathering food, it was the group decided where the most food is by the stronger smell (similar to an implicit vote).

This is a small demonstration of how ants are self-organizing. By doing so, they do not need a leader or to know the entire picture. This also ensures that decisions are made based upon the entire colony; thus causing the colony as a whole to make intelligent decisions.

The article then discusses how swarm intelligence has been successfully applied to some of man kinds most difficult problems. Some of the problems that it has successfully been applied to include routing trucks, scheduling airlines, and guiding military robots.

Benefits

Agile methodology has taken self-organization and will benefit from it by gaining the intelligence of the group rather than individuals. Self-organization can solve some of the most difficult problems that mankind encounters. A complex network of individuals form a more intelligent collective. Agile methodologies use of self-organization ensures that a more intelligent collective is preforming the work, rather than an individual manager.

I have always liked the All in One Gestures FireFox extension, but never figured out all the features (I am not certain I will ever). I haven’t really found any documentation on how to use some of the features, so it may just be assumed to be known or intuitive. I, however, did not understand all the functionality that is available until I sat down and played with it for a bit. After doing so, I wrote a brief tutorial on how to use it. I will go through everything in order of the Options for All-in-One Gestures.

General Preferences

Enable

This section is pretty self explanatory, but some of the features that you can enable/disable I don’t believe are.

Rocker Gestures

Enable this option on the “General Preferences” page. It allows the user to navigate through the history using a “rocking motion across the mouse buttons”. For example, to move backward in history hold the right mouse button and then tap the left mouse button. To move forward hold the left mouse button and then tap the right mouse button.

Scroll Wheel in Tab Bar

Enable this option on the “General Preferences” page. This allows a user to put the mouse over the tabs and use the scroll wheel to move between the tabs.

Scroll Wheel Navigation

When enabled this allows the user to use the Scroll Wheel to Navigate.

Middle button scrolling

Allows the user to scroll in various ways as specified by Middle Button Scrolling: Select

Link Tool Tip

Allows the user to see a hovering tool tip that displays the text of a link and the URL of the link.

Scroll Wheel Navigation: Select

This determines what the scroll wheel will do. In order to trigger this feature use the trigger button that is currently setup. For the following assume that “Right” is selected as the trigger button.

• Peform Gesture Actions – I assume this is suppose to allow a gesture action to be selected. However, I am unable to get this feature to work.
• Navigate through History – Right Click and use the mouse wheel to navigate through the history.
• Navigate through Tabs – Right Click and use the mouse wheel to navigate through tabs
• History / Tabs based on rotation – Right click and go one direction for tab navigation and the opposite for history. For example, if Backward is checked scrolling toward the user will navigate History and scrolling away will switch tabs.

Middle Button Scrolling: Select

Allows the user to scroll in various ways.

• All-in-One autoscroll – allows the user to middle click and move the mouse up or down to scroll in that direction
• Native autoscroll – allows the user to middle click and move the mouse up or down to scroll in that direction
• AiOautoscroll + Grab and Drag – allows the user to middle click and move the mouse up or down to scroll in that direction or hold middle button and then move the mouse in the direction to scroll
• Grab and Drag scrolling – hold the middle button and move in the direction to scroll

Gestures Customization

This allows gestures to be specified. Move the mouse in a specified series of movements holding down the trigger button and it will perform the configured action. Note that certain actions are tied to Mouse Gesture Actions

Advanced Prefs #1

Trigger button

This is the button that needs to be depressed for a gesture or scroll wheel navigation to be performed.

Mouse Gesture Actions

Anything in ” are the name of the action specified in Gestures Customization.

Advanced Prefs #2

Middle Button Scrolling

More options for Middle Button Scrolling

Tab scrolling

More options for Scroll wheel in tab bar,Navigate through Tabs, and Navigation through tabs for History/Tabs based on initial rotation

Closing Tabs

Determines what tab gets focus after a tab is closed.