If you’ve been on a Scrum team for some time, you will inevitably hear someone at the stand-up say: Today I cannot work on <some feature> because of <some reason>, but that’s all right. I’m not otherwise blocked because I can also work on <some unrelated thing>. There are two (very human) factors at play […]
The big problem with Building Science is that we call it Building Science. The academic study of buildings and their inhabitants is a young discipline; possibly even younger than Computer Science. The earliest articles in Building and Environment appear to date from 1966; Building Research & Information, from 1973. Like Computer Science, we have no single […]
I’m pleased to report that CARNOT, the Simulink library of models for HVAC systems, has now an official home. You can find it by visiting its page on the MATLAB Central. On that page you will also find a link to the official releases, hosted by the Aachen University of Applied Sciences. HVAC systems, in spite […]
I’ve uncovered evidence that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, may entertain a secret hobby. An interview of Linus Torvalds in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum had the following passage: I’d rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long. On the surface, this sounds […]
When you just fix a programming bug quickly, you lose. You waste a previous opportunity to think and reflect on what led to this error, and to improve as a craftsman. Some time ago, I discovered a bug. The firmware was crashing, seemingly at random. It was eventually resolved, the fix reviewed and tested, and […]
What is the very first question one is supposed to answer during a standup meeting? If your answer is: What did you do since the last standup? then congratulations. You have given the canonical answer recommended by Mike Cohn himself. But I am now convinced that this is the wrong question to ask. When you […]
You have been lied to. By me. I taught once a programming class and introduced my students to the notion of an unbiased estimator of the variance of a population. The problem can be stated as follows: given a set of observations $(x_1, x_2, …, x_n)$, what can you say about the variance of the […]
The SIM4Blocks European project held its kick-off meeting on 5 and 6 April 2016 in Stuttgart, Germany. A consortium of 17 European partners (including 3 Swiss organisations) have answered the H2020-EE-2015-2-RIA call for proposals for: … real time optimisation of energy demand, storage and supply (including self-production when applicable) using intelligent energy management systems with […]
When you read through the biblical books of Kings, you may have been struck by a phrase that repeats itself for every monarch: In the Xth year of (king of kingdom B), (name of king) became king of (kingdom A). He reigned N years, and did (evil|good) in the sight of the Lord. If you’ve […]
We once spent almost a week chasing after a mysterious memory leak in our application, built on top of the highly regarded eCos real-time operating system. The leak appeared after we had rewritten some of our code in C++ after recognising that C’s object-oriented capabilities were no longer adequate for our needs. After about half […]