Went to Söderhallarna for some shopping: fresh Swedish lobsters and a few very special bottles of wine and champagne.
Only Systembolaget can sell wine and spirits in Sweden. And they close the day before New Year’s Eve, so hundreds of people were there at the last minute – a peculiar but very Swedish tradition. Systembolaget exists to keep alcohol consumption down… but since they are one of the largest buyers in the world, they have a truly excellent sortiment.
Today my Freestyle Pool Primer, from Total Immersion arrived. I went down to the pool and tried out a few drills at once. They are all about finding a balanced position and becoming slippery in the water… great fun!
Here is some severe criticism of RUP (the Rational Unified Process of software development). Use cases can be useful – but RUP is more about selling Rational’s CASE tools than anything else. Link via Cam
Personally, I like use cases. But of course, they are very easy to abuse – and they do work best in small projects with experienced developers. BTW, I recommend UML Distilled, by Martin Fowler – it has a refreshingly minimal, common-sense approach.
Imperfect and changing specifications is what makes software special, so optimizations that work for a traditional manufacturing process are rarely enough. I consider sane engineering practice a good thing – but find the factory metaphor of software development both repugnant and misleading.
Which is also why I never worked for Ivar Jakobsson – though he asked in the early Nineties.