Gunshot wound to foot
Amazing. Microsoft Update just replaced Internet Explorer 6 with IE7. The menu bar that for two decades has been a common interface to familiar and unfamiliar applications has gone, removing my overview of what's available. Immediate challenge: how to do what File | Open has always done? And my bookmarks have vanished, replaced by a standard set.
Firefox has been my preferred browser for two years now. Microsoft’s new self-inflicted wound might end my use of IE for anything but proofing.
Ontology, metaphysics — or software?
Many objects are not defined by their attributes, but rather by a thread of continuity and identity.
Neither ontology nor metaphysics, but Eric Evans on the Entity design pattern in Domain-Driven Design.
David Armstrong at Sydney always insisted philosophy has no practical use; but I never did believe that.
The is very much a ‘new technology’ project. Claims are represented by XML files, and accessed through a Claim class that encodes all the business logic. Refactoring the calculations of the policy value, non-trivial in the original, resulted in a compacted table accessed through a key-indexed property; the calculations then become a classic APL 'inner product': +.×.
Software factories My thinking about writing software has led me further and further away from the industrialisation strategies of Software Engineering, towards a craft approach focused on communication and collaboration between domain experts and professional writers. Embedded Domain-Specific Notations (EDSNs) play a key rôle in this. I was encouraged to discover (courtesy of June Kim of the J Forum) that some influential writers value them:
So I was surprised to find another Martin Fowler article on language-oriented programming leading me towards www.softwarefactories.com and an article on industrialising software development.More on EDSNs
Improbable reconciliations Also on the bus is author Barry Boehm, whose Software Engineering Economics (1980) led the way to the industrialisation of programming in the 1980s and 90s. Originally an enthusiastic convert to formal methods, I eventually became disenchanted with what software development was turning into, and left the field for 15 years. I used to enjoy casting Boehm as a villain in this story, but without his work I should never have been able to bring back to programming whatever I have learned from philosophy, sales and psychology. Good and bad; is it ever time to judge? I was enchanted at dinner to discover that Boehm remembers studying under Ken Iverson at Harvard.
Santa says hej.
Conference close At the conference dinner, besides an acappela group reminiscent of the tralalero genovese with which we were entertained at XP2003, a choir of Finns, scorning accompaniment, came and shouted at us. (See Hubert Baumeister’s pic.) The bar manager at my favourite pub in the town square tells me this is a local group, usually booked up two years ahead. They gave us, among other items, an article from the EU Maastricht Treaty, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”. We were stunned and then enthusiastic.
On the last afternoon of the Oulu conference Eric Lundh made a brief but forceful attack on the assumption that agile development and formal methods are necessarily opposed, just in time to prepare me to meet Emine, who is preparing a doctoral thesis on formal methods at the University of York.
A new and impressive speaker on the last day of the conference: Jack Järkvik whose height, dry wit and mop of hair seemed uncannily reminiscent of KEI. We look forward to hearing more of him.
If I lived through the winters as described by Artop, an Oulu teacher I met at the town’s river beach, I would not want to sleep for the three summer months. Apparently other share this sentiment, and by autumn are slightly crazed with dropping by their neighbours at 3am for more coffee. I’m reacquiring a taste for Finnish humour. A compliment from Artop: “you’re not stupid enough to be happy.”
Meanwhile insomnia runs wild here. The sun will set on 27 July. Until then we shall stagger on with snatched hours of sleep and more excellent Finnish coffee. Or head south. Could always do that.
Northern lights Greetings from north Finland, where I'm at XP2006 in Oulu with north European luminaries like Morten Kromberg and Gitte Christensen of Dyalog, and Jutta Eckstein, the XP coach.
If the light never changed
I’d go mad in an hour.
Marilyn Hacker
I’ve already learned lessons worth the whole trip. From Geoffrey & Emily Bache, an alternative to defining unit tests as assertions about the states of variables. Instead, software can write a narrative of what it's doing, and a testing framework can compare narratives. And from Professor Giancarlo Succi, that there is really no way to recover a presentation when the chairman truncates it. Obvious in retrospect, but I had no idea; a lesson well worth learning.
The sun at midnightAnother surprise: Finns not only have a taste for cider, but keep a light perry, “Golden Cup”, on draft, serving it in pints with a fistful of ice. Bit girly, but a very refreshing summer drink.
tangled in red marks
a north truer than magnetic
Nottingham XP To Nottingham yesterday to meet XP coach Nancy van Schooenderwoert and talk to the local XP people. Here’s an MP3 interview with Nancy from Agile2005 last year.
Summer School Hey-ho, collegiate life for me. I'm at the XML Summer School at Wadham College, Oxford. A room, an Ethernet connection and colleagues like Elaine Brennan, teaching here on her way to WorldCon in Glasgow. After a candlelit dinner in the 17th-century dining hall, long conversations in the bar about SF writer Chip Delany, poet Marilyn Hacker (whose recent collection Desesperanto I have by my bedside here) and XML namespaces. It's not just the C5 cable organiser Kerry Poulter found for me: sometimes my world feels very tightly connected.
This morning Candace Partridge is helping me learn to use XLST to transform XML trees and Peter Flynn promises to show me more of XML and typesetting. Just where I should be.
Read my code A breakthrough in the work I’m doing in collapsing and accelerating the process of writing software. We’re developing ways to write software — a description of the behaviour of an imagined machine, that can be enacted by a computer — without first writing the same description in English. I’ve been using the expressive power of APL to develop intermediate vocabularies in which to write the business rules in a form the computer can enact, and so let us test and explore our expression of the rules. A discussion with one of the senior clerks (the domain experts on the rules) ended with her saying: I think I get it. Let me see the code.
This is revolutionary stuff. No one does this. Oh, except with APL. We’ve always done this.
Vectoring in Paul Mansour popped over on the Queen Mary II on a programming holiday which ended with two days of useful meetings in London, before I disappeared into my hole for the Bank Holiday weekend, working on VECTOR. Results are encouraging, see the new front page and Rules was a great way to finish.
Wireless encryption When I set up the wireless network here no others were detectable and I was relaxed about security and privacy. Now our computers report several networks round here, and have occasionally and alarmingly reported IP conflicts — two machines using the same network address.
Today I encrypted the wireless part of the network. When we had Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP machines that looked tricky. Now we have Windows XP and MacOS X machines and it’s not — just a few minutes work.
Dyalog APL version 10.2α has arrived, replacing the preview Conference Edition from the Naples meeting. Can’t wait to get tucked in.
» www.dyalog.com
MailTrain again MailTrain has tables with auto-width columns at last. See software downloads. Thanks to Paul Mansour — he pressed me to do this.
Firefox just got installed here and is doing what it says on the tin: light, fast and accurate with CSS. Looking good. www.getfirefox.com
Picked up the 1200-page Professional ASP.NET 1.1 on Thursday and am now immersed in a 3-day gulp of new technology that — at last! — unites APL and web building. ASP.NET compacts the source code for dynamic web sites, abstracts away detail I was hand-coding in PHP, and lets me use Dyalog APL as a scripting language, giving me a double hit on the code compaction.
Last rites for Software Engineering? Finished Ed Yourdon's Death March, a book about 'impossible mission' software projects.
» Continue reading “Last rites for Software Engineering?”Home at last Successfully moved 5jt.com to its new home, after months in temporary lodgings. Thanks to Bob Hoekstraand the boys at NovaWeb Hosting; every success with your new ventures. (5jt.com and Lambent's new clients are now esconced at Fasthosts. Thanks again to Jim Bell of the Kircudbright Community Website for the recommendation.)
The days of software as a product are numbered, writes the Angry Economist.
It's becoming obvious to more and more people that software is not scarce. The scarce good is people's time, and that is what commands the big bucks.
Chocolate Valentines Day in Japan was 14 February, as here. Women give their men chocolates, and Miki gave me a box of Pierre Marcolini's Saveurs du Monde single-origin chocolate squares. By tradition, men respond with white chocolate the following month. In this case Duc D’O white chocolate truffles got around Miki's usual distaste for the stuff.
Why can't Google find the Duc D'O website even when you ask for it by name? Several site design decisions stop it. While its front page is loaded with helpful metatag keywords, its HTML body contains nothing but images, most without text alternatives. This splash page uses JavaScript to pop up a further window, so there are no hyperlinks for Google to follow. The relationship between the HTML body and the site's content has been completely broken. This site might as well have been designed to be invisible to Google. In contrast, Yahoo finds it first when you search for Duc D'O. Small consolation these days, when google has become a verb. Put those graphic designers on a leash!
Eventually I had to try it. Saw a postcard ad yesterday at the library and today bought for £120 a small used 350 MHz Pentium II box with Linux (Red Hat's Fedora distribution) installed. No time this month, but in March I mean to set this up for software development, and add it to the Lambent network. Have heard great praise for this OS's stability.
Another pair: pair programming tonight (Ruby Tuesday) with Ray Cannon — email us at r-s@5jt.com with your questions.
Pair programming tonight with Adrian Smith. You can email us your questions tonight at s-a@5jt.com.
Amazing. CSS guru Dave Shea, the original Zen Gardener, is looking for work.
Absorbing a bucket of new technology:
PHP, MySQL and Blogger and trying a new open-source text editor, SciTE, which adds useful syntax colouring but I have yet to find the handy clipbook feature with which I customise NoteTab Pro. Although 5jt.com is my official sandbox, all the results are appearing in a redraft (no, you can’t look yet) of the Vector website, revamped for on-line publishing.
So, lots to report, but we may be off the air for a bit yet.
Beta release of MCMS (MikiY Content Management System) v1.09 generates picture galleries from folders of JPEGs, nested to arbitrary depth.
What a weekend. Two days, and the MikiY Content Management System is finally in a usable state.
Means doing what you want to do. I’ve had some good results sharpening my time management tools. The key result is that my inbox is empty, and only messages that I want to attend to quickly are showing up in it.
» How it’s done
Welcome feedback: software developers’ newsletter Java Today features my article on requirements specification as a Wittgensteinian language game and attracted some comment.
» Java Today Ignoring Requirements