I'm a bit late on this, I know, but Peter Gabriel has the first of two albums out entitled Scratch My Back. You can hear the whole thing at the Guardian. The concept is that he covers other artists on this album while the covered artists cover him on the next. Gabriels version of Bon Iver's Flume is a great showcase for his voice, and I like Heroes (Bowie) and Street Spirit (Radiohead) a lot too.

One of the less fun things about working as a software engineer is estimates. They're very difficult to get right, often pushed early by the client who naturally wants to know how much a project is going to cost them, and you'll sometimes get held to early wild guess estimates when they turn out to be terribly wrong. I enjoyed this Slashdot discussion on the topic, and there's some truth to this facetious comment:

I just ask my manager how long he's already told the client it's going to take.

At the moment, most estimates I do are done within a Scrum context, using Planning Poker or similar estimation methods. Planning poker is very simply trying to take all the pressure out of the estimation work; forget about what the client is expecting, forget what your project manager is expecting and never mind the experience of your colleagues. The estimates are not hours but relative complexity: start with a simple task and give it 2 points. Everything else is just relative from that. All developers on the team lay down their estimate card on the table at the same time, removing the bias of less experienced developers emulating the more senior developers. I know I sound like a geek when I say: it has put the fun back into estimation for me, and resulted in more accurate estimates.

I'm looking forward to the day though, when we as a business move away from expecting that we know the exact shipping feature set or cost at the start of a project. If you read any account of software projects throughout the few decades that such expectations will turn out to be wrong almost invariably. At the same time, I have respect for the client who wants to know what they're getting and at what price.

It's a difficult problem to solve.

Rails head honcho David Heinemeier Hansson reports that the beta of Ruby on Rails 3 is out. It's an exciting big release, and Engine Yard has more about what Rails 3 is all about, and Ruby Inside has a growing list of links about the new release.

Via Slashdot comes word that MPEG LA is extending their free license on the h.264 codec until 2016. The patent itself though, doesn't expire until 2028, and while the world might have moved on by then, 2016 is close enough to ask the question: "What then?".

H.264, for those not in the know, is one of the codecs in the running for the de-facto next generation video standard on the web. I'm still with Mozilla on this: get it right now, it's early days and we don't want to be stuck with something as important as this on a patent-encumbered codec.

Under the heading Modern browsers for modern applications, Google now only supports Internet Explorer 7 and up of the IE family.

No word on supporting Opera for Google Wave, though. ;)

Several sites are playing the guessing game ahead of tomorrow's Apple event where they're expected to announce some sort of tablet. I particularily liked The Guardian one, which predicts an iPhone-black 10,3" screen (or smaller) device. The votes also guess that it'll weigh somewhere between 0.7 and 1.1kg, that there will be only one model and that it will have mobile connectivity and an OLED display.

And the name? iSlate or iTablet. I voted for Canvas but that option is in fifth place.

More prediction voting here, where the votes are heavily in favour of a tablet-device being announced and Steve Jobs wearing a black turtleneck. No surprises there.

At least that's the point of this post by Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan:

Most importantly, if we'd caved, the Web everywhere would look like it does in China and South Korea, but more so --- dependent on ActiveX, and tied to Windows. No resurgent Apple, no Linux netbooks, precious few Linux users, no ChromeOS, no iPhone, no usable browsers on phones at all, and Microsoft's grip on the industry stronger than one dare imagine.

O'Callahan also has a pretty extensive list of arguments in support of Mozilla's decision not to support H.264 encoded video in Firefox. The gist of it is that the H.264 has patents associated with it, and those patents are being licensed by MPEG LA. Mozilla has strong interests in keeping Firefox free, and so widespread HTML5 video usage on the web is at a standoff between convenience and freedom.

I support Mozilla here. Even though I don't want to wait another minute for the day I can stop using Flash to play videos, and as a developer for the day that we have a uniform, standard way of displaying video on the web, I think they're right in standing up and taking the fight now, as opposed to five years down the road when we're all stuck with H.264.

This demo of the Mellotron simply has to be seen:

The Mellotron, of course, is a much used cult instrument that works by running a series of short tapes against tape heads when someone presses the keys. I know "much used" and "cult" doesn't really go together, but in the case of the Mellotron I feel it describes it pretty accurately. It's been used for over four decades on an incredible amount of records and yet has that eerie warbly tape sound that is simply weird.

The short glimpses of the insides of this incredible instrument are fascinating too. If anyone has better videos of the inner workings of one, please post a link!

With YouTube and Vimeo both offering HTML5 alternatives to Flash, the video tag seems to be gaining some traction. It'll be interesting to see how much is left of Flash usage on sites once simple video players are a matter for built-in browser features.

For now though, the video tag is encumbered by patent troubles, which in turn leads to cross-browser support problems, as outlined by Gruber, and debated further by Ian Weller. Robert Accettura has a good run-down of the complicated situation too.

Wow. Pat Metheny ups the ante on the orchestrion, the idea of the player piano taken to the next level. The whole project has a kind of mad scientist feel to it when I'm watching the video but it's unmistakably Pat Metheny, it's just that the Group is now mechanical.

Metheny is no stranger to triggering sounds from his guitar, first with the Roland GR-300 and later with the Roland VG-88, but this really is quite a spectacle and quite original.