The Rattsnest

Software as Magic?

2008-02-20T10:19:00.001-05:00

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke.

Any sufficiently large, poorly designed and maintained code base is indistinguishable from magic:
* You have to invest years pouring over tomes of arcane and confusing text.
* You must spend hours performing the same action with slight variation until you get the desired result.
* You should expect to be frazzled, burned or turned into an ass every once in a while.
* You'll need to consult with lore masters in a suppliant manner and be confused by their answers.
* It may help to sacrifice a small, furry woodland creature.
-- Me

The Grandfather Paradox / T2

2007-09-23T15:10:00.000-05:00

I was listening to the latest episode of The Darker Projects podcast of Doctor Who. They brought up the Grandfather Paradox. From Wikipedia

Suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveler's grandmother. As a result, one of the traveler's parents (and by extension, the traveler himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have traveled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveler would have been conceived, allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather. Thus each possibility seems to imply its own negation, a type of logical paradox.

This made me think of the end of Terminator 2. In T2, Skynet was derived from the remains of the cyborg from the first movie. These parts, plus the second terminator, were destroyed at the end of the climax. The movie ends with a voice over Linda Hamilton talking about the coming conflict. But if the Conner family had prevented Skynet from being created, then Sarah should be driving her Vespa around L.A. and waiting tables at a dinner. And John never would have been born.

But obviously, they managed to come up with some excuse for Skynet still being made, since they needed an excuse to make a third movie.

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god - Yahoo! News

2007-09-05T08:19:00.000-05:00

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god - Yahoo! News

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.

Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due the problem.

The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal's only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said.

"The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights," said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.

It is common in Nepal to sacrifice animals like goats and buffaloes to appease different Hindu deities.

I don't know what's scarier. The fact that they believe that Akash Bhairab was preventing the plane from flying or that they were willing to fly in it after it magically started working again.

You know, maybe this Western Christian God is just a light-weight. I mean, air and space flight have greately reduced the mystical nature of Heaven. A truly clever higher-power would have tweaked the laws of physics so that heavier than air flight was not possible. At least this Hindu sky god has the balls to fuck with his own people everyone in a while.

Castro Endorses a Clinton-Obama Ticket?

2007-08-29T08:14:00.000-05:00

Sign #27 of the pending apocalypse:
The sheeple of the United States elect a presidential ticket endorsed by a Communist dictator.

There is no real endorsement of the Clinton or Obama. It's more of a reference to conventional wisdom regarding that ticket. But who else but Castro could begin a story with this sentence:

One day, Che [Guevara] and I went to play golf. He had been a caddie once to earn some money in his spare time; I, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing about this expensive sport.

What he does suggest that Gore is a true communist:

The media declares that this [a democratic government in Cuba] would be essential, unless Gore decides to run. I don’t think he will do so; better than anyone, he knows about the kind of catastrophe that awaits humanity if it continues along its current course. When he was a candidate, he of course committed the error of yearning for “a democratic Cuba”.

At best this could be interpreted that Gore's green policies put him at odds with capitalism. And since capitalism is a side affect of individual freedoms, Castro sees Gore as a fellow communist.

A treatment for the Dark Tower Series

2007-08-21T20:28:00.001-05:00

I think that since Warner Brothers has struck gold on the 7-part Harry Potter series, and the Lord of the Rings was such a phenomenal success, we could probably expect to see the full seven parts of the Dark Tower. I'd love to see all of them made verbatim, but I don't know that it's practical. If I had to change things, this is probably how I'd do it.

The first book was extremely short, even the extensions added in the revised version didn't do that much to add to the story. I suppose you could pad it out to introduce even more world building material. I'd probably slip the Mejis story from Wizard and Glass into the middle, have Roland telling that story to Jake instead of the story of how Roland gunned down everyone in that little dried-up town. You might have to thin it out a little, but it could be done. You'd have to play down the politics, maybe even eliminate Rhea and Merlin's Grapefruit.

I think The Drawing of the Three would be perfect just the way it is.

Then I'd take all of the Wastelands and the riddling competition and Wizard of Oz sections of Wizard and Glass squish it into one movie and call it "The Wastelands". The first half of the Wastelands is mostly world building and is were King really hit his stride on how Mid-world worked. But that might not transfer so well for a movie. I'm not sure how hot of an ending the Blaine section would be. That's why I think you'd need the confrontation with Flagg in the Emerald City to get you back on the track of the tower.

Wolves of the Callas could probably stand on it's own, what with the whole Seven Samari story and Callahan's back story.

But the last two books would be like pulling teeth. I loved all these books, but the shine really started come off the diamond with the Song of Suzanna. I know King was aiming for the Arthurian legend mixed with his own odd sense of the occult, but crikey it made for a slow story at times. I honestly don't recall most of that book. I don't know how I'd handle SoS as a movie.

And finally, the Dark Tower. All of the world hopping in this book and SoS might make it confusing to the non-readers. Ditto all of the interweaving of Mid-world and our world. Obviously, you need King to play himself in the movies, but I might make just one trip to Maine instead of two. The battle in the Dixie Pig is a must though. Father Callahan was most righteous in that fight, pardon the pun.

I think the conclusion of the book / series was genius. Couldn't have happened any other way. And, like Sean said, that will really screw with people's heads. But I was never happy with the defeat of Red King. I hated it. Totally Deus Ex Machina. And you couldn't end a seven part movie arc that way. Not enough action.

I don't want a big, handful of good verses an army of darkness, everyone dies kind of conclusion, like the end of the Harry Potter books. Something more like the Matrix series, big one-on-one battle then reset the system. Roland stands alone against a single opponent.

I think you'd have to have a confrontation between Roland and Flagg on the stair of the tower, in top room or on the parapets. This would be a bit of a divergence, since Flagg was killed by Mordred, but I'm sure worse sins will be committed against this story.

But how cool would it be to have Roland step over Flagg's body, enter the top room of the tower and then be instantly back at the beginning of the story, chasing him again.

More thoughts on casting the Dark Tower

2007-08-21T19:48:00.001-05:00

Sean had made a few suggestions about casting for the pending Dark Tower movie.

He'd suggest Sam Elliot as the gunslinger. Elliot definitely has that western feel down, but I think he's a bit old as well. Roland is no spring chicken, in fact he seems to age quite quickly over the course of the last few books. But the man just turned 63 a few weeks ago.

I could buy into Sean's suggestion of Steve Buscemi. He's got the street edge. And the sense of humor. However, I don't know that I've seen Buscemi enough movies that weren't ultra-violent to dig him for Eddie's sensitive side. And looking at the recent pictures of him on IMDB, I'm more inclined to add him to the list for the Walter/Flagg/Martin candidates.

I think I might give Bruce Campbell
reading for Eddie. Partly because I'm a big a fan. Also, I could SO see him nailing the confrontation with Blaine the Mono. Plus he's done his share of niche, action and western material.

Sean had also thrown Peter Fonda or David Bowie as Flagg. Maybe. I've never drank the cool-aid of David Bowie, so I'm going to have to pass on him. I can see him getting a good bite on the creepy factor. However, I was checking out the pictures of Fonda in Ghost Rider and was impressed by how good he looked. I might consider him for the part of Roland.

Fonda's make up in GR made me think of Lance Henriksen, another journeyman actor with a lot of odd action movies under his belt. He might make a good Roland, Callahan or Flagg.

My problem is that I really don't watch a lot of movies, which is partly my Howard Roark shining through. For example, I love the Ghost Rider comic, but I couldn't bring myself to watch it because I was not impressed with the artistic decisions. That bike looked nasty and the skull and flames looked to CGd for me. I'd rather not see it.

Hopefully the end result of the Dark Tower movies will be more like the LotR than what has happened with the Spiderman movies. I'd even be happy a nice Harry Potter-esque compromise.

Stephen King confirms The Dark Tower Movie

2007-08-21T12:09:00.000-05:00

Gotta channel the anti-anti-guy for this one.

Stephen King has apparently opted the rights for The Dark Tower to be produced J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. Apparently, they are serious fans, having slip multiple references to King's works into Lost.

Of course, I've enjoyed most of King's books and loved the Dark Tower series. I also really enjoyed the Marvel comics adaption of Wizard and Glass into Gunslinger Born. The comic had great art and was a decent interpretation of the story.

I think casting could be a challenge.

The main character Roland was based heavily on Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone movies. Unfortunately, he's getting a little old in the tooth. No one comes to mind, but the guy would have to be tall and lanky like Eastwood. Maybe slip Eastwood in as Father Callahan, as a nod of the head. I think he would be great in that role.

When I first saw the twins on Disney's The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, I immediately thought of Jake Chambers. I don't know how you'd pick just one of them though.

I'm thinking someone that is an established crazy man for Flagg/Walter/Martin. Someone like Ed Norton or Gary Oldman.

Eddie.... Eddie's tough. In more way than one. He has emotional toughness and depth, plus street/criminal/druggie element. And he's a funny bastard with a twisted sense of humor. Eddies the one I've always associated with the most. First man into my mind was John Cusack. But I think he's getting a little old for the role. Shrug.

As far as Susannah Dean goes, I'm thinking someone unknown. I think an actress with a lot of work under her belt would ruin that character. It's so dynamic, over the length of the series, I think an actress that is a blank slate would be much better. No expectations.

Samsung files patent app for fertility measuring phone - Engadget

2007-08-16T15:28:00.000-05:00

Finally, a cell phone feature that I think might be able to get behind!

Camera phone, no love from me. Watching streaming video on my cell? Please. I don't need to squint.

But knowing whether or not the wife's ovaries are in overdrive, THAT is useful!

The beauty of the big city? NOT!

2007-08-16T10:16:00.001-05:00

Romain Guy's blog Curious Creature is great resource for information Java technology and especially Swing. He occasionally posts some really nice pictures.

In a recent post, he shared some pictures he's taken of San Fransisco, including this one...

Maybe it's the introvert in me, but that picture represents so many people in one place that it just makes my brain scream. I mean it's neat and all, and I can appreciate that it represents the phenomenal accomplishments of human society. But you can have it. Thanks.

Brits Edit Out Smoking Cartoons

2006-08-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

Tom lighting up a cigar is out. Jerry whacking Tom over the head with mallets, axes and lawnmowers is in.

So, apparently the Ministry of Truth over in Great Britain is at it again. This time, they are editing out sections of cartoons where the characters smoke. Tom and Jerry is going to be the first end up on the cutting room floor.

I mean really people, what is this going to accomplish? You know what? Some folks still smoke. It's not healthy, but for the love of Pete, it happens. Every time I'm watching TV with my kids I see some kind of anti-smoking PSA. I'm sure that there are even more on the BBC. If that is enough to counteract kids seeing a animated character lighting up a cigar in a cartoon from the 60's, then the kid is a waste anyway.

Turner, however, won't simply cut each instance of smoking from the classic 'toons, simply the ones, per Ofcom, "where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation."

So, the scenes where Jerry slips Tom an exploding cigar are still in. Great.

I suppose that they're going to make the cigarette companies pay for this, too.

Apparently, they've got their eyes on Popeye next.

10 tips on leading a balanced life

2006-08-15T11:42:00.000-05:00

Interesting post. Nothing really new, but sometimes you just need to hear someone say something obvious, or in this case, read it, before it will sink in.

Refactor while you work

2006-08-14T21:47:00.000-05:00

One of the most powerful techniques in software development is refactoring. By making small, careful changes in you code and using automated tests to verify those changes, you can significantly restructure the inner workings of your code. The mechanics aside, the purpose of refactoring is to alter the internal structure without changing its external behavior. This is done to rectify a poor decision or to reflect a better understanding of the problem.

Back in the real world, I'm building a light box for a movie poster. More details on that later. While I was working I'd dug out most of the tools I own, had scraps of wood everywhere and a nice layer of saw dust on all the flat surfaces. It was getting so that it was difficult to find the tools I needed quickly.

Then it happened. I was reaching for a piece of wood I needed to cut and KNOCKED OVER MY BEER!!! The humanity! After salvaging and consuming what was left of my frosty barely pop, I decided I needed to stop working and clean up the mess a bit.

As I was working, I realized that I was refactoring my workspace. I wasn't completely halting the project, I wasn't radically reorganizing my garage, I was just making the whole environment a little more pleasant to work in. That's the idea behind refactoring: make the code better without completely ripping it out and starting over.

It may not be the best possible analogy, but I enjoy those moments when I can reconcile what I do for fun and what I do for a living.

Legends of Dune

2006-08-08T20:35:00.000-05:00

I've recently finished reading the Legends of Dune trilogy. Written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, these three books attempt to establish the foundation for the world we see in the Dune books of Frank Herbert. This includes the begins of the spice trade, the development of shield technology, the seeds of the Bene Gesserit and Mentat schools and genesis of space folding.

The main story arc is the struggle between free humans and the machine empire that rules most of the known universe. This establishes the back story for the Butlerian Jihad and the prohibition on thinking machines. It also lays the ground work for the feud between House Atreides and House Harkonnen.

As a big fan of all six of the original Dune books (yes all six) I was hesitant to read these books. Nothing against the authors, but I'd rather they left well enough alone. I had no real interest in anyone else corrupting the Duniverse as I understood it. After reading the book, I'm pretty much of the same opinion, the world would not have missed these books if they had never been written.

I was not total repulsed by the books, but to paraphrase my Sci-Fi Lit professor, the books were "better conceived than implemented". It was interesting to see the events which triggered the creation of Bene Gesserit breeding program. The arrival of the Zensunni Wanderers onto Arrakis did quite fit my understanding of events. The characterization of Holtzman as a floundering inventor and the introduction of a brilliant protege was good. But none of it was engrossing.

Probably the most interesting character was Erasmus. None of the human characters realy grabbed me, not even Vorian Atreides. With his unexplained "life extension" treatment, Atreides was abused as the one human character the existed across all three books. I understand why they wanted and/or need that character, but I never perceived the sense of greatness I expectd for the character.

Same goes for the Atreides / Harkonnen feud. If I put myself in the characters positions, the events which triggered the falling out of the Atreides and Harkonnens might have been appropriate. But I had to stop and think about those relationships and the sense of betrayal. The writting did not make me feel it.

One last thing is that I found the over feel of these books missed the mark of Herbert's original style. No two people can complete simulate the style of third person, and part of the book did get close. But for the most part they felt completely separated from the previous works. Also, the conclusion of the story arc had that feeling of "we have a lot of loose ends so lets do a lot of things in a hurry feel but without a lot of passion" that I always got from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The original books built tension and expectation to a resolution. I never got that with these books.

Cripes, that's a lot of B.S. just to say "eh, it was all right".

'Nuff said

Another sign that videogames teach you something.

2006-03-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

"VIDEO GAMES CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE::

The U.S. Army has discovered a remote control gun turret that works, and cannot get enough of them. The army wants over 9,000 CROWS (common remotely operated weapon stations), but is only getting 15 a month. There should be about a thousand CROWS in service by the end of the year. . . .

But there's another reason, not often talked about, for the success of CROWS. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger."

Firefox saved passwords for all to see

2006-03-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Learn something new every day:

Firefox saved passwords for all to see: "Most people take advantage of Firefox's abiltiy to store your passswords for the multitude of sites you visit. How many realize that those passwords are easily accessible to anyone with access to your computer?"

Not sure I like this view passwords feature. I can see the use case for it, but don't know that it's worth the risk.

Quantum computer works best switched off

2006-02-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

Ok, I admit that I understand only the littlest bit of quantum mechanics, but this is a real head scracther. The reference to Schrödinger's cat helped a bit. But this is the part that really makes my head spin:

"A non-running computer produces fewer errors," says Hosten.

2nd hand electronic sales will NOT be made illegal in Japan.

2006-02-23T08:14:00.000-05:00

More clarification on that previous post.

"Turns out that other story that is being dug like crazy is missing out on some important features of the actual story.. Don't worry, you'll still be able to buy that old Famicom."

Japan bans old electronics as of April 1

2006-02-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

Here's one way to make sure the Japenese consumers keep spending their Yen:

No, this isn't an April Fool's Day joke: If you're in Japan and looking for a deal on used gear, your days are numbered, at least if that gear is more than five years old. It seems that Japan's government revised its 'Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law' back in April 2001, and added a stipulation that items authorized under the country's old law (the 'Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law') couldn't be sold anymore, but granted those products a five-year grace period. Well, if you check your convenient wall calendar, you'll see that the five-year period is about to end, which means that as of April 1, pretty much any electronic gear sold before April 1, 2001 can't be legally resold in Japan. Note that we said legally. We assume that if you're really jonesing for an original Famicom or parts for your aging Zaurus, you'll find a way to do it. Such as meeting outside the Zoo in Ueno Koen at midnight on Tuesday and asking for Yuki. Just don't mention our name.

Love to know what the motivation behind this is.

It's great to be a geek.

2006-02-15T12:22:00.000-05:00

This article courtesy of digg talks about a little poem that was embedded in Apple's OS X.

Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.

A secret message left by geeks that can only be found by other geeks. The Illuminati would be proud.

Space Worms

2006-02-03T22:39:00.000-05:00

Kinda like asteroids crossed with the classic worm game.

Islam In Europe: : Interviews with Bruce Bawer and Claire Berlinski.

2006-01-31T13:25:00.000-05:00

: "ISLAM IN EUROPE: Interviews with Bruce Bawer and Claire Berlinski. Excerpt (from Berlinski):

The problem which we see in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, Britain, everywhere in Europe, in fact is that every single European country has imported a huge body of ill-educated, unskilled immigrants who for both cultural and economic reasons cannot be assimilated and who do not see themselves as part of the larger story of Europe, and do not feel that they have been able to claim their proper share of the postwar European bounty. Neither France nor any European country can solve this problem because they are insoluble, at least within the parameters almost every European country has rigidly defined, in the postwar era, for solving social and economic problems.

Cash-in on your geocaching skillz

2006-01-31T11:12:00.000-05:00

Now this could be a hobby that pays dividends. From Engadget: Cash-in on your geocaching skillz:

If you're one of the lucky folks who live in or around the yellow area pictured on the map (it's a map of the upper 48 United States), grab the closest gadget with GPS, your EV-DO-sportin' laptop, and the keys to your pickup, 'cause money is literally falling out of the sky all around you 24-hours-a-day. Let us explain: Apparently some regions in the South and West aren't as wired as midtown Manhattan, so a company called Space Data found a way to make money by repeatedly launching weather balloons with cellular transmitters called SkySites, and charging what must be astronomical fees for getting your cell-on in the boonies. These eye-in-the-sky cell towers hover between 70,000 and 100,000-feet and provide coverage for a 200-mile radius on Earth- but the darn things only stay aloft for 24 to 48 hours before freefalling to the ground (or tree, or lake, or Grand Canyon). Once a balloon hits terra firma, or something close, it radios its location back to its successor in the sky, which then relays the data to the SkySite website. Since geocachers are known to be a particularly violent and rowdy bunch who would no doubt cause wanton destruction in a free-for-all pursuit of these $60 treasures, only a particular balloon's general location is posted, and the first certified 'cacher "

Contagious obesity?

2006-01-30T17:05:00.000-05:00

Not sure what to make of this. A virus that apparently increases the retention or creation of fat.

Contagious obesity? Identifying the human adenoviruses that may make us fat:

"There is a lot of good advice to help us avoid becoming obese, such as 'Eat less,' and 'Exercise.' But here's a new and surprising piece of advice based on a promising area of obesity research: 'Wash your hands.'"

So, the 450lb guy might have a case of this. But I'm guessing that your average overweight computer geek who does not exercise (e.g. ME!) still just has issues w/ his life style.

Cindy Sheehan for Senate.

2006-01-30T16:23:00.000-05:00

: "A CINDY SHEEHAN FOR SENATE BLOG: Why not?"

Saw this at first, and thought "not a good thing". But she'd be running Dianne Feinstein. Anything that gets Feinstein out of congress would be a good thing.

I'd might actually move to California just so I can vote for Cindy! Nah... but it was good for a laugh on a Monday. Really brighten my day.

Not like it would happen. The DNC will bully Sheehan out of the way.

Use your brain, halve your risk of dementia

2006-01-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

Use your brain, halve your risk of dementia: "Research from UNSW provides the most convincing evidence to date that complex mental activity across people's lives significantly reduces the risk of dementia. The researchers found that such activity almost halves the incidence of dementia."

So, put down the remote and do a few crossword puzzles, eh? Otherwise, you're gonna be a nut job when you're old. Nuff said.

Bayesian Filters Predict Sundance

2006-01-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

Saw this on slashdot...

Bayesian Filters Predict Sundance: "JohnGrahamCumming writes 'The LA Times reports on a company's use of Bayesian filtering to predict the winners at the Sundance Film Festival. They use a modified POPFile email filter and claim an 81% success rate.' "

Go straight to the orginal article here

Math is cool. Using computers to figure out who is going to win Sundance is a waste of zeros and ones, but still cool. Nuff Said!

XBox Commercial - Racing Airliners

2006-01-21T19:38:00.000-05:00

Saw this on digg.com. Fun.

A Politician Says Something Stupid for 2006.01.16

2006-01-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 16 -- Mayor C. Ray Nagin suggested Monday that hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" -- and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting.

"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Nice to know that right-wing wackos and Muslim extremists aren't only ones who can find the wrath of God in natural disasters.

Orignial post from The Y Files.

Gmail: Deleting Made Easy

2006-01-20T10:20:00.000-05:00

So, when gmail first came out, which seems like forever ago, you had to make two clicks to delete an e-mail. The information addicted geek and software developer in me understood why.

1) the harder it is to do something, the less likely someone is to do.
2) Google doesn't want people to delete their old e-mails.

For example, cigarette taxes are not about sticking it to people who participate in the vice, they are about discouraging the vice. Making the delete action take an extra click makes people think twice about whether they need to delete the e-mail. Even if it is unconscious, they think "I've got 1 Gigabyte (now 2 GB++) of storage. I don't need to delete it."

The reason that Google doesn't want to you delete e-mails is that it increases their semantic depth. Even if the don't let everyone search your e-mail, they are parsing it.

Next time you're in gmail, check out the ads off to the right. They parsed your e-mail to figure which ads to show. Once they show that add, they aren't going to throw that information away. Somewhere they are logging what significant words occurred in your e-mail. That gives them more data to build relationships between content. This makes their search engine better.

And you know what, they are going to do the same thing with blog post. Now, a blog is a public piece of data, which they can parse anytime they want. But by acquiring blogger, they got DIRECT access to the raw data, including the user data. This means less inference and more accurate results.

All of the "free" service from Google is just about improving their search engine. Why go out and search the web for content when you can get the users to send the content to you.

So back to the original topic, it is cool that Google put the delete button in there. I'm sure people have been clamoring for it for a while.

Are men really the new oppressed minority?

2006-01-20T10:07:00.000-05:00

: "RICHARD WHITMIRE writes in The New Republic on boys and education:

What's most worrisome are not long-standing gender differences but recent plunges in boys' relative performance. Between 1992 and 2002, the gap by which high school girls outperformed boys on tests in both reading and writing--especially writing--widened significantly. Given the reading and writing demands of today's college curriculum, that means a lot of boys out there are falling well short of being considered 'college material.' Which is why women now significantly outnumber men on college campuses, a phenomenon familiar enough to any sorority sister seeking a date to the next formal. This June, nearly six out of ten bachelor's degrees awarded will go to women. If the Department of Education's report is any indication, in coming years, this gender gap will grow even larger.

The report illustrates a dramatic and unsolved mystery: At some point in the early '80s, boys' relative academic records and aspirations took a downward turn. So far, no one has come up with a good explanation for this trend, but it's a story that affects millions of boys and their families. And yet, according to LexisNexis, the report was cited by name in only five newspaper and magazine articles. . . . Not only has there been little media attention to this crisis in boys' education, but there has been surprisingly little research. "

So, men are falling behind women in schools. Is that because boys are
a) getting dumber
b) drifting towards no-academic pursuits
c) girls are getting more attention and support because they are perceived as being "oppressed".
d) boys are getting less attention and support because they are perceived as the oppressors

Apparently women are already the majority on college campus (six out of ten bachelor's degrees will got to women). Arguable, as this trend continues they will become a dominant majority. Once that critical mass is reached, education will become more adapted to the needs of women and less towards the needs of men. Eventually, education will become the bastion of women that it was for men until the 20th century.

I'm not against the pendulum swing back and forth. We need balance. But I'm just saying that there is no value in progressing to the point where men become unlettered. That's incredible far off, but is a possible outcome of this trend. The second point of this post by limited visibility and research on the subject. Only further feeding the problem.

Indigenous Amazonians display core understanding of geometry

2006-01-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

Indigenous Amazonians display core understanding of geometry: "Researchers in France and at Harvard University have found that isolated indigenous peoples deep in the Amazon readily grasp basic concepts of geometry such as points, lines, parallelism and right angles, and can use distance, angle and other relationships in maps to locate hidden objects. The results suggest that geometry is a core set of intuitions present in all humans, regardless of their language or schooling."

Or, could it be that they have to use these things as a part of their "primitive" life. Angles and distance would play a huge roll in any spear/bow launched projectile. Gun powder is for people who can't do math and geometry. Their need to navigate in unmapped territories probably contributes to their to grasp spacial concepts.

Bottom line is that you don't have to live on a city block to know what a square is. Hell, you probably couldn't get an urban dweller to recognize the variance that would exist in a square the size of a city block.

"Uh, looks square to me."

Santhosh Kumar's Weblog on Swing

2005-12-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

Found this blog (of a sort) by Santhosh Kumar's Weblog. Has some really neat ideas including extentsions to standard widgets, memory management on the client side and all kinds of good stuff.

Open Source Look&Feel for Swing

2005-12-13T09:42:00.000-05:00

Some how this never occured to me (not a first). That someone would create and publish alternate look & feels for Swing. Might have to dig for more of these.

The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections

2005-12-09T19:20:00.000-05:00

Stumbled on this on while sniffing around digg. An interesting book, The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections by Stewart T. Coffin, on puzzle theory posted in HTML form. Check it out.

I've only flipped through it a bit, but it talks about 2 and 3 dimmesional puzzles, including everyone's favorite, the soma cube.

A few comments on Friday

2005-11-15T12:15:00.000-05:00

I polished off Friday last night and wanted to post a few quick impressions.

1) the society described in Friday is much closer to the practice of Free-Love than what was going on in The Church of All Suns in SiaSL. There were some relationships that Friday stumbled into that were stronger than others, like the family that was distributed in Winnipeg and Auckland.

2) Somewhere on the net, I read a post asserting that Heinlien hated women, based on the way he cast his female characters. By my interpretation, this is not the case. He casts his women is strong roles and they are almost always cherished and honored in those roles. For example, in all of the family groups that Friday encountered, the women controlled the group. In Starship Troopers, the captains in the space fleet were always women. Part of was accepting the fact that women had better reflexes, but this was communicated through Rico without a hint of resentment. Instead, the Roughnecks actually had a little party to celebrate the skill of their captain who got their asses out of a sticky situation.

3) I've not read up on anyone else's interpretation of Friday, but I'd have a hard time taking seriously a discussion that focused on the sexual aspects. The "Free Love" nature of the society only helped to accentuate Friday's alienation as an unindentured Artificial Person. For example, she could move from bed to bed in her S-group as long as her partners believed she human. Once they discovered she was an AP, they rejected her. The parallel to modern race relations is pretty obvious.

I have a few more thoughts, but will post them as time allows...

Comments on Heinlein's _Friday_

2005-11-11T14:05:00.000-05:00

I started reading Friday last night. I'm about 80 pages in and I've already identified a theme that is stretches across Friday, SiaSL and Starship Troopers. The main character in each novel (Friday, Mike and Rico) all make transitions through several serogate families.

In ST, Rico moves from his terrestial family to two or three different units in the Mobile Infantry only to reunited with his father again at the end of the book. Mike first has the Martians, then Jubal's little family, the circus and finally starts his own family in the Church of All Worlds. Early in the book Friday has already been through 3 families: the creche where she was manufactured, the family she earned within the intelligence group she is employed by and finally the Syntentic Family that she joined in New Zealand.

I heard someone describe Firday as worthless or pulp or something like that. I think that this being a little harsh, considering that in small part of the book I've read so far, the character has had to deal with racism in the traditional sense, the exclusion she feels in being an artifical person, the emotional aspects of the various "families" she's a member of plus the realities of her role in the intelligence agency.

An Open letter to the KAMN about SiaSL

2005-11-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Time for a quick quiz:

The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas is/are
a) a pair of Sci Fi fans named Summer and Joe
b) the podcast Summer and Joe record about the classic works of Sci Fi literature.
c) all of the above.

The answer of course is (c). If there is ever an "all of the above" it's almost always a safe bet.

So, the second show of the podcast was about Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing, because SiaSL is one of my favorite books, and a bad thing, because SiaSL is one of my favorite books. You'll understand the reality behind this enigmatic statement after reading the rest of this post.

After listening to the pod cast, I had plenty to say. Much more than any one had posted on the subject. So I decide to post my comments here. The rest of this posting will be what I orignally want to post to the Ninjas.

Founding Fathers and Slavery

2005-02-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

My newest (and possibly ONLY) Constant Reader raised the issue of the America Founding Fathers owning slaves. I believe his assertion was that this invalidated them as role models and leaders. I don't buy that, but it did get me thinking and I found a few links on the web:

According to this article, George Washington had slaves, but left instructions that upon the death of himself and his wife. Also that those who could not fend for themselves though age or infirmity should be maintained by his estate.

Here's an interesting article on the role of Benjamin Franklin on the issue of slavery during the period leading up to and after the American Revolution. According to it, both Franklin and John Quincy Adams did not own slaves.

Thomas Jefferson did own slaves, and we've all heard the stories about his supposed affair and child with one of slaves. This article touches on the topic.

This is hardly exhaustive research, but it does indicate a pattern. In a period when it was generally acceptable, two of these four men did not own slaves and the other two acknowledged the questionable nature of slavery, even if they did not do it consistently. That alone indicates leadership qualities and a desire to change the status quo for the equality of all men.

Equality for all men may not have happened during there time, but that does not invalidate Jefferson's "all men are created equal". They recognized the problems with the current society and attempted to create a country where it was possible to change these norms.

having one of those days

2005-02-03T19:27:00.000-05:00

and this is the only way to describe how I feel....

http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/

Dennis Prager - "The left is worth nothing"

2005-02-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

Posting a lot of political stuff right now.... not feeling very geekey of late I guess.... here's more:

Was listing to the warroom this morning on my way into work and Quinn was reading this article. Here's a few snippets...

The opening, explaining the source for article's title:

"Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing." -- Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005

It took a Polish rescuer of Jews in the Holocaust, cited this week 60 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp, to best describe those people who cannot or refuse to know the difference between good and evil. They are "worth nothing."

And why it applies to the political Left, world-wide.

Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. The Left could not identify communism as evil; has been neutral toward or actually supported the anti-democratic pro-terrorist Palestinians against the liberal democracy called Israel; and has found it impossible to support the war for democracy and against an Arab/Muslim enemy in Iraq as evil as any fascist the Left ever claimed to hate.

Strong words, but an interesting analysis of the situation. I'd like find a copy of the article where Mr. Kasprzyk was quoted. To see the context he meant it in.

Reagan on the role of religion in America

2005-02-01T22:56:00.000-05:00

Found this quote from The Gipper and I think it sums up my opinions on the subject pretty well

The only addition I'd make is that the absence of religious beliefs in one's life does not exclude the possibility of them being a contributing member of society.

The point I believe Reagan was trying to make is demonstrated by the way pro-lifers are portrayed if they say their stance is based on their religious beliefs. They are often derided for basing their position on the teachings of the church. The simple point is abortion is murder, and I don't need the Pope to tell me it is wrong. The fact that someone's opinion is based on a religious belief should not invalidate it. Unfortunately this is more and more often the case in our society.

This of course begs the question on corporal punishment,but that, like Conan's biographer says, is a story for another time.

More on the decline of virtue

2005-01-31T13:53:00.000-05:00

This quote was in another mailing from the Federalist and I thought it was a good follow up to this discussion

The anonymous poster had suggested that the problem was that the "wealthy voters" were fleeing the urban areas and taking their morals with them. Does that imply that poor people don't have values? I beg to to differ since my as a child my father was dirt poor but had the character, ethics and strength to make something of himself far beyond what might be expected his humble beginnings.

The real problem is that certain segments of the population feel that because they are "disadvantaged" they are not obliged to act like decent human beings. And yet they wonder why their "culture" is dismissed.

The Phillip K. Dick Reader for Paranoids

2005-01-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

I picked up a copy of The Philip K. Dick Reader over the holidays. This is the first of Dick's stuff that I've read out side Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sleep. I'd see all the big movies made from his storied (Balderunner, Total Recall, Pay Check and Minority Report) but some I never realized how deeply paranoia ran as common thread in all those stories.

Reading the short stories it's like getting hit with a stick, since the character is usually excercizing the paranoia by the end of the first page. In any other genre it would be a veritable persecution complex, but in Dick's shorts it show a savvy ability to see through the plans of all sorts of tricky alien and government types.

In hindsight, Decker from DADoES was the consummate paranoid.

One Nation Under God

2005-01-10T21:05:00.000-05:00

Read this quote from Don Feder in today's Federalist Patriot:

You know, it might just be that there is no God, that the bible was fabricated by man to control and instruct the body public. It also gave half the world's population a moral foundation on which to build. Whether it was "authentic" or not, Christianity (and religion in general) has been a boon to human society.

My biggest gripe with the people that want to hide all religious symbols under the proverbial bushel is that they have NOTHING to offer in it's place. Their social experiments over several decades have given us the mess that Feder describes at the end of the quote. I'd sooner accept a potentially manipulative religion which gives me something to strive for. A culture that offers no motivation for individual achievement or success and does not reward personal integrity and responsibility will get us no where.

I'd bite on Humanism, but until it is understood and applied by the masses, there will be a role for religion. Most of the MTV generation(s) don't have the attention span to read something like Atlas Shrugged, wouldn't understand it if they could complete it and certainly wouldn't be moved by it.

Booze + fire works = scars

2004-12-29T11:19:00.000-05:00

Now, don't get me wrong. I like alcohol. Beer is my friend. But there are just certain things that you shouldn't do while partaking a nice frosty barley pop. Like, I don't know, sticking a lit bottle rocket between your ass cheeks.

The shit people will do to generate "hits"

2004-12-27T23:39:00.000-05:00

I'm poking around on blogger, checking out other random blogs and came across this one.

The "posts" on this blog are links to one of those fake search engines that target certain products, in this case adware removal.

Checking out the profile the author of this marvelous blog, we see that he is quite prolific in his content. He has blogs on the following subjects:

Dildo Help
Radiology Help
Virus Removal
Vasectomy Help
Trojan Removal
Fix Herpes Now
Cruise Center
Body Scan
Fix Migraines
Spyware Removal

He's apparently very knowledge in a number of fields. A jack-of-all-trades you might say.

And you can tell he's a professional because none of these titles includes an exclamation mark. You can always spot an amateur by the excessive use of punctuation.

Pay to spam

2004-12-27T22:54:00.000-05:00

So, one of the really cool things about gmail is how effective their spam filters are. I rarely get any in my in-box, in spite how whorish I was with my bigfoot address (now redirected to my gmail account).

Of course, the price for this spam blocking and the Gigabyte of free storage is "targeted" advertisements based on the content of your e-mails. So, when ever I'm discuss some gratuitous fragging in Halo 2 with my buds, I'll usually see ads for this site or something similar:

Download halo 2
www.movieindemand.com/ - Download Movies, MP3s, & Games . DJ, Ps2-Xbox, DVD-CD 100% Legal

The content on this site suggests that for $60, you can get life time access to download any DVD, console game, audio track and software package ever published. And it's 100% legal apparently. This is just plain ridiculous, and I'd love to meet the schmuck(s) that hand over their credit cards numbers to these people.

My point is this: the "services" sold by this site are like something out of spam e-mail. If these same phreaks had tried to send a little direct binary marketing my way, it would not have gotten past the gmail spam filters. But because Google makes 1/25 of a cent (WAG) off of every one who clicks the link, I get to see ads for this bullshit.

A note: I suppose I'm biting the hand that feeds me since I'm bad mouthing Google on a free blog service they run. They run this risk by providing the free services, and I suppose there may be a risk of loosing my access to said free services. Who knows, who cares. Like they say in the movies:

'Every now and then say, "What the fuck."'

Anyway, I'd suppect that the New York Times would not run a full page advertisement for Crazy Ivan's House of Pirated Software, Music and Russian Kiddie Porn. Similarly, I'd expect Google to "editorialize" their advertisers as well. I'm cool with seeing targeted advertisements from legitimate businesses, but this kind of crap is not just bold faced extortion but it wastes my time, their bandwidth and to an extent it legitamizes these kind of sites.

I wonder if I started a e-mail chain about erecticle disfunction if I'd see ads for discount viagra.
Only one way to find out.

More evil than....

2004-11-11T21:53:00.000-05:00

Saw an article on slashdot about how M$ is supposed crawling Googles search results to expand the MSN search index. Not really too nefarious. Dubious business practice, but not nefarious. I don't see it as being all that different from a manager at one book store going to a competitor's store to see what's selling well for them. The indexed information is not intellectual property, cause Google doesn't own it. They just found it and indexed it for fast searching. Microsoft would basically just be doing to Google what Google does to the rest of the Internet.

More importantly, a few folks pointed out the following search and results:

MSN: more evil than God returns FireFox at the top of the list. Google was #2.
MSN: more evil than Satan returns Google at the top of the list. Microsoft Corporation is #4.

The same searches on Google and Yahoo don't return anything odd.

Even MORE wisdom from the tag line of Ron Jefferies

2004-10-22T14:47:00.000-05:00

The main reason that testing at the end of a development cycle finds problems is not that problems were put in near the end, it is that testing was put off until then.

Agile practices verse agile processes

2004-10-19T15:11:00.000-05:00

One of the sessions I went to in Boston was on applying the practices used by agile team on non-Agile projects.

The speaker made the point that you can't really say that you are practicing Agaile software development unless you genuinely adopt the four value statements in the Agile Manifesto. And you can't really do that wtih out applying the principles.

Interesting article about off shore software development

2004-10-13T13:31:00.000-05:00

Came across this article somewhere. Check it out...

A good summary of what's wrong with the Repbulican Party

2004-10-08T14:19:00.000-05:00

This was in the opening of the latest mailing from the Federalist Patriot...

After George Bush's razor-thin and highly contested victory over Albert Gore in 2000, many political observers argued (and continue to insist) that there are few distinctions between the
Republican and Democrat parties. Indeed, in regard to some seminal issues that once distinguished party lines -- most notably central government spending -- those lines are now blurred. Additionally, the recent Republican National Convention headlined party moderates
like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who disagree with significant elements of the Republican Platform, while also featuring Democrat Zell Miller, who agrees with most of the GOP Platform. This, understandably, leaves some with the impression that the two parties have all but merged.

That basically sums it up.

In case you want to start shopping for Christmas now....

2004-10-06T22:32:00.000-05:00

A 10 disc, count 'em 10: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, DVD set for the Matrix trilogy. Due out just in time for the holidays. That's not only excessive, it's gluttonous.

Me like. Me want.

But then, I still haven't picked up my copy of the Alien Quadrology. This is mainly a packaging issue. Why should I buy 2 versions of each movie. Who wants a wide screen and full screen version. Nuts.

The Dark Tower Cycle Completed

2004-10-06T21:58:00.000-05:00

I first read The Gunslinger when I was in high school. I'd just finished reading It in less than 2 weeks, and was hot to read something else by King. I was in a book store looking for something to read on an upcoming weekend vacation. I picked up The Gunslinger based primarily on the cover and interior art than the content. I ended up reading the book before the weekend was over.

Now, 15 years later, I've finally reached the end of this road with the 7th and last book. I can't say I'm thrilled with the ending, but I can say that it makes an odd kind of sense. Similar to the end of the Matrix trilogy; not really satisfying but almost anything else would have seemed bogus or incomplete. It really counldn't end any other way. I won't go into details right now, but maybe in a few weeks I will.

There's a point at the end where King derides the Constant Reader who has only been along for the ride, waiting 22 years simply for the end. He said the journey was more important than the destination. I realized then that I enjoyed the journey more than the end. Seeing the characters develop, getting to know them, participating in their adventures, etc.

There are other, significant, parts of the journey that have been left out which could be quite interesting. How many of these stories King will revist is anyone's guess. Again, subject for another time.

Think I have a new tag line, from another SK book which seems appropriate after reading this book.

everything's eventual...

More wisdom from the tag line of Ron Jefferies

2004-10-04T12:48:00.000-05:00

Ron Jefferies has the most entertaining and enlighing tag lines on his
messages. Saw this one on the TTD group on Yahoo!

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare,
it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
--Seneca

This speaks to the Courage value of XP / agile processes. There is almost nothing you can't realize in software, you just have to be willing to make the effort.

I guess it also applies to "real" life. It may be a daunting task to make a change in your life, be it personal or professional. However, once you set you mind to it you can almost always find a way to realize any change. Often the most difficult part of a challenge is getting up the guts to make the decsion to move forward with the it ant to accept the risk along with the reward.

A few points of interest

2004-09-30T14:52:00.000-05:00

a) Someone finally found a judge w/ the balls to rule against the patriot act. He was appointed by Clinton, so he probably just did it to spite Bush.

I'm not nuts about the Patriot Act. My saying "not nuts" is a mild mannered way of saying that I think most of it is unconstitutional. In the end, it may have the desired result. If you take away the civil liberties assured, not GRANTED but ASSURED, by the Constitution the country will eventually be little better than a despotic state. At this point all of the things that make the U.S. great will have been lost and the terrorists will not want to attack us anymore. Mission accomplished.

b) While reading the article above, I saw a banner advertisement on Yahoo for the DNC.

How lame is that. That makes them look so pathetic. I guess really they are banking on the "impulse buyer". And since web advertising contracts are based on click / sales and not the number of times the ad was presented, they could have a pretty good pay off. I might be clever, tech-savvy and effective, but it still makes them look pathetic.

Why your code sucks

2004-09-30T10:41:00.000-05:00

Saw this post by Dave Astels on theserverside.com via javarss.com and had to post it here. Pretty good stuff and consistent with my own opinions.

And I will be posting more stuff from Boston soon. Just hard to find the time once I slipped back into my "real life".

Automated Acceptance Testing

2004-09-23T05:50:00.000-05:00

I went to a session yesterday afternoon given by Bob Martin on representing requirements as automated acceptance tests. He started off by giving one of the most concise and effective description of how and why Agile processes work. He then went on to give a great explanation of how Automated Acceptance teasing works and the benefits.

For developers, you know exactly when you're done writing code. No more of this thinking "I've implemented the right code based on my understanding of the requirements." When all of the acceptence tests pass, you're done.

For dev managers, they always know how close your team is completing their work. There is a set of tests, and they either pass of fail. Any tests that are not passing represent work that still need to be completed.

For QA, you write your tests at the begin at the iteration and development runs them for you continuously. You get to spend less time writing test scripts and more time doing exploritory tests (ie mashing buttons, kicking the tires, etc).

For business analysts, this process leads to more concise and concrete requirements. This leads to less ambiguity in the requirements and fewer trips to go back and edit your requirements after development starts asking questions.

I want to write more on this, but don't have time this morning. Check back soon.

Kent Beck's "Moral of the Two Teams"

2004-09-21T21:17:00.000-05:00

In his keynote speech, Kent Beck told a little story that I'd like to summarize here:

In a hypothetical company there are two development teams.

Team A uses XP and realizes all of the wonderful things that have that been promised about it. They work reasonable hours, deliver quality software, have a very satisfied customer group who trusts them completely and generally love what they do. They ship a major release with no problems and no overtime. The release is on a Monday and no one works late the Friday before and no one works over the weekend. The release date is just another work day, no hoopla, no fan fare, the product just ships. There are just a handful of bug reported and these are fixed easily.

When was the last time your release day was just another work day? Not a day that you lived in fear of for weeks or months. How would that impact your attitude about software development.

Team B uses the waterfall technique. They struggle with requirements for months, are late getting started on development and they still have scope creep. They work really hard, put in lots of overtime and they still have to ask for an extension, but "just a short one". Once the ship date approaches, they make a heroic effort, work even more ridiculous hours for two or three weeks but they finally get everything done. There is much excitement about the release because of all of their very visible struggles. Then the bug reports start rolling in like a biblical plague. But that's all right, at least the software was shipped.

Why is it that beating yourself to death on a software project like this is considered "heroic"? If every other project you'd worked was the same way you continue to work the same way, that kind of behavior seems foolish, not heroic.

Now, the company is bought up and management is forced to down size the development department. Which team gets handed their walking papers? Team B, who struggles and flounders and ships software with hundreds of bugs? No, Team A is let go because their success was less visible, less celebrate and less violent.

This sounds like a farce, but Beck says he's heard this story over and over again. He's worried over how he's introduced this methodology that works really well, makes developing software fun but costs people their jobs. He said that this is why it's very important to have executive support and recognition of your XP efforts. If kept well informed, hopefully folks at this level will have the clarity to recognize the difference between the two teams.

Kent Beck's Keynote speech

2004-09-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

Today's keynote at the conference was by Kent Beck. This speech was titled "What Organizations Have Learned Applying Extreme Programming".

He started off saying that the world of software development is about to change. Among other things, he cited more development going to off-shore shops and the tighter wallets since the dot-com bubble burst. Beck made the analogy that the dot-com bubble was the people with the money letting the geeks run wild and seeing what came of it. In spite of all the good ideas that were generated we aren't like to see that kind of creative freedom for the tech sector in long time. My hope is that maybe next time the opportunity comes around again, Agile processes will be more firmly entrenched and the bubble can be sustained for a longer period of time.

Kent said that the methodology described in the second edition of his XP Explained book will be ONE possible way to adapt to that coming change. This edition includes a number of practice changes from the original version. He also say that the first edition was too dogmatic and looking back with the experiences of the last five years it was also naive. He expects that when he looks back at the second edition in five more years, he'll have the exact same observation.

Along the lines of being too dogmatic or preachy, Beck indicated that the XP practices are not binary states. You don't have to think that you are not doing XP just because you are not doing all of the practices just like they are described in the books. What is described is a based on empirical observation and experiences, but not all practices will work for all projects. Individual practices will work independently, but they will work better as a whole set.

Joshua K said he's reviewed an advance copy of the book and finds it to be closer to IXP. This makes sense, since IXP is essentially a fleshing out of the principles and practices of XP based on current experiences. The new edition is based on the experiences of Kent and the Agile community in the last five years.

Kent talked about how the values of XP are based on the values that most people hold important in their personal lives. If you have violate these values at work, it beats you down and feel less and less like coming to work.

From this point Beck drew an analogy between software development users group and Alcoholic's Anonymous. It might be a little tacky or characterized as "insensitive" but it's actually effective. How many times have we as developers buckled and given someone above us the answer they wanted to hear regarding an estimate. Or busted our butts to eat scope creep and still deliver the software on time. Now, suppose you went to an agile users group where everyone talked about these types of issues. And image at every meeting you had stand up and say "Hi, my name is Brian and I'm an irresponsible software engineer. It's been three weeks since I last changed an estimate under management pressure". The next time you were talking to your manager and they are prodding you to slice a few weeks from your estimate , you'd think It would feel better to be able say "four weeks" instead of "two days" at the next user's group. This type of thinking might give you the courage to stick to your original estimate.

The analogy really drove home the point of how this type of behavior is really self-destructive for developers. His point was that we have the power to at least be honest to ourselves. Managers may stick us with unreasonable estimates, but if we facilitate it by giving them the answers they want to hear, we only have ourselves to blame.

More on technical debt

2004-09-21T20:00:00.000-05:00

In the Birds of a Feather session on SCRUM last night, the issue of technical debt came up again. I believe they were discussing hard sprints where you let the process loosen up a little bit and get more done. The risk is that by doing this you leave a lot of potential issues in your code. If you don't clean these issues up, you get bogged down in the mess that you left. You then need to stop and clean up the mess that you made while going full tilt.

Mike Cohn described his way of manageing this problem on an on-going basis. He has his teams do six 2-week iterations and then a 1-week technical iteration. This techinical iteration does not return any new customer functionality, it just allows the development team to clean up their code.

More on sustainable pace, 40 hour week, slack and balanced life

2004-09-21T19:48:00.000-05:00

This seems to be a hot topic this year, so I thought I'd post a few more anecdotes and insights into the topic.

Kent Beck has a second edition of his eXtreme Programming Explained book coming out in the next month or so. The word on the street is that the "40 hour week" practice is and "slack" is in. These are not necessarily the same thing.

"40 hour week", was about aiming for a work load that did not tax you, similar to the sustainable pace practice in IXP. It might be 40 hours, it might be 45 hours, it might less that 40 hours. But 40 hours in the conventional idiom for a work week, so it made a good name for the practice.

My understanding is the Slack practice is more like slack in a rope than just having time to goof off. The idea is to not fill your iteration 100% with customer deliverables. Instead, have some low priority tasks that can be dropped in the case the features take more time than estimated. I expect that this lets you keep the customer's trust because you reduce the chances of dropping their tasks from an iteration. Also, it lets take of tasks that may not be customer facing, but are still important. Like paying down your technical debt, developing spikes, etc. These

One thing that Joshua said was that Google does some form of XP, and they have 20% slack time in their iterations. And he said that the Google news feature came out of an idea that someone worked out on their "slack" time. The PostIt Note came out of an experiment that a 3M employee did on "slack" time. That is a powerful argument for this type of flexibility.

Sustainable Pace / Slack / Balanced Life

2004-09-21T05:56:00.000-05:00

During the IXP session yesterday I asked Joshua to discuss a thread he started on the industrial XP group at Yahoo! Groups. In this original message he was discussing possible changes in the practices in the IXP practices, one of which was to change the name of the "Sustainable Pace" practice to "Slack". Joshua said he originally wanted to use Slack when he originally was writing up the practices of IXP. This was a tip of the hat to the Tom Demarco's book by the same name, but others suggested it was a loaded word. He went on to describe the motivations behind the Sustainable Pace / Slack practices.

After the conference last night Joshua posted a message on the list discussing the same issues. He repeated a number of the points he mentioned during the session, saving me from summing it up. Thanks, Joshua!

Folks,

At the first Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City, Jerry Weinberg really moved me with his keynote talk. He said that too many of us live in our heads, we don't take care of our bodies and we don't spend enough time playing with our loved ones. Near the conclusion of his talk he said something like this: "if you want to be a professional in this field, you must take care of your body and your mind." It was a powerful statement.

I've personally struggled with Sustainable Pace. It's not easy to be a family man, run a small business, write articles or a book and also find time to stay in shape. Yet I am happiest when I regularly exercise, eat right, don't work too much and have lots of fun time with family and friends.

I've enjoyed the discussion we've had here about Slack and Sustainable Pace. Yet somehow I now find those terms to be a bit too focused on work, and not focused enough on life itself.

So imagine a practice called Balanced Life. To be good at this practice, you'd need to find the right balance between working, playing and spending time with family and friends. With all the geeks I know who are glued to their computers (myself included), somehow this idea seems truly extreme.

What do you all think?

best,
jk

The idea of not being a professional if you don't take care of you body really struck me. You wouldn't think a craftsman was very profession if his tools were rusty or dull. Something else Joshua said was that a lot of us think that the only important part of our bodies is above the shoulders. But in reality, if we don't take care of our bodies it does impact the way our mind works.

Industrial XP session at the Software Development expo

2004-09-20T22:41:00.000-05:00

I took 10 pages of notes during this all day session and I can't quickly post them all here. I do want to post a few key observations that gleaned from the time.

Joshua often returned to the topic of "software debt". This term is descriptive of the technical issues that exist in your codebase that you have incurred during development. When you are running full tilt, writing code as fast as possible you write code which may not be proud of. Going back to refactor your code is how you pay down your debt. If you don't go back and clean up these issues. It think the concept is analogous to go back and fixing broken windows.
A discussion of pairing and open spaces consumed a large part of our time. These concepts are key to doing IXP. They often require buy in from high up in the executive level but pay off. One of the exercises we did was to discuss the dangers of solo programming. I'm going to prepare a separate post on this. It really opens your eyes to why pairing is important.
Joshua drew the analogy that software is like sausage. You can make really good software but it will take more time and more money. You can make software cheaper or faster, but you wouldn't want to know about the code in that product just like you wouldn't want to know what goes into a cheap piece of sausage. He talked about going into an exec's office and opening up a cheap sausage on their desk. "Is that what you want your software to be like?"
He also talked about shifting some of the vocabulary IXP to include more financial references. This is in hopes of putting the IXP concepts in a context that an executive can relate to. For example, he's now leaning towards calling the XP term Velocity "budget". I think this works better because it reflects more about how you plan your iterations. Velocity is observed from the previous iteration and you then plan your next iteration based on those observations. Really what you do is let the customer choose features for an iteration by letting the customer "purchase" those features in the scope of the iteration budget.

I have tons more to comment on, but it's like after midnight.

Software Development - Best Practices Day One

2004-09-20T21:43:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day of the Software Development Best Practices expo and conference in Boston. I must say that I'm more impressed with the arrangements than I was last year.

Last year everything was stuffed into the conference facilities in the Sheraton. Most of the classes were filled to the brim. I don't know if more people showed up than the organizers were expecting or what, but I don't know think they were very well prepared. The key notes were presented in a room that far too small, sessions were moved from one room to another and the changes were often not communicated well.

This year the proceedings are being held in the Heinz Convention Center. These are much nicer facilities, with larger meeting rooms and everything seems to better organized. I'll reserved judgment, since this was just the first day. The first day was a VIP package with in depth session that lasted half and all of the day. I expect that there will be more attendees for the balance of the week.

I spent all day in a session on Industrial XP lead by Joshua Kerievsky. The key note was by Tom Demarco about risk management. I'll post more on these talks.

One thing I really enjoyed about the conference last year was the Birds of Feather sessions, which I am very glad they are repeating this year. These are informal meetings where interested parties get together to share experiences and discuss challenges. This evening I attended a BoF session hosted by Ken Schwaber talking about SCRUM. In addition to Ken, Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software was there to contribute. Also there were representative from companies that have successfully implemented SCRUM. Ken had helped some of them, I think some had worked it out on their own. Again, I'm going to post more on these BoF sessions.

Pragmatic Project Automation

2004-09-07T14:42:00.000-05:00

Mike Clark, one of the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer has another book on the docket: Pragmatic Project Automation. This is right up my alley and I'm hoping I can lay hands on it pretty quickly.

Something I noticed is that more books are being made available in paper AND electronic form to be bought individually or as a bundle. Might have to try this, see if I like it.

The Underground History of American Education

2004-09-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

Saw this story on slashdot today, about The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto.

Based on the reviewer's comments, the book makes the assertion that
the American education system is designed not to develop intelligent,
free-thining people, but to provide worker bees for the American
industrial machine. The reviewer made references to Ford this made me
think of the parallels in "A Brave New World".

I'm going to pick up this book. I'll let you know what I think.

I guess that's why they call it "ignorant"

2004-09-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

I was at Eat 'n Park tonight with the wife and kids and had my genuine first encounter with "anti-Islam" since 9/11. I don't get out much I guess, or maybe I just run w/ a more enlightened crowd.

Not long after we sat down a table of 10 or 12 people whom I believe to be of Indian descent sat down near us. A minute later our waitress walked up with our drinks and said something about not feeling safe and tilted her head towards the other table. She had this look on her face like a 747 was gonna crash in the resturant because there was a dozen people from another country sitting there. I ignored the comment and she walked away.

And they weren't even Islamic. They were clearly Hindu or followers of some similar sect. Thus the title of the post. Hell one of them was a teenage girl with a T-shirt that said "Teen Miss USA". And one of the gentlmen was wearing a traditional headpeice but was speaking in accent that was all California tech without a hint of Indian. And all of them were wearing mainstream clothing, except for the headpeices worn by the adult males.

I hindsight, I probably should have confronted the waitress about it. Not only was she being paranoid and racist, she was grossly misinformed.

Ah, life in middle America.

'nuff said.

Light weight UML tool

2004-09-04T00:49:00.000-05:00

I was cruising Martin Fowler's Bliki and saw this post. It struck a chord with me because as much as I think UML and other structured models / graphical languages aide communication, modern CASE tools are almost to cumbersom to use. I'm always thinking with a pen in my hand. I'm either scetching out E/R diagrams, UML diagrams or some unstructure scribble trying to represent relationships between a two or more widgets.

We use Together at work, but I avoid it like the plague. It take forever to start up, and in spite of all the money that has been invested in the product over the last four years, I don't think that it is intuitive. The tool is so feature heavy that it becomes some what difficult to use.

Rapid communication is one of the premises of Agile process, and the continous face-time between team members reduced the need for formal design documentation. Because agile iterations are small and incremental, the need for massive and inclusive models are not needed.

Once I heard Scott Ambler talk about the role of UML diagrams in Agile teams. I can summed it up in three rules:

When you need to communicate a design, scratch it out on a peice of paper and hang it on the wall in a common area. When ever someone on the team needs to refresh their memory regarding the design, they wander over to the wall and look at this informal UML diagram.
When the functionality related to the design is complete, remove it from the wall to make room for the next iteration's design.
The only time you'd create a formal model is if the subject of the diagram is a central peice to the project or is so complex that the team's internal knowledge and "oral history" can not easily capture it.

I like the idea of a light weight UML tools, like the ones that Fowler described because they could be used to quickly represent the casual models in a knowledge management system for the team. This would also insulate you from getting sucked into heavy weight tools and processes but still let you have electronic records and images of the designs.

I'm going to try to work with some of these tools and see how they pan out.

MediaWiki Installed

2004-09-04T00:21:00.000-05:00

I installed MediaWiki on the Fedora partion of my laptop tonight. I must say that it was pretty damn easy. Basically just expand the distribution archive under the webserver root, launch your web browser, specify a few passwords anf viola! It's done.

I'll play with it some more over the weekend and see what I can see. Come Monday, I think I'll be pushing hard to get it installed at work. The tool is a breeze to use, feature rich and seems to have no holes. Some of the other wikis I'd experimented with were either feature poor or incomplete. Media seems to be very mature.

Software Development Best Practice 2004

2004-09-03T16:03:00.000-05:00

I'm off to Boston again for Software Development magazine's Best Practices conference and Expo later this month. I attended the conference last year and had a great experience. I had the chance to hear folks like Martin Fowler, "Uncle" Bob Martin, Ken Schwaber, Joshua Kerievsky, Scott Ambler, Dave Astels and Mary and Tom Poppendieck speak. I also had the chance to talk to most of these folk one on one, which was a real thrill.

This year's batch of speaks include many of the same speakers plus Eric Evans, Ivar Jacobson, Dale Emery and Kent Beck.

I have not seen Folwer's name anywhere, though which is a shame. Last year they had Folwer, Martin and Schwaber hold a key note that was a "state of the union" for agile process and then an open floor for questions.

Once again, I'll try to post my thoughts from the conference and afterwards sum up some of what I learned.

Going down the Linux Road

2004-09-03T15:48:00.000-05:00

So, I finally got around to putting Linux on my laptop. This is a Sony FXA49 model, about 3 years old. I'd been meaning to do it for w while, but never had.

First I installed SUSE and it was good. The install was pretty easy. Actually the hardest part was burning the CD-R from the ISO so it was bootable. Been about forever since I'd had to so this, so I burned discs until I got it right. Luckily their pretty damn cheap these days.

Eventually I decided that since my real aim was do to server development I'd switch over to Fedora. So, I installed Core 2, and that went off w/o a hitch as well. The only issue I had was with adding standard packages after the initial install.

I never installed RedHat before, so I can't really compare Fedora to it, but I would have expected a little more. There a feature-based installer that lets you pick from a menu of packaged software included on the CDs. However, it doesn't automatically resolve dependencies, as far as I could tell. It would sometime pop-up a dialog with a message to the effect of "can't install because these dependencies can't be resolved" and then list a bunch of libraries or such. It didn't tell you which features included those files, or automatically include them in the install set.

I ended up searching the web to figure out which packages included the files, finding the RPMs on the CDs and installing the RPMs manually. Not the easiest way to do it, but I guess that's how Linux users have been doing it for years now. I think this feature needs to be a bit more robust before it can be called mature.

OpenContent

2004-08-31T22:00:00.000-05:00

Just ONE of my many distractions at work is to try to find a system that we can use for knowledge management. Open Source is the rule, since money is precious everywhere.

So, at the plate right now is MediaWiki. With all due respect to WardsWiki, to call MediaWiki just a "wiki" engine is like say in the Grand Canyon is just some ditch. Check out the chrome on this bad boy! I've been noodling with wiki and CMS systems for a few months now and this takes the cake.

Even more interesting though is the content that is being hosted using this software. Most are examples of open content. Several are run by the "parent" group, Wiki Media Foundation. These include:

There's a full list here. Ones that particularly catch my eye include:

And of course, what technology can really be called mature if it isn't used for sexual purposes?

Information and knowledge are tools of incalculable value, and should be shared with everyone. This software and the people that use it are making this world a better place by developing these free resources of meaningful and useful content. There's so much crap on the net, it's nice to know there's at least a few bastions of intelligence around.

New reading

2004-08-05T10:13:00.000-05:00

Saw a post by Dale Emery in one of agile / testing lists I lurk on and checked out his blog.

His postings are a pleasant mix of serious thoughts on software and professional problems and quirky humor.

One particularly interesting posting was on what he calls The Responsibility Razor.

CruiseControl, StarTeam and the Nature of Time

2004-08-02T11:22:00.000-05:00

I was having an issue with the CruiseControl installation at work, specifically with the interaction with our StarTeam server. The two processes run on different hardware, and the system clocks on the two machines would get out of synch. What I believe was happening was the workstation running CC would update with the network time server more often than the star team server. This is probably because the CC box is just a NT workstation sitting my desk and is rebooted far more often than the StarTeam hardware, which is a production system under IT control.

The problem happens when CruiseControl tries to contact the source control system to see if there were any changes. It sends a timestamp with this request, "cctimestamp", which is effectively the start time of the current build loop . This value is derived from the local system clock and is sent to StarTeam to check for changes "as of" this time. StarTeam would reject the request because the system clock for the server it runs is on was a few seconds "behind" the time on the CC box. The StarTeam library would throw an exception and the current CC build loop would abort. This is the message associated with the error:

The selected configuration is not valid for the current view. The configuration of a view cannot be changed to a time before the view was created, a time in the future, or to a label that was not created within the view or that is empty.

I tried monkeying with the clock on the CC box, to set it behind the other server. This was just a hack, and eventual it would resynch with the network time server and end up ahead of the StarTeam server again.

The solution I came up with was to write a bootstrapper that would synchronize the clock on the box running CruiseControl with the box StarTeam. Both boxes are W2K, so I was able to use the NET TIME command. I created a Java class implementing the Bootstrapper that made a system call to EXEC call to this command, and dropped it into my config.xml. Now, every time the build loop starts up, the local system clock is synched with the system clock on the star team server. It's a little overkill, but it did the trick.

If anyone is intrested in the source, it's available here, released for public use. Right now, it will only work on a Windows-to-Windows situation, but I expect that it might be possible to enhance it work in other cases.

YOUR HEADACHE IS A LAW OF THE UNIVERSE

2004-07-28T10:25:00.000-05:00

1) Your headache is a result of banging your head against the wall.

2) Banging your head against the wall is a metaphor for Monotony and Despair.

3) Monotony is the scepter of Sisyphus; Despair is his crown.

4) Sisyphus is the God of Formal Process.

5) Formal Process is a pillar of Complex Organization.

6) Complex Organization is a hallmark of Modernity.

7) Modernity is an outgrowth of Evolution and the Passing of Time.

8) Evolution and the Passing of Time are immutable Laws of the Universe.

Ergo, your headache is inevitable and eternal.

Have a nice day.

The Order

2004-07-28T08:25:00.000-05:00

Saw this flick a few month ago, but I'm just getting around to posting about it. They should have just called this movie 'The Sin Eater', at least forthe sake of getting your attention. 'The Order' is kinda uninteresting.

The premis was that there is a being (there can be only one), called the sin eater, who can literally consume the trangressions of the dying. This frees the person to enter heaven, in spite of thier sins or excommunications by the church. This whole movie takes place under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic church and includes some politcal intrigue surround the ill health of the Pope.

The main character is from a very small (three members, and one was excommunicated) order within the priesthood, that still investigates demon activity and such. This included a great deal of research into the occult, which pushed the order further into the shadows of the church.

On several occasions, the Lovecraft premise of too much knowledge being a bad thing was raised. The facination with knowledge and resulting change of preception lead to the leader of the order being excommunicated. It could be argued that it was also the catalyst for the central plot of the story.

The movie has parallels to Anne Rice's Memnoc the Devil. In the book, the Devil shows Lestat his side of the battle between Good and Evil in an effort to get the vampire to suceed him as the Prince of Darkness. In the movie, the sin eater shows the protagonist his (the sin eater's) world, and how he helps people find their way into Heaven.

One other neat concept was introduced by a 'Dark Pope' ruling the underworld of Rome. The good guys go to him for insight into the sin eater and he instructs them to speak the dying. He even goes so far as to keep a few folks strung up in nooses, just waiting to be hung. The premis seems to be that those on the verge of death are granted insight beyond that of mortals, and they are obligated to vocalize this knoweldge with what little breath they have left

All in all, it was an enjoyable movie. It's definately worth renting.

On William Gibson

2004-07-27T08:18:00.000-05:00

I've read few of William Gibson's books over the past few months. tarted last fall when a friend lent me Burning Chrome. That was enough to demonstrate his creativity and his influence on modern science fiction. Almost every short story in the collection struck a chord with me, as a starting point for something else I'd seen or read.

Nueromancer was a roller coaster. I could hardley put the book down. The alien nature that had evolved in T/A, the role technology played in creating and preserving that way of life and side effects of abusing the technology was facinating. Same goes for his vision of artificial intelligence, the net and biotechnology.

Just like with Burning Chrome, Gibson uses concepts and metaphores that familiar and comfortable to me as a consumer of modern sci fi. Hell, it was like reading the novelization of a Shadowrun scenario guide, indicating how much of that game was drawn from his concepts.

I flew through all of these books. I think one reason that Gibson's stuff reads so fast is the concepts he uses are already famiar to me. Another is that it reads like a movie plays out on screen. He gives a lot of terse visual decription to set the environment, has dialog that is direct and to the point and then provides action in the same manner. Fast passed, direct and easy to visualize, and at the same time including just enough exposition to explain the cultural and technological environment that are the hook for his stories . I don't think this fast pace is a flaw, I'm sure the material was much more challenging when it was first published. Now it just makes the stories that much more fun to read

I think I'm going to a seperate post on Idoru. The world Gibson decribes in Idoru is much closer to ours in regards to technological advances, but still fanatstic enough to be, well, fantastic.

The true natureof Pong

2004-07-18T08:26:00.000-05:00

Thought this was pretty funny...

http://www.elfrigo.org/flash/pong.htm

Secret Window

2004-07-18T07:16:00.000-05:00

I'd read the story when four past midnight came out, but had forgotten about it. A few months ago I was trying to recall what the four stories were. The Langs, Lib Polic, Sun Dog and ... but could never come with Secret Garden, Secret Window. It was the least supernatural of the four stories, so it slipped my memory.
This turned out to be for the best, as it allowed me to enjoy the movie on its own merits. I did find it entertaining, but with just a little to much cheap Hollywood suspense.
as always, johnny depp does a great job playing a nut case. This redeem him for the bull shit in his role in Once Apon A Time In Mexico. Now if only Robert Rodriguez would make up for putting out such a crappy conclusion the El Mariachi trilogy.
I did like the dark ending. Atypical for Hollywood but consistent w/ King's MO for short stories. His shorts don't always end well for the main characters.
As modern suspense films go, it was pretty good. As an adaptation of a Stephen King story it was above average.

Consuming Mass Quantities of Mass Media

2004-07-16T18:55:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a while, thought I'd update it with some of what I've been reading, hearing and watching.

words:
Stephen King: The Dark Tower VI : Song of Susannah
Dan Brown: The Dinvici Code
William Gibson: Neuromancer, Idoru, Burning Chrome
Harlan Cobin: No Second Chance
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Also li

moving pictures:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Aaaaaaaah, you know what I mean.
Secret Window
Big Fish

sounds:
Led Zepplin,
Getchen Wilson,
John Mayer,
Jet,
Kings of Leon,
Distrubed

I'm going to try to make a few posts on some of these, as time allows.

I got it, I got it, I got it

2004-06-15T19:41:00.000-05:00

I got my copy of Bubba Ho-tep on DVD, right when it came out. The "bonus features" (which are pretty standard on DVDs by now) are pretty cool. Gives a lot of insight into what goes into making a great independent film. A few of my favorites:

You have to shoot for more than weeks. There's a bit where Bruce asked Don how long they were going to shoot for. When Don said six weeks, that convinced Bruce that this would be a solid movie. Apparently a lot of independent film are done with as few takes a possible in a little time as possible because of limited resources. By getting the re$ources to shoot for six weeks Don had the room he needed to realize his vision w/o sacrificing the integrity.

I get by with a little help from my friends. A good bit of this film was done pro-bono or at cost. Bruce apparently did his part w/o a penny and the mummy costume was done at cost by a top SFX house.

A good movie does not need popular music. A movie about Elvis, you'd expect to hear Jail House Rock, Let Me Be You Teddy Bear or something by the Big E in the background. Nada, zip, zilch, etc. The reality of this was that they couldn't afford to license any of the King's tunes. But you didn't really "miss" them.

It's all black and white. I'd never heard of Ossie Davis before this movie, but from what I've seen and read since then he's quite the mover and shaker. Having a "serious" actor play the absolutely farcical role of a black JFK was the only way to do it. It had to be completely dry and ironic. Having a comic actor do it would have betrayed the sincerity that "Jack" had that he was a Kennedy. Though I think it might be entertaining to see Bill Cosby take a stab at it.

'nuff said

Stand alone Dashboard monitor

2004-06-14T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've just completed the first pass of a stand alone Dashboard monitor. It's a little window that listens for mutlitcast traffic and displays it in two forms. The top half of the window is a list box that uses the "light bulbs" from the Dashboard plug-ins for Eclipse and Intelli-J. The bottom half is a raw log of the build events.

All of this code was derived from the Intelli-J plugin, and most of it was "copy and paste inheritance". Networking in general is not one of my strong suits, and I've never worked with multicast before. There a plenty of functions in the Dashboard protocol that are not being used / supported.

There are two main parts to the dashboard multicast client framework. The first is the MulticastManager, which encapsulates all of the real networking functionatlity. It listens for the multicast messages, converts them to objects and publishes them to an instance of DashboardProjectComponent. DashboardProjectComponent is the subscriber to the MulticastManager; the Intelli-J and Eclipse plug-ins extend DashboardProjectComponent and present the messages to the IDE user.

Even though it didn't start out that way, the end result of this development effort is in two parts. There are classes that are closely bound to the Dashboard code and others that are associated with the run time configuration of the monitor and user interface. It also turned out to be a neat excersise in refactoring, as I'll describe next.

I orignally had one top level class and an inner classes for the user interface. The outer class had the multicast listener and it would forward events on to the frame taking advantage of the outer-inner outer relationship.

As the window become more complex, I extracted it as a seperate top level class. Once I did this, I needed a well structured way to get build events from the main class to the UI, so I introduced an event listener interface, BuildNotificationListener. I also introduced another interface, BuildMessageListener, for publishing the error messages that need to be presented to the user.

Now that I had a clear boundary between the main class and the UI, all was happiness. The swords were turned to plows, the lambs laid down with the lions, etc. Then I realized that the main class was doing things: specifying the details of the multicast session (i.e. address, port, etc) and implement the DashboardProjectComponent functionality as well as forwarding the events to the UI.

At this point I extracted a class that was only responsible for the DashboardProjectComponent implementation. It handles all of the responsibilities of the DashboardProjectComponent in generic manner. It also handles adapting the Dashboard multicase events into messages to the BuildNotificationListener and BuildMessageListener interfaces.

Now, I had three distinct parts:

the free standing DashboardProjectComponent adapter that would process the multicast messages and publish them as events for the BuildNotificationListener and BuildMessageListener interfaces.

the UI which would consume these events and display them to the user

the main class that was responsible only for configuring the MulticastManager with the correct address/port information and associating the DashboardProjectComponent, MulticastManager and the UI.

I have been using Dashboard board for a number weeks now to monitor our CruiseControl process and I think it is a great tool. However, it very thin in the documentation department and this exersise has greatly helped my understanding of how it works. I think writing up a more detailed description of the process I described here would add more depth to the documention for the tool.

I'd like to submit my code to be included in the Dashboard framework. There are other IDEs that could benefit from a Dashboard plug-in (JBuilder comes to mind, since most of the folks I work with use it) and the DashboardProjectComponent adapter would accelerate these development efforts. A free standing client would be useful to team members who don't spend their days using an IDE, such as techincal managers or configuration management.

Test Driven Development, refactoring and your teeth

2004-04-18T20:33:00.000-05:00

Going through Kent Beck's TDD book again and found this quote:

You will often be implementing TDD in code that doesn't have adequate tests (at least for the next decade or so). When you don't have enough tests, you are bound to come across refactorings that aren't supported by tests. You could make a refactoring mistake and the tests would all still run. What do you do?

Write the tests you wish you had. If you don't, you will eventually break something while refactoring. Then you'll get bad feelings about refactoring and you'll stop doing it as much. Then your designs will deteriorate. You'll be fired. Your dog will leave you. You will stop paying attention to your nutrition. Your teeth will go bad. So, to keep your teeth happy, retroactively test before refactoring.

Not only is it funny, it's also kinda true.

Bubba Ho-Tep walks among us!

2004-04-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

This is too cool! MGM is going to release BHT on DVD on May 25th. I know I what I'm getting for my birthday! It's available for preorder at Amazon.

theonion.com screws up and interviews someone with a brain!!!

2004-04-06T19:41:00.000-05:00

I download the AvantGo channel from TheOnion, just for chuckles mind you. The shit is just so screwed up I can't help but enjoy myself. It's a guilty pleasure.

Anyway, there was an interview with Dave Sim, the creator of the epic comic 'Cerebus', in the "AV Club". Oddly enough, the AV club actually has REAL reviews about REAL movies, books, music, etc as opposed to the normal spoof content on theonion.

So, when the interview asked about who he thouhgt his audience was, Sim first said that he couldn't really describe his audience because it was nearly impossible to describe the comic. He then went on to say this:

Also, Cerebus contains a lot of new thinking on a variety of subjects and a number of different ways of looking at things. The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations—Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them—even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women. I think this is particularly true among leftists, which is what I assume The Onion's readership is primarily made up of. North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again. Oasis are a pretty poor excuse for The Beatles, and John Kerry is a pretty poor excuse for John F. Kennedy. But it seems to me that that's all that interests leftists. They don't want to think: As a central example, they don't want to examine feminism as a philosophy; they want to re-experience it as a new phenomenon. For obvious reasons. It doesn't work, so there's a very strong urge to go back 30 years to when it seemed that it might work.

What's really hilarious reading what these jackasses had to post about the interview. (oh, I mean 'jackass' in the nicest way possible.) Sounds like they are victims of the very matriachical society that Sim was rejecting.

I've never read the comic, but a coworker was a big fan and made it sound interesting. Might see if I can pick it up.

National sales tax proposed

2004-04-05T20:48:00.000-05:00

So, a new bill has been introduces in the House of Representatives, HR25, for a transition of Federal taxation from an income tax to a sales tax.

Makes sense to me; this would serve everyone better. The 'working class family' the Dems love so dearly would get to keep more of their hard earned money only pay taxes on what they spend. And the 'filthy rich' would get taxed on their big ticket items, w/o having to create a socialist 'luxury tax'. Hopefully it won't be a progress tax system, like the current income tax system is.

I have not read the details of this bill yet, having just heard about in on the talk radio station here in Pittsburgh today. Check out www.fairtax.org and search the website of the United States Congress for HR25.

TDD - fit the first

2004-04-05T20:30:00.000-05:00

The short hand for the TDD process is 'red / green / refactor'. The following bullets are a more complete list of the steps:

* Quickly add a test, which will fail.
* Run all the tests and see the new one fail.
* Make the smallest possible change in code to make new test pass.
* Run all tests and see them all succeed.
* Refactor to remove duplication.

The smallest possible change and refactor to remove duplication steps are really the keys. If you're writing a method to addition and your first test is:

          assertEquals(0, add(0,0));

then your implementation of add() would be

          return 0;

You then write another test for 1+1. It's only once you have written support for mutliple tests into your method that you have duplication to remove. This refactoring would be to implement the obvious addition operation.

The surpises are likely to include:
* how each test can cover a small increment of functionality
* how small and ugly changes can be made the test run
* how often the tests are run
* how many teensy-weeny steps make up the refactoring.

The goal is clean code that works, so sayeth Ron Jeffries. With TDD, you focus on getting the code to work first, then on making it clean. Making it clean is were refactoring comes in. The tests that you got working in first step keep you on track.

This is the opposite of Big Up Front Design (BUFD), where you solve the 'clean' part first and then try to make the business value into your design to make it 'work'. Problem with BUFD is that you often get distracted from the business problem while working on the architecture problem.

TDD notebook on-line

2004-04-05T20:25:00.000-05:00

I've completed reading Kent Beck's TDD book and have started going through it again, taking notes. I'm going to post those notes here. These will be in "note" form, so they will be concise little snips of text, which I may go back and embellish later. I'm not going to try to reproduce the whole book here, just to share key ideas in hopes of stirring up thoughts in my own mind and anyone else reading my blog.

CruiseControl is cool!

2004-03-31T23:14:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I posted anything significant. Been busy at work. Go figure. Some of what has been keeping me late is some new "toys".

First, I've been playing with CruiseControl. This is an engine for automating a continuous integration build loop. A couple of definitions are probably in order.

Anyone that writes software knows that in order to release their code they have to compile it, package it, deploy it and test it. If you only do this every few weeks (or God forbid, months), like when it comes time for a release, this can be a very painful process. The more that changed since the last build, the more likely you are to have problems. If you do it daily, the problems you have to resolve are going to be smaller, because there is a smaller window for changes to occur. This process of compiling, packaging, deploying and testing is called an integration cycle.

The idea behind continuous integration is actually pretty simple. If weekly builds are bad, and daily builds are acceptable (folks that practice XP will tell you that daily builds are for wimps) what would be better? To phrase it another way, consider this series of questions and answers:

So, continuous integration is the process of completely building, packaging, deploying and testing your entire code base when ever changes are made. If you can keep the number of changes between integrations to a minimum, any issues that will occur will be smaller and easier to handle.

In an ideal world, each developer would perform all of these steps everytime they checked in code. Using an automated CI loop lifts this burden off the developer's shoulders. This is not to say that the developers can run amuck, checking in code willy-nilly. Having the tool perform this meanial step, they can move faster and stay focused on implementing business value. Also, there are always folks who are not as diligent as others on the team or everyone has days when you're burnted out and prone to make mistakes. An automated CI loop provides a buffer for those kinds of situations.

The way CruiseControl works is basically in three steps. First, it monitors your source control system to see if there have been any changes. Second, if there have been changes, it invokes a build process. Once the build completes, it publishes the results. All of this done through a plug-in and interface driven architecture, so it supports a wide variety of source control systems, several different build platforms including Ant and Maven and notification forms out the ying-yang.

We have 40 to 50 developers plus another 10 CM, DBA, data modelers and the like on the team, and a code base approaching 10,000 source files. With that many cooks in the kitchen and an amazing number of ingredients for the soup, it can be overwhelming. I have set up CruiseControl to monitor our code base and it is already paying dividends. Compile errors on the master build are almost non-existant, integration issues are far fewer and developers can spend more time writing code.

Right now, each build gets the set of changes in source control, compiles all of the java code, packages up the classes and build the EJBS. So, we're not doing a full build loop yet, but I'm moving in that direction.

A second way the tool is going to pay off is when we start maintaining multiple code bases. Fixing a bug in one set of code is error prone enough. Having to apply that change to two or three code bases makes the risk of mistake even greater. By setting up a CI loop for each code base, we can help manage these risks.

Another tool I've been playing with is SnipSnap, but that, as Conan's biographer would say, is another tale.

'nuff said!

A shit load of Marshmallow Peeps

2004-03-24T22:53:00.000-05:00

Oh, this is just too much. Just too, too much.

Spam as an endangered art form?

2004-03-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

I heard a commentary on NPR on my drive home that made me crack up, given my recent facination with spam. In it, Andrei Codrescu, editor at Exquisite Corpse, compares the jumble of random words found at the end of many spam messages as Dadist poetry.

Also check out this blog which is in a similar vein. But rather than just enjoying the madness, this poet crafts the work by selecting words from the various droppings in their in-box. I don't know if it's poetry but it's an interesting idea.

Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam!

2004-03-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

I received a number of e-mails over the last few days with several full passages for an English text. This just a sample:

It was cold and sweet. Suddenly, she wasn't there. This is what I like, I'd tell myself. Sounds good to me, I said.

We're going to regret this, my friend said. Are you getting pieces of this? What are we going to do tonight? I asked. Are you getting pieces of this?

But this was a long road, and should I walk down it, I might never come back. There's something I should tell you. You can't go up to the unit. Nobody's allowed up there. I can never describe the walk back to my truck.

I was just thinking. There were many examples of animals all around. Suddenly, he disappeared. But this was a long road, and should I walk down it, I might never come back. A house full of condiments and no food.

So like I said in a previous post, this going to make it harder for e-mail filters based on statistical analysis techniques to identify spam. By overloading the message body with 'real' text, the 'offending' portion of e-mail looks trivial.

What's hilarious is that subject of some of the e-mails made pretty clear that they were spam.

Simpliest way possible

2004-03-07T12:40:00.000-05:00

This is one the tenets of XP, and not following this rule has bitten me in the ass twice in the last week.

The basic idea here is that if you take the simplest most direct possible solution, you will quickly have working code on which to experiment and gather feed back. From here you can enhance your 'simplest possible' code to add new features and refactor it to make it clean. Or if the simplest possible code does not perform as needed, you can swap out the slow parts now that you have the entire problem solved.

What tagged me is that the simplest possible solution is also sometimes the most elegant solution.

In one case we had to reverse the processing of a very complicated calculation. To over-simplify the problem space, the original code navigates a hierarchy of relationships from an element in set [A] into set [B] into set [C] into a final element in set [D]. From this last entity, several calculations are made. Also, there are many business rules in each step that are used to guide the selections.

The new problem was to go from an element in set [D] to all possible elements in set [A]. To further complicate the problem, set [D] was numerically small but set [A] was several orders of magnitude greater.

The size of set [A] is so great that it was intimidating. Our immediate reaction was that the simplest possible solution, to run the calculation on all elements in set [A], was not realistic.

However after ending several days implementing code to reverse the processing, we hit a wall. We were doing this in small steps, reversing each step one at a time. However, when we reached one step, we discovered that the calculations would be very so resource intensive as to be prohibitive.

The original calculation is measured in milliseconds, but the source input set is on the order of 100,000. The reverse process would require much more processing powering, over the same set of data. So the original 'unreasonable' concept of running calculation on the entire set suddenly seems more appealing.

Walter and Father Callahan

2004-02-29T18:46:00.000-05:00

Getting back to Walter, would he realy hand over Black 13 to a unknown player? I guess it might be reasonable if Walter knew that Roland would or might catch him. I suppose 'creating' an unsuspecting guardian for the ball, drawn from a work of fiction from another world might not be that bad an idea.

But like I said in a previous post, the even't of Callahan into Mid World could be just a bogus as the rest of his story. Could be Martin, the Crimson King or even Black 13 itself added that bit to the story to further entice Jake and Roland. It could also be argued that Walter might have known enough about Roland's adventures in Mejis to create the Callas. But is Black 13 THAT powerful?

My other blog

2004-02-26T23:20:00.000-05:00

Remember those posting from a few weeks ago, where I was talking about the game of Go? They we really just me talking to myself about the game, trying to psych myself up for another project I'm working on. I've started another blog, which I've titled The Java Go Journal.

The purpose use the blog as an on-line joural and notebook while I'm writing a Go engine in Java. This is no big feet, it's been done before, and what I create will not like be a serious contender in the areana of Go software. A key part of the project is to demonstrate solid software design, effect use of UML and agile practices.

I've actually been posting to it for a while, but had forgotten to post something here. I've laid out my vision for the project in more depth and have started doing so high level design.

If you're geek enough, check it out. Hell, feel free to contribute if you have something to share.

Father Callahan and the Tower

2004-02-26T22:43:00.000-05:00

So I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was interested in the resolution of Father Callahan's story. It's explicit that he was put in Roland's path to delay, distract or destroy the gunslinger. Walter said so himself. Walter gave Black 13 to Callahan with the assurance that it would be Roland's end. But even that part of Father Callahan's story is suspect given the revelation at the end of Wolves.

Unlike the references to The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon and the Talisman, the elements of Salem's Lot are not intermingled with those of Roland's world. They are INSERTED into it directly from the pages of the book.

So, if Father Callahan's "life" is derived from the book to explain his time before he entered into Mid World, what's to say his memory of how he entered was real.

Something else that intriguies me is Father Callahan's story itself. It seems to have something for everyone in the tet of 19: A long, lonely road of danger (Roland) substance abuse (Eddie) and entering Mid World through the door of death (Jake). These parts of Callahan's story would make him a kinred spirit to the men in the group. A 'hook' for Susannah does not jump to mind right now.

It does not appear that Father Callahan is in any way manvolent himself. He seemed as shocked as the gunslingers upon the revelation. We'll have to see how it plays out.

Wolves of the Calla

2004-02-26T08:06:00.000-05:00

I was going to post something last week about my thoughts on this book, while I was about two thirds of the way through. "this is kinda slow", "what's King doing dragging Father Callahan into this?" and "this crap with the rose is lame".

I never got around to posting those thoughts. The story did pick a little; the drama, politics and intrigue in Calla and at the Restaurant of the Mind finally drew me in. And Father Callahan's story certainly was entertaining.

As it was meant to be, not only for Constant Reader, but for Roland and his ka-tet as well. The reveal the end of the book (actually, it's kind of recursive) confirmed what I suspected not long after the tet of 19 arrived in the Callas. All of the south western settings was so eerily similar to Mejis, that I had to wonder if this wasn't a distraction. King waved the Mejis references in front of you left and right. Trouble, in their road, designed to slow down, misdirect or shatter the ka-tet.

This was vision held by Roland and Jake. Roland, that they could be dragged into a 'quest' in every small town they found in their path, and find the Tower slipping further away every time stopped. Jake was afraid the secrets kept about Susannah's chap would break the tet, but even after they aired that out, everyone except Eddie was hiding something else. Roland's arthritic pain, the resumption of Susannah's pregnancy symptoms in the week before the Wolves and Jake's suspicions which he hid out of friendship. He did share these, but he took a great risk going to the Dogan on his own.

And what was up w/ Rosa? There's nothing more dangerous in a man's road than a willing woman. I'm not sure I would call it out of character for Roland to bed a woman casually, as we saw this in the first book. But Rosa is certainly not a whore, as Roland is no longer the same man we met in the Gunslinger. Still another distraction, mayhaps meant to soften his heart and weaken the steel of his resolve.

I can definitely say that I enjoyed the book. I tore through the first third, was bogged down in the middle but consumed the ending like a mad man. I look forward to the next book, more for the story of the Pere and his relationship with the Tower than Susannah's chap and the Rose. But I wait impatiently none-the-less.

Bubba Ho-Tep

2004-02-12T21:22:00.000-05:00

So, I finally got a chance to see Bubba Ho-Tep. It was extended for a third week at the little theater it was playing at here in Pittsburgh. All I have to say is "Thank you. Thank you very much" to the theater management for keeping it around that long.

This is truly a solid movie. It was not a great horror movie, it was not a great comedy, it was not a great drama. However, it was a well rounded story and had enough of all these elements to make it a very enjoyable and very memorable movie. It genuinely deserves all of the nominations and awards it has received in the independent and art cinema festivals.

The movie definitely earned it's R rating, as it was what I'd a call "pleasantly crude" film mostly for the language. The violence was pretty minor for a horror flick. Hell, the special effects were not really all that great. But then the monster was really just a plot device for the central story of redemption for a lost soul.

My hat's off to Bruce Campbell. After 15 minutes, I was not seeing him playing Elvis. I was seeing Elvis. Simply an amazing performance. When I wasn't laughing at the banter between Campbell and Ossie Davis or the Campbell's 70 year old Elvis swagger and drawl, I was drawn into the remorse, regret and introspection that was so much a part of the Elvis character.

If this shows up anywhere near where you live, I highly recommend you see it. It will be in my DVD collection as soon as it is available.

Feds Win Right to War Protesters' Records

2004-02-07T15:45:00.000-05:00

Saw this story on Yahoo's front page news teaser. This is wrong man, just plain wrong.... the first few paragraph from the article:

DES MOINES, Iowa - In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.

In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.

Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas.

In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum.

Here is an article in the DesMoines Register back on the day after the event. This is an article from today about the decision.

Now, I'm just hearing about this but from what I'm reading this look kinda fishy. I checked out the website for the The National Lawyers Guild, and it looks like some pretty liberal, but nothing did not apprea to do anything that promotes violence. They have anti-death penalty, "economic justice" and Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Transgender programs all of which are bull shit in my mind, but they should not be subject to investigation by the government because they protested at a National Gaurd base.