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Not only have I just got Gentoo installed and running, but Gentoo 2007 has also been released. I have rebuilt the entire system with my cflags and now playing with the kernel and then I will install X11-org and gnome and open office and firefox etc..

Not only did I take some time away from things (work, training) over Easter to get a break, but I find out 2 weeks ago my wife is pregnant, which is really really good news as its something we've been hoping will happen for a while.

And to top it off I decided to reinstall my PC which went pear shaped, and then I broke my laptop power supply (snapped the connector), so I have also been without a computer for a while whilst I buy new parts for my PC and wait for new power supply for my laptop (which arrived this morning).

This has obviously put a big delay on things as I was going to use some of my time off to finish a website off and make a start on another, but with all that's happened, I've not had chance.

YACS has been agile for a while...

A while ago I posted about starting a project using agile processes, well I've started it. I've used Extreme Programming as a basis. I realised that how we currently work is rather agile already, so its not taken a huge change (I've avoided using buzz words with the other developers and some have not realised what I am trying out). What has been lacking is not in the development, but in the way projects have been managed, hopefully, the XP information I have read through will help, especially planning iteratively and not using an up front design (though we have story boarded).

Some things are different from XP, paired programming is hard to do in a team of 4, so we are working paired up, but both developing and testing each others work in exchange. I've not used story cards, but broken in screens into iterations and used bullet points for the features required and put in a spread sheet, to allow for easy shuffling. One huge weakness we have is the lack of automated unit tests and its quite late in the day to introduce that for this project, but we do have acceptance testing organised (test scenarios and data) along with using the feature spreadsheet as a checklist of agreed features. The customer is internal to our organisation and contacts sit a few desks away, so regular meetings wont be a problem.

I shall post details of how things are progress after the next meeting.

Had a break away from work (and my computer) and now I've caught up with things I've decided to have a play with different Linux distros. Firstly I am in the middle of installing Gentoo (Just built the Kernel), this is mainly for the re-learning of how to install linux the manual way (I last did this about 8 years ago with slackware) and the other is Debianwhich I will install at a later date. Another possible is SUSE, but still researching that distro. I'm not looking at any other Redhat like distros as Caos is good (yum/rpm based), and is in some ways the Debian of Redhat type distros.

One of my best friends Martyn Ranyard was hit by a Goose on the motorway. It went through the windscreen of his Bosses Skoda. Last week it managed to hit the news !

Terror at 70mph as a goose smashes through the car windscreen

SMASHED BY GOOSE DOING TON

Kamikaze goose destroys Skoda

More photos can be found on Flickr - ranyardm - goose

New version out, lot of bugs fixes and tweaks, one useful feature for me is that there is an integrated flash mp3 player, this is useful to me because in the new few weeks I will be building a website for a rock band and this functionality will be a bonus as they do have various tracks that they want available for download.

For more info visit YACs 7.3

In asp.net the inproc session is generated from a worker process which is automatically recycled after 20 minutes. The problem with this is that if you have a session set to more than 20 minutes, the worker process will kill the session and when using forms authentication causes some interesting issues (from exceptions to security flaws exposed).

I spotted this blog entry

Cookie Timeout Problem - usingtangent was suffering the same problem and highlighted the issue for me.

Due to running various websites on our web server, I cannot fiddle with the recycle time of the process, so have set my forms and sessions time-out to 20 minutes.

Also given me an idea of how to secure my code more, I will be implementing my own session expiration code that will force the forms authentication to log the user out, essentially tying the forms and session time outs together.

For a project I recently worked on, I had to develop a html template and it required some drop shadows. I struggled to find a single example on the web that worked in IE and Firefox and was simple/generic to implement, so I can up with my own solution, using some elegant css and a black image for the drop shadow itself.



What I have done is modified the source, html and css into YACS friendly code (based on the Digital skin) and would make an easy to create YACS skin.

Please visit Nex Design - drop shadows - easy to create into a skin - YACS for more details and the files

Just spotted this, another pretty skin for Yacs, nice to users developing their own skins.

Grigloo Yacs skin

I should have 1 new skin finished this week, just has a few glitches that need fixing.