Mary Rose Cook

A malleable gender and sexuality. Living in a punk/DIY/anti-captialist environment.

These are some things I’m not working on, anymore, but that might still be cool.

• Kisses: compare the magnitude of stuff
• Lollipops and Gumdrops: music recommendations
• Ear Defender: decide what music to listen to
• Switch off the light before you leave

In preparation for December, I made a Spotify playlist for Ten Years of All Tomorrow’s Parties. It contains an album for each of the bands on the line-up. The following bands were not available on Spotify, so you can check them out at their Myspaces.

The For Carnation,
Papa M,
Fuck Buttons,
Sleepy Sun,
Sunn o))),
Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra,
The Magic Band,
Porn,
Tall Firs,
BEAK>,
Polvo,
youm.

A new app I’ve been working on. It’s a wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities, or a digital scrapbook. You fill it with your favourite pictures, pieces of text, songs and film clips. Or, you could make a Slender for a wedding couple, or a new baby, or your Mum, or your girlfriend, and give it to them as a lovely present. I’ve made one for The Common Place, a social centre I was involved in when I lived in Leeds.

Actually, you can’t sign up, yet. Soon.

I have made a new collection on Kisses that compares the likelihood of different causes of death.

The words to a song by Stand, a hardcore band:

You are full of junk and junk fills your desires, but we know it’s easier to sit in a comfy chair with an ice cool beer and a kitsch pink horizon of how your life might take some form. Junk is cheap, junk is holiday romance, junk is beer and T.V. Junk is playtime. Junk is once in a blue moon in Hollywood U.S.A. Junk is a coffee shop, a bunch of actors and a monkey. Junk is bland and junk is your future, should you let junk into your life.

They talk about what they mean on the words page of their website.

The Waterfall method of developing software guarantees a result: a digital version of the requirements specification. Agile methods of developing software provide a service: software development.

Agile is replacing Waterfall. This means that software development is going from being fixed price to rate-based¹. With Waterfall, the developer would write the specification and then quote an estimate. With agile, the developer still writes a rough specification, but the features in it are not guaranteed to appear in the final product.

Instead, the developer says, “Let’s build this software together, and it will cost you $x per day.” It’s kind of like a cab ride: you tell the cabbie your destination, but you can settle up and get out at any time.

Which party, developer or client, is favoured financially by each of these methods? That depends on how good the developer is at estimating how long a piece of work will take. If they are great, Waterfall is better because they can sign a contract up front and get a guaranteed amount of money. If they are less than great, agile is better because they can’t dig themselves into a horrible underestimation hole.

Unfortunately, all developers suck at estimating work. To accurately estimate, you need to think through every problem you’ll encounter. To find every problem, you have to go through the work in detail. To go through the work in detail, you need to do the work. Some help is afforded by previous experience, but software development is rife with novel, tricky little problems.

So, financially speaking, Waterfall is bad for developers, and agile is better.

¹ Agile changes software development from manufacturing (secondary) to a service (tertiary). It was never quaternary, and it is also, finally, a developed country industry.

I am sad to see the little lady leave. However, $43 a month for hosting is quite a lot, so she has to go. The code is open source and on GitHub.

1. Open Preferences.
2. Click the All radio button in the bottom left.
3. Open the Video sub-menu on the left hand side.
4. Open the Output Modules sub-menu of the Video menu.
5. Click on MacOSX.
6. Untick the Back Screens In Fullscreen checkbox.
7. Click the Save button on the bottom right.

On Friday night, I programmed and came up with Switch off the light before you leave and my Mum watched the period drama, The Forsyte Saga, on ITV Watch Again. The Forsytes would suffer horrendous misfortune and dish out utter nastiness, but, then, every fifteen minutes, they would forget their troubles, go to a raucous disco and a man would shout at them about how they should be drinking Bacardi.