Chris O'Meara

Here’s the story board we used to coordinate work on the new house.

I picked up Kent Beck’s white book at JavaOne in 2002 and read it cover to cover before I got home.

Around ThoughtWorks, lean is in.

Having spent a few weeks exploring CMSes during a recent project start in Atlanta, here’s my rambling answer to “please recommend a Ruby CMS”.

Nicole likes the term mental space. It’s not derogatory like “dude, you got waaaay too much mental space.” (An obvious reference to the space between my ears where brain should reside.) No, I like to think of it like a measurement. You could define it as the distance between any two adjacent parts of one’s life.

Five weeks ago, Danny, Sean, and I were riding in Danny’s late-model SUV whooshing up I-5 toward the California-Oregon border. It was a comfortable ride; we laughed and talked about life. My friend Danny dropped a bombshell question: “How much do you work?”

I just posted yet another hello, world app. This one demonstrates integrating Concierge into a Rails app. Hopefully, the article helps answer the "so, what" question with respect to Concierge.

Say hello to Concierge.

I recently developed and released an open source library called Concierge on Ruby Forge. Concierge provides conventions and plumbing to join service implementations with service consumers. It represents my attempt to scratch an itch, emulate the Rails coding style and give something back to the Ruby community. Hope you enjoy it.

Read the introduction.

maker: a person or thing that makes or produces something : a cabinetmaker.

I make software just like artists make art, carpenters make woodworks, or chefs make gourmet meals. You could also call me a creator or a craftsman. I manipulate code and the result, when executed by a computer, solves real business problems. I love it. It's fun and engaging.

So I've been working on melodysphotography.com and have it pretty far along. In the portfolio section, I load QuickTime movies into a [thickbox][3]. It's a great effect, very nice and clean but Safari doesn't display the movie when the content loads.

So I'm working on melodysphotography.com and I want to load QuickTime content in a thickbox. It works , with the addition of my css hack, fairly well except that the audio track continues to play when the thickbox closes in Safari. Now that's ugly.

I take no credit for this work, but I wanted to point out an excellent reference for when you're trying to wrangle QuickTime content into IE, Firefox, and Safari without losing your mind. You might be tempted to go read your favorite reference on the <object> tag. Resist the urge and go read the article "Object Paranoia" over at Juicy Studio.

What must you leave behind on an agile project in order for someone to be able to pick it up and maintain or enhance it in the future? It's an interesting question because agile projects tend to travel light and carry as few artifacts as possible. Here are my initial thoughts, please feel free to send me your suggestions and I'll consider adding them to the list.

I recently read Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money over at Software By Rob. Please read it. I found it so accurate I almost laughed out loud. I sent it to my wife. She almost laughed out loud. I'm a motivation factor guy, not a hygiene factor guy. Email me and let me know where you fit in.