Technical terminology sneaks into common use. Terms such as "bandwidth" and "offline" get used and abused, slowly losing touch with their original meaning. ("Bandwidth" has suffered multiple drifts. It started out in radio, not computer networking, let alone the idea of "personal attention space".) It is the nature of language to evolve, so I would have no problem with this linguistic drift, if it were not for the way that the mediocre and the clueless clutch to these seemingly meaningful phrases.

I've long been a fan of the Firebug extension for Firefox.  It gives you great visibility into the ebb and flow of browser traffic.  It sure beats rolling your own SOCKS proxy to stick between your browser and the destination site. Now, I have to also endorse YSlow from Yahoo.  YSlow adds interpretation and recommendations to Firebug's raw data. For example, when I point YSlow at www.google.com, here's how it "grades" Google's performance:

I've got a new piece up at InfoQ.com, discussing the limits of unit and functional testing:  "Functional testing falls short, however, when you want to build software to survive the real world. Functional testing can only tell you what happens when all parts of the system are behaving within specification. True, you can coerce a system or subsystem into returning an error response, but that error will still be within the protocol!

Esther Schindler asked if I'd be willing to post my earlier article on staying agile in the face of ITIL at CIO.com.  How could I say no?  The piece is here.  

The Agile Manifesto is explicit about it. "We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools." How should an Agile team---more specifically, an XP team---respond to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), then? After all, ITIL takes seven books just to define the customizable framework for the actual practices. An IT organization usually takes at least seven more binders to define its actual processes. Can XP and ITIL coexist in the same building, or is XP just incompatible with ITIL?

Well, Release It continues to hold the #1 spot in Amazon's "Hot New Releases" list for Design Tools and Techniques.  I've even got a couple of five-star reviews... and they weren't written by friends or family.

I've been quiet lately for a couple of reasons. First, I'm thrilled to say that I'm joining the No Fluff, Just Stuff stable of speakers.  It's an honor and a pleasure to be invited to keep such company.  The flip side is, I'm spending a lot of my free time polishing up my inventory of presentations.  More frankly, I'm rebuilding them all with Keynote.  (Brief aside, I'm coming to love Keynote.

Is it an antipattern to have a consulting firm provide both the coach and developers?  By providing the developers, the firm is motivated to deliver on the project, with coaching as an adjunct.  If, instead, the firm provides just the coach, it will be judged by how well the client adopts the process.  These two motives can easily conflict. Case in point: at a previous client of mine, my employer was charged with completing the project, using a 50-50 mix of contractors and client developers.

Since NetInfo Manager is going away under Leopard, we've got a gap in capability. How do you relocate your home directory without the GUI? There are a few reasons you might want to move your home directory to another volume. For example, you might reinstall your OS frequently. Or, perhaps you just want to keep your data on a bigger disk than the one that came in the machine. In my case, both.

My friend David Hussman once said to me, "The next person that says the word 'POJO' to me is going to get stabbed in the eye with a pen."  At the time, I just commiserated about people who follow crowds rather than making their own decisions. David's not a violent person.  He's not prone to fits of violence or even hyperbole.  What made this otherwise level-headed coach and guru resort to non-approved uses of a Bic?