A nice parable

The Agile Management blog has a nice parable on requirements called “The Defective Paper Towel”.

It really gets to the point. Much of what was said about requirements in the ‘90s and before was kind of “ivory tower”, and really didn’t reflect the actual state of affairs concerning requirements.

It’s an “agile” fact of life: Requirements change. Accept it.

It’s all about understanding what the customer really wants, sort of the “meta-requirement”; and, in many cases, the customer doesn’t even know this coming into a project.

1/11/2006 10:22:12 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development

Unaware

Yesterday, Chris Sells posted a comment regarding a comic Rory put together about Chris and various other ‘Softie luminaries. Somehow, Chris has the mistaken idea that he’s not a marketing geek. sigh. Where to begin?

By the way, Chris’ blog/RSS includes no permalinks. It makes referencing his comments difficult. Just what I’d expect from a marketing geek.

1/11/2006 9:33:35 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

A Revelation

I saw today that the House of Representatives are considering a total ban on privately funded trips. This brought to mind the case of Mike Espy, back in the ‘90s. Mr. Espy was the Secretary of Agriculture when he was charged by an independent counsel, Donald Smaltz, of illegally taking gifts. At the time, I assumed that Mr. Espy had run afoul of the difference between the rules for Congressmen (he had previously been a member of the House of Representatives) and Cabinet Members.

As it turns out, however, Mr. Espy was acquitted of all charges in 1998!

This led me to a few thoughts:

1. Why didn’t I know this? The press was all over Mr. Espy when he was indicted on these charges, but I don’t remember anything when he was acquitted (to their credit, I discovered this via a Washington Post article, which they did publish, on the front page!).

2. The whole “independent counsel” thing was such a travesty. The concept came out of the Watergate scandal, when President Nixon attempted to exert undue influence over the Justice Department’s investigation of the Watergate affair and cover-up. However, the result has been just the opposite, with these investigators trying every sleazy trick in the book to “get” government officials. Frankly, I think these guys watch too much TV, and think they should be operating similarly to what they’re seeing in the cop shows.

3. (a corollary to #2) What if what we’re seeing here is how these guys conduct investigations of the average citizen? This is both ridiculous and scary. I’d say that this is a scandal waiting to happen.

1/11/2006 9:05:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

To 'DasBlog' or not to 'DasBlog'

Lately, I’ve been considering switching from dasBlog to Community Server…

I’d originally looked at Community Server when thinking about setting up my blog, but the blog support didn’t seem to be there back then.

Now, lots of folks are using it for blogging, and I’ve been toying with the idea of making my site available to friends and family for their own blogs. Also, Community Server has built-in forum functionality, which I’d like to have.

On the other hand, I’ve been pretty satisfied with dasBlog.

What to do… What to do…

 

1/10/2006 3:07:57 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Why I used their full names

So, why did I use Katy and Matt’s full names when addressing them in the previous post? After all, it sounded a little forced. Well, I recently did a Google of my name, and what should I see, but blog entries!

So, in the off chance that Katy, Matt, or one of their “people” should Google their names for comments, I figured it was worth it to include their full names. Just in case…

Did you guys get this one too? Katy Couric? Matt Lauer?

1/10/2006 3:03:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

More on Knowledge

I’ve been thinking about my previous posts on News vs. Knowledge, etc.

Just what is the “proper response” to this state of affairs? Should we point out when inaccuracies are published? And, if we do this, aren’t we just giving more attention to the inaccuracy?

Yesterday, Michael Barone commented on James Risen’s interview on the Today show… BTW, Risen is the New York Times reporter who co-authored the paper’s story about NSA surveillance of Americans. Risen seems to believe that Democracy is best served when decisions are left up to the civil service, and not up to elected & appointed officials, such as the Vice President or Secretary of State.

Now, in my mind, this is patent nonsense. But, 1: The Today show published these thoughts via an interview. 2: if these thoughts are not refuted, they become part of the public “conventional wisdom”. 3: if we do refute them, then we lend credence to the words, treating the idea as (in some way) valid.

I suppose, we could simply say that James Risen’s views of Democracy are ridiculous in the extreme, and probably self-serving, since he’s really just hawking a book he wrote and didn’t consider the topic newsworthy before the book was published.

In short, the man’s a hack, and Today should be ashamed of themselves for giving him a forum. Did you hear that, Katy Couric? Matt Lauer? Ashamed.

1/10/2006 3:00:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics | general

An Expected Disappointment

Originally, I’d planned on completely skipping The Wedding Crashers. I’d gotten my fill of Vince Vaughn’s character (and he always plays the same one), so I didn’t see any reason to see the movie. Then The Movie Blog listed it as one of the 10 best movies of 2005. They said that it was really funny.

I figured, “why not?” I could use some laughs.

The first half of the movie isn’t bad, and there are some very funny scenes in it. That being said, the movie stinks about as much as I expected. The second half of the move is so cliche its transcendental. I could not believe just how bad the writing of the second half was. I was actually glad when it ended.

That being said, Vince Vaughn was not bad, even tolerable. And (at least) his character has some interesting twists. Owen Wilson’s character, on the other hand, was so terrible it was indeed painful.

So, fair warning: Do not see this picture! Watch The Philadelphia Story instead…

1/10/2006 9:14:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Variation on a Theme: Regardiing my previous post

I’ve been thinking about my previous post. Just what do we “know” anyway? Just how much of our “knowledge” is based upon someone else’s idea of either what we “should” know, or even simply based on someone else’s idea of what they want to tell us?

There’s an old Chinese axiom that goes something like “the more you learn, the less you know”. I’m starting to feel that way…

1/6/2006 12:06:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

News vs. Knowledge

Cathy Young in the Y Files is reporting some interesting statistics from New Orleans and hurricane Katrina. This data completely contradicts the conventional wisdom on the storm.

Of course, this data is not news, since it doesn’t result in anyone being “blamed”. This is to be expected. Contemporary “news” is about real-life drama and astonishment, not about boring facts.

The unfortunate thing is that for many people, the news becomes what they “know” about the incident, so those “dramatic” stories regarding the aftermath of Katrina becomes their understanding of what “really happened”, and the so-called racism reported becomes enshrined in their personal history.

This is the real tragedy of Katrina: that most people won’t know what really happened there, because there’s no “story” for the media to tell.

1/6/2006 11:37:16 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

Testing and Interfaces

Today, both Martin Fowler and Ian Griffiths wrote about Implicit Interfaces and their implications in testing.

Essentially, both Java and C# borrow a “feature” of C++, that each class implicitly has a defined interface matching its implementation (actually, in C++ each class has 3 interfaces: public, protected, and private).

Martin’s point (sort of) and Ian’s addendum are that this implicit interface can be difficult to test, and using explicit interfaces can help this issue by making “mocking” easier. Ian goes on to make a good point that what we really need is some “automatic” way to split the interface from the class.

I’d like to add one other point:

Among other things, I use unit testing to evaluate the design of my classes, and if I run into difficulty testing them, I infer that means that there is a problem with the design of the class. This philosophy has helped me out numerous times. I’ve lost track of the number of times that changes I made to a class’s interface turned out to be necessary for proper usage of the class.

So, I’d say that the difficulty that Martin would like addressed in the language is actually in the design of the class under test.

Let the flames begin

 

1/5/2006 2:17:15 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development

Windows and IE

Today, Microsoft Watch had an article titled “Should the Windows and IE Teams go their Separate Ways?”. Here’s my own 2 cents on the subject:

Frankly, I think Microsoft has way too much of its attention paid to Windows. It seems that they are using their success in other areas more and more to shore up Windows. Not only with IE, but I see the same thing with .NET (C#, at least, should be widely available, and the .NET runtime should also), Visual Studio, and Office. While I never bought into the whole “Microsoft is a Monopoly” nonsense (depending upon how you cut it, Apple is a monopoly, Intel is a monopoly, Dell is a monopoly, etc.),  Microsoft is now placing their own interests ahead of those of their consumers. Now, this may be perfectly legal and ethical, but as a Microsoft consumer, I don’t like it, and am more and more leaning to expressing that dislike by moving on. Do you hear me, Microsoft?

1/4/2006 11:07:54 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

The (next) shoe's dropped at ReplayTV

Those of you who know me well (probably, all who read this  ), know that I’m a big fan of ReplayTV (arguably, the first DVR on the market). I don’t know whether TiVo came before it, but I sure never heard of TiVo before I’d already had my first ReplayTV installed.

Water under the bridge.

Anyway, I did my regular pilgrimage to the ReplayTV site, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but no ReplayTV models!

Then, the reason slowly appeared: ReplayTV is getting out of the hardware business. They’re saying “Coming in 2006 for the PC”. They say that this will make them profitable in a big way. We’ll see. The title of this is “next shoe” instead of “other shoe”, because I don’t think this is the end. And, I’m hoping that it’s not the end of ReplayTV DVRs. Because, there’s no way I’m going back to traditional TV, and I’d really really hate to have to buy a TiVo…

 

12/22/2005 3:48:51 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Turning up the volume
Michael Yon has done it again. He received an anonymous WMV of the Iraqi election that has to be seen. I was blown away by this. It’s too bad American elections can’t look like this (minus the election site searches, of course).
12/20/2005 2:38:15 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs

Today is (apparently) Gender Gap day

Today, both ComputerWorld’s Blogwatch and the Daily Grind (!) posted articles related to “women in computers”. Yawn. About the only thing related to this topic that doesn’t generate a yawn from me, is the seriousness attached to the topic by others.

To be fair, I should say that I’ve added the “I’m a geek. I’m Female…” blog to my RSS list.

This topic used to bug me. Why weren’t there more women in high tech? My early career was in both the education field, and then working in an office. Both of these areas are mostly female, so I’ve been used to having a lot of women around in the workplace. Once I made the switch to engineering, that changed dramatically. There had to be a reason.

Then, I read Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher (ISBN 0262632691). It was eye opening. According to this book, women don’t come into the field because 1) they don’t like the people (men) in the field, because they’re (the men are) too geeky (hard to argue with that point) and 2) women don’t deal positively with the kind of pressure created in the field (men tend to be optimistic toward the pressure, thinking they can conquer it. Women tend to be pessimistic toward the pressure, thinking their struggle is a direct reflection of their inability). I think its important to note that the authors are positive about getting women into computing. Their ultimate solution is to make the field more attractive/conducive to women. Sigh.

Look, it bugs me greatly that there are not more women in my field. For obvious reasons, this bugs me even more than the lack of hispanics and african-americans in the field (though there’s a shortage there too, I don’t know why). And there are indeed a lot of jerks in the field (hey, I’ve had to work with them too. I don’t much like it either). But there isn’t any discrimination going on (except, apparently, among women), so lets get on with our lives!

Whew! Okay, enough of this.

 

12/19/2005 12:03:35 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general