Project 31-A

I caught this blog post, The Tyranny of the Urgent , via IEEE. It happen to resonate with some recent reflections on the plus and minus of Continuous Deployment or Continuous Integration . Jim cites “Agile development easily devolves into management by crisis.”   I have observed that being agile and delivering quickly tend to deliver superficial products. Products that are then reworked, and reworked, and reworked. At one extreme, you have waterfall development which results in absolutely detailed plans that are difficult to adjust. At the other extreme, agile has been been taken by some into a gospel of immediate execution.  All of the troops get up and charge across the open field. Yes, the objective may be taken but there is often a high body count, a wasteful body count.   Recently I talked to a neuropsychologist who have treated many many battle causalities from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many start-ups. Unlike the US Marines, with “no man left behind”, c...

In my last post I successfully installed the Kindle driver as an Android Debug Bridge (adb) device. My Motorola Droid was not recognized as an adb device – and for one application that I am planning to do, I need GPS. So once more into the world of partially correct forum posts. First item to check was to insure that adb was enabled on the device!  It turned out that I had not enabled it (I had enabled Unknown Sources). When I connected the USB after changing the adb setting, I received a driver error. The phone now shows as a Drive (G:\) only instead of MTP USB Device .  One step forward, half a step back. I decided to just double check that the adb is not working… so at the command line, What! It’s there. The device ID is different from the Kindle. This was a mercifully short post.  If I had not double checked, I could easily gone down a rabbit hole trying to get something looking like a phone showing up in the device manager. A rabbit hole ...

,I’ve started to play with Appcelerator because it is effectively a cross-platform development platform for Droid, HTML5 and iOS. About two years ago I had done some Droid development just using the SDK. I have encountered a few frustrations and have not been pleased with the load time for the Droid Emulator on a Windows-7 x64 box with quad cores and 10 gigs of memory. For some simple applications, I have drunk a cup of coffee in the time that it took to build and launch in the emulator.   My traditional “magical chant” to get rid of technical frustrations is to start documenting. Often the process of documentation result in discovering skipped tests or alternative paths that could be needed.   Steps Download Titanium from http://www.appcelerator.com/ . Large download. I ended up having to re-install it to C:\Titanium , it appears that having a space in various paths results in problems according to forums. Doing this resolved some build issues and set a pattern t...