The Pomodoro Technique

Again, thanks to Henrik Kniberg's blog I've got a brief introduction to Pomodoro Technique, which is essentially a way to improve one's productivity. The PDF describing it is quite a simple one and is fun to read (for those lazy enough there exists a 5-minute guide too).

The sole idea of this technique is to split the work into fixed short time frames separated by breaks, plan it and protect it against interruptions. A set of simple yet efficient rules promises to make it work.

I was completely carried away by this paragraph, because it seems to be the thing I'm lacking most of all in my everyday work:

We can stimulate this ability to feel time in a different way by means of a series of exercises which serve to enhance consciousness of passing time among Pomodoro users. This different awareness of the passage of time seems to lead Pomodoro users to a higher level of concentration in performing the activity at hand.

BTW, the concept is thoroughly developed and there exist various tools dedicated to help using it, so it should be a fun thing to advance this technique, but I'm going to use it's simplest, hardware form. Yes, gonna try this on Monday! :)

Scrum and XP from the Trenches

Just finished reading a book by Henrik Kniberg. I found it really exciting and fun to read (at least, in Russian translation). Thank you, Henrik, looking forward to read more of your books :)

Short extract follows:

XQuery for mashups?

Consider this basic XQuery sample:

for $statement in document(https://www.sample.com/sample.xml)//post
let $comment := $statement/comment
where $statement/postedby = 'userBob'
return <quotebob>{$comment}</quotebob>


Nice, isn't it?

False language

I guess it's the most obfuscated programming language ever invented (and it's more-or-less useful, compared to Brainfuck for example). Meet False Language!

99 9[1-$][\$@$@$@$@\/*=[1-$$[%\1-$@]?0=[\$.' ,\]?]?]#

It's a program which prints all primes up to 100. It's so impressively smart, that inspired creation of K, F and Y programming languages, which in turn are... somewhat similar to J and Q.

Nice diagrams

Take a look at Treemap diagrams:



It's like a... well, upskirts view of the tree. Really cool Javascript for automated generation of these diagrams could be found here (it's a demo).

Grid Computing made easy with GridGain

I've just watched a 20 minute demo of GridGain usage for parallel computations. Looks quite impressive, at least easy due to Map-Reduce-like approach employed in a very simple form. Also it has a nice feature of transparent propagation of code changes between nodes, still it's not actually clear for me how they gonna manage changes in classpath, libraries, etc.

It seems that GridGain is not very popular (yet), at least I was unable to find a wiki article about it :) though I really sympathize its simplicity and wish them good luck.

Sun Web 2.0 tech is easy

Two following links describe how to achieve famous Ruby on Rails rapid development on Java platform using Sun tools - Netbeans and GlassFish. Among pros there are really fast setup, high performance (due to clustering) and flexibility (mix Java and Ruby):

• Developing MySQL-Backed Applications with Netbeans, JRuby-on-Rails & Glassfish (needs registration)
  
• GlassFish Clustering In Under 10 Minutes (also high-resolution version is available - the link is right after the movie window)