April 25th - 27th

Leisure
Julian Simpson raises money for Leukaemia Research.

Consulting
Geoff Oliphant agrees with Seth Godin that getting things done on time is an effective form of marketing.

Ruby
Jay Fields announces the release of Validatable 1.2.2.

Web
Sriram Narayanan finds Indian companys trying to compensate for terrible bespoke software with good customer service.

Comment
Jason Yip asks managers to give innovation a chance rather than finding fault.
Sriram Narayanan meets a raving bureaucrat.
Jason Yip wonders if individual accountability undermines systems thinking.
Jason Yip won't harm your dignity.
Jason Yip reads about what it takes to be the best.
Jason Yip sees how flawed reasoning can make number plates amazing.
Jason yip questions the importance of talent.

Internet
Ian Cartwright wonders what is stopping IP Multicast being used in practice.

Writing
Geoff Oliphant finds an explanation why some technical books are better than others but finds there's no substitute for getting your hands on the keyboard.

.Net
Geoff Oliphant gets into WPF.

Programming
Jason Yip late binds everything.
Jason Yip finds the term DSL too vague. Expressive software may be better and he looks at examples in Rails.
Paul Hammant recommends Branch by Abstraction to avoid multi-branch development.
Amit Rathore raises the level of abstraction using DSLs. To do this in Java he uses Ruby running on JRuby.

Agile
Andy Marks shares his approach to estimation.
Amit Rathore has a neat trick for tracking unknown estimates in story points.
Martin Fowler explains how checking in broken code and be a pain in a CI environment. Not many tools support the PendingCommit solution but the answer may lie with people not technology.
Neal Ford sheds his Architect title in favour of ThoughtWorker/Meme Wrangler,

Tools
Martin Fowler applies lessons from make to write better ant scripts.
Martin Fowler sees how time marker files created by touch are useful in ant scripts, and looks at Hibernate as an example.

Hints and tips
Vivek Singh tweaks his laptop power saving settings.

April 22nd - 24th

Leisure
Jim Webber charts his search for a decent cup of coffee in London on Google maps and invites candidate outlets to apply.

Ruby
Carlos Villela finds his Oracle client is compiled for PowerPC, not Intel. He gets his data eventually by running SQLPlus on Rosetta.

Comment
Jim Webber marks the 25th birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Rubber clad British computing history.

Writing
Pramod Sadalage herals his latest eBook Recipes for Continuous Database Integration

Programming
Darren Hobbs lists the 3 cardinal sins of programmers.

Agile
Joe Homs shares his opinions and favourite quotoes on planning.
Jake Scruggs experiences urgency inflation in ranking the criticality of bugs and recomends a standard 5 level model instead.

Tools
Sidu Ponnappa heralds the release of Mingle.

Rails
Paul Ingles shows us how he configured Capistrano to deploy to Joyent Accelerator.

Hints and tips
Pat Kua keeps on top of things with text files and Google desktop.
Neal Ford is finds out the hard way that knowledge is best kept in plain text files. And recommends ToDo.txt along the way.
Jonny Leroy is Getting Things Done with Outlook.

Usability
Marc McNeill disagrees with his customer and makes a silk purse out of a sow's ear of a UI.
Marc McNeill Is reminded that web page sizes are getting larger and that might not be a good thing for everyone.

Linux
Sachin Dharmapurikar can now enjoy Kubuntu on his laptop thanks to a proper driver for Intel ProWireless.
Sachin Dharmapurikar gets his Kubuntu installation up to a screen resolution of 1440x990 by using Adept Installer for nVidia.

April 20th - 21st

Leisure
Ian Cartwright shows us how to use a GPS unit, gpsbabel and gpisync to tag photos with the waypoints on your journey.

Agile
Pat Kua finds teaching new team members about a code base is a good way to learn about it yourself.
Jason Yip recommends a process evolved by the team doing it over heroes or static process.

Ruby
Daniel Manges uses to_proc to instantiate arrays of attributes into ActiveRecord models.
Jay Fields sees how complains about static methods in languages like C# and Java don't seem to apply to Ruby.

Design
Neal Ford calls out the difference between good design and being used to bad design and wonders if Vista will turn people on to Macs.

Comment
Hakan Raberg lives in Bangalore but wants it to stay open through the night.
Sachin Dharmapurikar bemoans the state of Indian mass media
Jason Yip reminds us to use libraries, frameworks and patterns to save effort.

Business
James Webster Looks at some of the technology behind Australia's ECN.

April 18th - 19th

Programming
Martin Fowler tries to speed up the build his Antlr builds with JRuby but may have prematurely optimised.

Tools
Neal Ford still prefers IntelliJ to Eclipse.
Neal Ford podcasts about Groovy in a conversation with Scott Davis.

SOA
Neal Ford finds an IBMer who agrees with him that there's not much more to say about SOA

Hints and tips
Paul Ingles looks for a low cost DNS providers with a clean user interface.
Paul Ingles uses Mocha to test object equality in Ruby.

Leisure
Paul Ingles falls out of love with LoveFilm.com

Ruby
Jay Fields finds "best practice" from C# of occassionally using stubs doesn't carry over to Ruby. Using Mocha he always uses mocks.
Jay Fields uses Ruby metaprogramming to initialise instance variables in a constructor from a hash.

Comment
Simon Stewart finds a use for pr0n in the development of the IP protocol.

Usability
Marc McNeill wonders what horrors lurk behind a website that's only available 8am to 11.45pm Mon-Fri.
James Crisp uses Amazon for the first time and finds 6 usability problems.

Agile
Amit Rathore lists some advantages of arranging stories as trees.
Jason Yip finds simpler approach to planning approach to planning poker from Patrick Masi that appears to be faster and more accurate.

April 14th - 17th

Mac
Neal Ford searches for and finds a way to right-click from his Mac keyboard.
Christopher Johnston tries to decide between Windows XP and Vista to run on Parallels on his Mac and decides to ask the audience.

Agile
Jason Yip finds other people working on improving stand-ups.
Christopher Johnston prefers unit tests to comments in the code.
Liz Keogh explains why BDD is more than an evolution of TDD.

Blogging
Jay Fields looks at interview candidates blog output.

Java
Hakan Raberg finds a BDD framework inspired by RSpec and thinks it looks promising.

.NET
Owen Rogers finds fault with the re-design of System.xml in .NET 2.0 while porting CCNet.

Hints and tips
Paul Ingles installs his Mephisto instance on Joyent's Accelerator.

Lean
Jason Yip reposts Mary Poppendieck's email thinking of standards as things not to be followed but improved.

Tools
Simon Stewart tries Camino for his main browser but goes back to Safari.
Amit Rathore gets more productive with large monitors.

Consulting
Neal Ford learns to live and work on not very much sleep.

Web2.0
George Malamidis sees a little bit of extra mark-up as a way to change the meaning of web content.

Leisure
Jez Humble explodes some myths during a visit to Iran.

Usability
Marc McNeill wants date fields in numeric format when entering credit card details on the web.
Marc McNeill washes 8 out of 10 fingers on a Boeing but perhaps it's the best he can do.

Comment
Farooq Ali sends his condolences as a past student at Virginia Tech.

April 12th - 13th

Tools
James Crisp provides the documentation he wished he'd had to write mephisto plugins.
James Crisp open sources the Mephisto contact plugin he wrote for ThoughtWorks Studios

ThoughtWorks
Vivek Prahlad gives a synopsis of BarCamp Bangalore 3 held at ThoughtWorks' Bangalore office March 31st to April 1st.
Jake Scruggs wasn't so keen on his Chicago riverside commute when it hailed on him.

Ruby
Jay Fields shares Brent Cryder's method of making tests concise by passing instance variables to instance methods of the same class.

Leisure
Chris Stevenson makes and Easter trip to visit friends in Chicago.

Conferences
Pat Kua summarises the 2007 Retrospectives Facilitators Gathering.

Comment
Liz Keogh lays out her Software Zodiac of "How?", "Why?", "Who?" and "When?" people.

Agile
Jason Yip would rather spend less on releses by making them cheaper than doing less of them.
Jason Yip uses the driving analogy to justify changing direction from time to time.

Design
Jason Yip wonders how Google would build a travel site.

Rails
Vivek Prahlad takes us through his talk on deploying Rails apps that he gave at BarCamp.

Java
Ketan Padegaonkar highlights the restrictions on fields of use which are effecting the Apache Harmony project.

Hints and tips
Sam Newman remembers to reconstitute his .htaccess file and now his Wordpress upgrade is working.

April 10th - 11th

Business
James Webster looks at the open source Marketcetera open source Java trading platform.

Linux
George Malamidis is seized with amazement over the ability of Debian to upgrade major versions with no down-time.

Usability
Marc McNeill sees a neat solution to crown-capped bottles.

Ruby
Jake Scruggs shows how to intercept calls to render with partial. Also see Mike Ward's post.
Josh Cronemeyer finds his legacy database has been normalised which breaks his Rails app. Get it working again through SQL views.
Daniel Manges provides a selection of common Ruby antipatterns.

Rails
Jay Fields finds himself developing for Oracle in an environment with no Oracle drivers. He shows how to fake the OCI8 drivers to allow oracle DDL to be generated.
Jay Fields discusses an alternative to using migrations.

Tools
Sudhindra Rao shares some hints and tips on automated testing with Firefox 2, putting period in your route elements in Rails 1.2 and suffers with MySQL going away on Windows.

Testing
Vivek Prahlad tells us about his visit to the Asia Pacific Testing Conference, his Selenium talk, and the early state of agile adoption in that testing community.

Conferences
Vivek Prahlad gives a synopsis of the Gnuify '07 Free and Open Source software conference.
Pramod Sadalage describes the experience of speaking at a conference in Moscow.

Web2.0
James Webster can now tidy-up his LinkedIn account and becomes a member of MyBlogLog.

Comment
Marc McNeill asks if pooh poohing drinking a Singapore Sling at Raffles is akin to using Firefox in preference to IE.

Agile
Jeff Santini uses a shorter working day as a motivation to hone a development team's working practices.

Programming
Darren Hobbs recommends using what he calls TinyTypes to wrap commonly used fundamental types such as Strings, to make code more expressive.