Words of Wisdom by MrWes

Pragmatic Wisdom of Wes Johnson

Navigation Menu

8 Steps to avoid feature creep

Posted by on Jul 27, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

Steps to avoid feature creep

  1. Create a list of features for the planned product version.
    • Some people call this a specification.
    • You know you can ship when the planned features are implemented and tested.
  2. Get product stakeholders approval on specified features before implementation begins.
    • The agreement on specified features helps everybody (developers, testers, sales, marketing, customers) know what the product is supposed to do when it’s done.
  3. Create a feature wish-list to collect suggested future features.
    • The key to avoiding feature creep is to prevent the features from sneaking into the existing product specification.
Read More

CentOS an inexpensive alternative to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

Posted by on Jul 26, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

If you need to practice on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution but don’t have the cash to play with an official Red Hat version, what are you going to do?  You’re going to look for an affordable (FREE) alternative solution.  The solution is CentOS, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System.  To find a quick overview of CentOS, visit the wikipedia CentOS site.

The official CentOS website is http://www.centos.org.

Read More

Barking up the wrong tree

Posted by on Jul 9, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

Sometimes we become so focused on the pursuit of a symptom of a problem that we don’t stop to ask if we are still focused on the real cause of the problem.  This happened to me recently.

During the iPhone development process you have a choice of debugging the iPhone App using the iPhone emulator or using the actual hardware.  The quickest way to test out your code is to build and debug using the emulator.

While developing an iPhone application for Podcast Stockton I used one of the iPhone Audio libraries. It never occurred to me that the emulator might not do everything the hardware does.  I was testing out the podcast playback and experienced some unacceptable behavior while using the emulator.  I spent the good part of an evening looking for the cause of the issue.  It wasn’t until after I had spent many looking over my code that I finally decided to do a sanity check.  I switched Xcode to debug using the hardware instead of the emulator;  that’s when I discovered I had been barking up the wrong tree.  The code that should have been working all along was working just fine.

When you run into an issue that should have been working, make sure to do a sanity check to see if it’s a symptom or a real issue.

In the future, when things seem a little off I plan to do a sanity check just to make sure I’m pursuing the cause and not the symptoms.

Read More

TiVo RSS feeds

Posted by on Jul 1, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments

Last week I was so caught up in iPhone development that I didn’t watch any of my favorite podcasts on TiVo.  This week I finally got caught up with some of them only to find out that one of my shows GeekBrief.TV had been cancelled.  I have been watching Cali Lewis for a couple of years now and was sad to see the end of the show.  To see the history behind Geek Brief TV visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeekBrief.TV

After a little digging, I discovered that Cali has joined Revision 3 with a new show called GeekBeat.TV.

I wanted to start following the new show.  The only problem was Video on Demand didn’t have the show in the lineup.  The good news is I have a TiVo HD.  TiVo HD has the ability to subscribe to RSS video feeds.  All I had to do was manually setup an RSS feed for my show.  Here is how I did it.

Read More