His mom and I are trying to get the boy to log off the computer and go to bed.
“Hang on,” he says, “I’m looking at a PC World thing.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“‘10 Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get in the U.S.’”
“If you can’t get them in the U.S., what do you care?”
“They’re cool. Don’t forget about that part.”
His mom is running out of patience. “Oh, am I steaming,” she says.
The boy’s still looking at the computer.
“Mmmm . . . cool,” he says.
My son’s just diagnosed and fixed a problem with my wife’s laptop PC . . .
“I should join the Northwood [his high school] Tech Squad,” he says, “with all the guys who tuck their shirts in.”
“That reminds me,” my wife says to him. “What clubs are you in at school?”
“What clubs am I in?” he says. “How about none?”
“You need to be in a club,” she says.
I say, “He’s in football and roller hockey.”
“He can be in those,” she says, “but he still needs to be in a club so he can get to know people.”
For some reason, this launches the boy into a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune . . .
“Getting to knooooow yooooou . . .”
“Can you look it up,” my wife says, “and see what clubs they have at Northwood?”
“No,” I say. “I’m busy.” Which I am.
“When can you do it?” she says.
“Why can’t you do it?”
“I need it by tomorrow.”
The boy’s now coming to the end of the stanza . . .
“. . . my cup of tea.”
How he knows that song so well, I have no idea, but maybe there’s a musical theater club we can get him into . . .
The annual ACM Awards banquet was held last month in San Diego. Recipients were afforded the singular honor of being photographed next to the embalmed corpse of ACM President Stuart Feldman (left):
Bill Gates and the Microsoft crowd have been very prominent in charitable circles, saving Africans from disease, etc. By contrast, a Google search for “Steve Jobs charity” or “Steve Jobs donation” turns up nothing except an article on how Apple bought him a $90 million Gulfstream bizjet.
So… if Steve Jobs doesn’t give money to charity and doesn’t pay for his own jet, is he doing something interesting with his $billions?
As part of a presentation I’m putting together on managing software projects, I want to talk a little bit about what not to do and how things can go spectacularly awry.
A great recent case study for this is the FBI Virtual Case File system, cancelled last year after spending over $100 million.
The original slide I put together (click to enlarge) showed the basic facts of the case illustrated with a photo of a rocket sled crashing into a wall. The heading I put on there — “Another fine mess” — didn’t seem to add anything to the mix, and I couldn’t think of a better one, so I started to think about other ways to lay out the slide.
In the second version, I dropped the header, used the rocket sled photo as the background, and overlaid the text on top of it. I think it came out a lot stronger.
I wish I could say I invented this technique myself, but I first saw it at Presentation Zen.
I’m rereading parts of The Psychology of Computer Programming and I notice that several of Weinberg’s “food for thought” questions at the end of each chapter would be good questions to pose to a hiring manager:
Click on the photo to enlarge and feel the full horror.
Originally uploaded by Zach Graham.
I’m listening to an online interview with Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres and Tom DeMarco. My son hears Andres’ voice and says, “You’ve got a woman teaching you about technology?!”
“What a sexist you are,” I say.
“I’m just repeating what you always say: ‘Oh, women don’t know anything about computers.’”
“When did I ever say that?”
“You say it all the time. ‘Men are a lot smarter than women.’”
I deny this vehemently, and not just because my wife is sitting across the room.
Meanwhile, Andres is saying something: Blah blah blah Kent blah blah blah . . .
“Ken!?” the boy says. “Who’s advising you? Barbie?”
I saw the following attributed to Ralph Johnson. I’m not sure if that’s the Gang of Four Ralph Johnson, but it probably is:
The problem is that almost all software schedules and budgets are bogus. They are created for political effect and have little relationship to reality. Thus, whether they are met has nothing to do with the people working on the project.
Who makes your schedules? Project managers? They are almost certainly the wrong people. You can’t predict how long something will take unless you are an expert at doing it. The programmers? Are they allowed to say “we don’t have enough information to make a prediction”? Are they ever told “that is too long, you’ll have to do it in six months”? The only way to get honest schedules is from people who have experience in doing the work who know that they need to get the schedule right and not under or over-estimate.
I asked an IT VP the other day why he thought every project in the company is late, and he said, “Bad estimating.”
No . . . there’s a difference between bad estimating and dishonest estimating. If we were dealing with bad estimating, I’d expect to see estimates all over the place, including some way too high and some way too low.
“Man, that’s some bad estimating!” I’d say.
But when every estimate is too low, that’s not bad estimating, that’s dishonesty. It may be forced dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty nonetheless.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
My son’s sitting in the family room playing the new Madden NFL 07. His computer-controlled kicker misses two extra points, after which the other team’s computer-controlled kicker makes a 50-yard field goal.
“Oh my gosh!” he yells. “Can you say ‘racist’?”
He’s a mixed kid — his mom is Asian — and he treats every slight as a racial issue. I think he’s kidding most of the time.
One feature of Madden 07 is that when there’s a break in the action, it pops up player profiles — photos and career blurbs — of old school players that, for the most part, the boy has never heard of.
“Fred Biletnikoff!? Looks like a stuck-up white boy to me! OHHHH! WOOOOOO!”
Every time one of those iPod silhouette ads comes on, my son asks can we make something like that with him in it. This weekend we tried it with Paint Shop Pro and this is the result (click to enlarge).
Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.
Sun Microsystems Inc. said co-founder Scott McNealy will give up the job of chief executive to the No. 2 person at the company, Jonathan Schwartz, a historic transition for a computer maker facing stiff pressure to cut costs and boost revenue.
So long, funny man!
My kid’s explaining World of Warcraft to me . . . if I understand it correctly, it’s like an old-fashioned game of Capture the Flag, but with some killing. And yet as I’m watching him play it, it looks more like World of Running Pointlessly Through a Forest. There’s no warcraft, no nothing.
“Dude,” he says, “that’s because I’m at Level 6. When you get to, like, Level 19, there’s more warfare.”
“Maybe it should be called World of Jogging Aimlessly Through the Fields Picking Flowers Like a Girl Until You Get to Level 19,” I suggest.
“You don’t pick flowers, stupid. You quest.”
The guy in the next cubicle is spending the afternoon looking at animal cams on the web.
“Look at this whale cam,” he says. “It’s underwater!”
Did you know that the pope has an email address? I wonder if he has a blog too?
If my son were to send a greeting to the Holy Father, I imagine it would look something this:
$71!! $(4r3d 70 (h4!!3ng3 m3 w17h l337 4? w3!! 1 93$$ U j5$7 dun 907 17 1n y4 y0, unl1|{3 m3, wh0 h4$ 907 d4 m4d $|{1!!$ n3d4%, n371m3! U d5n 907 n0 $|{1!! y0, 5 4 $71ff, 4 w4nn4b3, 7h0. u (4n7 (0n741n m3 n3d4y, n0 r34$0n n0 w4y. 1 907 d4 p0w3r, 1m (0n73n7 1n my 4(710n$… 1 907 n0 7r0ubl3 1n $|{00L1n u 4nd n0 7r0ubL3 w17 fr4(710n$. 1f U ju$7 L1$73n 70 m3 4nd j5$7 4lr43dy 91v3 17 up… 1 d4 L337 m4$74 d00d, 1 d4 f47h4. 1m d4 b19 D099, u d4 PUP!
lol, lmbo, rotfl, hahahahahaha!!! i rok…
Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing BS, a.k.a. Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, gets a good skewering . . .
True believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue.
The Globe and Mail reports that a “small but determined group of computer geeks [is] trying to translate open-source software into African languages, in an effort to reach the continent most isolated by the digital divide.”
