It’s not often that Slashdot comes up with something genuinely interesting that I haven’t seen from somewhere else before, but they managed it today. Puritan Work-Ethic, How I Loathe Thee really struck a chord with me: Nearly every video game since “tank pong” has buried its best content behind layers of work. Unlike any other retail product I can think of, when you buy a video game, the chances that you will actually get what you paid for are infinitesimal.

Since its inception, our IWWCM integration has been a bit of a pain to install – the instructions differed based on which version of IWWCM you where running and which version of WebSphere or Workplace you used and you had to move and edit files in various locations. Nothing difficult but it was just too easy to forget a step and have things go wrong. The simplest way to improve things – provide an installer that automates the process.

Ephox current has two job openings available – a technical role in our Brisbane (Australia) office and an administrative type role in our San Mateo (US) office. Application Support Analyst (Brisbane Office) Combine your software engineering skills with extensive client contact Work with a dynamic, innovative team doing eXtreme Programming Particpate in developing the Client Services team for a growing international business Overview We are looking for an Application Support Engineer with excellent communication and problem solving skills to join our technical team.

I got some nice feedback over night on an old post about WYSIWYG editors: # Pedja Says: June 6th, 2006 at 11:49 pm You are the greatest. You are the only web rich text control where I can simply paste image from clipboard. Congratulations! I had forgotten about that feature – it has often been one of my favorites, particularly when I want to include screen shots in technical documentation I’m writing.

I’ve come to realize that there is a world of difference between requirements for content authoring and requirements for site design. This really becomes clear when I look at the different view points between myself (The Challenge Of Intuitive WYSIWYG HTML) and Alastair (This Is What You See, This Is What You Get and now Responding to Adrian) regarding WYSIWYG editing. (Snide comment: see, I can use cite and emphasis too).

XP is a process that requires constant communication and a strong commitment to making XP work. While you can do XP subversively without getting the rest of the business to buy into the process, the benefits you get will be significantly diminished. For a software development company, adopting XP affects every single part of the business and it’s important that everyone understands their role in the process and wants to help make it succeed.

All of the writings on XP that I’ve seen seem to assume that a development team only ever works on one project at a time – there’s one product to develop and deploy, one client, one timeline etc. Oh what a nice world that must be to live in. At Ephox we work on a large number of products - all centered around the same core editor – and each product has it’s own requirements, clients and timelines that we have to satisfy.

Ah the synergies, Sam Ruby talk about getting MathML supported in planet, and the Ephox weblog talks about getting EditLive! for Java to automatically upload image versions of MathML equations so they render in any browser. The nice thing about this function of EditLive! is that you can still just double click the equation image to edit it again – the MathML is stored as an encoded attribute so that information isn’t lost.

Greg picks up on my previous post about XP principles and how it helps avoid rewrites. I thought I should explain in more detail why rewrites are a bad thing and my thoughts about when and how you should do them anyway. Programmers for some reason seem to think any code they didn’t write, and often any code they wrote some time ago, is poor quality, misguided and generally crap. Often this is quite true, but the degree to which the code is bad is usually significantly less than the initial impression it gives.

Sometimes you write code that is really important, sometimes you write code that is not and other times you write code that is somewhere in between. Should you apply the same quality standards to all of that code? It really comes down to a question of value – code that you write once, run and then throw away obviously doesn’t need to be pretty and certainly doesn’t need any documentation. What about code that you keep around, make the odd change to and run regularly but is of low importance?

Well maybe not so much “killer”… Anyway, Scoble mentions the return of SmartTags due to bloggers choosing to add them to their site. I pretty much never actually go to bloggers sites unless I want to write a blog post about them in which case I open a new tab in NetNewsWire to remind me for later, so I don’t notice them much. When I do see them though they really annoy me – they look far too much like hyperlinks and distract far too much from the content.

A while back Ben Hyde wrote his thoughts on the key XP principles in What every you doing, it’s wrong! I’m not sure I fully comprehend exactly what Ben is trying to say but a lot of it seems opposed to the way I see XP in theory and to the experience I’ve had in implementing XP. I’ll start with Ben’s rewording of the summary of Extreme Programming (see also James Mead’s original):