Continuous Monitoring Tutorial at Agile 2008

Last week, I conducted a tutorial on Continuous Monitoring at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. The title of the session is Continuous Monitoring: Beyond Continuous Integration. Unfortunately, the track organizers changed the topic title on me twice and as a result I ended up with a number of attendees who had come to learn about setting up an automated build server. Ack! Hopefully, they didn’t go away disappointed and still got something valuable out of the tutorial.

The session was divided into 3 sections: I began with a presentation introducing the topic; next, participants were encouraged to work in small groups to design an andon dashboard for their project teams; the remainder of the session was spent discussing the implementation details involved in building a dashboard. My plan for the latter half of the session was to get participants to integrate metric data from different sources via RESTful XML web services into a simple Rails-based dashboard that I have thrown together, but given the size and interest of the group, it seemed easiest to just discuss the implementation rather than go through with the exercise. I had also intended to demo using a digital photo frame as a digital dashboard, but my photo frame couldn’t get onto the hotel’s wireless.

If you are interested in a copy of the presentation, I’ve uploaded it in Keynote or PowerPoint 2003. Please feel free to use the contents of the slides. The presentation is done in the Lessig style, so it might not be the easiest to follow. If you end up presenting on the topic, let me know — I’m interested to track the thinking and ideas as they evolve. Here’s the embedded slideshow from Slideshare:

Continuous Monitoring
View SlideShare presentation (tags: continuousmonitoring agile2008)

As for the code that I used in the demo, I’ll get it uploaded to github soon.

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Filed under agile, ruby, technology : Comments (0) : Aug 14th, 2008

A proud day for Canadian Athletes

Today is a proud day for Canadian athletes. No, I’m not talking about the Olympics. I’m referring to the World Ultimate Frisbee championships that concluded today in Vancouver. Canadian teams won gold in the Open (Men’s) and Mixed (Co-ed) divisions. The Open division final was the highlight with incredible displays of athleticism exceeding what I’ve seen so far in the Olympics.

In the Open final, the Canadian men’s team took on their American rivals. Despite being the underdogs, the Canadian team came out with an early lead due to some intense, high-energy play. As the rain started coming down and the wind picked up, the Americans began to resort to calling out fouls left, right and centre. Ultimate frisbee is a game without referees, where the rules are balanced to provide a fair system of play — assuming, of course, that players are displaying good sportsmanship. Time and again the Americans called fouls on legitimate defensive plays made by the Canadians. It was a shame to see such dispirited play. Fortunately, the Canadians really showed their class and shrugged off the controversial calls to prevail in the end 17-15. I was proud to see the Canadian side rise above the pettiness and carry the victory.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : Aug 10th, 2008

Operations Database Talk at Agile Vancouver

I’ll be talking about leveraging operations databases to bridge the gap between development and production at tomorrow night’s Agile Vancouver meeting at Sierra Systems. See you there.

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Filed under agile : Comments (0) : May 26th, 2008

Continuous Monitoring on Hanselminutes

While at DevTeach, I was interviewed by Scott Hanselman for his Hanselminutes Podcast. We started out talking about the history of the CruiseControl.NET project, but I opted to segue into discussing Continuous Monitoring. Continuous Monitoring focuses on providing continuous feedback to a team by leveraging visible dashboard displays to ambiently communicate information about the health and state of their project. I intend to write more about the practice here on this blog, but for now the podcast is the best place to learn more about it. I will be presenting about it at Agile 2008 and if you are interested in joining the discussion, feel free to join the Continuous Monitoring group.

Corrections:
There are a few statistics that I cited incorrectly off the top of my head during the podcast:

  • The CruiseControl.NET project has consumed over 46 person years of effort - at least based on what oloh can divine from our subversion repository.
  • The CruiseControl.NET project has had over 800,000 downloads - not 80,000 as I said during the interview. I was off by an order of magnitude. Oh and this doesn’t include all of the direct downloads from CCNetLive

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Filed under .net, agile, technology : Comments (1) : May 20th, 2008

DevTeach Toronto Wrap-up

Last week I was out in Toronto presenting at DevTeach. I gave 3 presentations:

Unfortunately I ended up attending relatively few of the sessions as I was pretty busy preparing the materials for my presentations. But what I did see was quite good. I particularly liked Derek Hatcher’s Leveraging the Amazon Platform (EC2 and S3) and Greg Young’s DDDD, Unshackle Your Domain.

What I enjoyed most about the conference was getting to know and learn from some of the experts in a new technology circle. I missed last year’s DevTeach in Vancouver as I was in China at the time but I was glad to have made it out this one.

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Filed under .net, agile, technology : Comments (3) : May 20th, 2008

Using the MacBook Pro Remote Control under Windows

This past week I’ve been conducting a number of .NET-related presentations for the DevTeach Toronto conference. Unfortunately, the MacBook remote does not work by default in Windows and I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of keying my way through my PowerPoint deck.

Fortuitously, I came across this handy little utility called EventGhost. EventGhost hangs out in your system tray, intercepts events from external devices and then allows you to script the response to the event. It comes with a plugin for intercepting events from the MacBook IR receiver which you can then map onto keystrokes.

To get going with Event Ghost, you need to add a plugin for HID: Aple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver. Clicking the buttons on the remote control will then allow you to see the names for the various events. Next create a macro for each event type and then choose the Emulate Keystrokes action to produce the right response. The screenshot below shows the settings that I use.

Event Ghost Configuration for MacBook IR remote control

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Filed under mac : Comments (0) : May 16th, 2008

Disabling Caps Lock under OSX

I hate the Caps Lock key. I really don’t understand why it continues to be a prominent fixture on computer keyboards. I mean - who uses it anyway? It just gets in the way when you mean to hit the Shift or Tab keys and then you have to delete the text that’s now shouting back at you.

For many years, I’ve used a little Freeware Windows utility called BoldFinger. It sits in your system tray and intercepts any Caps Lock keystrokes. If you hover over the BoldFinger icon it tells you how many times it’s “saved” you from the Caps Lock key.

Now that I’ve switched to a Mac, I was happy to discover the OSX has built a way to disable the Caps Lock key directly into the OS. Just go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse and then click the Modifier Keys button on the Keyboard tab. Set the Caps Lock key dropdown to No Action and you won’t be bothered by that pesky key ever again.

capslock.png

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Filed under mac : Comments (0) : May 16th, 2008

China Quake

I have been reading with horror the unfolding news of the major earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan province earlier this week. Having just returned from 6 months living in China — in Xi’an, more precisely, which is not too far from epicenter of the quake — the news of the aftermath hits much closer to home. Living and growing up in Vancouver, the threat of a major earthquake is never that far away, and the idea of something like this striking Vancouver is unimaginable.

Reading the public reaction, at least here Canada, to the devastation has been challenging. The quake happened right at a time when criticism of China’s human rights policies and policy towards Tibet in the lead up to the Olympics was at its peak. Underlying this criticism there is also an unstated fear of China’s growing economic dominance as North American economies head further into recession. Watching people struggle to switch from China bashing to sympathy for those affected by the earthquake is to get a sense of how complex and tangled these issues are. At least in China, unlike in Burma, people are supported by a strong military and a central government that is acting in the interests of its people. On the other hand, this self-sufficiency makes me feel powerless to do anything to help.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : May 15th, 2008

Scaling Continuous Integration paper

I wrote Garmisch-Partenkirchen. While it is a bit dated, most of the advice in it is still relevant.

I’m in Toronto this week speaking at DevTeach. One of the sessions that I will be doing is on Recommended Practices for Continuous Integration and I’ll be referring this paper.

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Filed under .net, agile, technology : Comments (1) : May 13th, 2008

Ani and a xylophone

Last Monday night, we went and saw Ani DiFranco at the UBC Chan Centre. I’ve seen Ani in concert 5 times, and this time was definitely not a disappointment. She played a lot of material from her forthcoming album and it was truly excellent. I think that it’s pretty rare to see an artist in concert and like their new material just as much as their old songs — especially for a musician as prolific as Ani DiFranco.

Her new band consists of an upright base, drums, acoustic guitar and a xylophone. I wasn’t sure how the xylophone would work, but it sounded great and it was a nice enhancement to the sound of her older material.

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Filed under life : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2008

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