Preparing a talk or presentation? Here's a great idea

Energized work just made an irresistible offer for anyone in the London area who is working on a talk or conference presentation aimed at an agile audience - a chance to try it out on a friendly audience before the paint has dried, so to speak.

Details here.

Comfort for Application Developers from Tom de Marco

Thanks to a tweet from @flowchainsensei, I've just been enjoying an excellent article by Tom de Marco. It's well worth a read; I took away two key thoughts.

1. Developing software is much harder than developing hardware
2. Software developers spend much of their life feeling bad about late delivery when it's usually not their fault.

To put his core conclusion another way, most software projects are a waste of effort. They have such low marginal utility that they are doomed never to show a return for the organisation that funds them. If we just didn't do them the world would be better off.

Of course, we'd need to find work for the ex-developers.  Maybe they could learn to teach. We could certainly use a few more skilled IT teachers.

I2C on the Beagleboard xM

It's really easy driving I2C™ devices from the Beagleboard. I'm using the Trainer-xM from tincantools; that takes care of shifting voltage levels from the 1.8v used by the Beagleboard to the 5v levels that my I2C boards expect.

There are a few I2C coding examples on the web; since my BB image includes python and geany, I've written the I2C code in Python and can edit and test it on the board. Much faster than an edit-compile-upload-test cycle.

Here's the code:

import i2c, time

extender = i2c.I2C_device(0x20)
extender.begin_transmission()
extender.send(chr(0))
time.sleep(5)
for count in range(0, 16):
    extender.send(chr(count))
    time.sleep(0.5)
extender.end_transmission()

See it running.