PragDave

Slashdot Effect

Sorry that it’s been quiet on the blog front: I blame a combination of Christmas, the annual family flu epidemic, and Slashdot (the Version Control book had a wonderful review posted by Jared Richardson on Slashdot, and for a while I was in continuous shipping mode. A nice side-effect was that Pragmatic Programmer spent a day in the top 100 on Amazon too :).

Things have quieted down a tad, so I’ll try to get a new Kata out in the next day or so.

Happy New Year!

T-Shirts Back Online

A while back we were approached by someone wanting to produce a set of Pragmatic Programmer T-Shirts. (Honest!) The original folks doing this then went out of business (we have that affect on companies), but we just heard that the T-Shirts live on! You can now emblazon your bod with pithy pragmatisms at HackerThreads. My favorite is the new one: My programming job went offshore, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

Boycotting Microsoft's Search Engine

The calls to use technical means to deny content to Microsoft’s new search service will fail on both technical and political grounds.

Debating with Knives

A couple of years ago at OOPSLA I saw a wonderful panel format. On stage there was a table, short side facing the audience. People sitting on one side of the table had to support the motion, those on the other had to oppose it. At any time, anyone could stand up, walk to the other side of the table, and tap someone on the shoulder. Those two people then swapped places: the one arguing for then had to argue against. After a while, they let members of the audience come up and tap on shoulders too.

At last night’s Pragmatic Practitioner dinner here in Dallas we tried the same thing. After the meal was cleared away, we used our left-over knives to indicate the position we were taking: a knife lying in the customary end-on position meant you were supporting the statement "statically typed languages are better than dynamically types ones." A knife lying crossways meant you were opposing the motion. We started with knives alternating around the table, and tried to maintain a kind of parity: you could only swap your knife’s position if someone else did. Every now and then we had a group swap, where every knife switched.

The result was a fun and not too serious debate. It was good to be able to argue both sides of a position; very few things are black and white, and it’s nice to be able to acknowledge opposing points of view.

Now I’m wondering if the same technique could work in a business setting. Could it take the heat out of the discussions we have about architectures, design, timescales, and so on?

Vicarious Seat Backs

After a hellacious trip across to Norway for rOOts (note to self: never fly Lufthansa transatlantic), the return came as a pleasant relief. Not only was the SAS flight half-empty, letting me claim an entire center row to myself, but their new A340 had something I hadn’t seen before: nose and belly cameras wired into the seat-back video displays. A couple of touch screen menu picks, and I had one seat-back looking forward, one looking down, and a third on the moving map. It says something about the state of mind that you get in to on long flights that I started playing a game, trying to tie moving map features up with the downward-pointing camera. It turned out to be easy (which I guess is what you’d expect): just as the moving map said we were over the coast of Iceland, a rocky shoreline scrolled beneath us. Coming across Canada approaching the Great Lakes, most of the larger rivers on the map seemed to tie in with what I was seeing below. Looking out the front and seeing the runway appear through the murk during our final in to O’Hare was a nice way to end the trip. +1 SAS.

Quote o' the Week

This one has no definitive source, so it may well be totally inaccurate, but the concept is sound even if it was never said. :)

Francis Ford Coppola is reputed to have said that the difference between a good movie and a bad movie is getting everyone involved in making the same movie.

How could this apply to your current project?

Lehrer's Elements

Fan’s of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song might enjoy Mike Stanfill’s Flash adaptation.

Development as Gardening?

In the seventh part of Bill Venner’s discussion with Andy and me, we’re talking about gardening as a metaphor for software development.

Thinking in terms of analogies is a useful way of extracting hidden meaning. Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are co-hosting an interesting workshop at Alistair Cockburn’s Salt Lake Agile Development Conference. I particular like the first phrase in the description: The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity .

Andy Speaks!

Andy Hunt, my partner in crime, just started his own blog.

Netless in Austin

I'm down in Austin talking at the first of this year's No Fluff Just Stuff symposia. I'm still recovering from a shock: the hotel we're in doesn't have broadband to the rooms. This is the first time this has happened to me in over a year, and I've become spoiled enough that I dropped my dial-up accounts. So here I am, disconnected and suffering withdrawal. It's strange to think that this was the usual state of affairs just a couple of years ago, and yet now I'm feeling like a petulant child because I can't pick up my e-mail for 24 hours.

Ring Around the Earth

NASA has a great page (www.nasa.gov/events/) with news of upcoming events. One of the coolest links is to liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/toc.asp?s=Tracking, a set of applets and other pages which display the satellites in orbit around us. Watch a real-time display of 700 satellites around the earth, or type in your zip code to see when the ISS next passes over your astral neighborhood.

The 3d view applet is staggering. The Earth is swarmed by stuff we put up there: there’s a fog of LEO devices and a fairly solid ring of geostationary satellites. I just sat and watched it update for half an hour.

There are over 2,500 artificial devices in orbit, and we humans put them there. Each represents tens or hundreds of man-years of effort, and each is a major engineering achievement. At yet they pass silently overhead without our giving them a second thought. Maybe we need to celebrate them more actively.

Of course, if you want to waste time playing with orbital mechanics, there’s always www.bigideafun.com/penguins/arcade/spaced_penguin/ And Chris Morris (www.clabs.org) points me to www.shatters.net/celestia/ if you want something more serious than play.

Keynote Slides

Oh well. I gave it the old college try, honest I did. I've been using Apple's Keynote for all my new presentations of Jay Zimmerman's No Fluff Just Stuff symposia. It's been an interesting exercise in both technology and psychology (I first starting talking about this in Keynote).

Today I started work on the last of them. And I sat and stared at the keyboard for a fair while before I started. I wanted to use Keynote. I really did. But in the end, I caved and went back to Powerpoint.

It wasn't a cut-and-dried decision. I still like Keynote. I love the way its slides look, and I think the alignment guides are a tremendous piece of interface technology. But the minor hassles just broke this camel's back. I needed to draw a fair number of diagrams for this one: nothing fancy, just labeled boxes, circles, and arrows. but with Keynote each of these is two separate elements. It's a minor thing, but a hassle, particularly when you have to keep grouping and ungrouping them to make them animate properly. Then there was the export issues: Jay wants 2-up PDFs or Powerpoints. Even if I could work out how to do two-up PDF exports, Keynote seems to generate massive PDFs (unless I disable background images).

None of it is major, but it all gets in the way. And I just needed to get the job done. However, when 1.1 rolls along (or if Apple have a beta available somewhere) I'll be trying it: I really want Keynote to succeed.

Passing Information to Our Children's Children's ... Children

There’s a great article in the January 2003 CACM which describes some very long-term data storage technology (Organic Data Memory using the DNA Approach).

In a nutshell, you encode your information using sequences of DNA base triplets (AAA, AAC, AAG, and so on), then splice these on to the end of a DNA strand, making sure that the stuff you write is past that strand’s stop codon. You then perform the necessary magic to get this DNA into the host’s genome. That way the new material will not take part in protein synthesis, but will be passed down as genetic material from generation to generation.

This isn’t science fiction: the researches encoded the words of "It’s a Small World", added them to a bateria’s genome, then extracted the information again. Because bacteria can withstand all kinds of abuse (dessication, extremes of temperature, and so on), they believe that this gives us a good long-term storage scheme. (There’s the problem of mutations to deal with, but decent error correcting codes could probably deal with this).

Now, of course, we’ll see the RIAA step in to the act and insist that they need to add unique digital signatures into every human being.

Dave's Converging - Part Deux

So I read a review of the new Nokia 3650 device. I was going to call it a cell phone, but that would be like calling an Ferrari a mobile cigarette lighter.(see www.nokia.com/nokia/0,5184,2275,00.html).

This device gets pretty close to ideal for my current needs: I can carry it in my pocket. It plays well with the laptop, so I can use Bluetooth to export PDA-like things to it. It is programmable (in C++ and Java, no less), and has free development tools, so we might conceivably start seeing things like Wikis for it. It even talks IMAP, so I can continue to use my server for mail (hmm.. I wonder if it supports ssh?). This makes a great portable extension for the Powerbook. Given the two, I would truly start to feel position independent.

All things considered, this is a nice looking device. I wonder if Nokia are looking for testers… :)

Dave's Almost Converged

It’s been an interesting year for my infrastructure. Spurred on by the likes of James Duncan Davidson (www.x180.net), I finally moved away from my trusty GNUS e-mail reader, switched to IMAP, and now use Evolution, Apple Mail, and the Mozilla Mail client, all with centralized filtering and spam elimination. It is remarkably liberating being able to pick up mail (and I get a ton of mail) from any machine, but still to have the benefit of a decent mail infrastructure (I tried web mail a couple of months back—it lasted all of 6 hours). Having Starbucks be isomorphic to my bedroom (at least as far as e-mail goes) is remarkably liberating (although I’m still pissed at Kinkos for starting to charge for net access).

However, there’s still an area that sucks: I now find I have three different electronic address books: my old BBDB one under Linux, the Apple address book on the Mac, and the Mozilla address book (also on the Mac: why can’t it use the built-in one?). So I start looking around for some way to integrate them all, and come up empty. I’d kind of hoped that LDAP would hold the answers, but as far as I can tell, LDAP appears to be a read-only medium: if you have your addresses set up in there, then everything can read it. But none of the mail clients I use seem able to add a new LDAP entry, or edit an existing one.

So I’m still not fully converged.. Any ideas? dave@pragprog.com

Trying to Love KeyNote

Two days after Steve Jobs announced KeyNote (www.apple.com/keynote), Apple’s new presentation software, I found myself forking over my $100 at the local Apple store. And since then I’ve been using it for all my new talks.

I’m trying very hard to like it. Often irrationally so, because I’m continuing to pump new slides in to it even though it falls far behind PowerPoint. Admitted it has some nice features. It renders text beautifully, and it has some pretty dramatic slide transitions, but for everyday use, it is turning out to be a fairly frustrating tool.

• it can’t export HTML
• it stores each presentation across a number of files and directories. It’s nice that the save format is open (a combinatin of XML and grqphics files), but adding a new presentation to CVS is a royal PITA.
• it’s dramatically lacking in artwork (you get maybe 40 images with the package), and it doesn’t seem to be able to import from the PowerPoint clipart collections. This is a major problem: I’m using fewer words and more pictures in my presentations, and KeyNote out of the box just can’t give me what I need.

And yet despite all this, I’m sticking with it. There’s something about the Mac and its software. Even when it isn’t quite right, there’s some indefinable quality that makes you want to keep using it. I guess I’m hooked.