I’m hoping my readers can help me out with some software I’ve been looking for for my Mac.

There is a great piece of software for Windows called Tag and Rename, which can modify MP3 ID tags and rename files to match the tags in a format you specify. The piece of functionality that absolutely makes this piece of software is its integration with Amazon. I can enter the name of the application and it will go and retrieve all the MP3 ID tags via the Amazon web service.

Having recently abandoned my home pc in favor of a 20″ iMac (which I am absolutely in love with, by the way), I am looking for something similar for OS X.

I’ve found numerous utilities that will rename files, but none yet that have integration with the Amazon (or freedb.org) web services. If you’re aware of a tool that can do all this, please drop a comment.

Thanks in advance! :)

Recently, I’ve become very intrigued with Ruby on Rails and how it can be used to VERY quickly develop very nice web applications.

I’ve had conversations with other people about why I would want to learn this, and interestingly enough, my responses were fairly similar to what Stephen Chu observes in his article titled ‘Why would a .NET Programmer learn Ruby on Rails?‘

In order to stay on top of your game as a developer, its going to be important to look at things outside of your comfort zone. Learning a new framework would certainly be one of those things. This is also right in line with what the Pragmattic Programmer book suggests by learning one new programming language a year. This helps broaden your thinking and avoids getting stuck in a rut.

Most people that are familiar with Photoshop or digital photography in general will have heard of Scott Kelby.

His latest offering is a book called The Digital Photography Book. His brilliant premise around this book:

“If you and I were out on a shoot, and you asked me, ‘Hey, how do I get this flower to be in focus, with the background out of focus?’, I wouldn’t stand there and give you a photography lecture . In real life, I’d just say, ‘Put on your zoom lens, set your f-stop to f/2.8, focus on the flower and fire away.’ That’s what this books is all about; you and I out shooting where I answer questions, give you advice, and share the secrets I’ve learned just like I would with a friend — without all the technical explanations and techie photo speak.”

I recently purchased this book, and Scott absolutely hits the mark with this gem that, for under $12, will most certainly make it into my camera bag for constant reference.

Scott covers the major types of shoots you’d be involved in (flowers, weddings, landscapes, sports, travel/city life and people) and offers some great tips to get the most out of those shoots. He also covers other areas that are of importance to a digital photographer (getting tack sharp photos, avoiding problems, and printing). One tip per page… very simple, very concise, and incredibly worth it. I was able to read the book cover to cover in an evening, but will certainly put this in my camera bag so that I can refer back to it constantly while in the field.

The last chapter of this book are photo recipies to help you get the shot you’re looking for. Scott shows a picture per page, and describes the technique used to achieve the results.

This is an indispensible part of any digital photographers library. The techniques described in here work whether you have a $3000 DSLR or a point-and-shoot camera. If you want to get the most out of your digiral photography, I strongly recommend this book.

This came through my email box the other day, and I found it funny enough to share… Sometimes, technology isnt everything. :)

A cowboy was herding his cows in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.  He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says the cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows… Now give me back my dog.”

Bill Pierce has been putting together what looks to be a fantastic framework for building ASP.NET applications using Fowler’s Supervising Presenter pattern, using some neat features of the Castle IoC Container (aka Windsor).

I’m capturing the series here so that I can study them as a sequential unit instead of hopping all over his blog to find them.

• MVP Framework
• Dependency Injection and UserControls with Castle MicroKernel
• UserControl Component Activation in Castle MicroKernel
• MVP Continued
• MVP – Tying it all Together

The best part of this particular implementation is that the presenters and the interfaces are completely hidden from the web project.

This is very interesting to read and learn more about this particular pattern. Great job, Bill! I look forward to watching this progress.

I’ve been talking a lot lately on this blog about using Scrum for project management. Some feedback that I’ve been getting is what is this Scrum thing, and how can I learn more about it or implement it.

Rather than trying to explain it third hand to you, I think it would be best if I shared a link to Ken Schwaber’s introduction to Scrum. It’s an hour long presentation, which is time well spent if you want to learn more about it or (in my case) want to learn best practices for implementing Scrum.

I got this link from DonXml’s Grok This and just had to share it. 

I loved all of the 80’s hair bands growing up. I really enjoyed watching Kelly Clarkson (of American Idol fame) on stage swigging whisky and jamming with Metal Skool. She’s definately drunk, but does a semi-decent job singing a little bit of Sweet Child O’ Mine.

1. Helps the Scrum team to understand that it is self managed. It is the Scrum master’s job to ease this transition.
2. Has no authority over the development teams. They are only there to ensure that the Scrum process is adhered to and that the team’s needs are met.
3. Helps the team work collaboratively and helps with transperancy, which is essential to the Scrum process.
4. Let’s the team figure things out on their own.
5. Facilitates a daily Scrum meeting which the Scrum team uses to synchronize their work with the rest of the team. Since they are not reporting to the Scrum master, the Scrum team should be talking to each other, not the Scrum master.

Being an effective Scrum master is an art. An effective Scrum master can be the difference between the success or failure of an iteration. To read more about managing agile projects with Scrum, I strongly recommend that you read this book. This has really opened my eyes as to what Scrum means and how to implement it.

I received an email from a visitor to my site the other day. He was from webhost4life.com and was responding my post in where I praised his company.

I came across this post http://www.mattberther.com/?p=584  and I see many fake and unverifiable comments on it.  In fact, I see many identical comments on many different blogs and forums.  These are very likely to be competitor trying to hurt our reputation.  If you check our testimonial page, you’ll see that we do get good feed back on a daily basis.  I need your assistant in removing those comments.

Please let me know if you can help.

I figured that this would be as good a time as any to talk about my comment policy.

I will not delete any comment that add something to the conversations. The only comments that get deleted are those which are obviously spam. I believe very strongly in freedom of speech, even speech which I disagree with. 

I think it’s important to hear from everyone, not just those which I, or my readers, agree with.

To address this particular concern, I will say only that there are an equal number of praises in the comments of that post. It’s very important for people researching a product or service to hear unbiased feedback. If I buy something and want to do research online for that, I fully expect to see both positive and negative reviews. If I cant get an unbiased view of the product or service, I do not have everything I need to make an informed decision.

Last week, our organization brought in Jeff Sutherland (the father of scrum) to certify numerous people (myself included) as scrum masters. We wanted to do this, so that we could baseline what scrum meant to our organization.

We have 3 different teams, and three different interpretations of what scrum is. I can say, that after Jeff was here, everyone is on exactly the same page.

I think the one place that we fell apart on was the planning cycle. After seeing how release and sprint planning works in an ideal scrum team, I feel that our organization is really going to gain momentum with scrum and agile. We’ve been doing fairly well, but this course adjustment was exactly what we needed.

The most important things i took away was the idea of *one* backlog. You may have multiple teams, but there should ever be only one pipeline into all of them. One person, and one person only should be responsible for that backlog. A “single, wringable neck”, if you will.

The other thing that became quickly apparent to us was that we need to include QA in our definition of done. What we had been doing is have QA define the acceptance tests, and once the acceptance criteria was defined, only then would the development team engage the work. This seemed like a great idea at the time, but in hindsight, what it really was was a modified waterfall process. We were still tossing things over the proverbial fence. QA was so far disjointed from what the development teams were doing that at times when the exploratory testing started, they did not recognize what we were showing.

What are we doing now?

1. Cleaning up our backlog. All stories are going to be defined in the context of business value, rather than tasks, as we have been.
2. QA is going to be tightly integrated into each of the scrum teams.
3. Define what it means to be “done” with a story.
4. Iterations will be going back to monthly from weekly. Monthly iterations will allow us more time to get something truly done (see above). Having QA in with the scrum teams will really help with this.

Are we doing everything right? No… Are we getting there? I really think so. I’d like to hear from other individuals who have worked with their organizations to bring scrum and agile processes into their daily lives. Please feel free to comment, or write a post on your blog and link back.