thekua.com@rest – Page 112

Quicksilver/Roxy Pro

March 6, 2005 Patrick Sport

This weekend I managed to make it down to the see some of the surfing action at the Quicksilver and Roxy Pro. Once again, the beautiful beaches of Snapper Rocks at Coolangatta played host and would have drawn a crowd of (my guess) at least a thousand or more throughout the day.

QuickSilver/Roxy Pro @ Snapper Rocks
I managed to catch the final showdown for the Roxy Pro, which was won out by local 17 year old wildcard surfer, Stephanie Gilmore over Hawaiian Megan Abubo. The competition continues til next weekend, so there will be plenty more action to come. My highlight of the day (after all the awesome surfing) was when I found myself standing right next to the former World Champ, Sofia Mulanovich whilst I was taking pictures of the newly crowned one. Oh, and did I mention I saw the huge surfboard that everyone rode to set a new world record?

Reviewing the weeks just gone

March 5, 2005 Patrick General, Movies, Work Related

The last two weeks have just flown by with so much happening that I really haven’t had a chance to update the blog. Last week we were fortunate enough to have Martin Fowler (known best for his collection of books such as Refactoring, UML Distilled, and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture) down under participating in a number of conference/seminar events. Since I work for the same company he works in, we were even more fortunate when he found space in his busy schedule to spend time with us at a client site on one of our projects. I definitely took advantage of the numerous opportunities to dine and chat with the man, enjoying the time we spent discussing a wide variety of topics.

I also returned to Aikido for the first time since my accident, training with caution so that I avoided aggravating my leg. Upon entering the dojo, I was reminded of its great community spirit when everyone showed their concern by asking where I’d been for the last month. Last week also marked the last day of employment for another mate, Aaron (AKA DJ Anarchy) at my old workplace, which, of course, demanded some sort of celebration late into Thursday night/Friday morning.

Last Friday then saw to the start of my employer’s first “Team Hug” events for 2005. My company creates these conference-like events so that everyone in the country can share their experiences and knowledge with each other. For us working in Brisbane, it is also one of the rare occasions where we actually get to meet all of our fellow employees down south in person. Saturday is reserved for the internal conference (which I’m told tends to be much better in content and format than most other conferences) whilst Sunday is seen as the chance to relax, and get to know everyone else in a much more social atmosphere. This Team Hug was held at the Australia Noosa Lakes Resort and was a perfect location to do work related stuff without feeling like it was work related stuff. It was also my first time to present at one of these events, and despite the nerves, felt like it was well-received. Thanks to Andy for pairing with me on the entire presentation.

This week I was invited (thanks Michael and Sarah) to a pre-release screening of the movie, Ong Bak. Although it’s not going to win any academy awards, as far as action and martial arts films go, this is definitely one to go and see. I never released some of the things that you could pull off with Muay Thai kickboxing and the star of this movie manages to demonstrate them all. Although the storyline is not going to make you think very hard, the fairly decent length (for an action movie)is filled with enough humour, drama and lots and lots of action to keep you entertained throughout.

WordPress 1.5

March 1, 2005 Patrick Website News

Sorry if I broke anyone subscribing to the RSS feeds, but tonight I just upgraded TheKua to WordPress 1.5! Upgrading was relatively painless, with only a few teething issues since I had been using WordPress 1.3-alpha.3 and had to ensure some of my own *tweaks* didn’t break anything. It looks like my RSS is back to being everything as well for the time being. One of the nifty features of this new version is the ability to ensure RSS feeds get all of the text from the posts (which after this weekend, I know some people prefer).

Pair Pong (No, It’s Not About The Smell!)

February 21, 2005 Patrick Agile, Work Related

Pair Pong I’ve been a little bit quiet on the blogging front, both personal and work related (or at least it feels that way). The last few weeks have been busy, as I’ve been getting back into my normal routine (riding heaps!) coupled with the preparation of two major presentations. The first of these, intended for an audience internal to my company for this weekend, has had most of my attention for the better part of last month. The second, which had been the focus of this month, was for the Agile India conference that I had been accepted into. This presentation (more like a workshop), titled, “Priming the Pair Programming Practice For Production” (I couldn’t resist the alliteration), was aimed at providing an environment for people to experience pair programming first hand, with the benefits of coaching that would usually be lacking in the workplace.

I had been designing the session to expose people to both the benefits and challenges associated with this practice that is best learned with hands-on experience. Unfortunately for me, due to a whole series of recent events and bad timing, I have had to withdraw from the conference.

Now that I will not have the chance to actually run my workshop, I may as well describe what had been planned. In addition to going over the thinking behind pair programming, all of my exercises had been designed to give as much practice as possible, coupled with constant feedback, to pair programming and other agile practices. The first two exercises were intended to be fairly trivial, a programming problem to be tackled in pairs, the second, a pair programming refactoring session. I was probably most looking forward to the third exercise (especially from the participant’s reactions) which I had named “Pair Pong”, after the game “Ping Pong”, combining pair programming with the agile practice of Test Driven Development (TDD). Much like the real game, a token (in this case, a keyboard) would be constantly passed around between the pairs. One partner would write a test case to represent a requirement out of a given list, while the other would write enough code to get it working. The roles would swap and the game would continue until all the requirements were complete, with the aim of the pairs to only ultimately communicate via the code they passed between each other.

Although the “Pair Pong” concept is not new, I think associating it with something that everyone can relate to can make it easier to actually implement. I’m sure I’ll have an opportunity to run with this workshop one day; I just know it won’t be next week.

A Last Supper

February 10, 2005 Patrick Food

Tonight we had Ben and Michelle around for another dinner before they head off the UK. I’m very excited for them both as not only are they heading to somewhere different to live, but they’re having an awesome holiday before hand. I found it pretty difficult to put something together this time, wanting to do something that would be memorable and appropriately themed for the current weather (a ridiculous heatwave we’ve been having). Everything turned out better than expected, and with the rain that came down today, the evening was enjoyed by all. Tonight’s menu consisted of:

The Bike Is Back

February 7, 2005 Patrick Sport

Well it’s been a month almost exactly since the big accident, and I finally got my bike back today but not with the frame that I had been expecting. Apparently the yellow Kona that was suggested by the store proved too troublesome to put together with the handlebars of my old Vivace. After trying eight headsets, from a variety of states, stores and countries, they decided that they would have to give me the 2004 model fram instead of the older (I think almost 2001) one. The bike now has a pearly white exterior, and I can now get back on the road and ride! Have a bit of closer look at the bike here and here. I can’t say that I have been too impressed with the customer service (or lack of) I’ve been given over the last month, and I’m still stunned at how my bike has been in the shop for much longer than my car has ever been in. I’m going for a ride…