Andy Gavin's blog

An amazing demonstration of a technology under development that promises to, not only identify similar images, but piece them together like a jigsaw. Each photograph (or image) is stitched together to form a seamless image, which can be navigated in a very natural way.

The new kid on the block, which must have a number of banks wondering, is money lending sites--- otherwise known as peer-to-peer lending. These sites put people who want to borrow money in touch with people who have money to lend. These sites score the borrowers using the traditional credit scoring techniques and this is used to indicate the risk to the lenders who might lend money.

In the end the borrower gets the money they want a loan at a good rate and the borrower gets a good rate of return: often much better than a bank.

Moving back to working with C++ in visual studio can often be painful after working with Java. I find myself cursing the missing refactoring functions and code navigation that you take for granted in Java. Jetbrains resharper might be really good for VB and C# but where does that leave C++. Well recently we've started to use Visual Assist X which, dispite it's name, is a real lifeline and works like a dream.

How research into brains might help the future.

"She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose."

From her nest in the holm-oak tree the Nightingale heard him, and she looked out through the leaves, and wondered.

"No red rose in all my garden!" he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. "Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched."

The change-over to distributed Source-code control seems to be only a matter of time. Dispite the hype subversion makes many jobs harder, it might help with renaming files but it doesn't. The battle has really already been won my distributed systems in many organisations. There are a few factors that have prevented wholesale takup of distributed source-code control:

• Maturity of tools. Many of the existing systems exist as extended research projects. They are scripts on top of other systems written in perl or python. Where they might work very well they are slow.
  

One of the criticisms XP which is often questioned is its ability to be used in large groups and projects. Many have suggested ways to overcome this, from system architecture through to communities of practice. A particularly interesting take on though is Industrial XP, some thought has been given into making this a complete practice.
The approach taken is to have multuple XP teams providing some new practices for managing these teams: