(Sorry for the delay between shows lately.  It's the summer, and I was away on vacation...)

Especially THIS week, the opinions of Ken and Eric do not reflect the opinions of Chariot Solutions...

Speaking of this week, here are the links, found also on delicious.com at delicious.com/developernews/23

Links you can use!

• Release Notes - Grails - Version 1.3.4 - HTML format - jira.codehaus.org
• Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google
• Quite the firestorm : On a New Road
• InfoQ: Oracle Sues Google Over Java in Android
• A List Apart: Articles: Good Help is Hard to Find
• Rails 3 Interview « Envy Labs

Blog / Podcast Disclosure:  we have partnered or worked in various capacities with a number of the companies mentioned in the show, including Sun, Oracle, Google and SpringSource.

Thanks to Kevin Griffin for joining Eric Snyder and myself this week.

Articles of interest

From http://www.delicious.com/developernews/2:

• Django and NoSQL Databases Revisited « myNoSQL
• Using PGP Encryption with Mule
• Chariot Solutions: Machine Learning: Google Prediction API
• Continuous Deployment, Code Review and Pre-Tested Commits on Digg4 ...
• Sharding in Grails | Groovy Zone
• Python Package Index : webapp2 0.2
• Getting started with Chef -- A tutorial
• Listen to Brian Fox discuss Maven 3 on BasementCoders.com
• Eclipse 4.0 SDK released - there is an updated tutorial available..

The Chariot DeveloperNews is sponsored by Chariot Solutions. In September we are running a number of training courses in the Spring Framework, including Enterprise Integration with Spring and Hibernate with Spring. We are also running two one-day Maven courses - an Intro and Advanced course. Check our course calendar at www.chariotsolutions.com/education.

We are pleased to release this recording of Linda Rising's talk on Deception and Estimation.  This is a one-hour talk, and is a good talk about how we deceive ourselves in a number of ways in life in general, and of course in the estimation process.

From the abstract:

"Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception. It seems we are overly optimistic, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it’s almost impossible for us to estimate accurately.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are best guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go, which is, of course, the agile approach to managing change. Linda Rising has been part of many plan-driven development projects where sincere, honest people with integrity wanted to make the best estimates possible and used many “scientific” approaches to make it happen – all for naught. Re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure to do the best up-front estimate and resulted in a lot of overhead and meetings to try to “get it right.” Offering examples from ordinary life – especially from the way people eat and drink – Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and helps work with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us."

Thanks to Linda Rising for speaking at ETE 2010 and letting us publish her talk.  

slides

In the DevNews today...

• CouchApp Evently Guided Hack w/ CouchDB
• Announcing djangoembed, rich media consuming and providing with Django
• Andres Almiray's Weblog : Weblog
• Daily Dose - Rails 3 Arrives at First RC Station
• Spring MVC 3 Showcase
• GORM Gotchas (Part 3)
• Michael Hartl’s Rails 3 Tutorial Book

Sponsor Moment:

We are sponsored / supported by our employer, Chariot Solutions, a leader in development and integration services in areas such as Java, Spring, Flex and Ruby on Rails.  Visit chariotsolutions.com/education to see our online training calendar.  We're hosting courses in Spring and Maven this fall.  Check us out today.

Podcast Disclosures:

We are partners with SpringSource, SonaType and Engine Yard, all of whom which may have been mentioned either directly or indirectly in this podcast.

Ken & Eric

• Understanding iOS 4 Backgrounding and Delegate Messaging @ Dr. Touch
• mxcl's homebrew at master - GitHub
• Homebrew: OS X's Missing Package Manager | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
• amf.js – A Pure JavaScript AMF Implementation
• The Incredible, Growing, Commercial Hadoop Market — GigaOM Pro
• Another Chance To Win a TShirt: What Are The Major Milestones in Java Persistence? | Javalobby
• Eucalyptus Closes $20M Round
• Are You A Starter, A Finisher Or An Implementer? | Javalobby

For the full list of developer news URLs we considered, head over to delicious.com/developernews/20

Ken & Eric

Chariot Developer News Episode #19

Hosts: Ken Rimple and Eric Snyder

The watchword this week is Release... Many releases upcoming or out, including FireFox 4 beta/preview 1, Tomcat 7 beta 1, and the upcoming Passenger 3 and GMail with HTML 5.

Links are not being loaded to delicious yet, so here they are in their glory!

• MRHaki on Groovy and clearing time from a date.
• The Road to Passenger 3.
• Firefox 4 Article.
• Apache Tomcat 7 Beta 1 is released!
• The Memory Leak protection article Ken was babbling on about.
• The mrhaki article on Spock.
• The Spock Project Page.
• Eight Open-Source Business Models.
• HTML 5 Coming to GMail.

Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.

Her abstract

"A question I’m often asked is how a non-technical manager like me can tell when their software team is pulling one over on them. This seems to be especially true of enterprise managers and points to structural problems with command and control development methodologies. The principlesof whole team interaction and the practices of rapid feedback and response in Agile seem to create an alternative culture in which things "just work."

Explicit tag warning

You'll hear the word "B.S." in long form several times in this talk, so anyone offended by this term should not tune in. However, it's done in context, and is very tasteful.

Resources

• Bonnie's presentation page: http://ow.ly/24myk
• The Tree Cartoon: http://ow.ly/24mzq
• Slides from the discussion : http://ow.ly/24mAl
• The Cocktail Party Effect: http://ow.ly/24mBp
• Servant Leadership: http://ow.ly/24mCe
• Bonnie Aumann on Twitter: twitter.com/bonniea

Today's episode is #18.  We discuss a number of technologies.  LINKS, provided by the code snippet below!

• Git Reference
• Cloud Performance Comparison
• Pyro 4.0 released
• Google I/O 2010 - BigQuery and Prediction APIs
• Groovy++ in action: DSL for embedding HttpServer | Groovy Zone
• 11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic
• Groovy/Grails Talk - Adding Feeds With Grails Plugins
• Groovy Goodness: Strip Leading Spaces from Lines with Margin - Messages from mrhaki
• Five Really Handy Google Command Line Tricks

GEEK OUT!

If you're curious, here's how we fetched and converted the list from delicious rss using Groovy Console

def feed = new XmlSlurper()
      .parse("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/developernews/18")
  println "<ul>" 
  feed.channel.item.each { feedData ->
      println "<li><a href='${feedData.link}' " +
       ">$feedData.title</a></li>"    
  } 
println "</ul>"
return null 

Enjoy,

Ken & Eric

PS - Standard disclosure:  Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

Our ETE 2010 Session today is "Influencing your way to Agile" by Audrey Troutt. Audrey Troutt is a Software Engineer at the Drexel Math Forum.  She can be reached on twitter at @auditty.

In this talk, Audrey describes ways to approach your team members, bosses, bosses bosses, and other types in a more productive, influential way.  She discusses common pitfalls and traps, and the talk is very informative as well as entertaining. At the end of the session she takes audience questions.

Her slides are available online.

ETE Session #6 is "Write Once, Run on Any Phone"

A session with Chariot's Aaron Mulder and Kevin Griffin.

They discuss three popular mobile frameworks that allow developers to write the software one time and deploy it to each phone platform supported by the framework.

Rhodes, Titanium and PhoneGap are featured.

Slides for the presentation can be found here.