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Enjoy chasing storms from your couch like me? There's a great app called "TVNweather Live Storm Chasing" that I've been using to watch live streams from actual storm chasers out in the field. You'll see names like Reed Timmer (TornadoVideos.net) and the team running the Dominator 2. TVNweather Live Storm Chasing for iOS The app itself needs some work with stability, but the collection of active streams is incredibly handy and fun to watch. An Android version is coming soon as well. Until then you can also watch on their site at http://tvnweather.com/live.

It's grilling season again (finally) here in Wisconsin. I got my Range iOS-enabled thermometer over the winter season and only used it once with a ham. I used it today with grilling burgers, brats and steak and really enjoyed it. The Range thermometer is really fast at responding to temperature change. The problem I always have with even the best analog thermometers is that once they reach a high temperature, it's hard to test temperature of meat that may be a little bit colder. I can move the Range thermometer around from each thing on the grill and not have to wait for it to reset. ...

Glue is the thing that ... well ... glues everything together. You don't see glue (if the product is made right) but it plays an important role in the overall satisfaction with the product. If you buy a bird house that has bad gluing technique or not enough glue, you will be upset when the first bird flattens the house. The same hold trues for mobile apps as well as web and desktop applications. For sake of this discussion, I'm limiting myself to mobile apps and mentioning some specific iOS technologies. ...

If you run unit tests inside of Xcode, you may wish to turn on the behavior to show the test results after they run. Go to Preferences in Xcode.Click on the Behaviors tab.Click on Succeeds.Check the box shown and select "Show" then "Test Navigator".Repeat step 4 for Fails as well.Now when your tests finish (failed or succeeded) you'll see the pretty green or red marks.

You may not be aware but Apple has a pretty extensive set of public e-mail discussion lists. https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo There are topics ranging from fundamental Objective-C issues through to development for their various desktop applications. Some of the lists are quite chatty but you can subscribe in digest format to get a daily e-mail instead of each individual message. This is a great way to reach engineers working on the piece you're interested in and is a quite interesting place to lurk.

This is a pretty definite way of making me unsubscribe from your marketing emails.

Ever since I visited House of Shields downtown San Francisco, the cocktail called a Dark & Stormy has been one of my favorites. HoS makes their own variation of it, one part using a ginger syrup that they make themselves. I ended up finding a decent combination of ingredients locally that I prefer from HoS' recipe. Most Dark & Stormy recipes will indicate to use Gosling's Black Seal rum which can be hard to obtain. Gosling's also makes a ginger beer which is the staple used in a Dark & Stormy. I found a zippier ginger beer and a tasty alternative to Black Seal. ...

I've noticed that when I've achieved a free drink at Starbucks, I tend to add on things I normally wouldn't. Sometimes the baristas like to make a special comment about it as well which makes me feel guilty about ordering literally "anything I want." You know what, f**k that. I've purchased 12 drinks to get one free. It's one of the reasons I continue to patronize Starbucks because I feel like that 12th drink is nice to get. I don't go very often any more so when I do get the free one, I like to take advantage of their offer. Hell, I've dropped probably $60 by then! ...

You know you've lost your mind when you trip a little and the recovery move resembles a move from your step aerobics routine and you hear the instructor say: "Now, funky push!"

Dave Thomas has a really excellent post about how it's time to kill Agile. It's a very well thought out post and it embodies a lot of my concerns with the movement. I have a few insights to add to his perspective. I was a software engineer consultant for over five years. The Java and open-source community had adopted Agile and implementations like Scrum and XP fairly quickly. It made us find the way to get software that was good out the door in a timely fashion. It made us not sit on our asses collecting requirements for months before any real work was done. I worked on a very successful search project at a Fortune 500 company following Agile methods loosely based on Scrum. I still believe to this day the level of success was due to the project being in "skunkworks" and therefore having a simplified budget and leaving us in control of the moving parts. Once that project got into a normal budgeting process, innovation floundered. ...