An active coder

Getting ready for RAAM

panmanphil — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:08:00 GMT

RAAM is the Race Across America, a bicycle race from Oceanside California to Annapolis Maryland that starts in a couple of weeks. For solo riders it ranks up their with the Tour de France in difficulty. On the scale of crazy things to take on, this has to rank among the craziest! Cool, eh?

I was asked by some long time skier friends to join the team, Team Badger Bikers. I believe the qualification for me was that I like to have fun, so don't worry about serious athletic expectations from this old boy. Actually, old boy doesn't work at all on this team because the average age is 59 and I'm not quite ready for my AARP card. That makes me one of the kids on the team. Truthfully, every one of us has some fairly high expectations of ourselves, expectations that are driven by the athlete we dream of being. Having had a LOT of experience testing those dreams against reality, a reality that includes work and family life, discipline "issues", genetic "issues", and the real truth of how special our athlete heroes really are, it's still OK to have dreams for motivation and face it, out and out fantasy. As citizen athletes we have one up on our couch occupying arm chair quarterbacks and coaches because we actually get out there and do it.

This race has a much more important reason to see it through. We are doing it as a charity fund raiser for Make-A-Wish Foundation of Wisconsin. From their own description:

"The Make-A-Wish Foundation^® grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy. Wishes provide a special type of medicine, diverting thoughts from the difficult routine of medical treatments and hospital visits to dreams of possibilities, fun and hope."

Many of you may know kids that have gone through serious medical issues and know how truly awful that is. We like the idea that our team, made up of up people from an older generation are reaching out to help these kids. Some of you have probably already heard my pitch for a donation or will soon. Anybody else that is willing to donate to the effort should download the form here, and cough up a few bucks for us. The team and I would really appreciate it. Our goal is to raise $50,000 on the attention a race of this magnitude should provide. So help us out! You can check out our progress at our team site.

My training log is kept at DabbleDB, a very interesting online data application (note how I didn't say database application). There isn't tons of hours, but the training has been very specific. We take off on June 11th and I think I'll be ready. It will still be hard.

The winter of my content

panmanphil — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:01:00 GMT

I just had to mention that in spite of global warming, intense effort and hours at work, an aging body things aren't all that bad here. This winter we got our first snow in early December and it was weeks before it ever made it above freezing. The skiing was fantastic! Then we had a thaw. A day or so later it snowed again and again the skiing was fantastic. Then a thaw, this time lasting for days and including a full day of rain, often heavy. Most of our snow was gone. But then it snowed, and snowed some more, and then many of your saw pictures of the end of that during the glorius Packer playoff game last Saturday. Once again, it stayed below freezing and now more snow is on the way.Skiing is fantastic!

Day after day of a little soft snow over an icy base with temperatures in the 20's (0 - -4c) makes for some happy skiers.

Fun with phones and python

panmanphil — Tue, 01 May 2007 02:46:00 GMT

For a diversion from trying to get my head around the value or lack of value of WCF, I took up a project only a geek could love. I wanted to be able to manage my cell phone data from my computer, and it had to be with software that could run in debian linux because I didn't want to have to reboot to windows just to get something off my phone. Enter BitPim, an open source package that works with a variety of phones from a variety of carriers.

Though it's in release mode, bitpim is not the picture of polish. It tries to strike a balance between the IMPOSSIBLE US phone market where no two carriers will share any standard way of doing anything and users who might actually think they shouldn't have to get a different piece of software for every phone they buy. Bitpim has a gui that supports a kind of neutral view of a phone: numbers, contacts, calendars, ringtones, wallpaper, media and so on, and then supports adapters for each phone. You might imagine there are some challenges with that and there are.

My phone had a definition based on the Verizon phone but naturally my carrier had tweaked it their own special way. Pure hex dump binary hacking and I loved it. I created a new phone definition, subclassed from the Verizon version, tweaked the definitions, something the application design had made very centralized and clear and eventually got my calendar going back and forth with the phone, alarms, repeats, days of weeks and all.

A revelation about this to me occurred later. This was the first time I had ever done anything in python, but learning python was a total non factor. I found an online reference somewhere, looked up a few things, looked at working code for other phones, and just coded. I'm sure the overall design of the software helped, because I didn't have to deal with the integration with wxWidgets at all, and I would think that could require a bit more learning. But the fact I could just read the code and a little documentation and mostly focus on the application seems to be saying something to me about python. Hmmmm.....

Go Charles!

panmanphil — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:21:00 GMT

I haven't seen much from other software people about Charles In Space. A bunch of us met Charles last year at Cortina and I think we all really enjoyed him. I remember him digging into a "discussion" about IOC with the same vigor as everybody else and came off like the serious architect you would expect him to be. He was a very approachable guy and was fun to talk with about any number of topics. And now he's the 5th space tourist, fulfilling a life long dream. Congratulations, and good luck!

Open document formats

panmanphil — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:26:00 GMT

There is a bit of press right now about open document formats that have or are currently pushing their status as international standards. Everybody should be interesting in this who may be interested in keeping formatted information around for the long term. In the best world, having a document you created should not mean that you require a specific tool in order to view it in the future. We ran into this here at home when we retired an old computer that had an OEM version of MS Works. I wasn't willing to buy a new version of Works or pay for Office for my home, and nearly nothing else is able to read it's document format. So these formats are supposed to help with that. But....

Are there any other applications besides Open Office that can read the MS Open Xml format? Are there any other applications that can read the Open Office format? Better yet, what about libraries? I would love to know. It would be such a simple thing to do if you could allow non technical people to create documents as templates and the have systems flesh out the details if only the document formats were easier to use without the original programs. I've browsed the MS samples for dealing with Open Xml and some of this is doable, but it seems like the process would be very fragile to users formatting decisions. Even if that were done, I can't assume anyone would be able to read the document because even Word requirements are unacceptable for internet published documents, and Word 2007 is hardly used at this point. If there was some software that could programatically read these documents and convert them to pdf or html, it might be a better option.

Some standards bodies have used a litmus test: if an application can be written to use the specification by a certain class of programmer is a certain period of time, the specification is a success. I have a feeling that none of the contenders could meet this test but would be quite happy to be proven wrong.

Still alive!

panmanphil — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:17:00 GMT

I'm in the midst of doing some system updates and realized it has been a long time since I posted. I needed to see a post come through so at least I have an good reason to post now!

Lots has happened that deserves a little time to write about, but the most enjoyable lately is that code is flying from under my fingers again after more than a year layoff. Yes Mom, you really do lose your skills and fast when you don't code. Fortunately, you can get them back pretty fast too.

The other interesting part of that is connecting the architectural daydreaming I've been doing the last year to the new technologies available now that I'm working full time in the .net 3.0 world. I think we'll see some real progress on distributed apps now, and I'm looking forward to the adventure.

All for now.

My turn

panmanphil — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:39:00 GMT

I was tagged some time ago, but since I'm going to see the evil person in person next week in Switzerland, I figured by better buck up and write something. I have to admit, I found the game bothered some sensibility I couldn't quite name (chain mail). I have to admit, I've enjoyed reading the posts, so I'm in!

My first formal introduction to programming started in my third semester of college. It was fortran on punch cards. I found both the development experience and the formal study of computer science to be a horror I could never imagine doing for a living, and switched to a music theory and composition degree.
I'm not sure if there is some name for this "affliction" but I have a deep attention span: of about 2 months. Then my attention will move to something else. As I have gotten older I no longer need to totally abandon the thing I was just interested in and now I mostly rotate around between business, software, music and cross country skiing. Three cheers for growing up!
In spite of loving travel, loving the high culture of big cities, mountains, oceans and ski hills, I have only lived in 8 homes in 4 cities my entire life. Discount a dorm room and one summer with a gig in Minneapolis and that's 6 places and three towns my whole life.
I was once asked to join the Buddy Rich band on tour as a bass player. I said no in spite of how it might have helped my music career at the time. Look at the wikipedia article for the word infamous and you will have one, but not the only reason why I didn't join. Entertainment defined...
While I love reading a wide variety of books, from software tomes, to history and historical fiction, to biography and novels, my guilty pleasure is sea stories from the sailing days. I'm just finishing the Patrick O'Brian series from which came the movie Master and Commander.

Posturing is always in vogue

panmanphil — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:21:00 GMT

Check out this piece of crap that should never have made it past the desk of a responsible editor. So much for the arguments that having an editorial gatekeeper will shield the witless masses from being subjected to unqualified, sanctimonious opinions.

I can let go of the fact that this guy doesn't understand what Web 2.0 is all about, lots of people are in that boat. But why would a news organization allow someone so totally clueless about distributed objects and their relationship to the broad network get their blessing by publishing this? Didn't he ever hear about what happened to RMI, CORBA, .net remoting and a slew of other approaches? Has he ever heard of SOA? What works, what doesn't and why?

He seems to be mostly unhappy about a particular Web 2.0 technique known as the mashup, though he doesn't make it clear if it's mashups in general or mashups done in javascript and xml that make him twitch so. What he has missed entirely is how similar they are to the types of business partnerships that small businesses have relied on for centuries. In the past this aggregation of services might have been done with paper forms and faxes, allowing a group of companies to work together to service a client. Remember your last home loan as an example. The mashup is just another technique to make this happen electronically. Loose coupling, simple interfaces, a combined face for the customer, these are all proven techniques. It remains to be seen if html/javascript will be the best way to deliver mashups, but I think the technique will survive much longer than the term Web 2.0 which is becoming sooo 2006!.

Social Networks seem to be neither

panmanphil — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 17:22:00 GMT

I have spent the last few months trying to get my head around the effects of the new kids in town, the big social networks, the Web 2.0 darlings, the perceived shift of "ownership" of the web from companies to users and how companies relate to all this. My week at the Web 2.0 conference, while not exactly an overwhelming experience, nevertheless seems to have pushed my brain over a steep ridge where the shadows aren't so deep.

If you read this by Nick Carr, you can pick up on the various camps, exagerated as they may be, to prove his point. I mostly agree with what Nick is saying here about MySpace and other high volume social sites. The game is up, it's time to accept the fact that this is a mass media show run by the media companies now. I did my best to stomach my own profile experiment on MySpace and was amazed that people could even think of the connections they made there and the word "friend" in the same sentence. Popularity contest is probably more like it with friend described in only the most cynical, one sided fashion. Still, my own kids at one time were making connections they felt stronger about in LiveJournal and DeviantArt not so many years ago. Today, none of those relationships have survived.

I am probably by my nature more on the side of Esther Dyson described in Nick's post. While at the same Web 2.0 show I had dinner with an old San Francisco designer who like me was around at the very early stages of the web. We reminisced about our heady visions, utopian values and outright excitement that pushed us on at least as much as the steadily rising paychecks. At least the paychecks have been steady. There is another side to the discussion though. It's not just the utopian view vs the crassly commercial view. Viewing MySpace or vendor maintained CRM systems, or LinkedIn as posters of failures in bringing people together into meaningful relationships is a big mistake. I am sure there were some people who may have had those hopes, but the truth is, we have so many defense mechanisms in place to help us discriminate between friends and foes, the tools simply don't have the stuff that could overcome the barriers to real relationships. People have to work at that, overcome fears, reveal themselves, risk something. The social tools actually hinder that because you can remain carefully hidden behind a carefully constructed, mostly anonymous veneer as long as you like. In the end, they can help you *find* people with your unique mix of interests, but after that it's still up to you to make a relationship.

One more thing. When I first read Doc Searls views about how shallow and one sided the "relationships" are as maintained by a company CRM system, I was impressed with the message. But since, I've changed my mind because of my thoughts about social networks in general. I won't EVER want my bank to know about my ski coaching, jazz playing, kids names, dog and so on. I want to preserve the feeling that my relationship with my bank is just business, carefully cordoned off. I don't want to "make love" to the ATM or teller. And please don't ask me to remember the details that the bank is interested in. I'm happy with them taking care of all that in their CRM system or however they want to do it. I'd be happy if I could maintain my password and possibly my address information in the CardSpace style that MS' Kim Cameron is working on.

I heard that Google will allow me to download my search history at some point in the future. Yep, those are interesting facts about me, but knowing those facts will not make you know me. We need a new name to replace relationship in these discussions. Something more like neighbor and less like family or friend.

Slogging through Web 2.0

panmanphil — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:39:00 GMT

OK, actually I'm slogging through the end of Web 2.0 conference, waiting for the last hour of talks before it all ends. Slogging because one, I'm tired and two, this conference is run like a big TV show. I gave up TV a long time ago. I am sure I'm not the first to notice that at the conference arguably for and about user generated content, user relationships, and user ownership of the sites we visit, we are all herded into big rooms to listen to somebody else's conversations with little input. Without a doubt, there are lots of interesting people going across the stage with lots of interesting things to say. The hosts questions are all good. The high visibility of the guests and the companies they represent make it a real event too and justify the cost of the trip. As TV it is really well done.

When it gets down to it, I have been forever spoiled by the Open Space conferences I have been to recently in Crested Butte and various locations in Europe over the last couple of years. It's true that I was able to get some answers and some relationships that will be important or at least enjoyable in the months to come. Still, considering that the numbers of entrepreneurs and VC types were really high, because of the number of ideas still being heavily germinated would benefit by more talk between more people, I'd like to think that we the "users" would be better served by a modified format that embraced our input. I wonder how you do that with 1000 people? Quite a problem.

Response to Rockford Lhotka's SOA rant

panmanphil — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:25:00 GMT

Here is his rant., the SOA Elephant in the room.

It's strange to hear myself commenting on SOA at all honestly, but for a variety of reasons, Udi Dahan's blogging not least among them, my mind seems to have turned a corner on SOA. SOA puts a line in the sand about how to divide up large domain models along business lines and that is a very good thing. But this is not what Rocky wrote about.

This is an excellent post, ranting about the over hype of SOA while at the same time putting forward a nice definition of both syntax and semantics as it applies to SOA. I do have a counter point though about his dislike of the semantic coupling. The point of SOA is *not* to standardize services between providers. There was an effort some time ago to build industry vertical schemas and that has failed in almost every case. That's the syntax standardization! No, SOA should probably be looked at instead as a way to "explain" your business clearly and what is unique about it via the services you have to offer. If your business is not unique, that defines it as a type of commodity business, and that is not a good thing for many many types of business.

While speaking at SD Best Practices in September I had a chance to sit and talk with the always engaging Christian Gross and his adventures into the SOA world. He observed the same point as Rocky but came to a different conclusion. He was interfacing to a service provided by a high end brokerage and started down a typical path where he thought he should abstract out the specifics of that brokerage. He made two mistakes in his view. He set off coding away the abstraction to minimize the semantic differences between his need of the brokerage and how the brokerage actually worked. Then he exposed it via a service to the rest of his application. What he realized was that 1st, he now had two abstractions, the interface in the code and the service, when all he needed was one, the service. Second he realized that if the abstraction was at the service level, he could code the service to go against the brokerage api exactly as it needed to be used. If he would change brokerages he would just start over with a new implementation and his (internal) consumers would be none the wiser.

To answer Rocky's point then. Yes, services will and should provide different semantics. Because you will typically not have lot's churn with the partners you interface with the impact of the change should be small. If you're find struggling with this issue, you may be expecting the business to be a commodity when it isn't.

Vulnerability management

panmanphil — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:08:00 GMT

This arrived in my email this morning in the sans-qualys vulnerability alert:
"Good news - for a change.
For everyone who has ever tried to reduce vulnerabilities, and found it
very hard, today is a very good day. NIST just announced (this morning)
that it is launching a cooperative effort involving NSA, DoD/DISA, DHS,
and the Center for Internet Security, with the help of security and
software vendors, to radically upgrade vulnerability management. The
program will bring automation and standardization to vulnerability
management, and it is real. Within a few months, you should expect to
see new procurement language that can be used by any organization buying
software or system or system integration, that will require the vendors
and contractors to deliver systems and software compatible with the new
automated vulnerability management program. SANS will do a free webcast
on it shortly to give you more details."

I wonder if any teeth will come along with the effort? It seems like for many vendors, this could be a new and probably unwelcome development. For software purchasers, it could be a very welcome development. We'll have to wait and see what this is going to look like.

SD Best Practices materials are updated

panmanphil — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:09:00 GMT

I have placed the slides and demo code in an article here from my talk at SD Best Practices in Boston last week.

It was a good week and I had lots of interesting talks this year. The conference has continued to change shape since I first started attending back in 1999. This year there was a big emphasis on project and team processes and techniques. This conference also had a C++ track as it's only language track! There was a large number of first class speakers that I really enjoyed getting to talk to. Boston is a city that I really enjoy, though I it must be admitted that have some friends that are current Berklee College of Music students that know the town, the jazz haunts and look forward to jamming with me adds a ton to my attitude about it.

Software Factory du jour

panmanphil — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:34:00 GMT

Beat is one of the more enthusiastic Microsoft evangelists I have met. When I met him in Lillehammer in 2005, he was beating the SOA drum. Now he is beating the Software Factory drum. I think he really believes in what he is doing.

I was pretty much ignorant about Software Factories until I sat through an Open Space session on the topic in Cortina with some other enthusiasts and I really learned a lot. The idea seems to make a lot of sense for people who routinely build similar but somewhat unique applications. It seemed to me it would appeal to the Cap Gemini's, WIPro or IDS' of the world who (I am guessing I admit) tend to service vertical markets and see themselves endlessly cranking out code that looks an awful lot alike for client after client. The building trades figured this out long ago. The industry is divided between niches for the most part: residential, small commercial, industrial and large commercial buildings are all built by different kinds of companies. Materials are fairly standardized. Assembly of the materials is fairly standardized. Skills are fairly standardized. Whole neighborhoods are fairly standardized, at least those built in the last 50 years. Crank 'em out, like a factory.

In this comparison to a restaurant, Beat compares writing software to food orders. It's very well written and I would encourage you to read it. The idea is that you determine the products that make up your menu, and then only offer certain kinds of variations to the customer. The old Saturday Night Live skit "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, coke" comes to mind but I see where he is going. I'll bet there are lots of situations where the idea makes sense. Once a certain domain has reached the level where it can turned into predictable parts like that, has it really reached the commodity stage? Do I want to be in a commodity business? Probably not. The analogy of a factory itself troubles me. You build a factory to crank out the same things over and over again. You want a factory to last a long time to offset the relatively large cost of building it in the first place. You want to preserve the market as is for the factory's products so you don' t have to retool. All this seems dubious as an analogy for an industry that is so young and changes as fast as software development does or as business itself does these days.

Domain Driven Design is about expressing the very detailed nuances of a business in verbally expressive code. It seems to me it is the antithesis of Software Factories. Sure, I can imagine factories building some components of a domain model. The bigger that toolbox is though, and the more code it cranks out, the more you may be inclined to become MacDonald's instead of a 5 star joint. Or perhaps you become just like your competition. Frameworks, and I will admit I am as guilty of building frameworks as anybody else, have the same flaw unless they are evolved out of careful refactoring over a long period of time.

I had the pleasure hanging out with Lyle Mays one weekend some years back with a mutual friend. I asked him about how he uses electronics and computers to help him compose, a reasonable question to someone who has made a career with electronic music in the Pat Metheny Group. At the time his response surprised me, though now it makes perfect sense. He said he usually worked with pencil and paper at the piano because all the tools nudged him toward writing things that were easy to write with the tools. Instead, working with piano, pencil and paper, the composition could emerge as he heard it in his head.

There seems to be a lesson in there for us developers. Now if we could only reconcile that with the effort of handwriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code! I think that the lesson is that we need tools that work for us, not visa versa.

fr-agilists?

panmanphil — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:48:00 GMT

Ouch!
and one month later
Ouch!
(follow the links)

If you read through the posts and comments, the heart of the arguments come out. Agile methods and values are no longer the 'fair haired boys" of the industry. The early adopter phase is over and people reconciling the different views are coming to blows. I have to say that I experienced much of the zealotry of some agile evangelists while participating in the Yahoo TDD group. There is almost a religious zeal on the part of some of the practitioners, one where questioning the process puts you in the immediate line of fire. Scott seems to be making the point that the agile techniques are too hard to explain succinctly and that only by diving in fully and experiencing the methods in person with an open mind can you be in a position to criticize. Considering all the parts, that's asking a lot of the merely curious. Odd to for an approach that values evolution over planning, don't you think? Here are some observations to throw into the fire.

There are many who have staked their careers on big up front designs, and yes, some of them are good at it, enjoy it, and get software delivered. Agile techniques are an attack on them, often a very personal attack. Expect reaction and don't be surprised when they don't accept "you don't get it" as a justification.
Agile techniques are presented to developers primarily. There are a lot of parts to the process and some require changes to people outside the developer community. Developers are usually not in a position to make those changes and are often not practiced at the influence skills that would make that possible.
Could somebody quantify that pair programming is or is not a productivity loss? Account for quality gains if this can be proven. Account for the gains from shared code ownership if that can be proven. Otherwise we'll be arguing forever
While the Agile Manifesto does provide meaningful values, it does not provide a meaningful vision of how the world looks as an agile shop to a newcomer. As you look for more clarity of that vision, you will find an incredibly confused, contradictory and sometimes hostile picture. Others would say there is a vision: pick mine.
Tests and code as the real documentation: I have believed this to be true for many years. However this is only true for the developers. If the tests really were the expression of what the customer or business analyst expressed in a language they understood, they should own them, then you might have something. Hmmm, sounds like Domain Driven Design!
Bob Martin seems to take particular offense to code that doesn't have automated tests and that judgment, or "calculated risk" can guide you in what to test and what not to test. What about a manual test? What about unchanged code that has been in production (and tested manually) for a long time? What about low impact code with a high probability of "just works"? Generated code with a few parameters? No shortcuts to meet a deadline?!
I am beginning to believe that to succeed with agile techniques, you have to buy the full deal, not just pick parts that interest you. The parts all fit together and may not work nearly as well with any of them missing. I used to think pair programming was optional, but as I see things play out, I wonder if it is really the most important part of the package. I wonder how I feel about that ;-)

Change involving groups of people is always hard and requires tremendous leadership. It requires time and patience. It requires faith. Being right or wrong is almost irrelevant once you are in the midst of the change. Being fr-agile is identical to sticking your head in the sand about the real problems at hand. Ron Jeffries has been a master at staying in the fight to help people but keeping above the fray. The agile movement need lots more people like Ron.