Mark Roseman's Blog

Woo hoo!

That would be with respect to the previous post. :-)

Monotony.

I hate bugs that I can't yet figure out how to reproduce, but only occur sporadically in the field. It's this incredibly lengthy cycle of add more debugging, redeploy, wait for an eternity until the bad behavior shows up, analyze the debugging logs, rinse and repeat. It's inevitable that those kinds of bugs come from the absolute stupidest of causes, making you feel like even more of an idiot when its finally tracked down.

Business Partner Hell.

Interesting/entertaining/sad thread on the Business of Software forum about partnerships gone bad.

For Sale: Ocean Full of Kool-Aid.

Had an hour to kill in a waiting room today, so read the first couple of chapters of Don Tapscott's book Wikinomics, which is all the rage right now. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a rosy picture painted of how all this new technology and open collaboration is going to be an overwhelmingly and utterly positive force for all of society and for everything in fact, that the answer to all problems is more openness (etc.) and if you fail to go this route you will be left behind.

Now, far be it from me to suggest these tools aren't a good thing, but a little bit of reality and healthy skepticism is not a bad thing. Just thinking about the amount of dysfunction running rampant in most organizations of any size, it doesn't strike me as obvious that just adding in thousands more outside people (who aren't the least bit accountable to anyone) will magically solve anything. Once in a while improve things perhaps. Once in a while.

This mass collaboration is great, and really great for some things. And I'm all for harnessing the best intelligence everywhere to help solve a problem. I have greater faith you're far more likely to find the inherent stupidity of people though (even smart people who are mostly stupid in many areas, to say nothing of stupids who are stupid everywhere), which tends to throw a bit of a wrench in most such plans. To say nothing of mob mentalities, narrow and bigoted points of view being spread ever faster and further, and.... ok, stop hyperventilating.

As a book introducing these technologies and new patterns of collaboration and openness to a general business community, I'm sure this all serves as a good and poignant eye opener, which is great. And as a way to generate consulting dollars for the authors to help organizations take advantage of these things (so they don't die which is inevitable if they fall behind) also I'm sure fabulous. But please, even the most wide-eyed evangelism would be more credible with a little reality thrown in.

Of course, if the audience is really people who can be suckered into investing in every web 2.0 bubble startup, wow, its compelling evidence that the latest digg clone is as guaranteed a money maker as selling pet food online was, or buying Nortel in the day. Don't want to miss out or you'll look foolish, and this book is the proof!

In the meantime, anyone who might want to collaborate, but not with the entire world, I've got some software to sell you...

Ancient History.

Oh, my aching bones. Saw an item on one of the Mac news sites that its the 20th anniversary of apple.com being registered as an internet domain (it was one of the first hundred). Things have changed a bit since then on the technology front.

Let's see, twenty years ago I would have been just finishing high school. Admittedly, I was a geek at a young age, so I had a computer back then (some PC clone as I recall.. would have been I think the second computer I'd owned). Having a computer at home was just starting to be more common among late teenagers (maybe 25% in my demographic). Nowadays of course, if they don't have a computer by the time they are six, most kids would run to Children's Aid screaming child abuse. We'll just gloss over my being a pretty good assembly language developer by that point in time as completely anomalous but somehow being good for building character. I had used one Mac (the original one) back then, and had seen a Lisa.

Internet? Nowadays the kids couldn't imagine a time without it. Back then, nada. I did actually get a modem back then (300 baud, then a 1200 baud one). The homegrown BBS systems were at their heyday back then; the cool ones actually had several lines, and some even a real time chat feature (not exactly MSN!), along with a messaging system. It was only the hardcore geeks who were into that stuff; most people seemed to survive quite fine without an electronic existance.

Again very atypically, I'd attended a science, technology and business camp called Shad Valley the summer before, which was run through the university. Got my first tiny exposure to Unix there, and also ended up with an account on the university's Amdahl mainframe system (MVS) for the next few years, again which supported email and a sort-of real time messaging. It was connected to Bitnet, one of the many networks that were the precursors to the Internet. If you were really clever, you could actually send mail from one network to the other, by manually routing things through various gateway machines using specially coded email addresses.

And don't even get started about phones and iPods. No cell phones, that's for sure. Our school had (I don't remember, but I'm guessing) a few pay phones. There was also one phone in the office and one in the yearbook office (yes, I was a yearbook geek too, but it was a good place to go when skipping class). Can you imagine kids today without a phone? Portable music players were around then (cassette).. the Sony Walkman had been around for a number of years, so lots of people had those or ripoffs of them. People still stole music back then, but through copying audio tapes, not by swapping MP3's.

I feel really old now.

Security and SaaS.

Good article by Michael Sampson in this issue of Messaging News (starting on page 28): To Use or Not to Use: Security Considerations for Outside-the-Firewall Web Collaboration Services. Michael has also started a new consultancy.

Note to self.

Problem solving skills are useful when doing development work.

Code Guilt.

Overall, the last few days have been quite good. I've got an opportunity to do a bit of work with Jean-Claude, who I've wanted to do a more focused project or two with. The down side is, part of it will involve a good chunk of existing code I've written. While at the lower level (coding style, documentation, tests, coupling, cohesion) it's actually pretty good, there are still all those totally arbitrary "evolutionary" high-level issues. You know, those design decisions that made sense at the time, and still work quite well, but in light of later developments, there might have been a better way to design things.

In this particular case, the benefit of fixing them doesn't justify the work needed to refactor it, but there's nothing like getting a new person involved to remind you of some of those code smells that you've gotten used to and now ignore. Mind you, it's a far cry from 8 or 9 years ago when Ted started with TeamWave, and I spent I'm sure a solid two weeks turning a mountain of totally undocumented and truly wretched code (i.e. "university code") into something that was only moderately horrific. It wasn't quite enough to cause carpal tunnel, but pretty darn close. Never again.

Ewww, more cold and snow.

After the really mild start to winter, this last few weeks has been gross; I'm increasingly a wuss when it comes to cold weather. And yet more snow overnight, though we only got a small part of what some other places near here like Hamilton got. We've already gotten the MINI stuck once going up our (steep) driveway. Mind you, there are few things we need to actually drive to, as most of our necessities are walking distance. I'm pretty sure I ended up tossing my old cross-country skis during our last move, otherwise it would actually be a good day to go out (say, down the streets). No end to this in immediate sight either. It's hard to believe I grew up with continuous cold and snow that would be hanging around all winter, and even thought that was normal.

Top 25 Web 2.0 Tools for Entrepreneurs.

A useful list of Web 2.0 tools from Aviva.