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Coconut Revolution (Bougainville: Our Island, Our Fight)

This is an incredible modern-day story of a native peoples' victory over Western globalization.

Sick of seeing their environment ruined and their people exploited by the Panguna Mine, the Pacific island of Bougainville rose up against the giant mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc. The newly formed Bougainville Revolutionary Army began fighting with bows and arrows and sticks and stones against a heavily armed adversary. In an attempt to put down the rebellion the Papua New Guinean Army swiftly established a gunboat blockade around the island.
But with no shipments allowed in or out, how did new electricity networks spring up on the island? And how were the people of Bougainville able to drive around the island without any source of petrol or diesel?

Watch as the world's first eco-revolution unfolds within the blockade. A David and Goliath story for the 21st century. A multi-award winning documentary

Behaviour-Driven Development

BehaviourDrivenDevelopment - Behaviour-Driven Development

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is an evolution in the thinking behind TestDrivenDevelopment and AcceptanceTestDrivenPlanning.

It brings together strands from TestDrivenDevelopment and DomainDrivenDesign into an integrated whole, making the relationship between these two powerful approaches to software development more evident.

It aims to help focus development on the delivery of prioritised, verifiable business value by providing a common vocabulary (also referred to as a UbiquitousLanguage) that spans the divide between Business and Technology.

It presents a framework of activity based on three core principles:

1.Business and Technology should refer to the same system in the same way - ItsAllBehaviour
2.Any system should have an identified, verifiable value to the business - WheresTheBusinessValue
3.Up-front analysis, design and planning all have a diminishing return - EnoughIsEnough

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

Google TechTalks March 17, 2006 Dave Astels Dave Astels (co-author of "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming" and author of Jolt Award winning "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide") has over 2 decades of experience in the software field, most of that involved with object-oriented technologies and techniques. Dave has been studying, practicing, teaching, evangelising, and coaching XP and Agile Processes since 1998. Dave's experience ranges from embedded process control systems to consumer products (both consumer electronics and shrinkwrapped software) to energy trading systems. Dave is an independant software consultant specializing in the areas of agile process, programming practices, and object design/architecture. Dave is one of the thought leaders in the area of TDD, and now BDD. ABSTRACT Test Driven Development (TDD) has become quite well known. Many developers are getting benefit from the practice. But it is possible that we can get even more value. A new practice is getting attention these days: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). BDD removes all vestiges of testing and instead focuses on specifying the behaviour desired in the system being built. This talk will be focus on Ruby and will introduce a new BDD framework: rSpec. The ideas, however, are language independent.

The Brain that changes itself

Amazing video about the capacity of the brain to "rewire" itself. The player is quite simply shite, but it is definitely worth watching. You can find the video here.

high quality free people search engines

25 Free People Search Engines to find Anyone in the World | FinderMind

high quality free people search engines to help you reconnect with friends, family, school friends or any other person from your past.

Illegal downloads and dodgy figures

Bad Science: Illegal downloads and dodgy figures | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material."
...

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from?
...
The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."
...
I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.
...
In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press?
...
Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

I asked what steps they [Sabip, note by sambris] took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.

How Pirates Shook European Politics

How Pirates Shook European Politics

With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of rum and loads of pirate chants.

Code_Guardian

Code_Guardian
by Cee-Gee-Productions

Phill Harrison no longer director of Atari

Harrison out as Atari president // News

"Because of a shift of business operations to the US, Phil Harrison will move from the role of president to that of non-executive director of the group. As all board members, he will continue to assist, support and guide the company's strategy," said Atari.

Atari just recently announced net losses of 226 million€ for last year.

The limits of microtransactions

Tobold's MMORPG Blog

In the battle of business models for MMORPGs the monthly flat fee subscription model has one decisive advantage: It is extremely simple to understand, and has only one variable, cost per month. A statement that a particular game is going to be Free2Play and financed by microtransactions is not really telling you much; there are lots of parameters on what exactly is for sale, and how much it costs.

"Intellectual property is dead" by Eric von Hippel, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management (2007)

EndOfIntellectualProperty < Main < Reprap

"The whole concept of intellectual property is only stable when copying is difficult and legal penalties mean significant losses for those who would copy. Make copying easy and undetectable (as computers have for music) and the very idea of intellectual property starts to fade.

But creativity doesn't fade with it. There is now an outpouring of music all over the whole world unmatched since that in late eighteenth century Vienna. This is happening because the same technology that is eliminating music copyright allows anyone to make music and to try to find an audience for it. Most musicians don't compose because they have rationally calculated that it is a good way to get rich, they compose because they are driven by an inner compulsion. And an inner compulsion is exactly what you'd expect from an evolutionarily-selected mating trait."

I recommend reading the entire article...

DubFX- Street performance

Beatbox Dub FX 10/10/2008 'Love Someone' (aka part 2)

Btw, DubFX will be at the Glastonbury Festival in 2009.

Prototype Xbox 360Gameplay - 3 Minute Gameplay

More Prototype Info

2008 Game Developer Salary Survey

Gamasutra - News - 2008 Game Developer Salary Survey Reveals $79,000 Average Income

Programming: programmers are the highest paid talent next to high-end businesspeople, with an average annual salary of $85,024. Experience pays in this role, as those with greater than six years of experience earned 26% more than the average annual salary.

Art & Animation: artists – averaging a $69,532 salary, nonetheless, 28% of art directors reported lower salaries than the previous year. But these more experienced, higher status artists also tend to earn at least 35% more than those with less experience and lower title.

Game Design: averaging $67,379, design positions sprouted an average $3,730 over last year. As with many roles, region makes a difference, given that West Coast designers make on average $8,283 or 12% more than the rest of the game designers in the country.

Production: of all the game development disciplines, production – with a salary average overall of $82,905 – is the most welcoming to women, with 21% of the workforce made up of females – more than twice the industry average. The discipline as a whole saw a strong $4,189 bump from last year.

10 Game Design Process Pitfalls

Gamasutra - Features - 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls

Game designer Fisch looks into the process of making games, suggesting the ten biggest reasons why a game's production doesn't end up working out quite as hoped, and possible fixes for those issues.

Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability

Gamasutra - Features - Game Tools Tune-Up: Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability

There are probably tools in your pipeline that could benefit from usability techniques, but as a developer, you'll want to know which tools would benefit the most before investing in them.

In this article, I'll discuss how to find the bottlenecks holding up your production, measure the usability of your tools using proven techniques and streamline your entire development process.

Scrum Checklist

Scrum checklist - Henrik Kniberg's blog

"The main target group for this checklist are teams that are relatively new to Scrum and likely to get many things wrong.

Each item is tagged by priority. I consider the priority 1 items to be pretty fundamental, I'd hesitate to even call it Scrum if a company hasn't implemented all those items (or at least has good reasons not to).

When helping companies implement Scrum I normally start by ensuring that all priority 1 items on the checklist are implemented (or intentionally skipped) before even considering priority 2 and priority 3."

...

Independent Games Sales for 2008

Independent Games Sales: Stats 101

A presentation for the Indie Games Summit at Game Developers Conference 2009 by Simon Carless.

View more presentations from simoniker.

Publisher side product owners

Agile Game Development

"Product owners for a video game project using Scrum are usually a member of the development team. The reason for this is that unlike projects outside the game industry, product owners are needed to provide a much higher level of subjective feedback. Does the control of the player feel right? Is a mechanic “fun enough”? This feedback requires daily engagement with the team.

However, in some cases the publisher will require that product ownership be placed in the hands of someone on their staff. This could be an executive producer or someone who works directly with a licensee. In some cases this makes sense. If a licensee wants to maintain oversight or the publisher wants to make sure that their franchise is well tended, then product ownership at the publisher level makes sense.

Unfortunately this usually means that the team loses the day-to-day involvement of product owner. This can lead the project down bad paths. These projects can lead to “iterative and incremental death marches” when there is a reckoning between what the game provides and what the license or franchise owner sees much later.

A solution is to divide up the Product Owner roles..."

Developmag: The 2009 UK Games Development Salary Survey

The 2009 UK Games Development Salary Survey | Game Development | Interview by Develop

Earlier this year, games industry professionals that read developmag.com and mcvuk.com were invited to take part in an extensive salary and career survey. 528 people, from all sectors of interactive entertainment, took part. Here, Michael French analyses the answers given by developers…

Risk Analysis & Risk Management

Project Risk Analysis Techniques - Risk Management from Mind Tools

Evaluating and Managing the Risks You Face

Almost everything we do in today's business world involves a risk of some kind: customer habits change, new competitors appear, factors outside your control could delay your project. But formal risk analysis and risk management can help you to assess these risks and decide what actions to take to minimize disruptions to your plans. They will also help you to decide whether the strategies you could use to control risk are cost-effective.

Links to lecture notes for courses in game theory and applied game theory.

Lecture notes in game theory -- Game Theory .net university course notes

SCRUM Part 2

Control Chaos

ScrumBut

Many organizations have adopted Scrum. However, when they use Scrum, they run into ScrumButs. ScrumButs are reasons why they can’t take full advantage of Scrum to solve the problems and realize the benefits An example ScrumBut is (The Daily Scrum meetings are too much overhead) (because the team members don’t need to meet so often) (so we only have them once a week, unless we need them more often)

.In this limited attendance workshop (10 maximum), people who are accumulating ScrumButs will work with Ken Schwaber and other selected Scrum guru’s. They will identify their highest priority ScrumButs and learn how to systematically address and resolve them. While doing so, the attendees will learn how to assess the impact of a ScrumBut on the organization and quantify its damage. Attendees will also learn how to turn ScrumButs into actionable user stories that can be resolved using Scrum.
Attendees are expected to bring some of their highest impact ScrumButs to the workshop. Several will be worked on, including identifying how they were identified by Scrum, measuring their impact, and creating plans and techniques for resolving them. War stories of what these ScrumButs have done to other organizations will be shared. At the conclusion of the workshop, attendees will know how to identify, write-up, and resolve ScrumButs.

scrum primer - Google Search

THE SCRUM PRIMER

Scrum Methodology & Agile Scrum Methodologies

The Scrum methodology of agile software development marks a dramatic departure from waterfall management. In fact, Scrum and other agile processes were inspired by its shortcomings. The Scrum methodology emphasizes communication and collaboration, functioning software, and the flexibility to adapt to emerging business realities — all attributes that suffer in the rigidly ordered waterfall paradigm.

SCRUM Prep Part 1

InfoQ: Jeff Sutherland on Scrum and Not-Scrum

Jeff Sutherland on Scrum and Not-Scrum

Interview with Jeff Sutherland on Oct 24, 2007 07:26 AM

Scrum Breakfast

Most provocative was his proposal to modify the 3 questions of the daily Scrum:

1. What did I finish since yesterday's meeting?
2. What was particularly helpful?
3. What will I finish by the next meeting?
4. What do I need in addition or differently to accomplish that goal?
5. When was that help available previously?

A short version of the presentation is available for download. More information is available from www.korn.ch. Pictures are available on flickr (Thank you Marcello for finding a camera and taking the pics!)

Scrum Log Jeff Sutherland: What to do when Sales guys are Waterholics ...

What to do when Sales guys are Waterholics ...

Here is today's best question in my long list of emails. The Sales guys don't want Scrum in a company because they think they can't commit to the customer to close deals.

A ScrumMaster's Checklist | Danube

A ScrumMaster's Checklist
Submitted by MichaelJames on August 13, 2007 - 5:09am.

An adequate ScrumMaster can handle two or three teams at a time. If you're content to limit your role to organizing meetings, enforcing timeboxes, and responding to the impediments people explicitly report, you can get by with part time attention to this role. The team will probably still exceed the baseline, pre-Scrum expectation at your organization, and probably nothing catastrophic will happen.

But if you can envision a hyperproductive team -- a team that has a great time accomplishing things no one else can -- consider being a great ScrumMaster.

A great ScrumMaster can handle one team at a time.

We recommend one dedicated ScrumMaster per team of about seven, especially when starting out.

If you haven't discovered all the work there is to do, tune in to your Product Owner, your team, your team's engineering practices, and the organization outside your team. While there's no single prescription, I've outlined some things I've seen ScrumMasters overlook.

Scrum Alliance - Being an Effective Product Owner

Being an Effective Product Owner
by Roman Pichler | 23 Apr 2007

Related Articles

* Leadership Reading List by Bob Schatz, Bill Wake, Alan Shalloway, Tom Mellor
* The Manager's Role in Agile by Lyssa Adkins, Michael Spayd
* Two Tips to Help Product Owners with Release Planning by Lyssa Adkins

More Related Articles…

Tags: Scrum Roles | product owner

When I met Paul, a first-time product owner on a new project, the first thing he asked me was, “What do I really have to do and how much time will it require?” Even though Paul had attended a Scrum introduction a few weeks back, he wanted to double check his responsibilities. He was worried about the time commitment he had to make and the support he would get from his boss.

Helping product owners like Paul getting started is rather the norm for me. In most organizations that I have worked with, product owners are strapped for time, are often not aware of their responsibilities, and are unsure how they should best transition into their new role. Sadly, I have also met many product owners on Scrum projects who resembled more a business sponsor briefly stopping by at the sprint planning and review meeting or an on-site customer interacting more frequently with the team but leaving it to the ScrumMaster to guide the team.

Scrum Alliance - Being an Effective Product Owner

Being an Effective Product Owner
by Roman Pichler | 23 Apr 2007

Related Articles

* Leadership Reading List by Bob Schatz, Bill Wake, Alan Shalloway, Tom Mellor
* The Manager's Role in Agile by Lyssa Adkins, Michael Spayd
* Two Tips to Help Product Owners with Release Planning by Lyssa Adkins

More Related Articles…

Tags: Scrum Roles | product owner

When I met Paul, a first-time product owner on a new project, the first thing he asked me was, “What do I really have to do and how much time will it require?” Even though Paul had attended a Scrum introduction a few weeks back, he wanted to double check his responsibilities. He was worried about the time commitment he had to make and the support he would get from his boss.

Helping product owners like Paul getting started is rather the norm for me. In most organizations that I have worked with, product owners are strapped for time, are often not aware of their responsibilities, and are unsure how they should best transition into their new role. Sadly, I have also met many product owners on Scrum projects who resembled more a business sponsor briefly stopping by at the sprint planning and review meeting or an on-site customer interacting more frequently with the team but leaving it to the ScrumMaster to guide the team.

scrum product owner checklist - Google Search

Scrum checklist.mmap

Henrik Kniberg's blog

Henrik Kniberg's blog
Lean and Agile software development

InfoQ: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

Posted by Henrik Kniberg on Jun 27, 2007 01:18 PM


The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.