Ted Neward was interviewed on the Software Engineering Radio podcast a while ago, and while the show is consistently good, this one was exceptional. He's obviously extremely smart and experienced, with a deep understanding of what makes languages and platforms useful. It was wonderful to hear him talk about many of the same issues that I have to deal with when choosing the right tools to get the job done.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=coffee_and_keynotes

Marc's calculations show a lot of the hidden costs that most people don't think about in maintaining a data-center. As the comments noted, though, he left off another big one: A/C, which pushes things even further into the AMD side. Some substantial open questions about it are what dist of Linux are they talking about since different needs would involve different levels, and the assumption that white-box and Sun hardware is the same price for comparable capability. They are talking about AMD hardware from Sun rather than "pure" Sun/Sparc, though, so maybe they are reasonably apples-to-apples. (He did specify generally what systems he's talking about, but I haven't done any pricing to see if those really are comparable $3k machines.)

It's interesting to see how "conventional wisdom" is shifting as companies adapt to the changing technology landscape...

Chris Parsons is chronicalling his journey into learning Spring Rich, and he's doing a good job of it. For anyone that wants to learn more about the project, that's a great place to start.

The Waterfall 2006 Conference has been announced.

Some of the presentations I'm most looking forward to are

• Testing: Saving the Best for Last
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework
• Eliminating Collaboration: Get More Done Alone
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us

Or I think it will be good -- I won't really know until after it's finished...

Peter Provost at Microsoft blogged about how he and Brad Wilson turned TDD and Pair Programming into a game. They can an excellent webcast about it that gives a good feel for how it works. (Getting the recorded movie is far from intuative -- you have to "Register for event" on the left, even though it happened in the past.) It does a great job of keeping everyone disciplined in doing TDD and making sure that the person not at the keyboard when doing pair-programming doesn't just fade-out. It's well worth watching the presentation, even for people who already know and understand TDD and pair-programming (and even more so for people who don't yet get it.)