Friday, June 22, 2007

Morning Coffee 93

• The Washington Capitals unveil their new jersey tonight, though they have a picture on their web site. I've got mixed feelings, though I'm trying to reserve judgement until I see it "in action". I like that they're back to the traditional Caps colors. But the Caps have jersey change fatigue. They only had the screaming eagle jersey for twelve years, and they swapped out the blue jersey for the black one (that started life as a third jersey) somewhere along the line.
• Lawrence Lessig hangs up his IP spurs to go after the deep corruption of the political process. He points out that after a decade focusing on IP, he's learned all he is going to about these issues so he decided (among other reasons) that it was time to start fresh learning about something new. I keep telling my kids that "always keep learning" is one of the secrets to life. This move by Lessig is the embodiment of that principle. Good for him. (via John Lam)
• My old team keep chugging along. They've recently added "special coverage" sections on Agile Development and Enterprise Architecture.
• Miguel de Icaza details the three week "hackathon" (his words, not mine) they went thru to get a working version of Silverlight on Mono - aka Moonlight - in time for ReMix 07 in Paris. It's an impressive engineering achievement, to say the least. Also, it's nice to see the folks from Microsoft France invite Miguel to come be a part of their keynote. (via Larry O'Brien)
• Rob Bazinet points out VisualSVN in response to my question about SVN clients other than Tortoise. Like AnkhSVN, VisualSVN snaps into Visual Studio. However, where AnkhSVN is a native SVN implementation, VisualSVN depends on Tortoise. Scott Bellware wrote "VisualSVN takes a novel approach to bringing SVN into the Visual Studio IDE... it brings Tortoise into the IDE!". So it still sounds like Tortoise is the SVN client everyone cares about.
• Scott Berkun details a variety of immature development and management methodologies, including Development By Denial (DBD), Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) and my personal favorite Asshole Driven development (ADD). Scott Hanselman suggests looking around and making sure you're not said asshole. I tend to be somewhat...how should I say it?...strong willed about the direction projects I work on should take. My current project is about driving a paradigm shift to service orientation, and I don't think you can't drive that kind of change without being somewhat strong willed. It's a thin line between strong willed and asshole and hopefully I come down on the right side of that line more often than not.