Matt's page

Agile Software Development

admin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:40:00 +0000

Just had 2 great sessions with Angel Medinilla from Proyectalis. Highly recomendable if you ‘re looking for a good training on Scrum & Kanban methodologies. The guy has a lot of experience and helps you to implement it onsite.

Recommended book: “Miracle in the Andes”

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:48:18 +0000

In 1972 a plane transporting 45 people crashed in the Andes. Many of them died in the accident or some days after.
During 72 days the survivors had to fight against temperatures reaching -40º, with very few clothes, no food, no water, and knowing that nobody was searching for them anymore.

“Miracle in the Andes” tells this poignant story through the eyes of Fernando Parrado, one of the survivors that undertook a 10 days high-risk expedition trough the snowy mountains in order to find rescue. Fernando Parrado writes this story in 2005, 33 years after the crash.
You certainly know the famous movie “Alive” that was produced in 1992. But it’s only when you read this book that you begin to understand what really happened in the heart and minds of these guys, and how willpower, courage and love saved 16 of them.

Below is also a good documentary made in 2007: “Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains”, with interviews of the survivors.

WordPress tip – Page Template drop down box

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:49:47 +0000

If you create a new page in WordPress and you would like this page to have a custom template you’ll have to follow these steps.
If the Page Template’s drop down box doesn’t show up in the Admin Panel you just have to re-activate the template in the appearance menu.

Social Media Revolution…

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:36:30 +0000

It’s never too late…

What is sIFR?

admin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:35:25 +0000

In your website design if you want to use other fonts than the basic Verdana, Courier, Times,etc. sIFR can be of great help. sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) enables you to display fonts that are not in the user’s machine. sIFR is a mix of Flash, Javascript and CSS that enables you to display whatever font you need for more aestethic designs.

For example, in this wordpress blog the custom font typography used for date&time of each blog post is rendered with the help of sIFR.

Check Mike Davidson’s page for more info.
And for easy set up: sIFR Generator

Easy file sharing with Dropbox

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:03:44 +0000

If you’re looking for an easy way to share files with colleagues or friends you should give Dropbox a try.
Basically Dropbox is a storage area in the cloud.
Dropbox gives you 2 GB free space on an external server that you can access trhough any computer. It’s pretty useful if you have different machines in different places and need to have your files available and synchronized between them, anytime, everywhere.

Joomla: upgrading locally on Mac OSX

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:11:45 +0000

When it comes to upgrading a site to a new version of Joomla the process is different if you’re on a Mac or a PC. If you don’t know how MacOSx handles folder overwriting you can suffer from severe headaches!
Important:
On a Mac if you overwrite a folder it will replace it entirely leaving no trace of the old files.
On a PC if you overwrite a folder it will only overwrite files that have been modified and leave everything else untouched.
(see entire discussion here)
There are some solutions out there like “FileMerge” which allow you to compare folders on Mac and overwrites only the ones you need.
I personally prefer to do it on XP through VirtualBox as I’ve already set this up for crossbrowser testing.

Hope this helps…

French broadcast

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:33:39 +0000

“Complément d’enquête” is an interesting television program. Made of 90 minutes of investigations, reports and testimonies on current social themes, it gives a good overview on different economic, political & social issues.
Good interviews and deep investigations presented by French television broadcaster & commentator Benoît Duquesne.
See videos of “Complément d’enquête”

Recommended book: “The Selfish Gene”

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:06:37 +0000

“We are survival machines, robots blindly programmed in order to perpetuate the existence of selfish genes we hold in our cells.”

In his book “The Selfish Gene“ Richard Dawkins goes further in the theory of evolution and supports the gene-centred view of evolution which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes.

Richard Dawkins is a zoologist specializing in animal behavior as well as evolutionary biologist. He’s also known as a militant atheist, strongly defending his rational views of existence. In 2006 he wrote “The God Delusion” where he explains with practical examples why a supernatural creator certainly doesn’t exist…

Gran Torino

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:34:33 +0000

A great movie from Clint eastwood…
Gran Torino