Coding Slave: The Blog

Q: What do programmers and plumbers have in common?

2012-01-22T12:57:00.000-08:00

A: Both make the world a better place in which to live.

I've been captivated by programming and software since I wrote my first spreadsheet formula back in the mid-eighties. Despite the complexity of languages to which I have evolved, for me, programming is a compositional act in which the lines of code are more akin to musical phrases than 'just-the-facts' morsels of an instruction set. That I can put them all together and make something that works is still pretty remarkable. That it turned out that I could make living from it is nothing short of amazing. That my code has made a difference for the better is the ultimate reward.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that coding is anesthetic. When you are in the throes of getting your stuff to work, you are completely focused on the abstract game of logical pick-up-sticks that you’ve made for yourself. Nothing else is noticed. Nothing else matters. It’s just you and the code; no food, no sleep, no kids. The state of the universe is of little concern.

Ten years ago I was of the belief that if all the coders in the world understood the awesome power we held and could unite under a common vision, we could create a place completely free of the ills that plague mankind. Turns out that our common vision is acute and episodic. It takes a lot to provoke us, but once provoked, we do act, as shown by our recent reaction to SOPA and PIPA.

Still, at the end of it all, it seemed as if we considered ourselves to be more like civilization’s plumbers rather than its guardians. I had more than casual contempt for programmers that spent a lifetime learning the ins and outs of new techniques and products for no other purpose than to enhance one’s technical prowess in order to be the smartest person in the room. I was mad that those less versed in the complexities of the coding life, civilians -- for lack of a better term -- were articulating the Big Vision for the Planet and getting the attention due to the people that actually made the world go ‘round. My thinking was that the only action that mattered was the Big Action, that a gesture that was not big enough to get the attention of CNBC, Twitter or Slashdot, was an effort wasted.

I was wrong.

Today I understand the power of humility. Today I understand that plumbers are the true guardians of civilization. Being able to keep the sewerage from contaminating the water supply is probably a first order indicator of a civilized society.

Everyday hundreds of thousands of people sit down in a front of computers to write code that makes the world work. True, some of those people try to make the world work not-so-well. But, for the most part, those slinging the bits are good folks, with good intentions. Does it matter that many are doing so in a dream-like dance between the human mind and the artificial? Dunno. I do like to think that there is a certain advantage to being aware of one’s self and one’s situation. But, ‘so what?’, if it's otherwise. The important thing is that the code allows the information to flow, uncontaminated and continuously to everybody, because a civilization without water and without information is no civilization at all.

In Memory of Nick Statman

2012-01-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

My friend, Nick Statman was buried today at Hillside Memorial Park nearby in Culver City, California. He was 59 years old, two weeks short of his sixtieth birthday. My wife and I attended the memorial service and his burial.

My connection to Nick started as a commercial relationship. Nick’s and my paycheck came from the same employer. Making money was the binding theme that defined the context of our relationship, at the onset anyway.

My relationship with Nick moved beyond the commercial quickly. One day, about 6 months into my tenure at the Day Job, Nick approached me and asked would my wife and I like to join him and his family—wife, brother, in-laws and cousins, for a Sunday’s Dim Sum in downtown LA. I accepted. I was glad that I did. I enjoyed myself thoroughly in the company of Nick and his family, sharing the pleasantries of a Sunday morning get together.

Another time, when Nick learned that my wife and I would be eating solo on Thanksgiving, he invited us to dine at his brother’s rather than go to a restaurant alone for our holiday meal.

Over the three years I spent getting to know Nick, he and I, and our wives, would spend more time together, mostly eating and letting our pets, his dogs and my dog, play together.

Nick was a kind, warm, somewhat cynical, wit. I never heard him utter a bad word about anybody. He never raised his voice. Nick was a generous man, an overall nice guy. I never left his presence feeling angry or hurt.

Nick’s brother gave a thoughtful eulogy. He ended with a simple phrase, “He was my brother and I am proud of him.” I have found it rare for so few, loving words to describe so fully the enormity of a life.

I imagine that if you did the math, you’d find out that most of us spend about half of our lifetime with and around others in the pursuit of making money. The odds are that we spend more time in the “workplace” then we do at home. Yet how much do we really know about those others with whom we labor for a paycheck? And more importantly, how much do we really care about them? How much do we really want to care?

It’s been my feeling for a long time that when this plane ride we call life takes its final approach and we come in for the landing, in the final analysis, we’re all going to want the same thing--to be around those we care about and those that care about us. It’s the rare person that wants to die alone.

Thus, the paradox: few of us want to be alone, but in that place where we go to make a buck everyday, when it comes to the important things, the things that really matter, many of us are alone and, for the most part, are unknown. It doesn’t have to be this way. Nick Statman’s life was living proof that the workplace could be different. He saw that a relationship could easily go beyond the commercial. He understood community.

Nick Statman was my friend. I am proud of him and all he held dear. I will miss him in ways words cannot describe. May his soul rest in peace.

Q: What was the biggest fashion trend at CES?

2012-01-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

A: Earphones

I just got back from two days at CES 2012 prowling from exhibit to exhibit, looking at the newest and coolest technology that the Captains of Industry have put forth to fatten the coffers of the World Economy. I found pencil thin flat-screen TV's the size of my wall, 3D video cameras priced at consumer purchasing levels, home appliances united together in electronic, domestic bliss, cars that are more like computers on wheels than basic transportation and a plethora of other gizmos that will keep the factories of the planet churning out products of delight into the supply chains of every Big Box and online retailer from Sheboygan to Shanghai. (Whew.....)

I also saw a hell of a lot of earphones. I mean, a HELL of a lot of earphones. They were coming from everywhere. Go down an aisle, there's an earphone manufacturer. Given that I went down a lot of aisles in the 1 million plus square feet of the Las Vegas Convention Center, I am betting that there were enough earphones present in the facility to adorn the ears of every head in Nevada and Utah, maybe Arizona too.

So, it got me to me to wondering, why? I mean, the only time you put on the earphones during my pot-smoking adolescence was so that you could play Led Zep at the recommended volume and not incur the wrath of your parents yelling down from the top of the basement stairs to, "turn down that noise you call music." Otherwise, we'd get together, throw the vinyl on the turntable, light up the joint, turn up the volume and pass the album cover around for collective and individual ogling as music came roaring through the loudspeakers. We wanted to hear the music together.

A lot has changed since that time. First of all, I haven't smoked pot since the Reagan Administration, despite the fact that Ronnie provided more than enough reason for me to want to puff my way into a state of dream-like oblivion. The 12" vinyl disc, with accompanying album-art cover, has gone the way of the typewriter, leaving in its stead song based music downloads for playing on an iPod.

For all the good stuff about it, the iPod is not about listening to music together. I haven't heard of many occasions where the kids are sneaking downstairs, iPod in hand, to listen to the Devil's Music in a state of group euphoria. Parent's aren't yelling at the kids to, "turn it down", because there's nothing to turn down.Yeah, you can hook an iPod into your home theater. But the primary listening device for the iPod is not the loudspeaker. It's the earphone and its scrawny kid brother, the earbud.

Yeah, the entry point for it all is still the same two holes that Nature has put on either side of your head. But, it's fundamentally a solo experience. Yes, you can share your playlists online to those that are interested. But, sharing a playlist socially does not necessarily translate in to a society of listeners. After all, there is a certain bond to be enjoyed knowing that all your friend's parents are yelling at them too, to "turn down that noise you call music."

So, there were a lot of earphones at CES 2012, too many probably. Half of the manufacturers most likely won't be in business next year. The competition is too stiff and the product is becoming more subject to the dynamics of fashion, a dynamic in which, if you have "trendsetter" status, you get a two year ride; less, if you're marketing a style for women.

Or, maybe it hasn't changed. Maybe kids hang around the schoolyard and bond over the complaint that their parents keep coming into the basement yelling, "why don't you kids take those damn things off and listen to that noise you call music, together."

Q: What happens when you put 1 and 1 together?

2011-12-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

A: Depends on the type of personality you ask.

To my observation there are two types of people in the world. The first type conceptualizes that when you put 1 and 1 together, you get 2. The second type accommodates the notion that put 1 and 1 together, you get 11.

If you bang around a Meyers-Briggs lexicon of psychological types, you'll find that the first type is called a Sensing type. These folks rely upon the concrete facts to understand the world. The second type is called an Intuitive personality. For them, reality is a Big Picture in which the given experience is but an episode in a larger story.

For Sensing folks the role of language is to describe the world. For Intuitive folks the role of language is to express the world. Sensing folks ask, "How does it work?" Intuitive folks ask "Does it work?" For the Sensing folks, the beauty is in the balance sheet. For the Intuitive type, the beauty is.

When it comes to commerce, the Sensing type understands a very important fact: A business that does not make money, ain't. If the dollar amount attached to Accounts Receivable is not greater than the dollar amount of Accounts Payable, even the mightiest of businesses has a problem. And, if the problem goes on long enough, the business has a Big Problem. Profitability is acutely describable, always has been, always will be. As any Captain of Industry will tell you, profitability is best handled by Sensing folks.

Still, there is a whole world out there that cannot be described with words: explaining the color, red to a blind man or the sound of a chirping bird to one who is deaf. The only description is the experience itself. This is the world of the Intuitive. One just knows what it is.

Intuitive people experience a thing as part of a past, present and future whole. These are the people that see a ski and motorcycle and imagine a snowmobile. They see two cans tied together by a string and imagine computers talking to one another via an Ethernet cable. Give an Intuitive person a good cup of coffee, put him or her in front of sales force and you have a chain of Starbucks.

Businesses that last need both Sensing and Intuitive folks. Yet, it seems that as a business matures, the power bias moves toward the Sensing. Profitability, while essential, becomes paramount. Success is known more as a measurable quantity rather than a state of experience. Creativity, the de-facto realm of the Intuitive folk and the indescribable soul of an enterprise, becomes a transient commodity purchased from Ad Agencies that have a proven track record of staying on budget while increasing sales and market share. The transformation is not one of nefarious premeditation intent on sucking the life blood of originality from the corporate environment. Rather, to paraphrase an often used term, "it's just Sensing being Sensing."

So what's the point here? My point is this: If you are a reader that happens to have hire and fire power in your enterprise and also happens to be very good at understanding and defining profitability, when you look about your direct reports, how many people do you see that can accept that when you put 1 and 1 together, 11 is a plausible, if not useful result? If it's not half, you might be in some very real trouble.

Q: How many people can you fit into an Athenian taxi?

2011-11-26T08:23:00.001-08:00

A: As many as possible

I am forever amazed by the number of cars in the world that sit around doing absolutely nothing. Take my car, for instance. It sits in my carport all day Saturday and Sunday doing absolutely nothing. Monday to Friday it sits deep in the bowels of an office complex, three levels down, away from the elements, for 8 hours a day, doing absolutely nothing. It is just sitting there existing through another day in eternity, because eternity is how long the machine will last if left unfettered in its absolutely doing nothingness.

So let's do some math.

Let's say the typical consumer, non-commercial, car owner uses his or her vehicle for 2 hours a day. This translates in to a daily capacity usage of 8%. The unused capacity is a whopping 92%. Or to put it another way, 1 person is using a resource that has the capacity to service 11 other people. It's almost like owning a 2400 sq. ft. house, but only living in one of the bathrooms.

Sort of a waste, I'd say. Yeah, you could make the argument that by not using the excess capacity, you're not having to pay money to support the resource, heating the entire house or keeping the gas tank full for 24 hours of automotive operation. But, we'll let this go for now.

The fact is that, for the most part, having a lot of cars sitting around doing absolutely nothing might not be good in the Big Picture. But, we're Americans. We seem to have a historical sense of having unlimited resource. In Europe this is not the case. They used up all the forests a long time ago. Efficiency counts: don't heat water in big ass tanks that go cold; heat the water intensively as it comes through the pipe to the shower head, which is what I experienced in an old house at the foot of the Pyrenees. Or pack as many riders into a taxi as you can, as I experienced in Athens.

Taxi drivers in Athens can pick up passengers in transit. It's the way they do business, nothing shady about it.

I remember sitting in the back of a cab, on my way to the airport and at each stop light the driver negotiated with would-be fares for the available seating next to me. If the driver could make the deal, the street corner traveler jumped in. The driver was continually revising his route given the destinations in play, mindful of keeping his gasoline consumption down. It's sort of brilliant in a way.

So back to the 8%. Imagine what it would be like if any given non-commercial automobile was operating at say, 70% capacity. First off, parking in LA would be a lot easier because most of the cars would in use and not sitting on the side of the street doing absolutely nothing.

So, how would it work? Well, instead of owning your own car, you'd belong to a "Car Association". Membership would get you access to the car you need, when you need it. For example, when it's time to leave for work in the morning, I'd go to my smartphone, sign into my Car Association App, and get the photo and license number of the car that I'd use to get to work. The car would be sitting in the parking lot outside the local Ralphs down the street. When I get to the car, I'd use my smartphone again to photograph a bar code on the car's windshield to verify that I was indeed at the car and then punch in my password. The App would have the smarts to unlock the car via a service such as OnStar. The key would be under the driver's seat.

I'd drive the car to work, to a Ralph's nearby or to a parking lot underneath my office complex. I'd leave the key under seat. Once I exit the car, I'd contact the Car Association to have the car locked and make it available to anther driver as soon as possible.

I'd pay a monthly fee to belong the the Car Association. The fee would vary according to the class of car I want, figure Standard Plan (Corolla, no older than 5 years) to Triple Platinum (BMW 700 series, no older than 2 years). Maybe one month I'd want to go Standard. If my in-laws are coming to town around the Holidays and I want to impress them, I'd go Triple Platinum. I'd have status on demand!

Gas and upkeep? If I take an Association car to the car wash or gas it up, I'd receive a credit against my monthly fee. Or the Association would pay contractors to maintain the properties, just as my Home Owners Association pays a contractor the keep the building grounds well groomed.

Of course, for this to work, we'd need to have a lot of cars and a lot of people in the Car Association. So it will probably be an urban thing. But, what the hell? There's already a lot of cars out there. They just happen to be sitting around doing absolutely nothing. From my point of view it's just a matter of the ability to think and act differently, a small nudge on the collective automotive consciousness.

Here's some good news: It's happening as I write. There are a number of Rent-Your-Car-Out services on the rise. Think of the these service as first generation Car Associations. You have Spride and Getaround which allows you to rent the cars of others starting at $5 an hour. And the technology is already in place. OnStar has just cut a deal with Relay Rides, to unlock cars for renters.

If Car Associations take hold, maybe via Facebook or Google+, it's only a matter of time before Hertz, Enterprise and National will want a piece of the pie providing the vehicles. Having a car will be about... well... huh.... using a car.

To my understanding the dining policy in the US Army's Boot Camp is this: You can have all the food you want. Just make sure you eat what you take.

So, all we have to do is map the thinking onto automobiles: You can have all the car you want. Just make sure you use what you take.

Q: Is it possible to own a car in good conscience?

2011-11-19T07:55:00.000-08:00

A: Might be, might be

I find it funny in a way that for the last 5 years I have made my living coding around the automobile industry. I don't particularly like driving and each time I get behind the wheel I think of myself as an ecological liability. Yet, there I go driving around solo like most of the other people in LA, sucking up gas and throwing out carbon monoxide in a mechanical conglomeration of metal, glass, plastic and hand-crafted leather that will last longer than my time on Earth.

Owning a car causes me no end of moral dilemma. Yeah, I try to reduce my ecological footprint. I drive about 8 miles a day. I own a car manufactured in 2003. I rarely drive on the weekend, walking whenever I can, which might be de rigueur on the island of Manhattan, but is quite the oddity here in Tinsel Town. Yet, at the end of the day, I own and maintain close to two tons of environmental terror.

But, last week I learned something that offered me a morsel of hope that those of us driving on the highways of the planet can actually do so without bringing Mother Nature to her knees.

There is a little doubt the the electric car is here to stay. Just about all the major manufacturers are pumping out battery powered vehicles. And, new manufacturers such as Tesla and Coda are completely dedicated to the electric car space. So for me, it is not very hard to image a future 10 years from now when there are 50 million electric vehicles traveling the highways and byways of the nation. And, each of these puppies is going to require charging everyday. That's a lot of demand to drop on the power generation capabilities of America. That's the bad news.

The good news is that our national power grid has gotten pretty good at figuring out how to provide large amounts of electricity on demand to consumers everywhere, without putting the entire country into a state of anticipatory anxiety due to episodic blackouts.

Right now many houses have two power meters. One for the usual household stuff and the other for the central air conditioner. The reason for this separation is that having the air conditioner on a separate meter allows the Power Company to effectively monitor and control the device. In other words, the Power Company knows your air conditioner, it knows how much electricity it is using, has used and is likely to use. Also, the Power Company has the ability to turn the air conditioner on and off. So, when it's noontime on a hot July day in Topeka, Kansas and every air conditioner in the area wants to go on, machine intelligence at the Power Company can assess the situation and say, "well, we have so much electricity to go around and all these air conditioners want a part of it. Let's see if we can turn some of the air conditioners off for 10 minutes and allow the ones left on to get the cooling going. Then, we'll turn off those that are running and turn on the dormant ones. The humans will never notice a thing."

Great technology. So what does this have to do with cars?

This is what it has to do with cars: Most modern cars are digitally identifiable. For example, if you have a car with OnStar installed, the company will send you an email each month that reports the state of your car--do you need an oil change? Do you need to inflate your tires, etc...? OnStar technology talks to your car's on-board computing system and sends the email.

When it comes to electric cars, it will be possible to pass certain information about you and the car onto the Power Company: What is your customer profile? Where is the car being charge? What type of car you have? What is your current battery state? When do you need the vehicle fully charged?

Based on this information, the Power Company can figure out demand in terms of the Big Picture: "We know we have to charge 50 million cars in the next 8 hours. Given our super duper computing capabilities, we can figure out the most efficient way to charge all these cars to the specification of all these customers."

It's the typical win-win: the consumer gets another day of driving bliss; Mother Nature remains chaste.

I gotta tell ya, for the longest time I felt as if we are driving our way to vehicular Armageddon, without a care in the world about the effect that our 300 horse-power, fuel-injected beasts have on others and our planet. But, when I learn about something like the ability to power all the cars in the world using smart supply, I sleep better at night. Maybe this technology thing works, just maybe.

Q: How much data is Big Data?

2011-11-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

A: More than a single human being can type in a lifetime

(PS: This post is like a box of Cracker Jacks. There's a prize at the end.)

Recently I've developed more than a passing interest in working with Big Data. I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Hadoopsville: got a little bit of HDFS and MapReduce under my belt, taught a few intro classes. I even did an interview with Doug Cutting.

Then, about a month ago a colleague at the Day Job suggested that I take a look at MongoDB as a data store for a project I was imagining. So, I did.

As I began to piddle around the innards and start to work with the on-demand, distributed features of the product, I found myself in need of a lot of structured data, to do some advanced piddling, about 45 gigs worth.

(I wanted to make it so that I was performing operations that exceeded the memory capacity of any one machine, or any two machines for that matter.)

As I said before, I'm interested in Big Data. So allow me a moment to share with you just how big, big is. The sort of structured data I figured to use is the typical log file entry, about 100 characters long, which looks like this:

20204,2011-11-11 19:19:07.123,Leslee,Falleti,777-64-9738,625 Orange Terr.,Suite 87,MT,59430,16413,A

The structure of the line above is:

unique_id,datetime,firstname,lastname,ssn,address_1,address_2,state,zip,a_random_number,a_random_character

I figure a structured log entry like the above will provide a lot of flexibility to do some MongoDB indexing, run some Map-Reduce analysis and do some benchmarking comparison between Hadoop and MongoDB.

So let's take a look at what 45 gigs of log data looks like. Say I want to make a ~1 MB text file full of unique log entries. Such a file will contain about ~10,000 lines of text. Again, this is for ~1 MB file.

45 gigs translates into forty-five thousand 1 MB files.

Now, this is not the type of data that you keep around on a hard drive next to the pictures of your dog and grandkids. In fact, getting your hands on this sort of data is kinda hard.

So, I figured I'd make some.

I could type out 450,000,000 lines of structured data at a rate of a line every thirty seconds, which translates to 120 lines a hour, Thus, I can get out 2400 lines in a day, provided I forsake sleep and go for twenty hours without mistake. But, being the world's worst typist, we're more likely looking at a lot less than the optimal. Anyway, typing as required, I could do ~12,000 lines during a work week, which means that I could get my 45 gigs of data in say, 40 thousand days, which translates into ~123 years.

Not an option.

Or, I could create a website and get a grant from the Federal Government as a jobs initiative to get everybody in the US to go to a web site I've made and enter some data according to the structure I need. Actually, upon reflection I would need every man, woman and child to enter data over 150 times.

Again, not an option. Government cutbacks are rampant and few innocent bystanders have the patience to do a structured task 150 times.

So, I decided to automate.

I made a cute little project in Java under Maven. The program uses an address and name randomizer I made a few years ago. You can download a zip file containing the project--data generator and randomizer all-- here. (There is also a Post Office module included that is more relevant to the article that describes the randomizer.)

One of the modules, DataGen, kicks off files of unique log entries. You can set it to kick off a variable amount a files. You can kick off 10 files of 100 bytes of unique log entries. You can set the DataGen to kick off 1000 files of 1000 bytes of unique entries.

In terms of rate, DataGen presently kicks off a ~1 MB file of unique log entries of random names, addresses and US zip codes taken from some predefined lists loaded into memory, in about 2 minutes.

I configured DataGen to kick off 45,000, ~1 MB files of log entries. I started running the generation last night on my Ubuntu laptop. So in about 2 months I'll have the 45 gigs I need.

Sorta makes possible the notion that if you chained a chimp to a typewriter for eternity, eventually the beast would produce Hamlet.

Q: How do you traverse a MongoDB Collection of complex documents?

2011-10-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

A: db.stories.find({},{tags:true}).forEach(function(v){for(var i=0;i < v["tags"].length;i++){print(v["tags"][i])}})

Here is the collection, stories, against which you can run the JavaScript shown above.

[{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc28"},
"tags":["pcvim",
"twzbl",
"gajpv"],
"title":"teoqc ccqnupnqnf",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"pffafckratlladvyvmasqrkknnjfkj",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc29"},
"tags":["awdjq",
"gprzp",
"usnmd"],
"title":"iclih iqkfobaetk",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"ukuvdaqtejnpmzhgnkhmqqewcaeqch",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2a"},
"tags":["wofcd",
"mslmt",
"zmyec"],
"title":"uhbbu zvztgyqfsv",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"vshlhdsbtodolvboympvzbidyuvdch",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2b"},
"tags":["mzged",
"ewhwu",
"lcbwe"],
"title":"hnpjy akizruqepj",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"ybdpfhlfonkgoqbuousqszcfgbgjab",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2c"},
"tags":["blugp",
"zbsye",
"rmfvp"],
"title":"dbzwa slnnqwpgkk",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"uwlqaardkcewhgdrclqqppruocemgb",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2d"},
"tags":["lfcrv",
"nojgb",
"shdaw"],
"title":"ybyqk qpmubqjhcb",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"tsceoepdfczbkmrmyabnlelngacfyv",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2e"},
"tags":["uqoal",
"grwhy",
"fvijk"],
"title":"qyfbk webdlhgnvt",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"tswcepjcgmbwybwiiauaogsupgyekq",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc2f"},
"tags":["brtmf",
"jnwso",
"alhef"],
"title":"nwyjb fywupddvyq",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"jdisibfkwqsnfysmgcrunvflcrkfca",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc30"},
"tags":["jpvqr",
"kdwdy",
"tlnsg"],
"title":"fvths itzfjwlibg",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"kfvnwulgchlbzzlntlccoebpstssjc",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"},
{"_id":{"$oid":"4e9cea4d44ae29e89c65fc31"},
"tags":["supiy",
"ceqdb",
"eryyr"],
"title":"gzist ytikusfopj",
"email":"bob@cogarttech.com",
"description":"cowehuanouftyvwlrsqhrnpjbhheuq",
"lastname":"Reselman",
"firstname":"Bob"}]

Here is the output:

pcvim
twzbl
gajpv
awdjq
gprzp
usnmd
wofcd
mslmt
zmyec
mzged
ewhwu
lcbwe
blugp
zbsye
rmfvp
lfcrv
nojgb
shdaw
uqoal
grwhy
fvijk
brtmf
jnwso
alhef
jpvqr
kdwdy
tlnsg
supiy
ceqdb
eryyr

As you might imagine, I've taken an interest in MongoDB. I don't know if I like it yet, given that it is in a way sorta of a throw back to IMS. But, hey, maybe progress is more about rewriting an old story than not.

Q: How is a Coder like a Musician?

2010-10-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

A: Please see Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Coder - Musician Matrix

Changing Advertising Paradigms and My Grandmother

2010-09-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

My grandmother was born in the year 1900 in northeast Pennsylvania. At the time of her birth 43% of population in the US worked in agriculture. Automobiles were just beginning to dot the landscape and the airplane had yet to be invented. Also there wasn’t any commercial radio broadcasting. The median household income was $438 a year, not a lot by today’s standards.

You might imagine that my grandmother was born into a horse drawn world of farmers reading aloud around the fireplace at night after a hard day of laborious toil in the fields. The reality was a bit different. Joseph Campbell was packaging and selling Campbell’s Soup in tin cans in 1890. In 1899 you could buy a box of GEM paper clips via mail order and by 1901 King Gillette, a failed bottle cap salesman, was becoming quite rich from giving away the Gillette Safety Razor in order to sell the blades. My grandmother’s world had a lot of consumer technology available.

And with all this technology came advertising, a lot of advertising.

Figure 1: Advertising for mail order buying sold a lot of consumer technology in the late 19th Century.

Pictures and Words

Up until the late 1930s the predominant advertising medium of my grandmother’s time was print, text and illustrations distributed in pages of newspapers and magazines, on billboards and point of purchase posters, and the print equivalent of the infomercial, mail order catalogs. (Please see Figure 2.)

Figure 2: Sears, Roebuck and Co. Mail Order Catalog, 1900

Yet the focus of all this advertising was as it is today— to continuously emit compelling, memorable messages about the product at hand to as many qualified buyers as possible, in as timely a manner possible, as cost effectively as possible in order to build product awareness and increase sales.

Figure 3: The Boardwalk in Atlantic City 1923 - From the start advertisers wanted to reach as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, as cost effectively as possible.

As mentioned above, there was a lot of money being spent on advertising in my grandmother’s day. And, there were a lot of big advertising agencies working on behalf of major businesses to get the message out. Powerhouse agency J. Walter Thompson, born Carlton & Smith in 1864, had billings of $1,000,000 in 1890 dollars!

Business Analytics and Sex

Not only was advertising big, it was becoming more focused. In 1912 J. Walter Thompson commissioned a market study, Population and Its Distribution. Advertisers wanted to know more about people like my grandmother, how did she fit in a demographic model and what turned her on as a buyer? An advertising paradigm shift was in the works; the use of business analytics to understand the market.

The average life span for a man or woman in the United States in 1890 was ~45 years of age. Fifteen out of every one hundred children born died in childbirth. A toothache could kill you. So when it came to selling soap, the ability to cure ills was something to be advertised.

In 1910 advertisements for Woodbury Soap, manufactured since 1870, showed an illustrated headshot of John Woodbury with text describing the dermatological disorders the product would alleviate. Then around 1911 the advertisements shift focus. Gone were the descriptions of ills to be cured in favor of J. Walter Thompson’s ingenious "skin you love to touch" campaign. Sex appeal was appealing. Sales of Woodbury’s Facial Soap went through the roof.

Figure 4: Woodbury Soap Ad - Late 19th Century

Figure 5: Woodbury Soap Ad 1915 - J. Walter Thompson's "a skin you love to touch"

The paradigm was shifting from creating rational appeal to emotional affinity. But, to my grandmother it was still just text and pictures on a billboard, or in a magazine or newspaper...until the advent of radio.

Radio: Word of Mouth Gets a Big Mouth

Despite the fact that my grandmother as born into a world in which the printed word was ubiquitous and literacy was becoming increasingly universal, my grandmother was not a big reader. The only book that she kept in her house was the Bible. Her magazine of choice was the Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail order catalog, a collection of print ads impersonating a book. My grandmother got her information about the world around her mostly from the people around her: word of mouth. So when radio, that wooden box that sits in your living room and emits sound through the magic of the airwaves, came into general use in the 1930s, my grandmother was probably astounded and intrigued. At last she could have someone to talk to her whenever she wanted. And, there were plenty of people who wanted to talk to her and were willing to pay money to have her ear--advertisers.

Radio brought in a fundamental paradigm shift, to mass communication in general and in the way advertising was devised and sold, in particular.

By nature radio requires the use of the listener’s imagination. When an announcer describes a baseball game on the radio, you recreate the game in your head. When the announcer says "fly ball to left field" your mind imagines the ball flying through the air into the left fielder’s mitt. And, if you happen to know beforehand who the left fielder is, you can image that person catching the ball. With radio, you have to recreate the ballgame in your head.

So what does this have to do with my grandmother and advertising paradigms?

Radio is time dependent. Whereas with print readers can spend as much time on an advertisement as he or she desires, going back and reread portions of the copy, with radio there is only one way to go, forward. And, that "forward" is time bound. The implications for advertising are significant. Not only does your advertisement have to be easy to imagine and easy to remember, you need to KEEP the attention of the listener for the entire times spot. Thus, dramatic impact and repetition become important forces; hence the emergence of jingles and slogans.

When it came to selling advertising, advertisers were no longer buying space on a page; they were buying the time of an audience, sometimes a minute or two in the form of commercial spots or less directly as a sponsor of an entire program.

Big Business is Watching You

By 1938 my grandmother was a middle-aged woman and advertising had turned a significant corner. 1938 was the year in which more money was spent on radio ads than on print. And another paradigm shift was in the works: the gathering of intelligence about consumer listening behavior via electronic monitoring. By the early 1940s the Nielsen Audiometer was telling advertisers when and where the radio dials of listeners were moving. Now broadcasters and advertisers could determine the popularity of shows and advertisements as a percentage of market share using the Nielsen Radio Index. Needless to say, some time became more valuable than other time and prices were set accordingly.

But all my grandmother cared about was the voice in the box. She had no idea that she was being monitored, inspected and dissected. She could care less about the cost and efficiency of advertising.

Television: The Magical Box with Wire Ears

By the 1960’s my grandmother had moved from Pennsylvania to urban New Jersey, near NYC. By 1965 she had a black and white TV, albeit one from the early fifties. That TV was a very big wooden box that was about 4 feet tall with a seventeen-inch diagonal screen on top and speaker enclosed on the bottom. (Please see Figure 6.) The set used a rabbit eared antennae on top of the box to get the sound and image out of the air and vacuum tubes to convert those waves into an audio-visual experience in her living room.

Figure 6: The Early TV Set, the precursor to the Entertainment Center

Due to her proximity to NYC, she had a lot of television available to her. She could view three national network channels as well as three local ones. And of course there was the nascent public television channel. Most of the channels broadcast from 5:30 AM in the morning until 1 AM that night. One channel ran movies throughout the night. All the others showed a test pattern accompanied by a high pitch squeal. (Please see Figure 7)

Figure 7: The 2 AM - 5:30 AM Television Viewing Experience circa 1960.

Were my grandmother to have stayed in Pennsylvania in the 1960s she would have had three channels available to her and no twenty-four hour viewing anywhere. Nielsen still reported viewer habits statistically via a set top box. Television advertised to you in the home and in the bar. Radio advertised to you at work and in the car. To my grandmother it didn’t matter. She did not watch a lot of TV in the 60’s.

Cable: Advertising for Pizzerias

My grandmother moved back to Pennsylvania around the end of the sixties. By NYC standards, she was living in a backwater. In the late seventies cable broadcasting changed everything. The backwater was evaporating. From the East Coast to the West Coast, from North to South, we were becoming one big unified viewing experience. But behind the scenes advertisers were pinpointing advertisements specific to the demographic of our zip code. Forget Nielsen. Now every cable broadcaster knew what every subscriber was watching. I might be tuned in to same MTV in Boston as my cousins were watching outside of Scranton PA. But, our ad experience was different, well beyond the general regional advertising catchment available to advertisers during the days of antennae driven broadcasting. Under the new paradigm a pizzeria in East Lansing, Michigan could advertise via cable broadcast to households in East Lansing and not have to waste precious ad dollars on worthless eyeballs in Flint, fifty miles away.

Seeing it All

My grandmother died in 1993. Her lifetime started with the airplane taking off. As a young mother the radio told her about Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic and in her old age the television showed her men walking on the moon. She had literally heard and seen it all.

At the time of her death a big color television with a very large screen kept my grandmother company during her waking hours. Her favorite shows were afternoon soap operas. As her children and grandchildren moved on, TV characters became the people in her world.
My grandmother never experienced the Internet and the rise of precision advertising facilitated by an arsenal of business intelligence technologies. But to her it would not have mattered anyway. To my grandmother it would have all been as it always was—print, sound and pictures in motion. And no matter what, to the advertiser it is as it has always been: to continuously emit compelling, memorable messages about the product at hand to as many qualified buyers as possible, in as timely a manner possible, as cost effectively as possible in order to build product awareness and increase sales.

Q: When do dreams become a reality?

2010-09-07T17:12:00.000-07:00

A: When nobody's paying attention.

Punch line here.

Q: How much does it cost to really scare Hollywood?

2010-02-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

A: $1,840.46

Table 1 below is an equipment list that I put together for the purpose of making reasonable single camera, high definition, special effects treated videos of industrial quality. No doubt, industrial quality won't put many butts in the seats of the local multiplex theater. But, it will allow me to learn enough to transform some ideas into green light possibilities, were my interests to be in that realm.

Good thing for David, Steven and Jeffery that my ambitions are in the here and now.

BTW: I just bought a 1TB drive for $119.00. In 1987 I bought a 20 MB drive for $289; that's about 50,000 time more storage at less than half the price I paid in '87.

Kevin Kelly was right. Follow the free.

Table 1: An equipment list for driving Hollywood to the hills

1	Canon HF-20,Dual Flash Memory Camcorder	568.00	568.00
1	PRO 72" Super Strong Tripod With Deluxe Soft Carrying Case	19.89	19.89
1	Gemini UF-2064HL UHF Dual Wireless System 2 Headset/Lavalier	279.00	279.00
1	Audio-Technica MB-1K Uni-Directional Vocal Microphone	28.96	28.96
1	On-Stage Stands SDS7200B	12.99	12.99
1	Peavey PV6 Mixer	89.95	89.95
1	PREMIUM 50FT 3.5mm Stereo Male to 3.5mm Stereo Female 22AWG	9.95	9.95
1	3.5mm Stereo Plug/2 RCA Plug cable - 6ft	0.76	0.76
3	Premier Series XLR Male to XLR Female 16AWG Cable - Gold Plated - 3ft	7.30	21.90
1	Apple Final Cut Studio 3	$809.06	809.06
		Total	$1,840.46

Q: What happens with you take your wife to a geek conference?

2010-02-20T16:39:00.000-08:00

A: The sofa becomes your new best friend and boring becomes your environment imagined

Actually, I am not going to go into this in any sort of detail. Those of you who are self-admitted geeks know what I am talking about.

For those of you who are not geeks, and are thinking of making a lifelong or afterlife commitment to a geek, go here or here or here before taking the vow. If you can live with it, move forward.

For those of you that are looking for the SCALE Edition of the 7 Rules for Writing World Class Technical Documentation PowerPoint, go here. Otherwise you can read the article here.

Q: Why spend time on 800 words when you can do it in 150 characters?

2010-01-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

A: Because a fruit fly is not an airplane

(Allow me to twist some logic.)

I am hearing a lot of noise in the thought-o-sphere that the attention span of the public mind is just short of 20 second sound bites and 150 character tweets.

Might be true.

Recently I had to express the benefit, modernity and newsworthiness of a very complex technical architecture in under 200 words. It took me about an hour and half with a half dozen revisions. Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, "I would have written less, if I had more time."

The task was hard, really hard.

Let's face it, there's a lot of engineering going on to get a fruit fly off the ground, maybe more than required for an airplane. I mean, jeepers, fruit flies know how to replicate themselves!

It seems to me that issue at hand is not the brevity of message format. There's nothing wrong with a headline... as long as it's attached to a good story. In fact, headlines are a necessary part of a good story.

Sadly, most of the stories are just not that good.

[Word count: 205]

Q: What happens when you die?

2009-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

A: Your Facebook page lives on

I did it. I created a Facebook site for myself. I uploaded my email contact list which Facebook used to automagically send out 'friend' invites. Then I started to look at my 'friends' lists, my 'friends' of a friend's list and so forth and so on through the network. Now some of my acquaintances are 'friends', some of my current friends are 'friends', some people from my past are 'friends' and I am sure a few Facebook impostors are my new 'friends' too. Who knows, maybe Donald Fagen will be a 'friend'. Maybe a 'friend' will offer to drive me to the airport or invite me over to dinner. Maybe a 'friend' will volunteer to look after my dog while I am on vacation.

I can only hope.

Don’t get me wrong; I am really hot on Facebook. I find the notion and technology compelling. Facebook is important. These guys got it right, for the most part. I mean jeepers, the increase in the sales of BlackBerry and iPhone units that result from 'friends' just having to see what's on their walls is going to be of significant consequence. Facebook is a great step forward in the ongoing transformation of human attention into real currency.

I am a little embarrassed to admit it, but I find my introduction to using Facebook to be very meaningful. I am sorta loathe to go with the crowd. But, a I said earlier, it's an important technology.

A photographer-person that I knew from college days took a lot of photos during that time and posted them on his Facebook site. I was in a few of the photos. These photos, coupled with the ones I discovered as I put my life together to present on Facebook, have allowed me to take an objective look at my life. Words really don’t describe that which the eyes in those photos reveal. So here is a sampling.

Oh yeah, my daughters have yet to accept my invitation to be a 'friend'.

Q: What is the cure for our woes?

2009-08-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

A: Three days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music.

Forty years ago today I woke up in the back of a Pepsi truck. I had left Port Authority Terminal the previous night on a bus to Bethel, New York to go to Woodstock. I was with my friend, Henry.

The bus got caught in traffic way outside of the festival area, so we got out and walked, all night long. Sunrise came. It was pouring rain. The only dry place that I could find was in the back of an empty Pepsi truck on the periphery of the festival field. Henry was across from me. It was Saturday morning. We fell asleep in a sitting position.

When we woke up we were cold, damp and hungry. So, we did what the times demanded. We ate the orange acid.

And thus began my participation in the Woodstock Festival.

We trudged down into the mud, found a place to the center-right of the stage, about 150 yards up and sat down. The sun came out. Things began to warm up and look a whole lot better. I was no longer cold, damp and hungry. I was someplace else, someplace really, really else.

The first band up that Saturday was named Quill or Keef Hartley. I had never heard of them at that time and I have not heard of them since. No matter.

From then on it was pretty much as depicted in the movie, except for two things: Sly and chicken tacos.

After traveling around the cosmos for most of Saturday, I needed a rest. At some point in the late night, after Janis, I fell asleep again. Somewhere in my sleep I remember feeling the ground shake. I woke up. The ground was shaking still. I got up to look around. Down on the stage was Sly and the Family Stone. The ground was not really shaking. It was moving sympathetically to Larry Graham’s bass lines. The music literally took over my body. I had no say in the matter. The next thing that I knew I was singing “Higher” while dancing around on the little piece of muddy heaven on Earth that the cosmos had given me for the weekend. Had you told then that I would carry those sounds and memories around with me for the rest of my life, I would say that you were probably right. At that point the whole notion of what it meant to be alive shifted a few degrees off the beaten path. And, at last I knew what it meant to really play the bass.

After Sly finished his act and the stage was clearing I realized that I had not eaten in two days. So, I figured that getting some food might be a good idea. I left my muddy piece of paradise and made it to the periphery at the back of the field. I found a taco stand and stood in line for a while. I bought some chicken tacos and took them back on plate to share with my friend Henry. All of the fairy dust had worn off, so I was pretty hungry.

So there I was trudging through the mud back to my spot when out of nowhere a hand came up and overturned my plate of chicken tacos. I was really hungry and really looking forward to those tacos. The guy that had tipped over my meal looked up at me from the ground where he was sitting and said, “I am sorry man.”

I said, “It’s alright.”

And, it really was. At that point I had not a stitch of anger in me. The tacos were on the ground. That was it. There was nothing to get mad about. Why? Because for the first time in a long, long while I felt safe; really, really safe. At that moment everything was all right in the world. It was as if the horror that the TV had been bringing me since Nov 22, 1963 did not exist. Walter Cronkite was not there on the 6 O'Clock News to tell me how many of us and them had been killed that day in Viet Nam; there was no “we interrupt this program to tell you that somebody has been shot … again.” There was no more fear of getting arrested and being tossed into jail for ten years for being an adolescent pot smoker. I did not have to think about what I was going to do if I was drafted when I turned nineteen, to be brought into a war that had been with me all of my life. At that moment in time and space, I was safe. Nobody was going to do anything bad to me. Nobody was going to threaten to take me in the boy’s room, cut my hair and then beat the living daylights out of me. All that I had to worry about was to not eat the purple acid that the guy on the stage was telling me to watch out for.

And, for one tiny, itsy, bitsy, teeny-weenie, morsel of time I was not alone. There were a lot of me out there. It’s a feeling that’s been hard to replicate since, despite the relief of the last election and close to thirty years of drug-free, alcohol-free living.

Then the sun came up and the rain started again. Henry and I looked at each other. It was time to go. The rain was winning.

So we worked our way out, jumped on the hood of some car going to a bus station and headed for home. I was barefoot. My shoes were out there someplace in the mud.

And so it went, forty years ago today. I was fifteen years old.

Q: What is the warranty of Open Source?

2009-07-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

A: Here, you figure it out.

This posting is rated

PG

[Pretty Geeky]
Knowing about code is helpful,
but not required.

After seven years of enterprise programming in .NET/C#, over the past year I've been relearning the hardcore aspects of enterprise level Java. Maven, Spring, Jetty, Jersey and Eclipse have become my new and free-for-download best friends.

It was hard breaking away from the Redmondians. But after the bait and switch tactic of ASP.NET MVC, I decided to take a rest from the lemming like culture of Visual Studio's "Productivity Out of the Box". I mean, couldn't those guys on Lake Washington figure out that ViewState was a bad idea from the get go?

Anyway, all aspirations come with a price and a story. This is mine:

A few weeks ago I got this bright idea to exercise my Java coding prowess by making a Java library that provides a randomization service against often used data, in this case the city, state, longitude, latitude information associated with a given United States Postal Service zip code.

It was a simple idea. The library publishes a method, getAddress(). Behind the call to getAddress() is code that gets a random Address object from a list of Address objects. The list of Address objects is composed of data that resides in an XML file that contains all the address information for zipcodes in the United States.

The XML file is embedded as a resource in the Java project to allow the library to be transportable. I got the zipcode XML file from the Internet. The effort seemed like a no brainer.

So I make the library code as a Maven project under Eclipse and write my unit tests every step of the way using TestNG. (I am obnoxiously loyal to Test Drive Development.)

I run the unit tests under Eclipse and also from the command line, just to be extra special sure. No problem. All works as planned. At the end of it all I have a nice JAR file which I can share with my coding brethren and qualified family members.

Then I get another bright idea, "Say, wouldn't it be great to expose my Random Address library as a REST service". After all, I am just as susceptible to coding trends as the next guy. So getting a handle on writing a Java based REST service using that new fangled OpenSource project, Jersey, seems a nice way to kill two birds with one stone.

(This is the part in story where the skies beginning to blacken. Evil things are about to happen.)

That night I go home from the day job and begin to read up on Jersey. It seems that all the code examples on the Internet are referencing beta versions of the Jersey artifact, which is weird because I know for a fact that there is a 1.0 version in play. All the coders at work doing REST under Jersey are using the 1.0. Anyway, I figure to myself, what the hell, just get the Jersey code examples to work and take care of upgrading to 1.0 later.

So I do. I use Jersey to get a simple REST site up and running under a Jetty web server.

Then I fiddle with the code to my Jersey REST site to make calls to the API in my Address Randomizer JAR/Library.

You know what? THE ADDRESSS RANDOMIZER LIBRARY DOES NOT WORK!

I figure, OK, I'll work around the Jersey enabled web code; after all maybe the beta version really is a dog. I write a unit test within the REST Web project that accesses the Address Randomizer directly, straight call to the JAR file.

THE UNIT TEST FAILS TOO!

I ask a colleague for guidance. He says to debug the unit test in the Web Project as a remote server. So, I fire up the Surefire debugger from the command line and bind in the unit test under Eclipse.

(Now for those of you common folks that are looking for breathing apparatus by which to survive this descent into the perilous depths of Java coding, please know this: if all this geekiness is causing you to lose interest, take heart! Read on knowing that in 5 years all of this technology will be replaced with a whole new set of gizmos that will be just as hard to learn and equally exasperating to use.)

Back to the coding.

So I look at the code under the remote debugger. It turns out that the XML file is not loading under the REST Web Project. I don't know why. All I know is that there is a null value where the file based InputStream transformed by getResourceAsStream() is supposed to be.

The wheels begin to spin and the self-doubt sets in. What am I doing wrong? What don't I understand? Am I loading the resource properly? Is there something about the Jetty web server that I do not understand? Is the Jersey beta code that wacky? Is there something more about the XML file format that I need to learn?

I go to lunch with a coding friend. We talk about the problem. He says that I might want to check the XML to make sure that the prolog is correct. And, he goes on to say, that it's a real craps shoot coding to XML in Java because all the XML parsers seem to work differently.

So, I fiddle with the encoding. Still, the XML file won't load.

I do some new coding in the original Address Randomizer library using the Xerces parser directly. I get a new error: Content is not allowed in prolog. I track down the error message on the Internet.

At one point I am taken to a Java bug report, UTF-8 encoding does not recognize initial BOM.

I think, can it be this deep that I have to start looking at bytes in the XML file? But, I figure, what the hell? At this point I'll do anything. I am that frazzled.

So I download the workaround code. The code is literally doing byte inspection, not my favorite topic in the world of computer programming. Turns out that the code had portions commented out. Can I trust this code? I go through it line by line trying to follow the logic. It seems that some of the comments were left in by error. I start uncommenting code. Then recommenting code.

Three hours later I am still at a standstill. I go to sleep quivering in my bed completely obsessed about the error of my ways. I just can't get it. The code is working running the unit tests under Eclipse. But, when I try to use the code in the REST Web Project, running against Maven from the command line, it fails.

It's a new day. It's the weekend. I can hit the code really hard.

So I start fresh, getting ready to completely rewrite the whole Random Address library. Then I notice something.

I try to follow good coding practice. Thus, I put the name of the XML file in the resource as a constant value like so:

/** The Constant ZIPCODES_FILESPEC. */
private static final String ZIPCODES_FILESPEC = "zipCodes.xml";

Just for giggles, I look at the name of the resource file in the file system.

The name of the XML, zipcodes.xml.

Again, the name of the XML file in the file system is, zipcodes.xml. The value assigned to the constant in my code is, zipCodes.xml. One little 'c'!

So I go back and change the constant value to:

private static final String ZIPCODES_FILESPEC = "zipcodes.xml";

The code works everywhere!

So what do we have? I spent at least three evenings trying to find the bug and fix it. I took the time of at least two of my friends trying to leverage their expertise to solve my problem. All for what?

Here's for what: Learning that the libraries under Eclipse will load a resource file, case insensitive against a filename:

/**
* This is a helper method that fetches an Xml file that is embedded as a
* resources as an InputStream and converts that input stream into a string
* that represents an in memory representation of that Xml file
*
* @param resourceFilename
* the name of the xml file. You do NOT need to prepend a '/'
* symbol to the file name. This method make the prepend for you.
* @return the xml file as a string
*
@throws IOException Signals that an I/O exception has occurred.
*/
String getXmlFileString(String resourceFilename) throws IOException {
InputStream is = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream(
String.format("/%s", resourceFilename));
return convertStreamToString(is);
}

While the libraries in my Web Project will not!

Had Eclipse failed from the get go, I might have noticed that one little 'c' a whole lot earlier and avoided many a night of fitful sleep.

I love to code, always have, and always will. Coding is an enormously demanding, yet intensely satisfying creative experience that's hard to describe to anybody but another programmer. Still, when I signed up to work with code as a way of life, I don't remember reading the paragraph that said to be suspicious of all that you see and never to expect anything to really work, particularly if you follow the Way of the OpenSource.

It's like this: most painter's don't have to know about the in's and out's of each type of paint in order to make a portrait. Paint making is mostly a third party affair. An artist gets some paint and executes the intention.

I really wish that the same could be said of OpenSource programming. I do. I really, really do.

Muse Alert!

I need to thank my wife for her patience on this one. I spent the whole weekend getting the code to run and then writing up on it.

She didn't give me any trouble at all; no "You are spending too much time in your geekiness."

Most guys would have been sleeping on the couch for lesser offenses.

Q: What happens when work goes away?

2009-07-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

A: Society goes insane

No doubt about it, the bubble's blown and payment is due. Without a moment's thought I can come up with three friends that are out of work.

It seems as if every Saturday the number of people trying to resell old clothes, VHS players and tattered furniture along that stretch of block on Venice Blvd, just west of Sawtelle is getting bigger. The sellers are people that used to work in kitchens, haul lumber at job sites, trim trees and do light assembly in local plants. The work that they did was provided by an economy that was based on funny money. And that money is long gone and it ain't never coming back; neither are those jobs.

So this where we ended up. It's like some scene out of Metropolis where the cream of society dress in white and live far up high in the clouds. The laborers dress in black and everyday march into the bowels of the earth in a eerie lockstep to man the gears of industry. Sort of like working on the line in what used to be GM. Only now they march in lockstep to the unemployment line, food stamp office or, if INS status is wanting, the nearest border.

The sad fact is that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people will be unable to participate as wage earners in the modern economy. We've moved way beyond the value of labor being the brawn of one's body. And, that taking advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in most situations comes with a need for significant amounts of capital means that you can kiss goodbye the notion of starting an empire by selling oranges on the side of the road and reinvesting the profits. Fact is, the only viable side of the road to be had has 4 lanes in each direction with a name that starts with the letter "I", as in I95 and I80. Mickey D, Pizza Hut and Burger King tied those locations up a while ago.

Besides the important aspect of providing money to put food on the table, work organizes one's self and one's society. Ever since being ejected into the world, we've had agents that have organized our sense of self. When we were infants our parents held us and talked to us, even before we could figure out what they were saying. The subliminal message was,"You exist, you exist". We needed the ongoing message for our identity to emerge.

Then as we got older, regularity set in. Most of us had a specific meal time and bedtime. Then it was time to go to school. Our week became organized. School was soooo boring. But, as much as we hated it, the structuring of time further enhanced our sense of self and brought predictability to our world.

After school, we went to work. For some of us who were lucky enough, our life had meaning. But no matter what, just about all of us had structure. The notion of being without ego was kept far away. If we had no internal sense of existence, then that was easily provided by the alarm clock going off each morning.

But what about those of us that didn't have the parent telling us that we existed, the predictable meal and bed time and all the external structures that take a blob of undefined identity and evolve it into a mature human being? What's happens to these people?

Well, if the world won't on its own provide the structure required to differentiate, then these type of people force the world's hand. They injure themselves in public view. They'll get caught for a grand or petty crime that ends up having time structured for them: jail. In some cases they'll just join the military.

The human psyche needs structure.

Which brings us to work. Here's the deal. All the talking heads are saying that we are going to have significant unemployment for a long time, maybe forever. It takes a lot of smarts to participate in the modern economy. After a while the UPS packages will figure out how to deliver themselves and all the movie theaters will be in your house, even the 3D ones. We won't need drivers or ushers.

The birth rate might go down. But, without birth control in the water supply that's debatable. So there is a good possibility that we'll have a lot of people sitting around with no place to go, without need of an alarm clock. The external structures that reinforce ones sense of self will diminish. An ego without identity is an ego in panic.

Then as far fetched as it might sound, if the unemployment rate is high enough, for long enough, society just might go insane.

Q: What’s more dangerous than global warming?

2009-05-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

A: Riding a bicycle

OK, I’ll admit it; the global warming stuff is scaring the bejeesus out of me. You’d have to be half brain dead to think that melting glaciers, weird weather and rampant drought are not very, very serious problems.

There's no twisting my arm; I’ve drunk the kool-aid. Global warming is serious and I am not going to be an innocent bystander on the road to geothermal destruction.

So, I am paying attention and doing all that makes sense. I’ve taken a job four miles from my domicile. I drive a four-cylinder car, as does my wife. I have two trash bins in my kitchen, one for bio-degradable waste, the other is for recyclables. And, I avoid using my car whenever possible.

Which brings me to the bicycle.

I bought a bicycle a few months ago in order to kill two birds with one stone: to get some ‘free exercise’ and also to do my part bucking the trend toward environmental Armageddon. I mean, I going to go to work anyway, so I might as well burn some calories on the way there. And, there is both a moral and financial exhilaration that comes with filling the tank every two weeks. Win/win as they say.

Well that’s the dream. Let me tell you the facts. Riding a bike from West LA to Santa Monica is like going all in with the chips that represent the remainder of your lifespan. First, most streets do not have bike lanes. This means that I am forced to share the roads with four thousand pound monsters traveling at forty miles an hour, any one of which can just flick me off planet Earth with nothing more than a nudge from its right fender. And, if the fender does not get me, an open driver's side door on a parked vehicle will. The best case is that I can see it coming and hopefully avoid throwing myself over the handlebars as I careen to a stop. The worst case is that I go flying over the door into traffic, in which case I’ll get a one-way ambulance trip to a local hospital.

And then there are the alleys and driveways. I have to watch each alley and driveway that I pass to make sure that there is no vehicle emerging. In most cases the driver will not see me coming. And, if he or she does, it has been my experience that most times it just won’t matter. The vehicle keeps going on just the same. It’s as if I have a sign on my back that says ‘Hit me’.

There is no place for bicyclists on the thoroughfares of the American city. Don’t let the Save the Planet mumbo jumbo fool you. When it comes to LA, New York, Boston or Chicago, Mother Earth has been bought off by the Big Three, or what’s left of them.

But, there is a little, millimeter size sliver of hope. Some cities get it. If you live in Barcelona, you can walk up to a ‘share a bike’ stand and take a bike through a myriad of bike lanes to your destination. Pickup, ride, drop off…simple.

The same is true in Paris and Rome. We’re not talking about a few bikes for the Birkenstock crowd. According to a friend of mine from Paris, the City of Lights is going to put 400,000 bikes on the street. This is a lot of drivers to take out from behind the wheel.

Sour grapes aside, I’ll still keep at it. I need the exercise. When worse comes to worse, I'll ride on the sidewalk despite the fact that my municipal guide to bike riding in Los Angeles advises me not to. Who knows, maybe the bike thing will catch on.

Keep hope alive.

Q: What’s a good way for a Big Corporation to save money?

2009-03-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

A: Use the Corporate Jet [listen]

OK, I’ll admit it. I don’t think that I am going to make any new friends on this one. But, what the hell?

It seems that recently there has been a lot of hubbub running through the airwaves expressing indignation about the audacity of Big Ass Bank CEO’s taking the corporate jet to Washington in order to get some bailout dough in order to allow the big wheels of finance to keep on rolling.

Whether or not bailing out cash strapped banks is a good idea is a question that is better answered by someone who actually knows something about intricacies of financial prestidigitation. As far I can tell, turning a ten dollar deposit into a hundred dollars in loans is a fantastic, yet fundamental magic trick that seems to be the bedrock of the global economy.

So I am not going to comment about the wisdom of bank bailouts. But, I do know something about the economy of corporate jets.

The Big Ass Computer Manufacturer that I worked for in the nineties had a jet. It was a Gulfstream, I think. I was never on it. That was a privilege reserved for senior executives and board members.

One day I was ranting on about the injustice of it all—thousands of assembly line workers supporting the excess privilege of corporate executives. After I finished my rant my boss sat me down to explain the facts of life. If I had to put a title on the lecture, I would call it, The Value of Time.

At the time I was working for the Big Ass Computer Manufacturer, it had 19,000 employees and was pumping billions of dollars in revenue. Also the company’s stock was headed to its $80 a share high mark. There were billions of dollar in play every day. At the top of this prosperity was a group of ten people running it all. If these guys made a good decision at 9 AM, a few million dollars showed up on the bottom line at 5 PM; make a bad decision and a few million bucks went to the red. Given these numbers, it is not that far fetched to think that the value of the senior executive’s time was worth well in excess of $5,000 an hour.

So let’s say I am Joe the CEO in New York and I have a meeting in Washington with the powers that be. Let’s use the scenario that my group of four—me and three senior VPs—are traveling on a standard commercial flight, at a ticket cost of $658 round trip from NY to Washington.

We leave my office at 10 AM, just after a 9 AM conference call with the President of France. We want to get to LGA by 10:30 AM for an 11 AM flight to DC. We hit severe traffic at the Triborough and get to LaGuardia at 10:50 AM. Due to the heavy traffic we have missed the flight. The next one is in an hour. So, we get to wait. That hour will cost my company at the least $20,000. And because we are to meet with the House Committee on Really Important Things, I am going to cost the taxpayers some money because all the Congressmen and Congresswomen will have to wait for us too.

Or we can go to Plan B. We leave my office at 10 AM, hit severe traffic, arrive at La Guardia at 10:50 AM. We go to the Corporate Hangar, get on the Gulfstream and off we go. The cost? About four thousand bucks a head back and forth. (You can lease 50 hours of a corporate jet for about $425,000 or 8,515 an hour.) While this may seem expensive at first glance, when you take a look at numbers in terms of risk mitigation and opportunity cost, four thousand bucks for a NY to Washington roundtrip flight for a Fortune 500 executive is not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good.

I know, I know, four grand is a lot for the average traveling salesman. But, these people are not average. They may be running multi-billion dollar corporations into the ground, but they *are* running multi-billion dollar corporations. The Gulfstream is nothing more than a piece of the equipment that you need to play the game. Think about it. A pair of leg pads for a NHL goalie still costs around $1200, even if the goalie plays for a last place team. It costs a lot of money to play in the Big Leagues.

So it seems to me that the real issue is not the corporate jet. It’s the people traveling in the corporate jet. I mean, all this righteous indignation would be but a murmur if the passenger were Brad Pitt, or if our 401Ks were worth the money that we put into them.

Q: What is the price of a drink?

2009-02-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

A: $36,000

The other day I had a Dim Sum breakfast with some friends in LA’s Chinatown. Afterward we decided to take a walk around the area to get a sense of the local color.

So off we went.

We came upon this big store. It was like a cross between an Asian grocery store and an Asian department store. We went inside.

We strolled past a large varieties of ginseng root and royal jelly elixir, took a turn upstairs into cookware, bowls, plates, cups and finally went back downstairs to exit. We were about to leave when I noticed a large counter displaying an assortment of liquor. I went over.

Usually I don’t go near areas where liquor is being sold. I don’t go into liquor stores. In fact, I don’t even go down the beer and wine aisle in grocery stores. Alcohol and I parted ways a long time ago in early adulthood. It was a perilous relationship that was best to terminate and one that I have little desire to rekindle. But, in this instance there was something about that counter that drew me near.

I strolled over, past the Stoli and Jack Daniels. I looked into the glass case in front of me. There it was, the $36,000 bottle of cognac:

(click to zoom in)

We’re not taking thirty six hundred dollars; we’re talking thirty six thousand dollars—a year’s salary for somebody making $18 an hour.

I had to know more.

Turns out the liquor is Remy Martin Louis XIII Black Pearl cognac:

The new release will be limited to 786 bottles, the number of decanters that can be taken from one tiercon, the type of oak barrel used by Rémy Martin to age Louis XIII. The spirit is created from 1,200 eaux-de-vie aged 40 – 100 years. The Louis XIII Black Pearl decanter is made of crystal that has a silvery gleam like polished hematite and the decanter is finished with platinum fleur-de-lis designs. Each decanter is numbered and purchasing is done by invitation only.

I was hooked. I went to the web site. There was a cute, high end, animation. In order to get anywhere beyond the introductory Flash I had to register. So I did.

And then I got this message:

(click to zoom in)

There was no more Louis XIII to be had. All 100 bottles allocated to the US market had been bought. And, it seems that one of them made it to Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA where it will be bought by somebody to whom money is no object when it comes to taking a swig of fine spirits.

So think about this the next time that you hear about GM on the verge of bankruptcy and millions of Americans being out of work—the rich really are different than you and me, always were, always will be. Just ask Louis XIII.

Q: For what did Stalin lust?

2009-02-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

A: Twitter

One of the things that made Winston Smith special was that he could hide from the camera. Everybody else in 1984 was watched all the time, but not Winston Smith. His apartment had a unique floor plan. There was one little corner in his flat where the camera could not see him. He had privacy.

1984 was a fantasy, albeit a grim fantasy. The old Soviet Union was the real deal. Stalin went to a great deal of trouble to make sure that the government knew as much about the governed as was possible. Children ratted on their parents, students on teachers, employers on employees, neighbors on each other. Complete knowledge about, and control of the comings, goings and thinking of the population was Stalin's idea of paradise.

But that was then and this is now.

Whereas in the past people jumped barbed wire fences for the right to mind one’s own business, now we can’t wait to give it way.

We used to make it hard for the State to keep tabs on us. Now it’s just a question of buying one of the many GPS enabled devices that are available for purchase. We don’t have to worry about some neighborhood commissar reporting our whereabouts. Our cell phones will do it just fine.

The sad fact is that we really don’t mind. We’re more than happy to report what we’ve eaten for breakfast, who we’re dating, the books we’re reading, even when we’re taking a bath. It seems as if we can’t wait to tell the whole world the most trivial facts about ourselves. Yet when someone on the elevator asks us how we’re doing, we say, "fine" regardless of the true state of our condition.

It seems as if we’ve created social networks with a slew of supporting technologies without having any idea about who our next door neighbors are.

But the saddest thing of all is that our billions of bite size messages don’t mean squat. Yeah, the State wants to keep an eye on us to make sure we’re not going to blow stuff up or infect Los Angeles with The Plague. So, in a sense, those messages count. But all the other messages—where we’re going, who we’re seeing, what we’re thinking—those messages don’t count. It’s noise to the powers that be. The only messages that count are the messages that The Man overlays on our messages, and those messages are called advertisements. Because you see, in the currency of human attention, advertising is what makes the world go 'round. Just ask Google.

So think about that the next time you just gotta Twitter.

Q: What’s more painful than putting your head in a bucket of ice water?

2009-01-23T19:09:00.000-08:00

A: Paying attention to the news.

OK, I’ll admit it. The transnational, worldwide message queue is more messed up than usual. Normally you’d turn on the television and get your standard assortment of rapes, murders, fires, lost dogs and celebrity DUIs. No big deal. Our cultural metabolism has developed over the years to accommodate the day to day anxiety and fear produced by bad news, sort of like accommodating the fact that most of us are going to have skin damage due to too much sunshine. Melanoma has become more an annoyance than a terminal possibility.

But that was then and this is now.

Now you turn on the tube and you get a fire hose dousing of tragedy: Microsoft lays off 5000, 1 in 10 mortgages are in trouble, Iceland’s gone bust, Bernie Madoff has stuck it to Kevin Bacon and Steve Jobs is just a bit too skinny for a hormone imbalance. It’s been like this for months now, over and over, on and on, with no end in sight.

I’ll let you in on a secret. It was getting to me. I’d wake up at 7 and have a wrenching stomach by 9.

So I took at look at my morning routine: get up, make the coffee, slice up the banana, mix it with yoghurt, pour in the walnuts, sit down, read Google News, The NY Times, Huffington Post and then do a fast check on iGoogle to check out Market activity.

I got to thinking, “jeepers, is my information queue messing with my head?” I abandoned network news and CNN years ago. I knew that stuff was poison in a flat screen panel. I thought that I was safe. Maybe I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I pride myself on being well informed. But the information was killing me.

So I stopped reading the news until noon. It helped a bit. Yet I still had that gnawing feeling of impending doom.

I decided to be proactive. I thought, “ya know, instead of polluting my head with bad news, maybe I should take in good news only.”

I found a web site, Good News Network.org. Things were looking up. Turns out the site cost $24 to $97 dollars a year, based on income. I can live with this. I mean, some people need to pay a lot more than a hundred bucks a year to keep the smiley face going. So, in the scheme of things, it’s a good deal and the site’s good too.

You might want to check it out.

But, if you don’t have the bucks to subscribe, send me a note. I’ll help you out. I've made it a practice to find some good news around me on an hour by hour basis. I’ll be happy to share my finding with you.

Operators are standing by.

Q: What’s the easiest way to be a good employer in bad times?

2009-01-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

A: Work with your employees

Somebody I know was laid off on Friday. After two half years of giving it all to a gig as a Web Master for an online publication, he was shown the door. Putting the sadness and stress of the situation aside, it was probably a short sighted move on the part of the employer. Maybe the former employer has a plan in place to mitigate the risk incurred. But, a web site without a web master is like a truck without a truck driver. You really can’t let the machine run uncontrolled.

Way back in 1998 when I worked for the Big Ass Computer Manufacturer, it was layoff time. The company had its first losing quarter ever. So, they did the usual: setup HR counseling, setup a re-employment office with desktops and fax machines, and start the layoffs.

I was friendly with a Big Ass VP. He told me that he had just gotten an email from an employee of 10 years that had been laid off. The laid off worker asked one question: “How could you do this to me?” The VP was shaken. The laid off worker was a friend of his.

When business goes south, changes need to be made, no doubt. Businesses cannot run at a loss forever. But there are typical ways to address bad times, and there are extraordinary ways to address bad times.

I wonder what would have happened at my web master friend’s employer or at the Big Ass Computer Company if the supervisor gathered all the troops together and said, “Business is such that we don’t have enough resources to support our current payroll. Our business is based on treating our customers and our employees as partners. We want to work with you. So I’ve been instructed to ask you, what can we do to solve this problem?”

Maybe somebody will say, “Gee, I can work part time for a few months.”

Maybe somebody else will come up with an idea to increase sales or trim expenses.

Maybe somebody will say, “Hey, Jane doesn’t do jack shit around here. Get rid of her!”

Who knows what other ideas will transpire? Maybe none. But at least all parties will have made the effort to look out for one another.

There is a big difference between having something done to you and having something done with you. It's the difference between a shove and a dance. Shoving creates resentment and retaliation. Dancing makes friends, even after the dance is over.

Q: What’s worse than being unemployed?

2008-12-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

A: Depending on a job.

There has been a lot of screaming coming across the sky, “the layoffs are coming, the layoffs coming”. In fact, they’re here.

The economy is contracting. Thus, no dough means no going to the mall to work out with the plastic and no going to the bank to refi the house in order to pay down the plastic to be able to go back to the mall.

It seems that the only things going these days are the Big Ass Corporations going to the Government to refi the whole stinking mess. This has happened before and it will happen again. It’s sort of the way the economy works. That this recent run of profitability from 2002-2008½ was based on more than the usual amount of funny money is making it feel as if tragedy is coming out of nowhere.

One day you’re employed; the next day you’re out of a job. And for most people, not having a job is a devastating experience. Jobs are the compass we use by which to navigate life......for most people.

The story that has been fed to us since the time that we filled out our first form is that a responsible person can get and hold a job....forever. The responsible citizen gets up and goes to the office, plant or delivery truck to do a day’s work for a day’s wage. Only miscreants, con men, artists and actors drift from gig to gig, working as the work suits them, unless of course you happen to be ‘well-off’, which probably means that you made some money doing the work that suits you, not laboring away in a corporate position waiting to see if you get your annual 3-6% raise depending on the strength of your performance review and the company’s financial condition.

And as I said, this is supposed to go on forever, or at least until you retire or die, whichever comes first.

Well those days are over. There is no more ‘forever’ in the corporate landscape. I don’t know if there ever was really . There is little question in my mind that the perceived, maybe mythical, covenant between worker and corporation, which seems to me to be an offshoot of the 1950's emergence of the Corporate SuperState is gone, never to come back. Except for a few shining years when unions sorta looked out for the basic well-being of the membership, employees are and have been an expense to be minimized whenever possible. I mean, I can’t think of any Captain of Industry that started a business saying, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if we started a company that provides really interesting work and employs a lot of people for life, paying them an extraordinary salary and exceptional benefit package? And, the way we’ll do this is to make great stuff that people need and want!”

We’re just not that generous.

So where does this leave us? I like the notion of working as the work suits me. Also, I like the notion of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

To paraphrase Freud, it's all about love and work. So taking a transitive approach, this is what we get:

meaningful_love + meaningful_work = honest_days_work = honest_days_pay

(But, this is easy for me to say. My kids are grown.)

Q: What is the second rule of software development?

2008-12-06T18:16:00.000-08:00

A: Even the easy stuff is hard

A few years back I found myself sitting in a team meeting about a software project that was running way behind schedule. The company had an old Windows 3.0 product that it was trying to catapult to a Web 2.0 version in order to capture back lost market share.

The meeting was called by a Really Big VP. This last missed date was indeed, The Last Missed Date. There were no more excuses to be had.

So we were sitting in the meeting getting the expected reaming..... as if a blast of justified fury could undo a year of misguided coding. Finally the Really Big VP said, “look, we’re going to finish this product by the end of the month, even if it means that I have to learn how to program over the weekend.”

At that point I knew that this product would never see the light of day. And it didn’t. But more importantly I found myself having to confront this very serious question: How the hell could a profession present itself in such a way as to give feasibility to the notion that competence could be garnered with nothing more than a weekend’s worth of cramming?

I mean, can you imagine a hospital administrator saying, “We are going to save this patient even if it means that I have to learn brain surgery over the weekend”?

Everybody knows that practicing medicine is hard. Yet, for some reason, there’s a bunch of people out there that think that coding is easy.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because of all those advertisements that promote “productivity right out of the box”.

Or maybe it’s because some dentist‘s kid with a knack for Dreamweaver took a few photos and made a web site that got an A on the science fair project. Thus, the syllogism becomes: "hey, if my kid can do it, how hard can it be?"

Whatever the reason, the premise is a dangerous myth.

Believe me, coding is hard. The learning curve takes five years minimum, and the devilish details are picayune and astronomical.

Still we seem to want to believe it’s easy, even yours truly.

For example, only three days ago I thought that I could do an installation of Subversion on a Linux box in four hours. (So what if my installation experience was Windows based?) The reality was that I forgot that I had forgotten all my Unix admin skills as well as my aversion to working at the command line.

So, what I thought would take a half a billing day of labor, took a day and a half and a ton of documentation review.

I guess that the only thing that’s easy when it comes to making software is falling prey to our own delusions.

Q: What is the first rule of software development?

2008-12-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

A: Making software is expensive.

I learned this lesson from one of my former employers, Cap Gemini. Cap Gemini is a very, very big IT consulting company—worldwide, if not intergalactic. The rule at Cap was, “software is expensive; if the client cannot understand this, pass on the work”.

Very few places can pull off making software on the cheap. I’ve seen a few. Usually these places are staffed by about 4 developers that are very, very, very good. They’ve been there, done that and know that even the easy stuff is hard. These types of developers know what to build and what to buy. They don’t have to ask a lot of questions because they have most of the answers. And usually, they’ve learned by burning through a bunch of money on other projects that never saw the light of day.

But, as I’ve said, such situations are rare.

Everybody else just has to bite the bullet and accept that fact that making code is a high risk game that costs lots of bucks

In fact, a good case can be made that the less the product sells for, the more expensive it is to make.

Take Windows for example. You can buy a copy of Vista Home Basic for around $200, or get it for “free” when you buy a new machine. Do you have any idea how much it took to make Vista? $10 billion dollars is one estimate. In other words:

$1 of product price = $50,000,000 development cost

Or to put it more concretely:

A single iTunes download (purchase price) = three and a half F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft (development cost)

And this is a product that you pay for. Think of the cost for the stuff that’s given away for nothing…. like Internet Explorer, or Google’s Chrome.

In the case of Microsoft, the company has been making software for twenty years. Although their products may be of questionable quality, you have to think that they learned something along the way about cost control and development efficiency. Believe me, these guys know that you can’t make software on the cheap.

And still the streets are strewn with the carcasses of development projects and web sites that started with an attractive lowest bid or a sales pitch that sounded soooooo good. And then, once the really expensive talent is brought in to resuscitate the mess of dead code that the dream left behind, the truth sets in. Making software is expensive, always has been, always will be.

So the next time you hear of a project that has an operating budget that is not at least 50% more than the estimates, print off this page, and cut along the dotted line below.

Experience has shown time and time again:

     MAKING SOFTWARE IS EXPENSIVE

Don't be fooled otherwise!

Q: How many vehicles does it take to make a point?

2008-11-24T19:32:00.001-08:00

A: Thirty

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the works lately about the plight of the Big 3 Automakers. Will they survive? Should we bail them out? What will it mean to the American economy? The questions seem endless.

So the other day I got this idea to practice some empiricism and get some data on the situation. I decided to take it to the streets, literally.

I enlisted the aid of my dog, Itchy. Itchy is shown below.

While we were out walking, using my trusty Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS, I photographed every car that we passed on the way to the corner of my street.

I live in a neighborhood that is, according to Experian and ZipWho, somewhat white, somewhat Hispanic, somewhat African-American, somewhat Asian and somewhat professional, with a median income of around $37K. In the scheme of Los Angeles, California we’re not Beverly Hills and we’re not South Central. We seem to be sorta in the middle.

I photographed thirty cars. The results of my investigation are consolidated into a single graphic shown below. (You can click on the image to see an enlargement.)

Here are my findings: Of the thirty vehicles photographed, eight were made by a Big 3 Manufacturer. Of the eight Big 3 vehicles, six were either an SUV or a van.

So what can be said? Try this out for size. An overwhelming number of people parked on my side of the street (75%) do NOT drive a Big 3 vehicle. And of those that do drive a Big 3, most drive a gas guzzler (75%).

And people wonder why the Big 3 can’t make any money? From my unscientific inference, it’s not a profit margin problem. It’s a sales problem. Most people are just not buying Big 3 cars. No sales, no business. It’s that simple; it really is.

Being American means buying Toyota.

So here is an idea that is somewhat painful to express. Let the Big 3 go the way of Pan Am, Commodore Computer, Orion Pictures and the IBM Selectric. Hopefully the vital auto manufacturers will buy up the factories, dealerships and customer lists. All will be as it was. The people on the line will keep on working, if not on making cars and trucks that people want to buy, then on a transcontinental light rail system that runs on solar/magnetic power and carries folks and freight from coast to coast at a cost that is a fraction of fossil fuel based transportation. Profits will flow and 401Ks will rise.

All will be well.

It’s that simple; it really is.

Q: What is the shelf life of my head?

2008-11-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

A: Two years

I jumped ship back in July and went from coding in a hardcore .NET enterprise to tech writing in a hardcore J2EE shop. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the technical implications of this move, it’s sort of like a baseball player moving from the American League to the National League—the rules are fundamentally the same, but because there is no designated hitter, pitchers have to hit. Thus, the dynamic of the game is different. You’ve got to make adjustments and learn a new way to play the game.

(For those of you that are tech savvy, the reason for the switch is that the Redmondians embracing MVC in ASP.NET five years too late was the last straw!)

Needless to say I’ve been in heavy duty learning mode about all things OpenSource: Maven, Spring, FreeMarker, SiteMesh, Jetty, Derby, the whole unified theory of programming under POM.XML. The list goes on.

At the end of every week I have to press both hands to my ears to stop my head from spinning. This stuff is hard! You’ve really got to like leaning new things, which I do.

And then I get to thinking to myself, “I wonder, will this be another set of technologies that I’ll employ for a few years and then never have call or need to use again?”

The first time I ever wrote a line of code and gave it to a machine to execute was back in 1975. It was a line of PL/1 code written on a remote terminal and was transmitted directly by telephone wire to a mainframe located at a place unknown. There was no monitor of any sort. All display was handled by a typewriting printer hooked up to the terminal. The paper wasn’t ever perforated to separate neatly. You simply tore it off of the printer.

The purpose of the program was to have the computer solicit the operator to do lewd and lascivious acts. I guess that I was acting out my anger about Watergate.

Since that time I’ve learned a lot of applications and done a lot of programming. Most of what I have learned is useless today. The more I think about it, of all the technologies that I have mastered, the only one that I have used consistently throughout my lifetime has been English. All the others are a crapshoot.

Here is a partial list of all the applications and programming languages that I spent days, some times years of my life learning and which I have not used in the last two years.

Visual Basic/VBA 1.0-6.0
VisualAge for Java
Visual Cafe for Java
Visual C++
Delphi 1.0-4.0
MFC/ATL
COM
MTS/COM+
Together
Windows 3.1/95/98/NT 4.0/
MAC System 5-9
Novell NetWare
LAN Manager
O’Reilly’s WebSite
FrameMaker SDK
Adobe InCopy/InDesign SDK
Lotus 1-2-3 (with macros)
Lotus Symphony
Freelance Graphics
Quattro Pro
Paradox
Ashton Tate DB3
PageMaker
Quark Xpress
Q&A
Harvard Graphics
Storyboard Live!
Demo-It
WordPerfect
AppleWorks
MacWrite
MacPaint
DOS 3-6 (with memory configuration)

My father told me a joke once. It goes like this:

An automobile mechanic sends a bill to a customer for $500. The customer complains, “you had my car for 1 hour and you charge me this? I pay my doctor less for an office visit.”

The mechanic responds, “Well your doctor only needs to know how to work on two models, and they don’t change from year to year.”

I can relate. When it comes to coding, there are some days when Medical School looks really, really good.

Q: How do you know when you are old?

2008-11-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

A: When all the of baseball players, most of the police officers and The President of the United States are younger than you.

I’ve been thinking about my age for a while. I am counting down my remaining years in the workforce from a number somewhere between fifteen and twenty-- fifteen if things look good, most likely twenty if the economy continues going the way of the dodo.

I lay in bed at night pondering a time when I won’t exist as I presently know existence. I, all the memories, anxieties and technologies gathered over a lifetime, will be gone. From what I can gather, there will be no "there" there, no more "me" as me.

Earlier on life was a Never Ending Story. Now I experience it as a collection of chapters with beginnings, middles and ends.

I saw the World Trade Center go up. I saw it come down. I’ve been to Woodstock. I remember the Cub Scout uniform that I was wearing the Friday that Kennedy was shot. I’ve lived through a lot of people being shot. Each is a story in itself.

I remember gas shooting up to 73 cents a gallon in 1973. Today it is a bargain at $2.45.

I can still imagine the sound of a room full of typewriters.

I remember Black Monday in 1987. It didn’t really matter then. I didn’t own any stock and didn’t have a 401K. I just put money in a savings account. That was then, this is now. I’ve grown up. I do own stock and I do have a 401K. If things keep going as is, both will provide me with a comfortable “retirement” for about two weeks.

I’ll probably keep coding into my seventies, if I can keep up and the carpal tunnel doesn’t incapacitate me. Otherwise I’ll become a greeter at Ralph’s, a fate worse than death according to a financial planner that wanted my money back in the nineties.

I've made it to the top of the hill. From here I can see the dock from which the ship departs for the Great Beyond. And yet I still worry about what is to become of me.

But, as we learned out in the terrain: We come in alone. We go out alone. We pack in a bunch of people, pets and things in the middle. The people and pets matter more. The Past is but a memory, the Future is but a dream. All that we really have is Today, with or without a bailout.

Q: What might the recent election signify?

2008-11-06T08:03:00.000-08:00

A: The start of the Great Do Over

Electing Barack Obama President of the United States might indeed be the start of the Great Do Over.

The board, although not wiped clean, has had a number of houses and hotels removed. Maybe the deeds for Boardwalk and Park Place will go back into the box too, for later acquisition by the Public Trust for the betterment of us all. Maybe we'll be able to stash a few hundred dollars more under Free Parking for future generations. Maybe making our way back to GO won't be so risky.

However, the rules of the game are still the rules of the game. Some of the old players at the table still own a lot of properties of like color. And, there are a few Get Out of Jail Free cards outstanding.

Yet today I am as happy to wake up in America as I am to wake up in Los Angeles.

Now, once we get this marriage thing straightened out in terms of one's right to equal access, waking up in California won't be so bad either.

Q: What happens when you can no longer report what you think about an idea?

2008-10-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

A: All that’s left is to report how you feel about it.

In his book, Culture of Complaint, Robert Hughes asserts that, as a culture, we’ve lost the ability to think. I agree. Newspapers have become reduced to running two column stories with lots of graphs and pictures. Movies are more visual action than dialog. And, public political discourse has ended up as nothing more than two minute answers with "one minute follow up" to questions that do nothing more than mirror the obvious.

It’s seems as if we have neither the concern nor the attention span to grasp complex ideas.

From where I sit, the important issues of the day are complex, very complex. Addressing problems with the economy and foreign policy with solutions that can be described in a sentence with less than ten words is an insult.

Sorry, “We’ll get Bin Laden where he lives.”, “The surge worked!”, “A nuclear Iran is dangerous.”, “Those making less than $250,000 will pay less tax.”, “We’ll buy toxic mortgages.” does not cut it. Pretending to be less smart than you really are for fear of voter backlash doesn’t cut it.

I am frustrated and I am angry. I am tired of the dumb stuff.

I want to tune into the next Presidential Debate (if you can really call it that) and I want to hear this:

My fellow Americans, the issues that confront us today are complex. In order to ensure the prosperity and well being of our nation, now and into the future, we must value thoughtful action.

Understanding complex issues takes time, skill and discipline. We cannot address problems that take days to understand with solutions that take minutes to explain. Therefore, I say to you tonight that I plan to take the time necessary to answer fully your questions to the best of my ability, no matter how long it takes! I will not bore you, I promise. Rather, I will engage you and invite you to join me in the labor that is required to act with wisdom.

We must move beyond the politics of sound bites to a politics based on comprehensive thinking about the issues at hand.

We must move beyond how we feel about issues to how we think about issues.

In the defense of liberty and freedom, being thoughtful and learned is no vice. Acting on unsubstantiated belief is no virtue.

And yet sadly I think the probability of this desire being satisfied is about the same as getting world peace in the next 90 days.

There’s a joke. It goes like this:

What’s the difference between a chimp and a human being?

A human being can reason and rotate his or her thumb. But some people only get the thumb.

Yet, no matter what, we still get to vote. So I will.

Q: What is the result of fighting?

2008-09-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

A: Somebody getting hurt.

I’ll share a secret with you. I fight with code. There are times when I will sit down and try to program something that I want. But, the compiler doesn’t like the way that I do things. It kicks out some error messages trying to tell me the error of my ways and then leaves me to my own devices to figure it out. I try to force my will again and the machine just won’t give an inch. Unless I figure out how to accommodate the situation at hand, I am left in the throes of my own frustration. It hurts.

That’s what fighting is really all about, one will trying to gain dominance over another, either by physical force, or in the case of computer programming, intellectual assault.

Fighting with a computer is a waste of time. The computer just doesn’t give a shit and it's impervious to pain . When the fight is between humans, somebody ends up hurting.

It seems that we like to fight, particularly in politics. Candidates want to fight for us. Some candidates want us to fight for them. There are a few that want us to fight, period!

Debates aren’t a rational exchange of ideas. They’re fights. We want to see our guy trounce their guy. That’s the way it is.

There is a theory that the language that we use describes the way that we think.

You don’t hear talk about “struggling”. You don’t hear talk about “persevering”. You don’t hear talk about “thinking”. All you hear is talk about fighting…fight, fight, fight.

We seem to be a nation of fighters, at least that how it seems by the way we talk. I guess that we're not adverse to inflicting pain.

We’ll I don’t like to fight. I like to do things with people that at the end of it all everyone comes out of it feeling just all right. I think that it's called cooperation.

If I am going to hurt somebody there needs to be a really good, concrete, in my face, life and death, immediate family and close friends reason to inflict injury.

Fighting with my neighbors over politics just doesn’t cut it. I’d rather struggle, persevere, think and learn to accommodate the situation at hand in order to get what I want. And, if that doesn't work, move on.

Then when it’s time go to bed at night I will sleep better knowing that nobody got hurt due to my need to have my way.

As they saying goes, all you need is love.

Q: What’s more addictive than heroin?

2008-08-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

A: Tragedy

We all know about addiction: You know something’s bad for you, the more you do it, the worse things will be. And yet when the object of obsession presents itself, you follow with undivided attention. The feeling is just too good to pass up.

So I was watching the Democratic Convention last week and I could not help but notice that sooooo much attention was being given to the episodes of tragedy that exist among the population: the mother with autistic children being denied insurance, the soldier on his third tour in Iraq, the couple that was told to declare bankruptcy or get a divorce for some reason or another. It seems as if we are a nation full of tragedy, that there are so many people down and out and so little time to save them.

I think that the reality is much different. Sure, 47 million people are not covered by health insurance and that sucks. But, most of the people in this country are getting over. There’s food on an awful lot of plates and two cars in too many garages. On the whole, between the job and easy credit, in the scheme of our time on the planet, most people in the good old USA are doing all right.

So, what gives?

Joshua Meyrowitz wrote a book back in 1986 titled, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. One of the points that he makes it that media is a megaphone by which perceptions are amplified. Take a 100 people, put them in a frame of video and have them shout some slogans. It seems as if hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets. The numbers might be small, but the perception of volume is huge. The whole world really is watching.

Probably the most telling example is the conflict in the West Bank and Gaza. The entire population of Israel is ~7.3 million people. In terms of rocks, guns, suicide bombings and armored personnel carriers, I suspect that the number of belligerents might be less than 20,000, if that. Yet is seems as if the entire population, Palestinian and Israeli, is in a state of siege, that millions and millions of people are going at it, every hour of every day.

As any ad exec will tell you, media works!

Which brings us to the Democratic Convention. Now don’t get me wrong, I am an ardent Obama supporter. I plan to vote for the man as many times as they’ll let me. He’s right; the stakes are much too high this time around. Looking back I can only imagine how different the world would be were Gore to have taken office in 2000.

But, I need to admit that political discourse that embraces the Queen for a Day, "no tragedy is too small for empathy" brand of attention getting is disheartening. The political prime directive seems to be: Get the feeling and the votes will follow. On the HD-TVs of America, looking tough is more valuable than being thoughtful.

Yet can we expect more? As Robert Hughes points out in his book, The Culture of Complaint, to paraphrase, when we can no longer report our thinking about a topic, all that is left to report is our feeling.

Q: How many words is a picture worth?

2008-08-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

A: How many do you have?

A while ago I took the Coding Slave site offline and redirected it to here. I did this for a variety of reasons, mostly because the MySQL database that ran the site broke and I ran out of time keeping the site up in terms of content updates. Also, I was not very successful at talking some Big Ass Venture Capital Firm into giving me a few million dollars in order to hire a small staff and buy a time share in a GulfStream, things which are necessary to take the concept to the next level.

So the world gets the blog, which for now is probably the best to be had, and not a bad thing at that.

But, one of the items that went away was a bunch of postcard photos that I created. I think them to be humorous and thought provoking. It was a mistake to take them offline.

So, I am going to post them here. Take a look. Feel free to download them. Send them to family and friends. Hell, send a few to your boss.

If you make any money selling them off as your own, well..... karma is karma.

Coding Hell

ERD

How to determine a dysfunctional organization

How Jefferson justified slavery (in questionable UML)

Why people get dogs (in questionable UML, with reasonable VB)

The nature of things

Q: Where do the competent go?

2008-07-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

A: Away

The other day we had the random good fortune of meeting a young couple and having them share some refreshments with us at our big ass dining room table. (Click here to see the big ass dining room table.)

Turns out that the husband is a former aeronautics engineer turned filmmaker.

We got to talking about the aeronautics engineering business.

He told me a story. It goes like this:

It was his review time at his employer, a very, very big company that put satellites into orbit. His boss sat him down and gave him a marginal raise.

My new guest was taken aback.

He said to his boss, “Look, I do just as much work as anybody here and I am paid less than most of them. I could easily go to your competitor and get 20% more than what I make here. And, then in a year or two you’ll try to hire me back and have to pay me another 20% more. So why don’t you just save yourself 40% and give me a decent raise now?”

His boss replied, “Look, if I bump you up to what you are really worth, I’ll have to bump everybody up. And, that’s not something that I am willing to do. Anyway, when you come back you’ll be more valuable.”

At that point my guest decided to quit aeronautic engineering and go to film school. He just didn't want to be in a business where, if you are at all competent, the only way you can realize your worth is to keep moving around to the highest bidder.

Makes sense to me.

So the next time that some recruiter calls me up and puts me in touch with an HR person that wants so know why I move around so much, I’ll have a ready answer: “… because I am competent.”

Q: Where does logic run insane?

2008-07-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

A: On Wall St.

This is a story about a stock, James River Coal Company.

James River Coal Company mines coal. It is a pretty big, not the biggest, but big enough. (It takes a lot of bulldozers to mine coal.)

The company employs about 1600 people and at the end of 2007 had a negative net income of $63 million dollars. JRCC lost money. Its nearest competitors made money.

There’s nothing too dramatic about this story: small size mining company loses money. Happens every day.

But, let’s pause for a moment and look at its stock price.

On March 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $14.60 a share.
On April 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $24.00 a share.
On May 23rd, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $35.87 a share.
On June 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $62.48 a share.

That’s a 427% increase in the price of the stock in 90 days.

You’d think that the company was pumping out 4 times as much coal, or had done some reorganization magic and increased its profit margin from the 7.76% to the industry average of 27.92%.

Nope, not at all.

Why has the stock price of JRCC increased fourfold?

Well, let’s look at the price of oil during the same period or thereabouts.

Mar-2008: $96.87 a barrel
Apr-2008: $104.31 a barrel
May-2008: $117.40 a barrel
June 2008: $122 a barrel
July 3 2008: $145 a barrel

OK, oil is going up in price, about 66%.

So let’s see, the price of oil goes up 66% and the stock price of a mediocre mining company goes up 427%. Sounds sort of whacky doesn’t it? We’ll it is whacky.

So what happened? Here is what I think happened. Some whacky analysts somewhere said something like, "Oh shit, the price of oil is going up. In no time at all the \whole world is going to favor coal. There will be a huge demand for coal. The price of coal will go up. All the coal companies will make a fortune. Let’s buy all the in coal company stock that we can, balance sheets be damned."

Never mind that the sun has not yet come up on a day in the last fifty years that anybody has favored coal over oil. Jeepers, even nuclear's gotten a better rap.

And Wall Street does what it always has: take a morsel of logic and go insane.

Sort of makes the current banking situation looks well thought out doesn’t it?

Oh yeah, Apple sold a million iPhones over the weekend. The price of its stock dropped 2.44% today.

If this is not insanity, then tell me what is?

Q: What’s the difference between a real friend and a virtual friend?

2008-07-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

A: A real friend gives you a ride to the airport.

I’ll be honest. I’ve been having a lot of trouble ‘getting’ FaceBook, MySpace and all those other social networking sites. Yeah, I belong to LinkedIn and it has been sort of neat getting back in touch with all those people that I went to college with thirty years ago.

I get a list of people who were former classmates. I contact them. They contact me. I find out they have a kid in college. They find out I have a kid in college. Some have come over to the dark side as software developers. A few own a small business. Few have gone on to the Big Time.

Great information! Then I never hear from them again.

I have a hundred people on my ‘direct network’. About half of them would be able to pick me out of a crowd in an elevator or recognize my voice on the phone. The others have not shared a meal with me in a long, long time.

Of the 2,965,200+ people in my extended network, I think that few would know enough about me or my whereabouts to turn me into the FBI if there was a million dollar reward on my head.

But still, this bunch of virtual friends and contacts have a lot of value to people who buy, sell and operate social networking sites. In fact Linked In has been valued at $1 billion USD. (That’s a thousand million dollars folks!)

So where does that leave us? We have ‘communities’ of people who know each other as web sites, emails and interactive avatars. Jeepers, for all we know, Bill Joy might be right! Maybe there is nobody there. Maybe our virtual friends are nothing more than a collection of very smart computer programs that know how to behave as that which we assume to be a person.

So how do you tell your real friends?

It’s simple. The next time that you have to take a plane trip and you want to avoid paying for a cab or airport parking, put an alert out on your social network seeking a ride to the airport. Any one who responds is a real friend. Because as we all know, a real friend is someone who will take you to the airport when you need a ride.

Q: What’s a bad idea?

2008-06-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

A: The notion that there’s no such thing as a bad idea.

Don’t be fooled by the oft heard saying that there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Believe me, there are plenty of bad ideas to be had. I know. I've had more than my share of them.

I think that the worst idea that I ever had was to dress up as a giant frog in a Santa suit at the annual Christmas party thrown for the residents of a secure detention facility that I worked at in my late twenties. I still cringe when I think about it.

But, if this was my worst idea ever, it pales compared to other bad ideas running around, current and past. So in the spirit of sharing the wealth, here is my list of what I think are the best bad ideas of the recent ten years.

No down payment mortgages requiring stated income only.
Let's pretend that we are in the WayBack Machine and it's 2003. I just found out that I can buy a house...ah, I mean a home. All I gotta do is say that I made $200,000 last year. Don't have to prove nothin'. This guy says that I can afford a $500,000 house, no problem. Pay the mortgage? Hey, the guy says that all I have to do is pay the interest which is about $2000 a month. And NO MONEY DOWN! Jeepers! Where else but in America can you move into a brand new 3500 sq. ft. house for $2000 a month? Just signed the papers. I move in next week. Now all I gotta do is figure out how to make $2000 a month.

The Hummer and its noble competitors the Cadillac Escalade and the Lincoln Navigator.
So let me get this straight. An average person weighs around 170 lbs. A Hummer weights 6400 lbs. So, for every $4 spent on a gallon of gas 10 cents goes to moving the person and $3.90 goes to moving the vehicle. If this is not a bad idea, then tell me what is?

Rap music.
Being an obnoxious poet is really nothing new. Ezra Pound was spewing garbage along with the Cantos well before any young rapper was uttering endless rounds of “motherfucking bitches” and passing it off as musical innovation. Music can exist for only so long without melody. But then again, what can you expect from a culture that sells Dr. Scholls footpads by reciting “Gellin’ associations as poetry in action?

Blowing up the Twin Towers
Do I need to say more?

Trying to rebuild the Twin Towers
There are some memorials that should remain memories.

6 string basses
If I want to play something with 6 strings, I’ll buy a guitar. Basses have 4 strings. Cellos have 4 strings. Violins have 4 strings. Violas have 4 strings. There's a pattern here. OK, I like to go down to that low B as much as the next guy. If I am hot to go low, I’ll just restring the ax with heavier gauge strings and tune lower. And as far as going beyond the G string....hey it's called a BASS not An Instrument that Can Go Real Low and Sorta High. Anyway, when it comes to bass playing, I have a simple motto: what would Jaco do?

Sentencing guidelines
When I look at the evidence presented, I can easily believe that there is some guideline somewhere that instructs the judge to throw away the key if the guy is black.

ASP.NET MVC
If you want to use Microsoft technologies to do internet based development, first you learned ASP, which reduced you to procedural programming after years of leaning how to be a good object oriented programmer. Then MS tried to make it better, so you leaned ASP.NET which reduced you to writing bloated client side code after years of writing lean, stateless code like all the other guys. And now, after 5 years of finally learning how to optimize ASP.NET bloat, MS says, "hey wait a minute we have a better idea. We’ll just have you use MVC", which they really should have implemented under ASP years back. So, you can kiss your tools and experience from the last 5 years goodbye. Usually a better idea from MS is a bad idea for the rest of us.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Baseball players go to the Hall of Fame. Football players go to DisneyWorld. Rockers come in the night and make good girls bad. Hall of Fame? Give me a break. Anyway, I wonder if John Cippolina is resting any better knowing that his rig is on display in Cleveland.

And the worst idea of the last 10 years:

Invading Iraq
I wish I could say something really funny about this, but it’s well beyond humor. The guys that thought this one up make Nixon look like a favored dinner guest. The transgressions are no longer political. They’re criminal. Our executive branch has become that which they say they are fighting: Extremists with no sense of humanity and no respect for the rule of law.

Q: Where is God?

2008-03-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

A: Somewhere beyond language.

A long time ago when I was a composition student in college and pretending be the next Maurice Ravel, I got into a heated discussion with a professor about Beethoven’s real intentions during a certain passage in the Lenore Overture. I was like a dog on a bone; I wasn’t going to give up on my hare brained idea no matter what. Finally, the prof said, “Look, Beethoven’s dead, we can’t ask him what his intentions were, he left no writing behind to tell us, thus we can’t really talk about it. Let’s move on to what we can talk about, the music.”

Fast forward 35 years.

Over the last few years I have been spending more than cursory time thinking about God. I’ll admit that I am doing so out of fear, mostly because of what I see as the late 20th Century re-emergence of religion as a military-political force . And, where you have religion, you have a notion of the intention of God. There seems to be a lot of messaging going in the cultural landscape about the Word of God, the Will of God, what God wants, Judeo-Christian Nations, Islamic Nations, etc…. It seems as if a lot of people out there have a serious take on God.

Me? I think that that God just might be something that we cannot talk about.

Let’s face it, there are things that exist and are experienced in a place beyond language. Take hunger for example. I had hunger way before I could wrap language around it and ask my mother what was for dinner. Maybe God lives in that space—real, known, yet inapplicable to language. I mean, would you rather talk about hunger or eat?

So, if God is beyond language, what are we to do?

To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” (What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.)

Q: What is usable?

2008-01-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

A: That which is measurable.

When it comes to usability in software everyone has an opinion: “Put the button here”, “make the font type this”, “use this color as the background”, “make the click sequence like so”, on and on and on.

The sad little fact is that opinions are like fingers; just about everybody has at least one. And like fingers, you really don’t have to go through any special effort to have them.

So maybe usability is more than an “intuition” about how the software should work. Today just about everybody has an intuition as to what a Save button does and what a little red asterisk next to an empty textbox means. There’s a big difference between intuition and desire. To my observation, when someone says that a piece of software is not intuitive, what he or she really means is that the software “is not doing what I want it to do.”

So I’ll let you in on a little secret: Making software more usable is not about understanding what the user wants. It’s about understanding what we want the user to do with our stuff.

This I learned when I worked for the computer manufacturer, Gateway.

Back around 1996, Gateway built a Usability Lab in order to save a yacht load of money on tech-support issues. (They were getting mauled on the phones. Ten thousand phone calls a day, at $27 a call adds up!)

They hired a bunch of Ph. D. level Human Factors Engineers. Because I knew a thing or two about operating systems, desktop applications and component integration, being the Consumer Platform Architect, they invited me to join the team and go along for the ride. So I did.

The Ph. Ds taught me two essential things. The first was to put instructions directly on the screen whenever possible. Don’t make the user wade through documentation in a help window.

The second and probably most important thing that they taught me was this: if you can’t measure it, you don’t know it.

(Actually, I was introduced to the concept while studying Robert L. Ebel in an educational testing course that I took in graduate school. But, as I suffered through a typical high school educational experience in the late 60’s, I looked at testing as something akin to waterboarding. I dismissed that which I should have pondered. But, back to the story.)

The most meaningful work that we did at Gateway was based on quantifying what we wanted the user to do and then developing tactics to concretely achieve that which we had defined.

Computer setup time was a real problem for Gateway. We wanted to cut support cost in half. It was taking 30 minutes and one tech call on average for a buyer to setup a new computer. Our goal was to get it down to 15 minutes and no call.

In another case, users were not browsing the on-line catalog that shipped on each system. Knowing that the catalog was there and then being able to find the desired information was the problem. Putting the catalog icon on the desktop and coming up with tactics to get navigation down from 6 clicks to 2 clicks was the tactic that became the solution after passing the rigors of quantified observation.

Our pattern of execution was the same:

define what we wanted the user to do
establish a baseline
set a goal
create tactics to meet the goal
test and measure
rethink when the results are not those desired

Most of the places that I’ve been since Gateway don’t have the means or desire to plunk down a few million dollars in order to build a Usability Lab. But then again, it really isn’t an issue of money. It’s an issue of thinking. It’s as simple as deciding to put our minds to work gathering facts rather than listing opinions. And, most importantly, it’s about knowing the behavior that we desire from the user. After all, if we don’t know what we desire, we’ll never recognize it when we get it.

Believe me, there are a lot of people going through life looking for that which they have already.

But, this is supposed to be about usability, right?

Q: When is it over?

2007-12-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

A: January 4

Lately Des Moines, IA has been getting a lot of attention. You’d have to be brain dead to not see that city is in the news just about everyday. Rudy’s in Des Moines, Hillary’s in Des Moines, Oprah is in Des Moines, the Dodds have moved to Des Moines. Des Moines, Des Moines, Des Moines.

I lived in Des Moines IA from 1998 to around 2002. One time in 2000 I even got to see Al Gore giving a stump speech on the side of Ingersoll Ave, standing on a jury rigged stage.

So, I like to think that I know a thing or two about the place.

Des Moines is a great place to raise kids. It’s safe, cheap and clean. Overall, the people are friendly and helpful. The library system is first rate and the Downtown Y has an amazing Executive Club. The city is tolerant. It has synagogues and a gay bar, maybe two. You can get a very decent cup of coffee in an independent café. A few years back Starbucks moved in. But, Zanzibar seems to be holding its own, regardless. And, there is more than one “art” movie house. The city has a lot going for it.

That’s the good news.

On the other hand, it is very cold in the winter. There is not a lot of diversity in terms of how to make a living. It's pretty much insurance and financial services. You can work for The Principal, Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, ING, etc. These are big companies that have HR departments that really matter. It’s hard making a buck if you are a dancer or play reggae music as a way of life. Believe me I know; I tried to get over playing reggae music in Des Moines. I ended up contract coding at Wells Fargo to feed the kids. (I should have known better.)

As I said, the place is cheap. A starting brass player for the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra will make about $5,000 a season. The minimum for a player in the Chicago Symphony is $104,000. Serious players do not stay in Des Moines, unless you're part of Slipknot.

Educationally the place values test scores more than creativity. The fact is not lost on me that one of the standard tests for educational achievement used nationally is the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. If I had to sum up going to school in Des Moines, I could imagine a t-shirt that says, “I am from Iowa. I test well.”

In Des Moines, those that get ahead follow the rules. But, this can be said of any place.

This is the first presidential election in a long, long time where the candidacy for for both parties is on the line. Sort of funny in way: On January 3th, 2008 a few thousand people will get together for the Iowa Caucuses and make some decisions that will dramatically shade the course of American politics for a long time to come.

Sort of puts Des Moines in the center of things. Breakfast joints that usually serve deep fried hash browns to truck drivers, secretaries and hung over college students from DMACC and Drake have become newsworthy.

But as we know from the story of Cinderella, the clock does indeed strike midnight.

On January 4th it will be all over. NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX News, The NY Times, Hillary, Barack, Mitt and Rudy will pack up their tents and leave town. The party will be over figuratively and literally. Left behind in their wake will be a very small, industrious city that has a pretty stagnant population of about 200,000, (620,00 metro) with a part time, figurehead mayor who is paid $31,500 a year (the city manager really calls the shots), where the per capita income is about $20K and making a living is a very, very, very hard activity for most people.

Des Moines will still be a great place to raise kids and still a place that is trying very hard to become better. All it really needs is for Oprah to pay attention when Barack is not in town.

Q: How long is forever?

2007-10-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

A: 10 Years

I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day about team maturity. His take was that the team of which we are both members is young, that we have been working together only for about ten months.

I was surprised. To me a young team is one that has been together about month. So I asked my teammate about his work history. Turns out that of his last two jobs, he was employed for ten years at the former and six years at the latter.

Holy moly!!!

In my forty plus years in the work force I had never met a person that had worked anywhere for ten years. I realized that I had stumbled upon a perspective on commercial life that was completely unlike my own.

So, I tuned in to listen closely. There was serious learning to be had.

One thing that I learned was that because my colleague’s perception of time is different, his expectation of team integration is different. It’s sort of like understanding time in terms of a fruit fly and a dog. A fruit fly is born, lives and dies in a span of 4 weeks. A dog lives for about twelve years. If you’re a fruit fly and you're not married with kids by Week 2, you can almost guarantee that you’ll be foraging around garbage heaps old and alone. On the other hand a dog doesn’t even start dating until Year 2.

It’s all about perception.

So I realized that what I thought to be running late in terms of team formation, my colleague had accepted as right on schedule. Whereas my thinking is that a team needs to go through the stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing in about 30 days, for my colleague a year is a very acceptable time span.

In a way I was envious. Part of me longs for the notion of doing interesting work in a place for ten years. Jeepers, why settle for 10 years? Why not 30 years?

I wonder what it would be like to say, “Oh yeah, I worked with Bill for 30 years. I remember when his kids were born. I remember the day he came in with pictures of his first grandkid. I remember what it was like when his mother died. We all went to the wake. It was a tough time. He was really hard to get along with after the funeral. It took him a long time to talk about it.”

The way I see it is that at one time work wasn't something that we did to make money to pay down the credit card balance, just like shopping wasn't something that we prefer to do online in order to avoid the human contact of a sales person. Work was something that we did to feed the kids, pay tuition and take our place in the world.

Oh yeah, it’s true that 5% of the population still owned 50% of the places where we went to work and most of the work was monotonous, if not dangerous . But, so what? We had each other.

It seems as if we’re free agents completely focused on the short term, never knowing what team we’ll be playing for next year. Why get close to someone? We’re all just passing through.

It takes time to have a common experience upon which to have a history. And, a culture without a history is no culture at all.

Sadly, given the velocity of life today, it seems as if the experience of longevity in the workplace has gone the way of the rotary phone. We don’t seem to have to the time to dial the numbers.

And some of us will miss it.

Q: What’s the easiest way to control your mouth?

2007-10-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

A: Format your language

Here's a dirty little secret: I have trouble expressing myself using my mouth. When I talk it’s almost as if my oral cavity has a mind of its own. I mean, I could try to be doing something as simple as ordering breakfast as the counter, completely intent on getting two eggs scrambled, ham and a black coffee. The next thing I know something that sounds like the Gettysburg Address is coming out of my lips: I am asking the waitress what she thinks of Hillary Clinton, offering a medium size dissertation about the proper roasting of coffee and then maybe, if there’s time left I’ll mutter, “Oh by the way, please give me two eggs scrambled with ham and a black coffee.”

Then the next thing that I know I am wolfing down breakfast trying to be on time for my next appointment.

I’ve been described as a person that has a dense neural net, an opinion on just about everything coupled with a fondness for talking and a gift for gab.

Believe me, I can go on… and on and on. And I will.

I am not alone. At another time, in another place I played in bands. These were more like cooperatives. Nobody was on salary. We all volunteered our time to make music and maybe make some money from making music. That it was a volunteer activity meant that anybody in the band was entitled to introduce musical ideas for us to pursue. And many did...for as long as it took. In most cases in took a long time. Twenty minutes of talk time to introduce a musical idea that took 20 seconds to execute.

This sort of band never really made a lot of music or a lot of money. It took too much time to get the sound into the air. All we heard was talk, talk, talk.

I was having what one could call a discouraging musical experience. If I wanted to keep playing cooperatively something had to change.

So I had an idea. It went like this: What if anytime anyone of us had an idea to present, we would start out by saying verbatim, “I have a musical idea. Here is the idea:” and then present the idea in ten words or less.

My bandmates thought I was daffy.

I said that even though it sounded hokey; we should just say the words no matter what. Always start with, “I have a musical idea:”

My thinking was that if you follow the format, the idea will come out clearly and concisely. So we tried it.

I found my suggestion quite useful when I executed it. After all, it was my idea.

My experience with others was not quite so useful. One of two things happened. Either a player would go to no end to justify his or her right to take as much time as he or she wanted to express even the smallest of ideas while never really expressing an idea. Or, the player would be speechless, unable to express a musical idea within the ten word constraint. It was painful to observe.

So, over time I learned that in the cooperative context, the best way to have a good musical experience is to show up and play. No talking allowed. Thus, I did a lot of pick up work and jam sessions. I didn’t make any real money. But at least I got to play and enjoy it.

I knew that if I wanted to make enough money to feed the kids, I would have to do salaried work.

Salaried gigs were a lot different. Each and every band leader knows that time is money. So the rules are simple: Here’s your play list, here’s your charts, here’s the rehearsal schedule. Know your stuff and show up on time. That was the good news. The bad news was that the democratic, free flow of musical ideas was sorely lacking.

So I went back to software.

Now, I think that making software is more like making music than not. You put a bunch of people in a room (virtual or real) and you hope that all have a similar conceptualization about the software to be made. Then you play. Hopefully the software (music) that comes out is what everybody had in mind.

Most times it’s not.

And then the talking starts and it goes on and on and on …. And the next thing you know you have two hour meetings and no software. Four hour meetings and no software. Then two day off-sites with no software. Then one week off-sites….This can go on for years, until the project is canceled.

Yet, the solution is so simple. What if every word uttered in a design meeting or code review had to conform to a certain format? What if when expressing an idea you said, “I have an idea and here it is: [in ten words or less]”?

Or “I have a question and here it is: Is it, Are There, Where, Who, What, When, or How…[in ten words or less]?”.

Or, “I have an observation and here it is [in ten words or less]”

You might very well say that there are some ideas and questions that require more than ten words to express, unless the idea is a really, really, really big idea such as F=ma.

You will be correct because some ideas can take reams of paper to explain. Well then, do the obvious; write the idea down and then go to your meeting and say: “I have an idea and her it is:”. Then pass out the paper(s) on which your idea is written. You'll amaze your friends and dazzle your relatives.

Or you can create a language format the works for your group. I mean, jeepers, it’s not about making cognitive zombies. It’s about having a way to get the best possible software (music) out the door as quickly as possible.

Or, you can talk on and on and on and on and maybe, just maybe, one day you’ll get around to making software that changes the world, if you live that long.

Q: What is the future of Iraq?

2007-09-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

A: Poland 1795

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a nation called Poland. It lay between Prussia, Austria, and Russia.

Over a period of about twenty years, Prussia, Austria and Russia got it in its collective mind that Poland served no purpose. So each country sent in some armies, occupied some territory and the next thing you know Poland was gone.

It wasn’t until Napoleon took over most of Europe that Poland came back into existence.

So what does this have to do with Iraq?

Well let’s go back to the beginning in an elementary sort of way. After World War I England and France sat down with a pencil and created Iraq out of the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Prior to the nation building by pencil, Iraq, a.k.a Mesopotamia, was just another land of scattered tribes united under the Ottoman sultan, living by the word of Muhammad or Ali’s Prophet.

Western Europe needed Iraq. Left unattended that area of the world could fall prey to any one of a number of emerging powers: Bolsheviks, Corporate America or jeepers, the Mesopotamians themselves.

Iraq was and is more a figment of Western European imagination than an indigenous nation state in blossoming mode.

Over time a variety of kings and tyrants kept the figment, erh… I mean dream live.

Today the United States is the keeper of the dream and United States military is holding the dream together. Nobody else seems to want to. Of course, we can’t be there forever. If you look at our history of occupation, Viet Nam, Japan, Germany, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, at some point we leave. We really don’t like to occupy. We’d rather leave some military bases behind and let corporations spread the spirit of American capitalism.

Make no mistake. We will leave Iraq. It may take 10 months or 10 years. But we will leave. And in our wake we’ll leave one really big ass military base around Basra the will allow us to regulate the transport of Mesopotamian oil to the Persia Gulf.

And then nature will run its course.

The Kurds in the north will set up their own state, maybe in collaboration with the Kurds in Turkey or annex itself to Kurdistan. The Shiites will make a sandbox and align with Iran. The minority Sunni’s will set up a state that most likely will have the support of the US, Western Europe and most importantly Baathist Syria and Wahhabic Saudi Arabia. But there won't be any Iraq as we know it today.

So here’s an idea: Let’s save a few million lives and billions and billions of dollars and send Condoleezza Rice to Baghdad with a big pencil and do what François Georges-Picot and Mark Sykes did in 1915: carve it up in the best interest of the victors.

Q: What are men?

2007-09-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

A: Dogs

I’ve been a guy for a long while. I am pretty typical in terms of the gender. I like to eat. I like to sniff women. Give me a toy and I will be enraptured with it for hours no matter how stupid it is. Saturday nap is a big deal. Put me on a leash and I will pull at it to the point of asphyxiation.

Whereas my evolutionary ancestors may be apes, in terms of my day to day wandering I am a dog. I’ve come to accept it. It’s my nature.

I like to think that I am a good dog, the type that any owner would want: loyal, house broken, entertaining and a good companion on a cold night.

But not all dogs are good dogs. Some dogs are bad. You know the type, half starved creatures that roam the night, foraging from garbage can to garbage can while looking for bitches to hump.

They're mongrels.

Mongrels eat whatever they can sink their teeth into and hump anything that walks, regardless of breed or condition.

Some mongrels look adorable. They have those forlorn eyes and cute tails that lead the unsuspecting mark to think that the intermittent doggie treat and occasional pet on the snoot will make the animal safe to be around the kids. And they will be safe, until no one is looking.

Mongrels have no care for the feelings or conditions of other dogs. They’ve spent much too much time in the trash bins of life to have developed the adequate ability to look out for any number other than one. For them it’s all about feeding and humping.

So what’s the big deal?

Here’s the big deal: I am the father of daughters, brother to a sister, husband to not one, but two wives, (sequentially of course) and a friend to many women. I have an investment in the well being of the gender. I’ve come to learn that more than a few of the women in my life have been bitten by mongrels in the most horrible of ways: words of undying affection and eternal consideration that crescendo to a grand finale of “It's not working out. Thanks for the nooky. Goodbye.” No reason, no discussion, no nothing.

Now here is what I know about women: they’re flowers. They smell good, look good and bring beauty to world. Good dogs don’t trample on flowers. Mongrels can't wait. Mongrels make me so ashamed to be a man that there are times that I want to cut off the johnson, if I didn’t like it so much. It’s despicable.

Now don’t get me wrong. I've dated my share of Venus Flytraps. We all come with baggage. But for a man to pursue a member of the opposite sex with no other purpose than to eat, hump and throw away is unconscionable and indecent.

And yet the mongrels get away with it. Why? Because they can. Unless you’re Amy Fisher, there’s no pain in mongrel behavior. So ladies next time you encounter a mongrel, don’t call the dog catcher. Just call the exterminator. And remember, every man is a dog, and can be a mongrel until proven otherwise.

Q: What is the 6th Commandment?

2007-08-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

A: Thou shalt not murder.

This weekend I watched a documentary DVD, The Ground Truth. The DVD is a collection of interviews with former soldiers, sailors and marines who were active recently in Iraq. Here is what I learned from watching the DVD.

Killing another human being is hard thing for a person to do.
One of the goals of Basic Training is to overcome the human safeguard not to kill.
Basic Training is so good at overcoming the safeguard not to kill that by the time an enlisted man or woman gets to Iraq, he or she wants to kill. Sort of like the dynamic of practicing the piano a lot. By concert time, you want to play; you really, really, really want to play.
The current opposing combatants in Iraq are not uniformed soldiers, but civilians with guns.
There are a lot of guns in Iraq.
Iraq is one big combat zone in which soldiers, sailors and marines live on the edge, considering any and every Iraqi that they encounter to be life threatening.
Our military is killing a lot of civilians. Some are combatants. Many are not. This number includes a lot of women and children.
Most times killing civilians is a response to a perceived threat. Incidents of recreational killing, killing for fun, have been reported.
Many American soldiers, sailors and marines are coming back from Iraq physically and emotionally broken. Body armor technology has improved dramatically. Wounds that would have been fatal in the Viet Nam era now result in the loss of a hand, arm, leg or eye. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is rampant.
Suicide among in country and returning military personnel as well as Iraq era veterans is on the rise.

If you were to ask me how the DVD ended I could not tell you. I could not watch it to the end. I was too overwhelmed by the tragedy and immorality of it all. I went to sleep feeling powerless, criminal and deeply ashamed of American foreign policy and military tactics.

But, more troubling is that the stupidity of our foreign policy is practically guaranteeing future violence on American soil. These people are not stupid or docile. They too are People of The Book. They know all about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Imagine what the people who live in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Palestine think after watching footage on Al Jazeera or YouTube of American troops killing civilians. Imagine watching the footage every night. Just as America wants revenge for 9/11, they will want revenge for Iraq. Don't doubt it for a moment.

Our government has done a horrible, horrible thing in Iraq and a horrible, horrible thing to the American men and women in uniform. Our military volunteers were sold a bill of goods that advertised an opportunity for experience, service and a few bucks for college. In return they were delivered a baited and switched package that brainwashed the sons and daughters of America into that which they most despised--invading killers.

And in turn, our nation is now viewed as that which we most despise.

I am beginning to lose sleep. I hope that our leadership is too.

Q: What’s the fast lane on the road to divorce?

2007-08-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

A: Office 2007

It’s back to college time for my youngest daughter; so it's time to do the Laptop Shuffle. The Laptop Shuffle is a simple dance. I buy a new laptop for my wife and give my wife’s laptop to my college bound daughter so that she can IM, FaceBook, LiveJournal, email and maybe write a paper or two.

So I bought my wife a Gateway laptop with a big ass screen with Windows Vista and Office 2007. My daughter got the Dell Latitude.

All seemed to be good. My wife liked the big ass screen and my daughter was happy to be back in the online soup with her cohorts and colleagues. (Her previous laptop, which was the product of a Laptop Shuffle with my older daughter, died an “I’ll power up for five minutes only” death.)

As I said, all seemed to be good.

One night my wife and I are sitting around on the couch. She was working on her laptop. I was working on my laptop. We both watched mindless TV. (We like to parallel play and multitask.) It's her first night on the new laptop with the big ass screen. She opens up an old Word document that I had copied over to her new machine. The next thing that I hear is, “WHAT'S THIS?”

She starts plastering me with questions:

“Where’s the File menu?”

“Where’s the Edit menu?”

“How do I save my file?”

“How do I print?”

“How do I change the footer?”

So I say the obvious, “Read the help files.” (Not a wise move on my part.)

She says, “I don’t want to read the help files, I can’t even find the help files. I want my Word back!”

So I figure out how to access the help files and read them trying figure out how to make Word 2007 display in “Classic Mode” so she can have her Word back.

Turns out that there is no Classic Mode. All that's to be had is Word 2007 with it wonderful, easy to understand, easy to work, patented pending, Ribbon enhanced, Graphical User Interface. NOT!

So I end up having to learn the entire new interface to Word 20007 just so my wife can get her night’s work out.

I felt like her personal computer, and I let her know it.

(Another, not wise move on my part.)

We both went to bed angry. The next morning was not fun. We did the “let’s try to smooth things out and understand each other perceptions” talk, which is unusual because it is rare for my wife and me to have an angry word between us. (I got most of the angry words out in my first marriage. But that's another story for another time.)

All this over Office 2007.

I mean, help me understand the benefit of changing this:

to this:

With no backwards usage path?

Ya know, I’m use to having Microsoft impose its will upon my profession. I've learned to adjust. But this is the first time I’ve had to deal with the company imposing its will on my marriage.

I mean, jeepers, some boundaries really should be respected.

Q: What’s a good way to enhance meeting productivity?

2007-07-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

A: Strong type the conversation.

Time is money, just ask any manager that has put a group of people in a room for an hour in order to make a decision. What do you get? Yak, yak, yak, yak, some wah, wah, wah, wah and just maybe a decision, just maybe.

One of the things that I've noticed about nonproductive business meetings is that many times a question of one type will be asked and an answer of another type will be given.

For example, someone may ask, “Do you think that buying widgets from FooCo is a good thing to do”?

And, someone will answer, “I’ve am not happy with FooCo. The company charges a lot for its widgets and their quality is questionable.”

Talk about a type mismatch. The question in play is yes/no. The answer is free form text. The person asking the question wants a return type of bool; the person answering gives free text. The question goes unanswered. In the world of strongly typed programming languages, we’d have a compiler error: type mismatch.

Run time errors run rampant in business meetings. Lots of talk, no information, questions with mismatched answers, marginal results. It’s amazing that any business gets done at all.

So wanna have fun? The next time you are in a meeting try this. Say, “I am going to ask a question. There is one of three answers available, yes, no, or I don’t know. Please answer accordingly.”

Or try this: “I am going to ask a question that requires that you provide a whole number between 1 and 3000, please answer accordingly.” (This is what we in the programming trade call a return type of integer.)

Or this, “I am going to ask a question, please answer in no more than ten words”.

And don’t be a pansy. If you ask for yes, no, I don’t know and get a number or free form text, throw an error. You’ll save time and money, and you might have more talk that has the information necessary to have a productive meeting.

Or you can say nothing, open your notepad and work on your doodling.

Q: What is the difference between then and now?

2007-05-18T18:20:00.001-07:00

A: Propriety

Richest Guy in the World, 1918 *

Richest Guy in the World, 2007

* Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips, 2002

Q: How do you make Watin catch a JavaScript confirmation dialog?

2007-04-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

A: Use the JavaScript setTimeOut() function

[Parent Advisory: This is GEEK!]

I like Watin for automated unit testing... a lot in many ways. I wish that the documentation was better. More examples would be nice. So here is my modest attempt to contribute to making the world a better place for those of us who have seen the light and understand that Test Driven Development is really the way to go.

Recently I had a problem getting Watin to click JavasScript Confirmation dialog boxes.

Here is what I learned.

Watin testing works in machine time not human time.

Thus, page interaction instructions fire in under a millisecond.

This is OK for web page interactions such as hyperlink and button clicks. But, for Alert and Confirmation dialogs, which live outside of the page, catching a button and firing a click is a problem.

The Confirmation or Alert display takes place too fast for Watin to pick up.

I get "confirmation catching" to happen by putting in a 1 millisecond time delay in the JavaScript in HiThere.htm. This 1 millisecond delay is unnoticeable to human beings but of significance for testing computers.

So here is the HiThere.htm page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Confirmation Thrower</title>
</head>

<script type="text/javascript">

function doWrite()
{
var isGood=confirm('Do you to do this??');
elm = document.getElementById('WriteHere');
if (isGood == true)
{
elm.value = 'I am good';
}
else
{
elm.value = 'I am bad';
}
}

function getConfirmValue()
{
setTimeout('doWrite()', 1);
}

</script>

<body>
<form id="form1">
<a id="YouOK" href="javascript:getConfirmValue()">OK?</a>
<input id="WriteHere" value="" />
</form>
</body>
</html>

Here is the Watin test:

[Test]
public void SimpleConfirmCatchTest()
{
IE ie = new IE();
ie.DialogWatcher.Add(new LogonDialogHandler(WATIN_USER, WATIN_PWD));
ie.GoTo(GetHiTherePage());
ie.ShowWindow(NativeMethods.WindowShowStyle.Maximize);
Link link = ie.Link("YouOK");

link.Click();

ConfirmDialogHandler confirm = new ConfirmDialogHandler();
using (new UseDialogOnce(ie.DialogWatcher, confirm))
{
confirm.WaitUntilExists();
confirm.OKButton.Click();
ie.WaitForComplete();
}
ie.Close();
}

Go here to get the code for UseDialogOnce. (Thanks Trev!)

Q: Where have you been?

2007-03-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

A: I've been everywhere.

Up until the end of the 2006 I was busy being a Software Executive sort of guy. The land of a Software Executive is very political. It's all about the organization and distribution of power. One of the Key Indicators of Success is who likes you. Talent and the ability to produce required results other than getting identified parties to like you is of secondary importance sometimes. (Just look at what Rudy Giuliani is going through.)

Some parties liked me and some parties did not. My employers liked me, but... well... let's say that an Executive without a staff to execute is sort of meaningless. So I moved on. (It's a long story. Write me if you want to know the details.)

I have decided to spend some time being lost in code, which I am, and work on becoming a better software developer as well as a better human being. I am hanging out with some talented developers at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and slinging code that makes business objects in all shapes, sizes and dependencies.

That making software is very much like playing the piano, you have to keep doing it to keep your chops up. And, you have to take on challenging pieces to improve your playing. Both of these needs are being met in my present circumstance.

So I am hanging around Rocky code, reminding myself of the intricacies and foibles of the .NET CLR and embracing Test Driven Development.

Life is good.

I d do have more to say. But, it's a beautiful day in Southern California and I have always been one to take advantage of the opportunities that come my way. So we'll talk again real soon.

Q: What’s better than the SAT?

2007-01-15T21:17:00.000-08:00

A: The President’s Test

Just about anybody who wants drive a car in this country must pass a driving test. Cars are dangerous in the wrong hands. We just can’t have anybody driving two thousands pounds of matter through midday traffic. So we test.

A simple driving test does not guarantee that you won’t create havoc in the streets. But passing a driving test is a good predictor that you’ll drive safely within statistical limits. Yet we let just about anybody drive this country, regardless of experience, skill, intelligence or aptitude. No wonder things are all messed up.

So I propose a change in the way that we do things. I propose we revise the Constitution of the United States to require not only must the President of the United States of America be natural born, at least thirty five years of age and live here for fourteen years, but that anybody that occupies the Oval Office must have an 80% passing grade on the President’s Test.

So in the spirit of patriotism, here are some of the questions that I think anybody who wants to be President should be able to answer.

What is the difference of between the city-state and the nation-state?
Who was the last President of the United States when Louis-Phillippe was King of France?
What are the two commonwealths that exist within the United States?
Who was Levy Woodbury?
What are the nine states of present day Austria?
What was Teapot Dome about?
What is the difference between the head of government and the head of state?
In calculus, what is the Theory of Limit?
What is Thomas Malthus’s Theory of Population?
What were the causes of the Crimean War?
What factors led to the unification of the German states in 1871?
In the event the disaster strikes the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate and the Secretary of State, who is next in the line of Succession to the Presidency?
How many bytes are in a petrabyte?
What is a gerund?
What caused the Panic of 1819?
Who was the Ambassador to the Court of Saint James during the Civil War?
Who are the current members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China?
What is the difference between the Marxist dialectic and Hegelian dialectic?
How many pints are there in a gallon?
Name 5 characters from Shakespeare’s play, Richard II.

I am sure that there are others.

One of Barry Levinson’s early films is titled Diner. One of the plots of Diner had to do with a couple about to be married. Before the marriage can take place the bride-to-be has to pass the Football Test. The Football Test is administered by the groom-to-be. The way that the test works is that the groom asks a series of question that have to do with the game of football or any football team to play the game.

Everybody relevant to the marriage was concerned about the Football Test. The bride’s parents want to marry her off. The bride wants to be married. The groom wants a bride that can pass the Football Test. Whether the bride had any interest in football or not was irrelevant. In order to get married the bride had to pass the test. It’s that simple.

Now I realize that not many candidates will have the time or desire to learn the answers to questions such as those posed above. But, just as the bride-to-be had no real interest in football, she desperately wanted to get married. So she learned what was necessary to get what she wanted.

And, not many of us want to know or care about what has right of way first, a police car, a fire engine or a mail truck? But, if we want to drive, we learn the answer.

So, moving forward, if you want to be President, learn the answers. It’s that simple.

Q: What is the most overlooked present day threat to our youth?

2006-12-04T16:07:00.000-08:00

A: Pelicans

So I was hanging out on Catalina Island, 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, having an extended getaway weekend, in honor of my wife’s birthday, which is December 1st for all of you who wish to send belated gifts. We did the usual stuff that all tourists do on Catalina, which for me boils down to walking around a lot, eating in restaurants with not so good food at prices a bit beyond the norm and sitting in my favorite café, C. C. Gallagher’s, watching the boats come in. Also, I conspire with my wife to see if we can tell which couples had just recently experienced an espisode of conjugal bliss. We call it the FFL. (Freshly ****** Look) Not a bad way to spend a morning.

We stayed at the Zane Grey Pueblo, for those of you that are interested.

On Saturday we went to down to the Casino, which has the Avalon Theatre, the only movie theatre on the island and watched a flick titled, Happy Feet, about a dancing penguin that is ostracized by his penguin tribe because he can’t sing, but nonetheless manages to save his brethren penguins from starvation by talking the entire global fishing industry into making a buck some place other than around his tribe’s icebergs. Eventually the dancing penguin is accepted by his tribe for who he is and gets the girl in the end, despite the fact that our penguin hero completely ignores the ramifications of the dramatic change in artic temperature caused by global warming. You’d figure if an Arthur Murray-like penguin can talk the entire world economy into reorganizing the fishing industry, changing mankind's driving habits in order to eliminate green house emissions should be a no-brainer.

But I digress.

The good news is that before the motion picture event, there was the weekly organ concert performed on the mighty and majestic Page Organ that resides in the historic landmark protected theatre. The thing not only has enough pipes to herald the arrival of St. Peter, it can produce clacking sounds, clicking sounds and any bell ringing required to celebrate the Yule Tide, as idiotic as the notion of a Winter Wonderland in Southern California may be.

So a good time was had by all. But, as we were taught in kindergarten well before the advent of the Internet, all good things must come to an end, even for the Republicans.

So, we’re standing in line waiting to get on the boat to go back to the place from whence we came along with the other holiday revelers and a few children attached to a few said revelers. As we were waiting, I noticed this:

standing on the dockside. So I went over to take a few snapshots using my trusty Canon PowerShot A520. Having satisfied myself with my foray into aviary voyeurism, I went back to stand in line. However, the creature identified above turned out to be cut from a fearless cloth and followed me.

I thought it strange. Other than pigeons and the random wren or sparrow, most birds try to avoid mankind, with good reason. But, this one was different.

Turns out there was a young human in line, a little girl about three years of age that was the offspring of one of my short term tribe members. She decided to leave the tribe to go exploring, to discover the ways and meaning of this alien species. As she approached the specimen, it came to meet her. And, as it approached, it spread its big jaws to a length that permitted easy accommodation of the little girl as a lunch time snack. This was one hungry beast. The little girl got the message and did what any prey would do: run like all hell back to the protective center of the herd.

So the moral of the tale is this: If you are going to make a movie about a dancing penguin that saves its species from humankind, make sure the pelicans get fed too.

PS: Shameless self promotion: here.

Q: What do you call an object oriented database developer?

2006-11-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

A: Lost

I’ve been working out with LINQ, Microsoft’s “let’s take databases and turn them into object models” beta product, to be released under .NET 3.0.

In order to use it I had to install the .NET 3.0 extensions for Visual Studio 2005. Now, I usually don’t install beta products on my work machine. But, I was pretty excited by what I saw DevConnections. So I figured, what the hell? Well, now the class diagramming feature of Visual Studio is broken, won’t load. Visual Studio is looking for the old libraries. Oh well.

Let's get over it an move on.

So being hot for LINQ, I decided to do a little demo of the product to my co-workers at the day job, all of whom are database developers. The results were not inspiring. First off, all the DB-heads live in a land of T-SQL, stored procedures and ETLs. These people are mostly about one thing: speed. When you are dealing with multiple databases, each containing data warehouses with transactional data for about six million people, speed and getting the stuff out on time for report consumption is all that really matters. Objects, smobjects.

Pretty much the response from my DB brethren was, “this might be nice if I understood C#, innerfaces, abstract paintings, ah, I mean abstract classes, genetics, oh no wait, it’s generics, isn’t it? and by the way what’s this private, protected and public stuff about?”

“And, hey I imagine in the innards of this stuff there is some SQL. How do I know this is high performance, highly optimized SQL?"

There is little doubt that SQL Server brought a lot more enterprise level database technology to a lot more companies and organizations in a way the Oracle and IBM overlooked or didn’t care to implement. However, Microsoft also has a habit of creating and promoting technologies that look good on the outside for about 5 minutes, but never really catch on due to poor engineering or lack of market acceptance. I mean, MS-Bob may be a distant memory; but at one time it was some MS program manager’s dream of how to get to the top.

So where does this leave LINQ? Well, until they get it to go fast in the real world and have a real cognitive migration path to teach DB developers how to get from T-SQL to .NET, well… I think there is a TV show that describes the situation.

Q: Who rocks?

2006-11-15T21:35:00.000-08:00

A: Petzold rocks!

Some guys get to be heroes despite their best intentions.

Here

Know thy roots. Know thy culture.

Q: Will Donald Rumsfeld go on unemployment?

2006-11-09T07:50:00.000-08:00

A: He can’t. He resigned.

I think that the dream of every working American is to, having decided that there is more to life than The Job, quit and go on unemployment… forever. Now, most of us would not admit it given the shame that has been associated with being on the dole. But, if there were a shame free, guilt free way to get out of having to go to The Job everyday, most of us would take advantage of the opportunity, which probably explains why the lottery and Las Vegas are so popular.

Yet we don’t. Most of us have to make the rent, buy the food, pay off the tuition or if life has blessed us with smart children, pay their tuition.

So I wonder, what in the world was Donald Rumsfeld thinking when he resigned from the Secretary of Defense gig? Anybody who has ever punched a clock knows that it’s almost impossible to get unemployment benefits if you quit. Even the home boy manning the fries at McDonald’s knows that the wisest thing to do when it comes time to leave a gig is to:

a: have another job waiting
b: get laid off so you get benefits.

When the President announced the resignation he did not say that Rummy was being promoted or moving onto another post, such as running Haliburton or GE. Nope, for all we know, the former Secretary of Defense might have said, “Hey, take this job and shove it.” He just plum quit, no two weeks notice… nothing.

So, how’s he going to get over? How’s he going to make the mortgage payment? I imagine that he doesn’t live cheap. Maybe he’ll decide to not look for another job and go on Social Security. But, how much can that pay? Most people that I know on Social Security know a whole lot about the clipping of coupons and the benefits of day old bread in the Bakery Aisle.

Rummy has a real problem on his hands. No job, no benefits and the bills still need to be paid. It doesn’t seem as if he’s thought things through. But then again, thinking things through has never been one of his strengths, just ask all those guys that are still in Iraq.

Q: How do tell your left hand from your right hand?

2006-11-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

A: Ask a professional.

Q: What do you call a place that replicates cultural achievement for the entertainment of others?

2006-11-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

A: Las Vegas

Oh yeah, for you code heads, I am at DevConnections.

Q: How do you get on the road to freedom?

2006-10-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

A: Open a bakery.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I read spam. I don’t read all the spam that I get. There’s just too much of it, tens of hundreds of unsolicited invitations to buy Viagra and Cialis at a better price or meet willing singles in my area.

I don’t read these types of emails; don’t need any Viagra or Cialis I am proud to say and I am not in the mood to meet anybody—single, double or triple, thank you. I am very fussy about who I let into my life, as is my wife.

But there is one spam item that always grabs my attention. These emails have a subject that is along these line: Become a world renowned chef in no time at all.

I have a fantasy. It goes like this: One day I reach my limit. I can no longer tolerate the dynamics, waste and idiosyncrasies of Corporate America. So I just toss in the towel and go to culinary school. I learn to be a most excellent chef. I can walk into any kitchen, look in the most barren of refrigerators and produce a world class meal, practically out of nothing. I become capable of making something of value to others in a way that requires every morsel of my thinking and creativity, sort of like the reason that I got into software.

I become most well known for my pastries. I can make the most buttery croissant and an éclair to die for. I can make my little oven produce an angel food cake that is truly heavenly. Soon just by word of mouth alone news of my recently acquired skills reaches willing buyers from all walks of life. It doesn’t happen quickly. It takes time: first a cake order here and a pastry order there. Then two cakes a day, five cakes a day, ten cakes a day, all with pastry orders. After a while, I have so many cake and pastry orders I need to I rent oven space in a nearby bakery to meet demand. Soon I am up to thirty cakes a day, ten dozen croissants and five dozen assorted pastries.

I am wise. I save up my money. Soon I have saved six thousand dollars. I have enough to buy a used convection oven, a mixer, a refrigerator, a pastry table, a display case, a coffee grinder, a coffee maker and a point of purchase system. Also, there is enough left over to pay first month and last month on a small, 500 sq. ft. store front with parking in back. I am lucky. The area is well trafficked and the Board of Health is easy to get alone with.

Soon I am up to two hundred cakes a week, twenty dozen croissants a day and a twenty dozen assorted pastries. Also, I am selling a hundred cups of coffee a day at dollar gross profit per cup.

I need help. I hire burnt out, computer science refugees who want to learn the business. The helpers learn the business, after all they are really smart. And they are really ambitious. They too have dreams.

After a while I lend them money and support to move onto their own dreams. All I ask in return is 3% of the gross profits. They are so grateful that they report their income accurately regardless of the fact that, although we have been taking credit and debit cards for a while, fifty percent of the business is still based on cash transactions.

It’s twenty years later. We have a hundred units across the world. All are profitable. All still make the most buttery croissants, éclairs to die for and angel food cakes that is heavenly. We had an opportunity to get funding to grow to a thousand units world wide. We took a vote among all the dreamers. We decided that if we got to a thousand units, we would become that which we had escaped. We are all content with what we have.

After twenty five years I sell my five hundred square feet to a kid who tried to rob me five years ago on a Wednesday afternoon in broad daylight. He was no older than fifteen. He had never been to school. His family did not have a computer at home. The only way to go to school twenty five years from now is on the Internet. There are no more brick and mortar educational institutions, not even for the really rich. The business model is unprofitable.

Anyway, the kid walks in one day, pulls out a gun and demands money. I told him that we no longer use cash, that everything is done by plastic. He gets mad. I tell the kid that if I had cash, I would give it to him, “you’re one scary dude!”. I ask him if he’d like an éclair instead. The kid says that he has never had an éclair. I give him one. He likes it. He asks me how you make one.

I show him. It’s a total fluke. Most kids would have shot me or just eaten the éclair and left with no inkling of curiosity about the tradition and knowledge required to make such a delicacy. This kid is different. Five years later the kids knows everything that I know. He can make the most buttery of croissants, an éclair to die for and an angel food cake that is heavenly.

I am old and dying. I sell the business to the kid on terms that have two conditions: that he teaches someone else how to make the most buttery of croissants, éclairs to die for and angel food cake that is heavenly, and that he makes affordable monthly payments to me until my passing.

A few months later I die.

But the dream lives on.

And that’s why I read spam that tells me that I too can become a master chef.

PS: This is dedicated to my friend Wolfgang on the anniversary of the passing of his most beloved wife and my friend, Inga. May her beautiful soul rest in eternal peace.

Q: What do you call a Democrat with money?

2006-10-15T16:49:00.000-07:00

A: A Republican.

Given that the 2006 election is but weeks away, allow me to share these thoughts.

First, the terms Liberal and Conservative have different meanings in different places. In the UK a person that has liberal political thinking is a person that champions the rights and wisdom of the individual. A person that supports conservative ideals is a person who thinks that the rights of the individual most be moderated with the welfare of the nation. Thus, the individual needs to be governed.

In the US, well… I have no idea what the terms Liberal and Conservative mean. Ten years ago I would have said that a Liberal thinks that the state has a certain obligation to insure the wellbeing of the governed and a Conservative supports the notion that government has marginal responsibility for the citizen; that the individual is quite capable of taking care of him and herself. Government should concern itself with keeping a good standing army, a decent interstate highway system and making sure the banking system is not a house of cards.

Second, I used to think that the Democratic Party was the party whose fundamental political affiliation was with working stiffs and that the Republican Party had the interests of Big Business at heart.

Now I think that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have the interests of Big Business as its first concern. The working stiff, the man and woman who can plan to spend fifty to sixty years of his and her life doing that thing called a “job” has absolutely no political party to look out for his or her interests.

Like it or not, one of the pillars of the Industrial Age is what I call the Fundamental Covenant between Big Business and the Working Class. It goes like this: Give me, Big Business, all of your adult life working in my factories and offices making stuff that may or may not be of interest to you. Get up every morning and work eight to twelve hours a day, five to six days a week, in conditions that may or may not be interesting, meaningful, and healthy to your body and sensibilities and in return I will pay you a decent enough wage so that you, your wife and your kids can live in a sort of nice place, have enough food to eat and movies to go to. And since you will make enough money so only one adult, most likely the guy, will have to work, the other adult, most likely the woman will have the time to make really, really good things to eat. So, at least your dinner won’t be boring. Also, your kids will get to go to good enough schools, the cops won’t be too corrupt and if there is a war, those who live through it will get to go to college on the government’s dime. By the way, if there is war, everybody goes. Only the really rich kids get to stay home.

Also, when you retire, you’ll get a pension with enough to get you through to old age. You won’t get a hip replacement, bone marrow transplant or cataract surgery because we don’t know how to do that stuff. But, don’t worry about polio or smallpox. We've got that covered.

But that was then and this is now.

Now to be thought of as working class is shameful. It’s all Big Business. We live in a time where every house is a castle and nobody has enough money to pay for them and all the other stuff they don’t really need. So the only recourse is to borrow, which Big Business really likes because all the banks are really big. Most savings and loans were wiped out in the late 80s during the Silverado Scandal.

Now The Covenant looks something like this: We, Big Business will pay you some money, maybe a lot of money if we like you. By the way, we are under absolutely no obligation to do anything for you in the way of long term employment. As a matter of fact, if we can find a place where we can get the work done cheaper, we will. But don’t worry. You’ll get twenty six weeks of unemployment, if you are eligible.

Don’t forget that unemployment payments are not tax free. Everybody pays tax all the time, unless you're us, that is. However, not everybody is entitled to the stuff you get taxed for. In fact, most of the money that we get from Federal tax collection will go to pay for defense, military contractors and to pay down debt for those things we, erh.. I mean the Government bought but couldn’t pay for. Yeah, Social Security and Medicare get a lot too. Why do you think we want to get it into our hands?

The good news is that if there is a war, your kids won’t have to go. But if you can’t make enough to get them into college or provide them with any sense of security about their future welfare, they are welcome to join up and we’ll, oops, I mean the Government will give them money toward college when they get out, if they get out.

In terms of pension, put some money in a 401K. However, if it goes south, don’t blame us. You’re in charge of your money. But, on the other hand, if you need major, life sustaining surgery, you can get it. All you need to do is pay for it. If you’re old enough for Medicare, you’re in. If you have a job that provides health insurance you’re in (for as long as you're on the payroll). If you’re on your own, well you’re on your own. You figure it out.

And so on.....

P.J. O’Rourke had a great saying when considering De Toqueville’s observation on American democracy: “We’ve voted ourselves rich.”

Me, I’d rather be working class. The food’s better. The sex is better. The music’s better. The only thing I wish was that there was a political party that had the real interests of working class Americans at heart. And, it ain't about keeping prayer in the classroom. It's about keeping food on the table and books in the library.

So think about that the next time you’re about to vote.

PS: The government still seems to be good at keeping a standing army. But the highways suck and the banking system is a house of cards. Also, the important elections are rigged. Have been for a while.

Q: What’s the best day of the week?

2006-10-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

A: Monday

Know how I know if my life is going in a good direction? The way I tell is if there is no better day of the week for me than Monday. If I find myself sitting around Sunday night having angst about what the next day will bring, something’s wrong.

Looking forward to Monday is where it’s at. Most people look forward to Friday. When Friday comes they dress up the way they really want to, not in some outfit that embraces conformity and gives the impression, maybe deception of professional competency. I mean, is a pair of Dockers, a Ralph Lauren shirt and penny loafers supposed to make you better at what you do? Does a suit and tie make you tops in your field?

Come to think of it, what does a person dressed up in Dockers, a Ralph Laurent shirt and penny loafers do anyway? We know what a person dressed up in a white lab coat and stethoscope does. We know what a guy dressed up in a blue shirt, blue pants, black shoes with utility belt and a side arm does. We know what a person dressed up in a wet suit and scuba tank does. But, what does a guy in a suit do? Lawyer? Banker? Insurance broker? Lobbyist? Venture Capitalist? Big Six Consultant? Guy going for a job interview as a an Assistant Manager at Starbuck’s?

I mean jeepers, Friday is so much the Gateway to Meaningful Existence that somebody actually made a serious buck with a restaurant chain celebrating the meaning of the day.

But, I digress like an entitled teenager who's all pissed off about actually having to get up in the morning in order to be at work on time.

It makes me sad to no end to think of a culture full of people checking out of their lives from Monday to Friday, going through the motions of participation and interest on a work week basis when in fact, the only thing that really matters is what happens on Saturday and Sunday, 5 paid holidays, and two weeks of paid vacation, expanded to three weeks after five years of service. It makes me much sadder if I happen to be one of those people.

Sadly for most of my life I’ve enjoyed Monday about as much as I’ve enjoyed deep scale teeth cleansing. I’ve been one of those people more often than not. Yet somehow I’ve come to understand that no matter how high paying the job is, if the work is meaningless, the money won’t make Sunday night any better. There really is more to life than waiting for the 401k to get to point where one can actually live off the interest, if indeed that time will ever come. Somehow when I am in an “oh shit, it’s Monday” mode, I get the sense that something is passing me by.

But there have been a lot of times in my life when Monday morning was better than a good time under the covers on Saturday night. I experienced great Mondays during college, (NOT during high school) and during those periods in life when the Universe was benevolent enough to arrange my time on the planet to be in an “I do not have a job, I am doing stuff that has more meaning than Webster’s Dictionary and I am making enough money” lifestyle.

But that was then and this is now.

From where I sit today is the only day that really matters. So, I am going to make some lemons out of lemonade. To celebrate Mondays I am adding two new products to the Coding Slave line of apparel. These additions are T-Shirts. One says the following:

“My life is so good that Monday is the best day of the week.”

The other says:

“Having a job is a highly overrated activity for people in my line of work.”

Write bob@CodingSlave.com is you want to order some. Makes the perfect Christmas gift for the person who has everything.

Q: Build it or buy it?

2006-10-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

A: Depends how good you are.

When asked to solve a problem, just about every software developer in the known world will create a solution, maybe one that is cost effective and fast to deliver, maybe one that is expensive as all hell and prone to more missed dates than Windows Vista. On the other hand, ask a business manager to solve a problem, he or she will hit Google, find a purchase to meet the need, and if The Budget allows, cut a purchase order.

Engineers want to make stuff. Business managers want to make money. That’s the way it is in our well ordered Universe.

Up until today I was in the “buy” camp, which is pretty funny given that when push comes to shove I define myself as a software developer. I mean, the consolidation of the software development industry into low cost, off shore coding centers in India, China and Eastern Europe has made it almost impractical to do any sort of profitable commercial development for the general market. If you do want to make a custom solution, most times it pays to buy some off the shelf components and just stitch them into your code. Or you can forget stitching anything together. Just use one of the big ass portal products such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, the open source DotNetNuke, Joomla for PHP, or WebSphere’s Web Portal and configure it to be the app that you want.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love building software, in fact I love building anything. I am a builder sort of guy by nature. But, I can see the handwriting on the wall. Making software is hard and expensive. Most custom software projects that start never see the light of day, let alone become a reliable mainstay of the organization that plunked down the bundle of money required to get it out the door. If some company has the brains, tenacity and deep pockets that are required to actually make commercial software that works, well far be it from me to let my ego get in the way. I’d just rather buy something that I know works and learn how to use it. I mean if, I really gotta code, I can just make something and post it on SourceForge or space that I rent from GoDaddy.

As I said, my brain says buy while my heart says build. Then I read this month’s issue of Wired. It seems that Google is building a Big Ass Data Center out in Oregon. The company is building in Oregon because there is plenty of cheap power to be had coming off of the waters of the Columbia River as it roars through the turbines of the Dalles Dam. The undertaking is stupendous. We’re talking about tens of thousands of servers under one roof chugging away as one big, RAM based collective intelligence processing millions of queries a second worldwide. This is not an undertaking for amateurs. We’re talking a data center that will consume as much power as Las Vegas.

They’re building it! Not buying it from Verison or ATT.

But, then again, Google has been building it’s infrastructure from the get go. The company figured out a while ago that it could take some off the shelf processors, power supplies, RAM and hard drives and turn them into world class server farms doing things that used to be the province of mainframes and supercomputers. Google builds because the company has the competence to build. In fact, I believe that any organization will build if it has the competence to build. But, when the competence is gone, what’s left?

So now the question I have to ask myself is this: If Google has the competence to build big stuff, what’s stopping the rest of us who are just trying to build the small stuff? We just can’t seem to be able to ship. Granted, component based software is the way to go. No sense reinventing the faucet every time we need to build a bathroom. But jeepers, some days it seems as if we can’t even build the sink.

So, if you can’t build, you buy. And, if you can buy…. well, you sell.

Maybe that’s why there seems to be so many mortgage brokers around.

Q: What is a benefit of totalitarianism?

2006-08-27T19:47:00.000-07:00

A: Better driving

My friend Carl Franklin sent me a interesting book last week in a Thinking Man’s Care Package. The title of the book is Freakonomics. One of the things that I learned from the book is that since the 14th century the homicide rate in England has gone from 23 per 100,000 people to 0.9 per 100,000 between the years of 1950-1954. Seems that England is doing something right! Maybe it has something to do with the all of the video surveillance technology they use.

I attended Traffic School on Saturday. Traffic School is a State of California institution by which traffic violators such as myself can attend a 400 minute class and upon successful completion of the curriculum, have any trace of the 1 point that would have been put on my driving record expunged, thus assuring me that my auto insurance will not increase because I was deemed an unsafe driver.

My driving infraction was that I ran a red light on the corner of 17th Street and Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica.

I attended Traffic School in Beverly Hills. The particular Traffic School class that I attended was offered by Comedy School out of Northridge, CA. Comedy School is an authorized provider of Traffic School classes licensed by the State of California. Comedy School puts actors and comedians to work in the service of the public good teaching the specifics and benefits of safe driving.

The guy the ran my class was Brian McLaughlin. He was very good. He was funny enough to keep all 23 violators in my class interested. He was experienced enough to keep us in line, despite the fact that one of the guys in the class whose violation was a DUI, kept going on and on about how his wife has left him that day, that she had taken $25,000 with her and that his life was coming to ruins despite the fact that he kept on trying to start a brand new relationship with the woman two seats down from him. Me? I sat in the last end seat of the back row paying attention and not trying to get too involved. I had a breakfast of bagel and coffee, so my life was just all right.

One of the facts that Brian McLaughlin taught me was that when a municipality puts one of those automatic policing cameras at a traffic intersection, after a while the number of people running red lights decreases dramatically. And, that most traffic accidents occur at an intersection and that one in ten traffic accidents result in a fatality, over time the death rate due to traffic accidents goes down. Using automatic policing cameras save lives.

And so I say, totalitarianism is a good thing.

Most people mistake totalitarianism with authoritarianism. Totalitarianism is about the state having total knowledge of the governed. Authoritarianism is about complete subservience of the rights of the individual to the rights of the state. Sometimes you get authoritarian states that are totalitarian too, for example the Soviet Union during the 50s and Germany during the mid 30s and early 40s. But sometimes totalitarian states are not authoritarian, for example England and the good ole USA today.

Let’s get real. Our government knows a whole bunch of stuff about us in particular and everybody else in general. We have a ton of listening and watching going on. Do I know this for a fact? No. Is it feasible? Yes. Does it matter in the scheme of things? Probably not.

Privacy is the great middle class myth. In the old days, when we were all huddled into two bedroom apartments and farm houses, before the advent of McMansions and the notion that every adolescent should have his or he own room, we all knew a whole lot about each other, probably more than any one party thought was public. All you had to do was put your ear to the wall and keep an eye on your neighbor’s clothesline. Your kids learned about sex from listening to you from the room next door, or in some cases watching you if you couldn’t afford a 2 bedroom flat. And, well….. seeing Mrs. Jones sheer lace nightgown and undies drying in the sun told you a whole bunch about Mrs. Jones.

But that was then and this is now.

So the government has been listening to us since the first party line was run from switching station to household and has been watching us since we put the first satellite in space. Maybe it’s a good thing. I mean, intersection cameras do save lives and maybe if the government eavesdropped on me more often it might learn a thing or two.

But tell me please, what happens when my violations go beyond absentmindedly running red lights? What happens when my violations are more about who I am, what I think and what I say rather then where and how I drive my car?

I learned in Traffic School that just about any police officer can cite me any time he or she desires. There are that many laws in play. It’s not the law. It’s the execution of the law that prevents crime.

You know what keeps me awake at night? It’s not the totalitarian state. It’s the emergence of the authoritarian state. I am a lot more worried about the Unitary Executive than video surveillance cameras in subway stations.

Q: What’s the fastest way to bring peace to the Middle East?

2006-08-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

A: Build more shopping malls.

I was in Mississippi last week on business. It was my first time to that area. Before my trip I imagined the state to be pretty much as depicted in the film, Mississippi Burning—lots of twangy voiced, inbred rednecks of marginal intelligence and education, doing twangy voiced, inbred, redneck things that involved the desire to do bodily harm to "colored people" and Yankees like me.

I was wrong, very wrong. In fact, I was so wrong that my preconceptions could be considered chauvinistic, almost bigoted, definitely prejudiced. Funny in a way. That which I feared I had become. It's embarassing.

What I discovered in Mississippi was that the state was more like New Jersey than not. I found Starbucks in competition with Seattle’s Best, MTV on the tube, classic rock stations on the radio, multiple channels of HBO just like I have in LA and more than a few Mercedes on the roads, some driven by African Americans. There were independent restaurants going up against Applebee’s, KFC, McDonald’s and Wendy’s. And, there was so much highway building going on that you could feel decades of growth on the horizon.

I did not see one "whites only" washroom or lynching. I did see African American policemen and TSA workers in the Jackson-Evers Airport. (The Evers part named after Medgar Evers, the slain civil rights activist.) The only people that said ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ to me were white and they did so out of respect, not deference.

I expected to find a lot of violence. Instead I found a lot of commerce—people from all walks of life just trying to get over and grab a bite of the American Dream. That the dream has become a homogenized, credit driven experience based on the continual consumption of Asian produced goods and the overreaching acquisition of questionably constructed McMansions leads me to say this: “So what?!”

The fact is that in the wake of chain stores, shopping malls and credit cards comes pacification and integration. It was blindingly apparent to me as I walked the aisles of a CVS in Ridgeland, Mississippi looking for shampoo; the store had black and white employees, black and white customers and the automatic debit/credit card processor at the checkout counter didn’t really care too much about the nationality or race of the person using it. All that mattered was that the customer’s card was good.

My personal sentiments aside, it seems that consumerism really is the way to peace among men. It’s hard to want to blow things up when you have to worry about paying down your credit card balance and keeping your cable service on.

I have seen the future. Just as the post Civil Rights South went through a period of violence and adjustment, so too will the Middle East. Then slowly, very slowly transnational corporations will infiltrate at the retail level. Wal-Mart, Toyota, Borders, Home Depot, TGIF and the Gap will come spreading consumerism based on easy credit. KB Homes will start to rebuild Iraq, Lebanon, and all the other countries decimated by the horrors of war.

We will run out of fossil fuel. We will all want more money. We will never have enough.

ExxonMobil, BP and General Electric will devise new energy sources based on magnetism and atomic energy. The private automobile will be a luxury of the rich. The rest of us will use mass transit aircraft and trains for long distances, and for short distances, light rail vehicles, subways and cabs just like they do in Manhattan and Athens. We will rent cars when we really need one.

All of us will have unlimited access to easy credit. Credit will be expensive for poor people, affordable for the middle class, free for the rich.

Everything will be made in China, except movies and credit. Movies will be made in Hollywood and Mumbai; credit in New York, Hong Kong and London.

The best cheese will still come from France.

It’s sort of weird. Martin Luther King had an amazing dream. Deutsch Bank, Sony, Intel, Microsoft and PepsiCo will be the ones to fulfill it.

And, that’s what I learned from my trip to Mississippi.

Q: How many drunks does it take to turn rumor to fact?

2006-08-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

A: Two

The recent rumor out of Malibu is that Mel Gibson was not alone in his car on Friday, July 28 when he was pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving.

Witnesses report that George W. Bush was in the car with Gibson just before Gibson's Lexus was stopped on the PCH.

According to unidentified sources, Gibson and Bush were out that night cruising up and down Sunset Blvd in West Hollywood enjoying themselves as fun loving tourists. After some stops at a few undisclosed locations, the pair decided to call it a night. Bush was scheduled to rendezvous somewhere in the Pacific Palisades with the clandestine Secret Service agents who had made it possible for the President to enjoy an anonymous "boys night out on the town" prior to commencing his August vacation. Bush and Gibson were driving to a secret drop zone where Bush was to be transported back to Washington to resume his role as Leader of the Free World.

Both Gibson and Bush had been drinking.

While driving north on the Pacific Coast Highway, Gibson noticed that he was being followed by a law enforcement vehicle in the distance. Knowing he was about to be pulled over and wanting to avoid embarrassment for Bush, Gibson somehow managed to make it possible for the President to exit the car before being stopped by the police.

As later stories confirm, Gibson was pulled over and eventually arrested.

Once in custody Gibson was initially reported to have said, "F'ing Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

Law enforcement officials have admitted that Gibson was misquoted. The noise level in the holding cell was so loud that arresting officers could not accurately report what Gibson was saying.

Audio tapes of the incident reveal that Gibson was saying, "F'ing George. George is responsible for all the wars in the world."

Q: Knock, knock. Who’s there?

2006-07-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

A: Human beings as currency

[Please be advised that there a lot of dots to connect on this one. So make sure that your pencil is sharpened.]

As of late I have been reading up on the finer points of putting a database marketing program into action. One of the pieces that I read asserts that a good database marketing program will tie together the enterprise’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with sales transactions so that the company’s customer service representative will be able to say something like, “Tell me Mrs. Brown, did your granddaughter, Jennie enjoy the purple sweater that you bought for her last month?”

[Lifetime Value = CUM-NPV/ acquired customers]

Saturday was my birthday. I am now 52. In my inbox was an email from LinuxQuestions.org wishing me a Happy Birthday. I don’t know anybody at LinuxQuestions.org, although I did sign up to the web site to get some information when I was doing some debugging on a NetBeans project about a year ago. I guess that I provided my birth date.

[Corporation: A body that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members.]

A while ago I had to add some minutes to my cell phone plan. I called up T-Mobile to make the change. I got a female voice on the phone welcoming me and asking how she could help. I told her that I wanted to add some minutes to my plan. She asked for my social security number. I provided it. Then she asked me to hold so that she could retrieve my account information. I said, “OK”.

While I was waiting I tried to make some small talk. So I started yacking away, asking her where her call center was located. The voice on the other end did not respond. I kept trying to talk to her. No response. Finally I asked, “Are you a human being?” She responded by asking me my mother’s maiden name.

[Turing Test: If it acts human, it is human.]

We’re masters of selling. Well, at the corporate level we really don’t sell, we market. And, at the core of our marketing is the Customer Relationship.

Now the funny thing is that with all of the Customer Relationships being established, there is not a lot of relating going on. Maybe it’s because that the only time that a human being is involved in the process is when there is no alternative. All other times it’s just one machine taking to another: machines making stuff, ordering stuff, processing credit card numbers, correcting our spelling, reconciling our bank statements, telling us when our box will arrive via UPS, providing our MySpace page and sending emails to email addresses wishing the happiest of birthdays while making sure that the hourly call center employee with marginal benefits and five days of accrued vacation time asks about Mrs. Brown’s granddaughter, regardless of the fact that the employee has no idea who Mrs. Brown is, human or not.

Seems that the only entity to which a relationship with Mrs. Brown has meaning is the corporation that buys the advertising to attract Mrs. Brown and owns the CRM system to retain her. And yet, with every right to not care about Mrs. Brown, her granddaughter or the purple sweater upon which the Customer Relationship is based, the employee answering the phone does, not so much because Mrs. Brown is worth caring about because all parties in the relationship live int the same city, go to the same school or attend the same church, but rather because the employee is paid to care about her.

We’re that disconnected. We’re that much for sale.

[Connect the dots.]

Q: What happened when Bernie went to lunch?

2006-07-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

A: He lost the business.

I’ll share something with you. I do my laundry in a Laundromat. The one bedroom apartment that I share with my wife is not big enough to allow us the necessary space to install a washer/dryer combo and our landlord is too cheap to fix the ones out back.

So just about every Saturday I drive over to my favorite Laundromat in Mar Vista and fill up two triple loaders—one for whites and one for colors.

Actually, I like the Laundromat. There are lots of kids running around, mostly in Spanish. I can go buy a frozen cocoanut bar and diet soda at the adjacent Mini-Mart when I need to change a twenty and, most importantly, doing the laundry in the Laundromat allows me the time out of my demanding work week to do my technical reading, which is really important considering I haven’t written any code in the last four months. (Whereas I used to get paid to code, now I get paid to “manage”. But this is another story for another time.)

So there I am in the Laundromat, spinning up a storm in the triple loaders and reading the latest article by Ted Pattison on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server2007 (MOSS) in this month’s MSDN. Turns out that MOSS, the next generation of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003), is built on top of Window SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and ASP.NET 2.0. Also, it turns out that “MOSS 2007 is quite different from SPS under the hood. SPS builds its portal site infrastructure around the concepts of areas and listings…areas and listings have been eliminated in MOSS 2007…” (Italic are mine.)

Now, I’ll let you in on another secret. I never got the chance to code to the concept of areas and listings in SPS 3.0. In fact, I am embarrassed to say that I have yet to get the chance to code to WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007. If the truth be known, the only acronym that is part of my life is ASP.NET 2.0 and I am having a bitch of a time keeping up with that. So there I am, sitting in the Laundromat, learning about a new technology that is enhancing/replacing an old technology that I never had the chance to learn to begin with! Yikes! Talk about Future Shock.

I’ve written more than once that the rate of change imposed on the average man or woman trying to make a buck from coding is more than one mind can handle or should handle. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up. In fact, if things keep going on the present path, just to make a decent living you’ll have to be reading about a new technology with the left eyeball while coding paying work with your right eyeball.

Obviously something has got to change.

I don’t think that the powers that be in the software industry are going to stop the technology churn to make it easier for the average coder to have a balanced life. I wish that they would, but they won’t. Technology churn is the way that software manufacturers bind our brain to their product. If you have to constantly keep relearning .NET and associated technologies, you are not going to have the time to learn J2EE and all the stuff that goes with the Java world.

So, if the industry is not going to change, we are going to have to change. Ray Kurzweil has some interesting takes in his books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near about the laundry list (no pun intended) of changes that will be ours for the choosing. In the extreme scenario Kurzweil suggests that in the not too distant future we’ll simply take a pill containing nano/biotechnology that reconstructs our brain to have the information that we need. For example, “Want to learn how to work Windows Office SharePoint Server 2020? Here, take this pill.”

For me, I am just thinking about getting into another line of work that doesn’t require absorbing so much new knowledge so quickly. Maybe I’ll become a lawyer. (I’d say auto mechanic. But these guys are in the same boat as software developers.)

So what does this have to do with Bernie?

Bernie is a character from Doonesbury who started a software company and worked night and day to become rich, which he did. One day Bernie went to lunch and lost the business. While he was out for that hour all of the technology changed and he couldn’t catch up.

I wonder; how much money can a hair stylist make?

Q: What is a wonder of the modern world?

2006-07-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

A: Data warehouses

Over the last few months I’ve been working in the Land of Big Data: data warehousing. This stuff is new to me. Previously I treated data as a necessary evil of application development, thankfully abstracted from my coding landscape as nothing more than a call to some stored procedure that returned the relevant dataset of interest. Not a big deal given that the usual size of the dataset returned was a few hundred rows at most.

That was then and this is now.

Now my landscape is filled datasets the contain millions of rows. And, most of these rows are filled with pretty standard stuff—first name, last name, address, city, state, zip, stuff the person in the row bought and when they bought it—things that are pretty usual in the everyday data warehouse of a large company that has millions of customers or wants millions of customers.

Yet it turns out that not only is my landscape filled with the names and addresses of millions of people, but we also know a lot of tasty tidbits about each one: average age of each person, how many people are in the household, what type car he or she drives, what type of house he or she lives in, marital status, age of children in household, favorite grocery store and I image if we added a bit of effort to our inquiries, we could find out sexual orientation, frequency of sexual activity and if the person prefers half gallon size containers of milk as opposed to gallon size containers. It’s that comprehensive.

Entire companies such as Information Resources, Experian and A.C. Nielsen are built on the buying and selling of millions of rows of data that tells us a lot of stuff about a lot of people. Sort of freaks me out. You’d think that the Average Joe would be all up in arms about this for reasons of invasion of privacy, violation of family values or mass manipulation of the national consciousness by Big Corporations only concerned with getting the general population to forego buying Tylenol in favor of Advil because adults between the ages of 35 and 65 prefer the color blue over the color red.

But no such indignation exists about the fact that so much knowledge about the “collective us” is available to any company that has the money, technical infrastructure and analytic know-how to facilitate the inquiry. We sort of like it this way.

The mass exposure of a private individual's information to corporations is not being done to us, but by us.

In the old days, if you wanted to know a whole lot about a large population, you’d create a society filled with political informers and secret police, which resulted in kids reporting the political activities of their parents and workers ratting on each other. And, if that didn’t work, you’d put a gun to some person’s head and tell them that if they didn’t spill the beans on everybody that they knew, you’d shoot them.

But again, that was then and this now.

Today no such intrigue and violence is necessary. Just give each member of the population a credit card with a line of credit appropriate to the holder’s income level and credit score. And, on the paper that gets signed to accept and activate the card you put a little language that says, “Oh yeah, we get to sell information about you and your purchases to any interested buyer that can pay for it, whether headquartered in Cincinnati or Beijing”.

Voluntary totalitarianism. Who woulda figured?

Q: How do you make money?

2006-06-14T22:02:00.000-07:00

A: By losing money.

I heard the most amazing story today. A friend of mine reports to me that her boyfriend, an IT boss sorta guy, works for a company that actually loses money in order to keep a big ass corporation as a customer. They make not a cent from the account. But, they do get to work awfully hard, sometimes to the point of absurd exhaustion just for the privilege of saying, “hey, we have this big ass corporate customer who brings us so much prestige that we are willing to lose money to keep them just so other big ass corporate customers will want to do business with us because we stand in the glow of such amazing prestige.

I know, It’s hard to believe. But, I have been roaming the halls of Corporate America long enough to take it at face value. In fact, the more irrational something sounds, the more apt I am to believe that it happened, in Corporate America anyway.

There’s a saying that goes like this, if you want to remain sane in an insane place, the best thing to do is to become insane.

Q: What causes depression?

2006-06-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

A: Depressing experiences.

There’s no doubt about it. I suffer intermittently from depression, the blues, sadness, melancholy, whatever you want to call it. It shows itself in different forms at different times: nausea, lack of energy, feeling as if nothing really matters but watching TV, always wanting to eat, not wanting to eat, not wanting to get out of bed, continual need for sex, the list goes on and on.

I am not alone. There enough of us out there that the pharmaceutical companies have managed to build a nice little business around us. Seems there is a cure for everything these days. Feeling sad, take some Xanax. Feeling fat, take some Jenny Craig. Feeling poor, call up CitiBank and get a credit card.

I have a theory about this depression stuff. It goes like this: The reason that there are so many depressed people out there is because things are pretty depressing. Let’s face it: our economy is based on funny money and our culture is becoming more militarized in the service of non-beholden corporations impersonating national governments, most of which have significant interest in Financial Services and Energy. It seems as if the model for our interpersonal relationships is based on a cross between Desperate Housewives, the World Wide Federation of Wrestling, MySpace and fundamentalist Christianity.

Seems that the purpose of modern, dual income, career oriented life is, to quote George Carlin, “to buy shit that we don’t need with money that we don’t have.” If this isn’t depressing, then tell me, what is?

Call me a cynic, but I can’t help but wonder what society did to address depression before the medicinal response. Well there’s a good argument to be made that we simply drank our woes away. But most people didn’t. In fact, it’s my belief that most people simply just made due. We coped. You had your family and you had your friends. That you didn’t get to choose your family meant that every once and a while an Uncle Ernie popped up and did some fiddling on your cousin’s private parts. But, you did get to choose your friends. Thus, most of us were fortunate enough to choose well. Our friends lasted us a life time, regardless of our socio-economic status or geographic location. Before our salmon like existence of upward mobility we shared a history, a place on the planet, a seat at the common table. Today we share a highway, driving around in little, lease instead of buy, self contained boxes that we drive into other self contained boxes, that are part of other self contained boxes—Russian Doll environments in which our most significant ties to one another are the Internet and our home theatre.

Then to top if off, we send our children off to have a collegiate experience in which Texas Hold’em is more important than Chaucer, calculus, premarital sex and pot. A mind really is a terrible thing to waste.

Call me a Romantic, but I long for a time when I knew most the people on my block, where the corner candy store was owned by a guy name Nick, not a company named Walgreen’s, and there was still such a thing as a children’s matinee at the local movie theatre—fifty cents to get in and twenty five cents for a box of Dots that was guaranteed to rot your teeth.

But, I am not so much of a Romantic to have forgotten that those days brought us Blacklisting, the War in Viet Nam, and a national televised experience where a lot of people died right before our video glazed eyes. I was eight when the first Kennedy was shot in black and white and thirteen when the last one met an identical fate, albeit live and in living color. It’s a lot for a developing mind to take in and still be in tact.

We’re told that happiness is a choice, a state of mind, that our thoughts create our reality. If so, then what do we do about the sad fact that we’ve become a nation of privatized occupiers of oil rich client states and a global community that is just sort of accepting the fact that our atmosphere is a bit too warm to maintain the Good Ole Days and that the politics in Central Africa, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Mexico are more akin to Crips and Blood diplomacy than Realpolitik. Believe me there are some things in life that really are louder than Prozac, no matter who is listening.

But as the song says, Don’t Worry, Be Happy. And, as the TV commercial says, for everything else there is Mastercard, which, by the way, can be accepted as payment at your dentist for teeth whitening services, your psychiatrist for counseling services and at your local pharmacy when it comes time to have your prescription of Celexa refilled.

Q: What's the difference between software and reality?

2006-04-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

A: The installation process.

Lately I have had the opportunity to work my business admin chops doing a bit more of an executive role than has been common over the last 4 years. Sort of like the Guy that Wrote Coding Slave doing the Boss Thing. Funny in a way; but predictable too considering that we all know who really rules the world in the end.

Thus, getting the blog out with predictable regularity has been a chore.

Anyway, I have been rediscovering a thing or two.

Here is what I have rediscovered: If the reality before your eyes is out of whack, no project plan will cure that which ails; no allocation of man hours will make the insanity sane and no amount of code will alter that which is to be codified.

And here is the other thing I relearned: I make my reality--every moment of everyday; that which I seek, I find.

Yeah, I'm being cryptic. But, it's late and I am very rusty.

Think about it, please.

Q: What might be the most important Open Source project around?

2006-03-19T20:46:00.000-08:00

A: Universal Health Care

Let's face it, there are 46 million people in this country who do not have or cannot purchase health insurance. They are on their own. Either they can pay a doctor, clinic or hospital for health care, or they can depend on th kindness of strangers. Most times the stranger is the Emergency Room at a local hospital. This means that if you are uninsured and cut the palm of your hand slicing a bagel on a Sunday morning, you get to go to the emergency room, get stitched up and pay up by cash or plastic. If you don't have the cash or plastic, you work out some sort of payment plan. And, if you don't have the cash or can't work out a payment plan, don't worry. That's the way it works. The Emergency Room has to treat you. After all, that's what an Emergency Room is for—fixing up sliced hands on a Sunday morning. But, what if you are a single or divorced, 45 year old, $75 an hour independent software developer on the way to meeting a client about a new project. In the elevator on your way up to the client's office you start loosing feeling in you legs. The next thing you know you are sitting in chair in the client's conference room. Seems you passed out in the elevator.

You go home.

You haven't seen a doctor for the last 5 years. You have been frightfully healthy for as long as you can remember. You don't smoke. You go to the gym regularly. You run a a mile a few times a week. You don't eat a lot of red meat. You are more of a Chinese food and Sushi guy.

At one time you worked for a company that provided health insurance, so you took it. But when you lost that gig due to all the stuff that went on with the dot com bubble burst and the end of Y2K, you were lucky enough to get a 6 month contract for 50 bucks an hour. The tax advantage that you gained by all those “business expenses” put more money in your pocket than when you had a full time job. Yeah, you lost the medical coverage. But, you had enough money on hand to pay your dentist out of pocket and for a year or two you bought catastrophic health insurance: if you got in a car accident or got appendicitis, you'd be covered, sort of.

You like working on contract. You don't have to put up with the office politics that come with any full time gig, you get to do a lot of interesting work and get a breadth of knowledge that you would have missed if you stayed in one place for all those years.

And, the money was good when you could get it. Working contract has it's ebb and flow. Your rate is reasonable, not too cheap to have prospective clients think you are incompetent, not too expensive to have to work the hardcore, suit and tie corporate consulting thing. Most often you got a new contract within three weeks of the termination of the old one. But, one time you had a two month layover. During that time you let the catastrophic coverage go. But what the hell, all your teeth are healthy and you can bench press your body weight.

Everything was fine until this morning.

Luckily a friend of a friend is a doctor. You call the friend and he calls the friend and you get an appointment three days hence. You go to the friend doctor. You fill out the forms on the clipboard that the receptionist gives you. She asks for your insurance card. You tell her that you don't have one.

A nurse comes and takes you to an examination room. Just as the nurse is about to put the gizmo on you that's used for taking blood pressure, your legs start to loose feeling again. You let the nurse know that something is going on. The next thing one know you are looking up at the doctor. He says that there is no time to waste, you need to get to the hospital. Something is seriously wrong. The receptionist comes in and tells you that you cannot drive yourself, against doctor's orders. She says that she has called a cab. If were insured, she would have summoned an ambulance. Oh yeah, since you don't have insurance, you will be taken to a public county hospital....

And this is only the beginning. You don't even know what's wrong. There is a real possibility that you might die very, very soon. However, you can forget about getting insured at the moment. After all, you can't insure a burning house.

Far fetched you say dear reader?

Well, do the numbers. The general US population is around 240 million and there are 46 million uninsured. That means that 1 out of 5.3 people in this country are on their own. Actually, the 240 million includes kids. So, if you take the adult population, a ratio like 1 in 4 is more likely.

So, think of all your friends who are contract workers and freelancers and tick off every fourth name, because that name my friend is in serious trouble if his or her body decides to stop working according to spec or the bagel cut severs an artery.

It's time to make a change.

Q: With whom did you have lunch?

2006-01-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

A: Mel Torme

I started a new gig this week doing architecture or something close to it. I took the gig for a variety of reasons: nice people, interesting work, I get to take the bus to work and the location can't be beat, a few hundred yards from Westwood Village and a one minute walk from Pierce Brothers Cemetery.

In case you don't know, Pierce Brothers is the final resting place for the likes of Walter Mathhau, Jack Lemon, Dean Martin and of course the delicious Marilyn Monroe.

Not one to let hidden benefits go unrealized even when they involve brushing up on Tomcat JSP server configuration, I grabbed my reading, rode the elevator downstairs and took a seat on a bench in the sun located at the marker where Mel Torme's soul rests.

Pretty cool, huh?

But that's not what I really want to write about. I really want to write about taking the bus to work part of the gig. You see, in the final analysis, talk is cheap. At one time it wasn't. But since talk seems to have been relegated to the back halls of persuasion, it's become about as valuable as Beta-max video and 8 track cassettes. So not for a moment do I want to give the impression that my political action ends at the end of my tongue. Thus, when the opportunity came along to get a gig that would get me out of the car and on to my feet, I took it. You see, there is some romantic resonance to the saying, “Think globally, act locally.”

So tomorrow I'll plunk my seventy five cents into the fare box and take a 10 minute ride into Westwood Village. At some point I will probably squawk a bit about the debacle of foreign policy in Iraq or the fact that there is little articulate discussion in the public arena about how a state can wage war quickly and effectively against a stateless belligerent. I'll probably get a little bummed. Then, in order to renew my spirit, if the sun is just right and warm, I might go downstairs, grab a bagel with a schmear and have lunch with George C. Scott, if he's available.

Q: Why didn't you do DotNetRocks?

2006-01-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

A: Mismatched technology

Recently I was scheduled to do an on line radio show devoted to Redmondian technology, www.DotNetRocks.com. The show is prerecorded and aired at a later time.

I did the show. Later, as the content of the show was reviewed, we all sort of independently came to the conclusion that it would be best not to broadcast it. It didn't feel right, at least on my end. My thinking was garbled and my discourse was erratic.

So, I got to thinking about the reason that it did not feel right to me. The reason that I discovered after truthful introspection was that I was trying too hard to be intellectually entertaining and adorable and not spending enough time getting to the point of my message and staying focused on my message.

I was failing because at the time I had no conscious understanding of what my message was.

Well now I do, and here it is:

Doing technology is a great vocation. Writing code is a creative experience second to none. But, as long as we in the technical community support, passively or impassively, a type of political culture and national government in which we piss away 2 trillion dollars on a war that does nothing more than create misery and instability in an area of the world that requires the opposite and does NOT provide more security for our nation and our world, well.....we had a 2 trillion dollar opportunity and we blew it.

From where I sit...

that 2 trillion dollars could have been put toward programs that eliminate our need for foreign oil and promote our positive standing worldwide.
that 2 trillion dollars could have been used to start a viable national intra-city and inter-city railway system that uses non-fossil fuels and transports freight and people cost effectively, usefully and with regard to civilian transportation, enjoyably
that 2 trillion dollars could have been used to assist the Big Three automakers to repurpose part of its workforce and technical infrastructure to make products and services that support such a railway system.
that 2 trillion dollars could have been used to modify the nation's health care system so that every citizen has fair access to quality medical care.
that 2 trillion dollars could have by used to create a national on-line library system in which every citizen has immediate access to information within the public domain.

What did we, this nation, do instead? We invaded a country with marginal relevance to the compromise of our national well-being. And, in doing so we created more enemies than friends, killed a whole bunch of people and promoted a national value system in which force is more important than reason.

And here is the comedically tragic thing. China, a nation that has a government that is not a shining example of democratic rule, gets to sit by and watch us piss away our money, a good portion of it borrowed, while it builds up it's economy and infrastructure so that one day in the not too distant future there will be more cell phones, computers, programmers and automobiles there than any place else in the world.

So think about that the next time you trying to get your .NET objects to serialize properly.

That's the message.

Q: What is the future of tech support?

2006-01-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

A: An RMA number

Over the holidays I bought my girlfriend a digital camera to go with my new laptop. I figured give a little, get a little.

Anyway, last night I wanted to download some photos to the laptop. So I get the camera box out from the gift corner, install the software and plug the camera into the USB slot via the nifty little cable that Canon sent. (The camera is a Canon PowerShot A520.)

My Windows XP Pro laptop does not see the camera.

I figured it was a driver problem, so I ditzzed around with things for a while: searched for WinXP drivers, read up, tried reinstalling, you know, just what I wanted to do on a Monday night. The result of my efforts was nil. So I try on girlfriend's Win2K laptop. What the hell, use the old drivers, I figure.

Still nothing.

So, I figure that I'll call Dell, the makers of my brand new laptop. It's late 10:30 PM PST. But, I get a garbled voice on the cell phone after dancing in the Dell phone queue for about 5 minutes. Not bad in tech support minutes, I guess. I mean, the deal is you get a voice. Nobody said anthing about a voice with meaning.

I understood about every other word that the technician uttered. I am almost sure the the guy that I had on the line was in India because the phone connection quality was frighteningly similar to sounds that I get from recruiters calling me from India using a cheap VoIP service to try to place developers from Southern California into lifeless gigs in data centers in Exurbia. We talk for 2 minutes and then we are disconnected.

I call back. I get another VoIP challenged guy who eventually directs me in to the tech support netherworld of unresolved voice menus, abrupt magical disconnections and “not my table” responses.

Still no photos on the laptop. So, in desperation I try the tech support chat.

Here is my first conversation:

Session Started with Agent (Mathew_xxxx)
Robert Reselman: "Can't see camera"
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Thank you for contacting Dell Consumer Hardware Warranty Support Chat. My name is Mathew."
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Please allow me a moment to review your question."
Robert Reselman: "Hi Mathew"
Robert Reselman: "The phone kept hanging up on me...."
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Hi, Robert."
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Robert, I am unable to help you at present as my system tools have gone bad. I can't access my database as my system does not seem to allow me to do so. So I would request you to please understand my helplessness and contact us back after half an hour so"
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. I am very sorry for not being able to assist you at the moment as all my resources are down now. I hope you will understand my situation and get in touch with us soon."
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Thank you for visiting Dell Technical Chat Support and allowing me the opportunity to assist you."
Agent (Mathew_xxxx): "Also, feel free to visit us again at: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/en/chat?c=us&cs=19&l=e"
Session Ended

Here is the second conversation:

Session Started with Agent (Ankur_xxxx)
Robert Reselman: "Need WinXP driver for Canon Powershot a520"
Agent (Ankur_xxxx): "Thank you for contacting Dell Consumer Hardware Warranty Support Chat for Portables. My name is Ankur.Please allow me a minute to review your question"
Robert Reselman: "Hi Ankur"
Agent (Ankur_xxxx): "I would have liked to help you however your chat has been connected to Dell Consumer Technical Hardware Chat Support for Portables\Desktop. To get specialized, professional help with your at-home installation needs kindly contact Dell On Call who are spec"
Agent (Ankur_xxxx): "Since we do not have a Chat based helpdesk support, I would request you to call them at (866) 497-2661 and do vist our Dell On Call Site at:"
Agent (Ankur_xxxx): "Thank you for visiting Dell Technical Support online chat and allowing me the opportunity to assist you. Please feel free to visit us again at http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/en/chat?c=us&cs=19&l=e"
Session Ended

OK, so at this point I am well..... nuts!

So, I figure, hell, I'll call the paid support line. All I want to do is get the photos into the laptop. It's a simple thing. Why is this soooo hard? I get through to paid support almost in no time, only three key skips in the menu system. Then I learn that help getting the photos into the laptop will cost $99.

At this point I felt I had only one option left: send the camera back, go down the street in the morning to Radio Shack, pay a little more to talk to a human being with free will and no cyber-intelligent tech support policy implant and get the photos into the laptop.

I get online to the DellTakeThisThingBack.htm web page and apply for an RMA number. (RMA stands for Return Merchandise Authorization, I think.)

So, I am just about to cash it in and go to sleep. I decide to give the Canon site one last try and read the very fine print in the product description that says that no special drivers are needed for Windows XP. OK, I figure. I plug the camera back in one last time . Still no camera to be seen by the laptop. Then as if by some psychic premonition I get this vision: Turn the camera on and put the mode switch on VIEW.

Do I did and it does. The laptop sees the camera.

So with absolutely no support from anybody, not Dell, not Canon, or Big Government, after 2 hours of trying to figure out how to get photos to the laptop, I finally realize my goal. I feel like a guy that would make the Founding Father proud: success through self sufficiency, private initiative and the labor of one's brow!

So for all you irate, frustrated owners of a Canon A520 searching on Google et.al., for relief, this is for you. If you want your Windows XP system to see the camera in order to get the photos onto the system, do this:

Plug in the cable between camera the system USB port
Turn on the camera
Set the mode switch down to view.

Click here for a diagram that will show you exactly what switch to move down.

Now you might want to know what photo required such urgency to download. Well, click here to see it. I am trying to sell a Crate PX700 PA mixer-amp: a nice piece of equipment for mixing to output or powering 6 mikes for a small ensemble. BO accepted.

Oh yeah, I am still waiting for the RMA number. I guess in the future we're all just another IP address in the queue.

Q: Can you debug VS2003 and VS2005 apps side by side.

2006-01-06T18:30:00.000-08:00

A: Not on Bobby's machine.

(This is a hardcore tech post. Buyer beware!)

So I got my spiffy new VS 2005 and installed it on baited breath. I had asked a few people if they had had any problem running VS2005 along side VS 20003 on the same machine. No problems reported. Thus, I felt completely comfortable not removing the existing installation of VS 2003 on my machine.

Well guess what?

You cannot (can not or can't, for all you Google searchers) debug existing VS 2003 projects after you install VS 2005, at least not on my machine.

Boy, was I upset.

But, I had the privilege of having discussion with Paul Nguyen of Avanade. He told me how to fix the problem.

If you have installed VS 2005 on a machine with an existing copy of VS 2003, simply remove the existing installation of the .NET Framework 2.0, then re-install.

Also, make this entry in the web.config of the target assemby, after the <config .... /> sections.

<startup>

<requiredRuntime version="v1.1.4322"/>

</startup>

Simple!

So I did and it did.

So to my friends in Redmond and in the NSA, please pay attention to this post. I mean, jeepers I spent at least 4 hours trying to solve this problem. Did everything the help files told me to do and still....

Thank you, Paul.

Q: What does America not want to see for Christmas?

2006-01-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

A: Two men kissing.

Here's the poop: I have been doing a contract for a major Hollywood research group. The name will go unmentioned to protect the innocent, namely me. One of the benefits of the gig is that that I get to see a lot of numbers about movies--total gross, weekend gross, how many theatres showed a movie, what day of the week the movie was released on, etc...

Anyway, it turns out that a certain cinematic love story featuring two cowboys supposedly grossed 3 million dollars during its first week out. This might seem like a lot of money. But given that it took around fifteen million bucks to make, the success of this film does not bode well.

Now according to all reports, it's a good movie, worthy of the price of admission. But you'd think that the guys who distribute this film were out skiing in Aspen during the part of business school where they talk about optimal release time. Jeepers wanna release a hit at Christmas time? Release a movie with a talking lion, a movie about a family with 18 kids, a film about retribution in the Middle East, or a film about an oversized ape. America can live with blood, murder and talking or oversized animals. But a film with two guys rolling around in a sleeping bag during CHRISTMAS WEEK, what were these guys thinking about?

Now, if it were a story about two women rolling around in a sleeping bag.....

Well, it probably wouldn't do well either. But you can bet it'd clean up on DVD.

Q: What's the second worse thing to tell an IT manager?

2005-11-24T21:05:00.000-08:00

A: “I don't know.”

Wanna drive your boss nuts? The next time you are in the throes of trying to figure out why the hell your goddam code isn't working and your boss comes over and asks you when your feature will be done, just tell him the truth, which sorta goes something like this: “I don't know”.

Then, if you work in a typical corporation, prepare for the worst.

Corporations don't like, “I don't know”, even if it is the truth. For some reason the phrase is perceived as being tantamount to saying, “I am out of control.” This is weird to me. I mean, anybody who has coded anything for a while knows that there is a period of time, sometimes an extended period of time when you don't know what is going on. You think for a while, and if you're any good, you think for a long while. Then you sort of try this, then try that and then, after this period of not knowing, well... you know!-- which is usually about 30 minutes to 3 days before you deliver your feature. Thus, by saying, “I don't know”, you are saying that you are very much in control. From where I sit not telling the truth is a sign of being out of control.

Yet, except in very rare cases, have I met a corporate IT manager who can tolerate, let alone relish a developer saying, “I don't know”. Most would rather that you just tell him or her a date, any date, preferably one that fits into his or her bonus incented project plan.

I used to think that my experience was unique, that there was something about me that drove IT managers nuts when I said, “I don't know.” But having been coding, for better or worse, for over fifteen years, what I have come to understand is this: that one of the indicators of a dysfunctional organization is managers that can't deal with the phrase, “I don't know”.

The superstar tech managers are so on top of the code that he or she just knows when things will happen. The mere mortal variety of competent manager will ask, “what's stopping you from knowing?” The not so good just get mad. It's a sense of and a sensibility for knowing and finding the truth. The champs have it. The corporately challenged ask for dates.

I'll share something with you. I think that the dictum that says that a good IT manager does not need to know the technology of the group he is managing is horse shit. That's like saying that Tony La Russa doesn't need to know about baseball, Phil Jackson could be just as successful at GM as he was with the Lakers and that John Scully really was good for Apple. After all, he did well with PepsiCo, didn't he?

Yet sadly, I have come to discover that in the dysfunctional insanity of the Corporate State, there are more than a few people out there running IT coding groups or running people that run IT coding groups who couldn't tell a logical AND operator from an addition operator. (&&,+ in C# for those of you who might be interested in learning programming in the next 60 days). And, these are the people to which the Corporations give both millions of dollars to play with and imaginary deliverable dates that are usually made up to assuage the folks on The Street.

And the result is bad code that is expensive to produce, a nightmare to maintain and coding shops where the only joy in life shows up at 5 PM or when the code ships, whichever comes first.

(If I told you that I was in a group meeting a month ago, for an “important” project, with a insane deliverable date of 60 days hence, and I heard an upper, mid-level manager say, “I will learn programming if I have to to make this project succeed”, would you believe me?)

So here is what I propose, the next time your boss asks you when your feature will be done and you really don't know, try saying this:

“Well, I could pull a date out of the air, or I could do what the Guy who wrote Coding Slave suggests and tell you the following, 'If you have to ask, you'll never know.'”

You'll probably get fired or promoted; but no matter what, you will have stopped the insanity dead in its tracks.

Q: What do IT managers and mothers have in common?

2005-11-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

A: Telling either that the baby is ugly is a futility.

Well, I am doing consulting again: hired gun coder, take my mind for some money an hour.

I am four weeks into a project that has been going on for over a year. There has been lots of developer turnover. I am the eighth developer to touch the code. Of the four people on my team, nobody has worked the code base in its entirety. The project is due to ship in beta 1/1/2006.

It's an ASP.NET/C# solution under VS 2003.

The developers want to do good work. Nobody is going out of his or her way to make the code ugly. But it is. It's as if a group of well intentioned, community minded folks who knew little or nothing about the production of art decided that they wanted a mural made about a loosely defined theme but could not figure out which or how many artists to hire. So they hire a bunch and the mural becomes a hodgepodge of any artist's interpretation of the theme. Doesn't really work. I mean jeepers, a David or Rembrandt mural might have had many artists working on it. But, the artistic vision was unified under a Master. This a project is in need of a Master. Instead the patron is running the show and what do you get?

Marginally organized code base
Scrambled egg namespace organization
Haphazard version control using Visual Studio/Source Safe integration.
Lack of global architecture
No bug/issue management
Lack of feature lock
Development machine to production server deployment, no staging server
Imagining deliverable dates to assuage unreasonable deadline pressures

The list goes on....

And then toss the who Guy that wrote Coding Slave into the mix. Makes for a fun filled day.

Sorta feel bad in a way. At the beginning I tried to impose some beauty on the ugly baby by instigating broad, global changes. Turns out that my efforts were premature. The code base was too fragile for large scale change. I hurt more than I cured. As granny would say, “bad doctoring.”

Nonetheless I am still doing a honest hour's work for a fair wage. But part of me is mad at myself and at the world. I wonder, am I really doing any good? Can beauty happen while accepting ugliness? Or am I simply a self-deceiving accomplice in a Dance of Futility interested only in making some money to buy a meal?

Not that eating is bad, mind you.

Q: How do you know that you are getting old?

2005-10-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

A: Most of the policemen are younger than you, all the baseball players are younger than you and your friends die of natural causes.

My friend Inga died over the weekend, quite suddenly, from a heart problem I am told.

She was in Austria with her her husband, Wolfgang. Wolfgang is my friend too. Wolfgang is from Austria.

Inga was 61. We have known each other for about 25 years. She was an artist. Also, she and her husband started a little baking business in a 500 square foot store front. Today that business employs in excess of 100 people over two industrial grade baking facilities.

When I had my little gourmet store in Somerville, MA in the early 80's, I did business with Wolfgang and Inga. That is how our friendship started. Our whole life was before us. When I got too far behind on my bread bill, Inga would call me up and say, “Hey send some money.” I always liked sending Inga money.

Later on, upon the birth of my first daughter, I left the little gourmet store in Somerville behind. I never made more than $5,000 a year in salary. I needed to make more to take care of my daughter. Yet, Wolfgang and Inga remained friends even though my little high end food store in a low end, working class neighborhood didn't make it. We went beyond commerce. We understood that there were people in those businesses, not resources. When the business went away, the people remained, the friendships remained. And, if fortune had it that the business survives and prospers, well that was good too. But, more than anything, Inga always seemed to be about people and art.

In her forties, Inga had a daughter, almost coinciding with the birth of my second daughter. She told me that Wolfgang needed a kid to calm him down.

I always like Inga. She always like me. The last time I saw her was in December 2002. Strangely, I had been living in Austria at the time and I came back for a visit, with an Austrian woman friend. It's poetic that that little country with only eight million people and not much industry save for Red Bull and AKG should loom so large in our landscape.

During that visit we had a big meal and joked a lot. We compared daughters. Her daughter was spending a year in Latvia at the time. Inga was born in Latvia and grew up in Boston. She had a strong Boston accent. She said, “thurd” for third, “forwuh” for four and “ahht” for art.

Now she is gone. And in her absence the statement, life is short, takes on more significant meaning. Inga was a good, creative, caring, bright woman. I always liked her and she always liked me.

I grieve her passing.

May her soul rest in peace.

Q: What is the secret for a good life?

2005-10-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

A: Living well on as little money as you can.

From ComputerWorld:

"All that special treatment that IT people were getting [before Y2k and Web-enabling] just stopped -- the high pay raises, the special bonuses," Van De Voort explains. "Many employers didn't even bother to explain it, and [employees] didn't squeal," for fear that their jobs might be outsourced to lower-paid workers. Nearly half (48%) of all respondents said that their organizations outsource work.

One project manager at a prominent East Coast financial company knows that fear. "During Y2k, the company was lucky to get any [new IT hires]. When they found somebody who knew what they were doing, they treated them with respect and made them part of the team." Now the sentiment toward IT employees has changed. "Senior management says, 'If you don't like the work, we'll get somebody in India to do it.' The computer people are seen more as part of the technology rather than part of the human resource," says the project manager, who asked not to be named.

The good news is the trend toward offshoring has slowed a bit as companies have become more aware of the quality of work and technical support they receive from overseas workers, says Van De Voort. "The whole offshoring dynamic feels a little less pressing than a year ago. But I think domestic outsourcing will continue to be a factor," he says.

'nuff said.

Q: Why give to the Bobby Fund?

2005-10-23T14:17:00.000-07:00

A: Because the DNC, RNC, NRA, Microsoft and Google already have enough money.

Here's the deal; Coding Slave is a no profit company, not a non-profit company mind you, but a no profit company, as in $36.10 in the bank. Well, CodingSlave.com is not exactly a no profit, the book turned a modest buck and lots of people have profited from Coding Slave in terms of humor and spiritual support. But in terms of a Dun and Bradstreet verifed P&L, CodingSlave.com does not have the type of P/E ratio that puts it up there with the heavyweights of eCommerce and commercial publishing, which is probably just as well. I mean, if we (and me) had an operating budget of millions, then we (and me) would have this huge payroll and an HR Department and you know where that leads: to the land of Job Titles, Job Numbers and Class Action Suits. So, in this regard I guess being a no profit is a blessing in disguise.

However, this is not to say that we (and me) do not have plans. We (and me) do. We have more books to write, blogs to publish and trouble to make. We (and me) have to get Dr, Phil's Tech Tips on line. (Dr. Phil is THE Phil Haack.) There's a collection of famous guest writers in the wings waiting for some dough. We (and me) have a mole or two in the bowels of the Redmondian Empire that need some new spy equipment and of course, we (and me) need to have enough cash around so that The Guy who wrote Coding Slave can be a bit more selective about the type of coding weirdness that he wants to let into his life. Remember, the Guy who wrote Coding Slave does get fired once in a while. But then again, in the current climate of global software development, most of us will get fired once in a while.

Also, the pin-up girls need to get paid. (Think it's easy getting beautiful women to take off their clothes for free?).

So, we (and me) need your ( and your's) help. Give a buck or a hundred to the Bobby Fund, the fundraising apparatus of CodingSlave.com. At the mundane least, just imagine that you have called an RPC function that turns money into food for the Guy that wrote Coding Slave. At the sublime best, you can support a voice that says, “Hey, we're tired of the acidic grind of tight budgets in search of cheap labor, blurry specs intended to be tight applications, burnt out managers two steps from the 401K afterlife and Big Time Wannabes trying to go public on ideas funded by Visa and MasterCard at 17.45% APR. There has got to be a better way!”

And maybe the first, better way is to give to the Bobby Fund. Do it. You'll be glad that you did.

Oh yeah, your contribution is in no way tax deductible, so don't even try it.

Q: What is the Perfect Boss?

2005-10-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

A: Dunno, but Jim and Michele McCarthy have some ideas.

This is a guest blog, written by Jim and Michele McCarthy. (I like the part about the Boss not playing the parent.)

The Perfect Boss
by
Jim and Michele McCarthy

A perfect boss doesn’t take care of those who work for him. He is much more effective than that. Some bosses act on the impulse to play the parent to subordinates. They cannot resist the temptation to respond to childishness with “parentness.” When the perfect boss encounters immature behaviors among his subordinates - behavior that simply begs for a parent’s touch from his boss’s hand - he just will not give in. He understands a simple, sad truth: a parent’s touch will forever stay missing if it was missing when it was originally needed. A boss’s touch won’t help.

So, wisely, he declines to provide that which will never satisfy.

Instead, he pretends that only the adults come to work. He views his relationship with his subordinates as one of respect. Securing the services on which he depends is far too important to be left to the needs of the unsatisfied children lurking within his staff. He must discharge his responsibilities after all, and it is this which ultimately provides the livelihood of all the team. To do this most effectively, he has found it best not to reward the childish aspects of our nature with attention of any kind. He acts as if the dark aspects of the children within us don’t even work for him!

What he does do is conduct business. The perfect boss treats those who work for him as if they were his most important suppliers. Which, of course, they are. Their supply of services is his biggest personal dependency. In addition to the timely pay for acceptable services he offers, there are a few additional conditions that he imposes on you, if you are one of his subordinates. These are:

A. What actions you take, you believe in.
B. What commitments you make, you keep,
C. What resources you have, you use.
D. What words you say, you believe to be true.
E. What you create, you intend to be great.

He occasionally gives you written assignments. These are your purchase orders, really. A good thing. And, if indicated, he helps the team secure resources. He also seeks accurate status from them frequently and efficiently, and he stays out of the team’s content. He knows that if you buy something from an expert, you are wise to let them to deliver it on their own. That way, it will be to the experts’ standards and he cannot be blamed for it, if it is not.

He requires that the team credibly believe itself to be doing something great, and also insists that all involved relentlessly pursue - and always adopt - what they think is the best available idea.

He requires that his team members accept their assignments explicitly, believing them to be the best possible assignments. Of course, they have the chance to improve the assignments, if possible, in collaboration with him, before they accept them.

The perfect boss always refuses to serve as a parent/judge among immature subordinates in conflict. He also knows that no good ever came of listening to one person complain about another who is not in the room, so he won’t allow that.

He never allows people to say, “People say…” If unidentified “people” have something to say, they can come say it. He listens. He just doesn’t believe in the self-appointed representation of selves not one’s own. And if people think they ought to report to him what, “people think…” they will be dismissed out of hand for not thinking.

The perfect boss pays vastly more attention to insuring the productivity, managing the satisfaction and tending to the well-being of those subordinates who get the best results than he does to those who are dramatically inclined, results-poor and/or costly to employ. He pays the most attention to those who behave the best.

The perfect boss is compassionate and wise. One sure sign that this is so is that, one way or another, people who are mostly pained about their job, (and this is especially true of any whose pain spills over onto others), will not suffer long in his domain.

When review time comes, the perfect boss assesses his satisfaction with your work. Then he summarizes it with an unambiguous grade. Plus, he says what you did to earn that grade, and tells you precisely what you would have to do additionally to gain the maximum grade. He adjusts your pay, states any new requirements regarding your future results, and does both directly in relation to the grade he has decided on for you.

The good thing about this process is it is perfectly subjective and fair. Since your boss as an individual is clearly your most important customer, fairness and your desire for truth ultimately require his naked, subjective judgment.

And, of course, the one task that the perfect boss never overlooks is to regularly and without interruption arrange that the agreed sums of money be paid to you for the services you choose to render him.

And that is all the perfect boss does.

GIVE TO THE
Bobby Fund

Q: What is the Guy that wrote Coding Slave going to do next?

2005-10-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

A: Go to Hollywood

In last week's episode I was fired from a coding gig. I did the obligatory shock, sadness and fretting and blogged hard on the topic. Seems that whenever I blog hard on something, friends and fairies gather 'round. The readership was pretty unanimous in their response: “Don't worry, you're the guy that wrote Coding Slave. You'll be fine.”

Gotta have friends and fairies.

So, I took the week to pretend that I was sitting on top of the world. I slept until it was time to get up, no alarm necessary, sat in the sun and drank caffeinated beverages. Also, since I haven't read a thing that was not attached to a piece of code in close to a year, I decided to read a book. I am reading Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled.

It's a book about love, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I figured that recently my psyche had been taking a beating, mostly self-inflicted, so a little new information couldn't hurt. Peck goes over a lot of things and for the most part I like what he writes. Today I read about grace. ( Not George Burns' wife). Peck's position is that that just about all of us have had bad childhood experiences and that many people have had some atrocious experiences, yet for the most part we grow up, don't become ax murders and learn to live through things. According to Peck, what's weird is not that there are neurotic people in the world, but that there are not more neurotic people in the world. And to this end, Peck chalks it up to grace.

There just seems to something out there that helps most of us get through things for the best.

Today before I made my way up to Whole Foods to buy some coffee, sit in the sun and read, I made a call to some people in Hollywood who had wanted me to do some work for them about a year ago. They called me back in about an hour. Turns out that there was work to be done and they wanted me to do it.

So tomorrow the Guy that wrote Coding Slave is going to Hollywood to code... for two months, anyway.

GIVE TO THE
Bobby Fund

Q: What do you call a tired, middle aged programmer with an attitude?

2005-10-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

A: Fired.

Let's cut to the chase. I got fired last week. That's right, the guy that wrote Coding Slave, Mr. 15 Years Experience in the woe and sublime of software development got fired-- your services are no longer needed, the company is changing strategy and direction, and oh yes, you have been missing your dates.

To say that I was shocked and subsequently saddened would be an understatement. After all, I thought that this would be The Gig: Heaven, Nirvana, all of the oysters and shellfish that you can eat at Balthazar, cute girls at the Playboy mansion, a long running series on HBO, never having to say that you are sorry, the lucrative gig with no musical compromise.

But, it wasn't.

It was a coding gig pretty much like the ones that I describe in my book: make a product with varying degrees of specificity, to be developed under tremendous deadline pressure, subject to the approval to a variety of people with whom I had no direct contact. Just the type of work I like: NOT!

And yet, I took the gig, eyes wide open.

I figured, this was advanced code, up to the abilities of Mr. Know-It-All. The money was all right, the new Boss was a skilled developer and this was an organization that could “get” the guy that wrote Coding Slave.

And then the development cycle began. Code, code, code... all the time, 10, 12, 16 hours a day, weekends from home. Gotta meet the date. If we don't meet the date, bad things will happen. The company is relying on us.

And so I code, like a hero at first. Then as the fatigue sets in, I get grouchy, I make mistakes, I get an attitude. I wonder, who are these people? Why do I need to be working like a dog for all right money? Don't these people know who I am? I am the guy that wrote Coding Slave. I make fun of situations like this. I don't do situations like this.

And yet I did.

I try to hide my dissatisfaction, I try to go along, to have faith, to keep the faith. I can't keep up. My Boss distances from me. Work that is assigned to me is being reassigned to others. The warning signs that I have read about in the “How to Tell You are About to be Fired” articles that pop up every so often in On The Job Lifestyle magazines appear as road signs on the way to the inevitable. I do not see them.

The product ships, somehow.

I go away for a long weekend.

I come back. I ask my Boss for an update on the work at hand. We agree to meet in the conference room. I go into the conference room with my Boss and another person.

“We want to thank you for all that you have done.”

(I thought I was getting an atta boy for working all that time)

“But we are letting you go. Do you have any questions.”

(I take a second to regroup, to understand that I am being fired.)

I asked why.

“The company is moving in a different direction and we will not need your services.”

I asked if there was anything in my behavior that warranted my dismissal.

“There has been concern for a while. You've been missing your dates.”

I asked if there was any severance. (Maslow was right.) At that point the other person who was sitting directly across from me at the end of a long conference table pulled out a manila folder. (my Boss was at the head of the table to my right). In the folder was one check for two weeks severance, another for four days vacation and two papers to sign. One piece of paper was a written agreement that in exchange for the severance I would not bring legal action against them. The other was an acknowledgment of the final payout.

I signed both pieces of paper and took the money.

“We understand that you have some stuff at your desk, you have an hour to collect your stuff.”

I had worked for The Company for about 90 days. Shortest coding gig that I have ever had.

There is a saying: Once you turn a cucumber into a pickle, it can never, ever go back to being a cucumber.

I wonder if the guy that wrote Coding Slave, knowing what he knows, professing what he professes, can ever be paid to write code again. I have no regrets about writing Coding Slave. I mean, if I didn't do it, who would? As I say in the preface:

All characters depicted in this book are purely fictional; the situations, less so.

Still, there are some days though that I wonder if it would have been easier if I had just remained a cucumber.

Oh yeah, feel free to:

GIVE TO THE
Bobby Fund

at the Coding Slave site. Make believe that you are doing an iTune download. And, as always, you can download the novel for free.