matthewthornton.info

I’m playing with a business idea and I am consequently working on the requirements for the application.  I started out using a program called Virtual Paradigm.  It’s nice.  But not great and certainly not worth the cost of an actual license.  My hypothesis is that I am going to be able to do a much better job by using a wiki to document the requirements.  True, it won’t provide some of the bells and whistles, like being able to create traceability automatically, etc. but it certainly allows for people to quickly read, review, and refine requirements.  During my last semester of classes, I took a course on requirements engineering where we reviewed a number of software requirements development systems.  Sitting in the calm, thoughtful world of academia, they look like a good idea but, in reality, I don’t think it gains people anything.  For example, with the company I work for, they use a glorified document editor to create and track requirements.  I’m pretty well convinced that a wiki is going to be better.  Any thoughts?

I am biased, so everyone will jump on me as saying that a president doesn’t have to have served in the military to be commander in chief or a senator doesn’t have to be a doctor in order to pass health care legislation can go ahead and pile on.  However, I think there should be a new law passed, in addition to this one, is a law that requires congressmen to at least have an e-mail address before they pass legislation on the internet.  Right now we have a number of issues with the internet.  Last night, a bill was passed that requires all online purchases to be forwarded to the IRS.  (Potential survey of how much money they’re missing out on?)  But that’s just the one they passed last night.  Let’s look at what else: net neutrality, telecom immunity, who controls the internet, and censorship on the net, to name just a few.  This week, John McCain has been saying in some of his stump speeches that he doesn’t even have an e-mail account.  This is discouraging.  You would think at the very least he’d want one to keep track of old Air Force buddies or something like that.  It wouldn’t be so much the fact that he doesn’t have an e-mail account because there are times when I wish *I* didn’t have one but it’s the tone of his speeches where it sounds almost as though his technical ignorance is a badge of honor.  And he’s one of the ones passing this legislation so, I say, we need to force them to start using those big ‘ol internet pipes before they decide to legislate on what goes through them.

A while back, my brother on his blog wrote the following about my blog about the future of search:

http://sentientsearch.net/2008/05/05/oh-dear/

Well…some of the points he mentions are good and I happen to agree with the spirit of them.  However, it’s always good to know when, as far as how search will progress and what the next step was for Google and optimizing search….  HAHA!!!  I’m right and you’re wrong!!!  Ha HaHa Ha HA HA!!!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/14/google-bucket-testing-new-digg-like-search-interface/

Not entirely what I was advocating but definitely a way of improving search results by group consensus rather than just having an algorithm run and spit out results.

In my current job, I’m having to learn about the language Python so I am once in a while forced to go onto forums or read forums as a result of a google search to figure out the ins and outs of the language.  I dread doing this because people just become real idiots on forums.  The übergeek mentality comes to life.

Now, my good geek friends, I know that you are socially inadequate and are incapable of communicating effectively to people who don’t measure up to your high standards so please allow me to give you a couple of simple list of things you can do to improve your forum posts.  All of these pretty much boil down to the first rule:

1.  Your response to a question should first and foremost include a) an answer, b) a request for more information.  If you chose to add additional content for context or clarification, that’s fine.  But your response should be guiding the person in the right direction.

All of the other rules sort of feed back into this one.

2.  Do not sagefully suggest an alternative solution:  say none of the following:  “Don’t do it that way.  Do it this way.”, “That’s a stupid way of doing it.”  “It’s too hard to do it this way.  Try it this way.”  You have no, did you hear me?  NO way of knowing why the person is asking the question.  Maybe they’re using a design approach that requires the path they’re taking.  Maybe it’s an intellectual exercise for them.  Maybe they’re a schizophrenic, homicidal programmer and the voices are telling him to write their program a certain way.  Do you really want this guy hunting you down because you think they should use a for loop instead of a while loop?

3.  Do not take a person’s question as an opportunity to begin a flame war.  The person is not asking for your diatribe on the evils of using lambda instead of defining all your functions in Python.  The person is not asking for other posters to chime in on why lambdas are good.  This person has a 5:00 deadline and is needing to know or he could lose the contract, his job, and his house.

4.  Theory is great.  I love the back story of things.  However, it goes *after* you answer the question.

5.  Hey, Nurse Ratched!  Yeah, you!  Posting in the wrong folder on a forum, despite what you may believe, is NOT the end of the world.  The post is not McMurphy.  They’re lost.  They’re coming for guidance.  In this Web 2.0 world, everything is sort of uncategorized anyways.  Everything is “tagged”.  We’ll find it.  If there is a strong need to maintain a organized forum, follow rule 1 (answer the question) and then after that, remind tell the person where to post questions like that in the future.

I hope this has helped the trolls among you whose only joy in life is being a bully and a hotshot in cyberspace.  I’ve seen enough of you all and, frankly, am not nearly as impressed with you as you think I should be.

Well, Jess woke me up Monday morning with the sad news–George Carlin died.  I remembered the first time I saw him perform on HBO.  It was the Jammin in New York concert.  He was incredible.  His political commentary was edgy, his situational humor was great, and he spoke with rhythm and energy and used the full plate of words in the English dictionary.  People my age always liked that he swore in his routines as much as he did.  With me, it wasn’t so much that, it was the way he said it.  Jon Stewart described the holy trinity of comedy as being “Bruce, Pryor, and Carlin”.  I never got Lenny Bruce.  I never found him to be all that funny (with what little of his routines I can find).  Richard Pryor was terrific.  His comedy was edgy, no-holds-barred funny but he hit his peak before my time and so he always seemed detached to me.  Carlin?  Carlin was a guy you could walk down the street and shout “Hey, George!”  He was one of us.  He observed the things that we all knew but didn’t realize was funny until he brought it up.  He was terrific, he was the best, he’ll be missed.

Here’s my list of top 5 routines by George Carlin–if you haven’t seen his stand up routine, google these or find a YouTube video of them and be ready to laugh.

5–Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television–I never found it to be his funniest stuff but its the one that started it all and for that reason alone it needs to be on the list.  His suggestion of juxtaposing the F-word with the word “kill” in movies makes for some pretty hillarious dialog.

4–Cars and Driving–George drives kind of recklessly, he doesn’t repair his vehicle and he doesn’t believe in traffic laws.  Just like any driver you’d meet on the Capital Beltway.  This is one of those routines from “What am I Doing in New Jersey?” where you realize that George is one of us.  I realized this when he says “Do you ever get so f’in mad that all you want to do is drive up along side this car just to see what the f*#k he looks like?!”

3–The Ten Commandments–From “Complaints and Grievances”.  I think this is George’s last great routines.  In 10 minutes takes the 10 Commandments and turns them on their head, reducing them down to two somewhat nebulous and flexible rules and the logic he uses to break them down is either so funny, true, or insightful that you have to agree with him.

2–Baseball and Football–One of my all time favorites.  George compares and contrasts the two sports and you kinda get the idea that ol’ George is kind of partial towards one by the end of the routine.

1–Al Sleet your Hippy Dippy Weatherman–Comedic gold.  This is what I’m saying about George.  I understand that he went counter culture and his persona was to be edgy but this routine shows just how funny he could be with out uttering even one of those seven words you can’t say on television:

• “Tonight’s forecast–dark.”
• “The radar is picking up a line of thunderstorms…….however the radar is also picking up a squadron of Russian ICBMs, so I wouldn’t sweat the thundershowers.”
• Al’s final forecast:  “The weather will continue to change on and off for a long, long time.”

Joe Bless Al Sleet and Joe Bless George Carlin.

Bear in mind that I’m on the outside looking in; I don’t like either major party.  However, I think that a Obama-Clinton ticket wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  Obama has repeatedly evoked Lincoln throughout the primaries.  A Obama-Clinton ticket would be an interesting parallel that would compare greatly with Lincoln.  In history, Lincoln had beaten the presumptive nominee for the Republican party, William Seward.  He ended up picking him to be his Secretary of State and became a powerful counselor to the President.  If we assume that, should Obama become the President, he is a strong leader and not just a bunch of speaches, he’s going to need Hillary’s strength to do a lot of the things that his flowery rhetoric lays out.  From what I’ve read of him, he will listen to everyone and then he makes the final decision.  If that’s the case, then the electoral math notwithstanding, I think that such a ticket would probably end up crushing John McCain in the Fall.

I’ll confess that I’ve kinda drank the “Obama Change” Kool-Aid.  It’s probably my last-ditch effort of not becoming completely jaded by the Federal Government.

Then Tuesday rolled around.  On Memorial Day, Obama made the claim that one of his Uncles helped liberate Auschwitz.  Number of things wrong with that; his mother was an only child and Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians.

I swear, I have no idea what makes these politicians tick.  One of two things has happened here: either it was a complete gaffe, in which case he should have listened more to his elders when he was a child or it was just a show to try to 1-up McCain, which would have been at best futile and at worst pathetic.  Why didn’t he just say something like, “I can’t imagine the horrors of war.  I honor you today.  When I’m Commander-in-Chief, I will only use you to preserve our way of life and you can leave your homes knowing your family is taken care of and when you come home, we’ll take care of you.”  Sometimes the flowery rhetoric he comes up with needs to be better honed, in my opinion.

This will be my last (solely) Microsoft-hating/bashing blog for a while, I promise.  A few years ago, Alan Weisman wrote a book about what would happen if mankind suddenly disappeared.  With my previous blog entry, it got me to start thinking.  Microsoft has really gone off it’s meds.  A number of things have happened recently that I think shows how Microsoft has in many ways been marginalized.  Not ground into the dust, but just not the center of the universe like it used to be.  The Yahoo! acquisition failed.  5 years ago, they would have bought them without a blink.  Now, they spent a month haggling, negotiating, etc. until they ultimately walked away from the table.  Second, a guy I’ve never heard of named Jason Matusow aparently went off his meds when he indicated that South Africans don’t understand OSS and, more shockingly, said that South Africans don’t know how to program well enough to delve too deeply into Linux (Unless, of course, you’re one of the developers of Ubuntuu Linux.)  Finally, and I think is actually most telling, Microsoft’s biggest, coolest invention in the past 5 years or so?  Surface.  You know what it’ll probably cost when it first comes out?  Multiply a macbook pro by about 5, I’m guessing.  You know what has already happened?  DIY sites net-wide have come up with ways of doing it very easily and very cheaply.  Bill Gate’s vision of technology, while grandiose, I don’t really think needs a big corporation like Microsoft necessarily calling the shots.

So what happens if Microsoft goes away?  Not necessarily the way of Enron or Bear Stearns but, say, the way of Atari.  What happens?  Does Apple fill the void?  I hope not.  I think they’re a great company and all but with the problems I’ve had with my Macbook in the past, I’d hate to see them when they don’t give a fig about their customers.  Does everyone go to Linux?  I don’t know–I’d be surprised if it happened, though if you go to a Linux help site/forum, you’ve never met friendlier people on the web.  They’re all very interested in helping with your problem, so maybe it will be a generational thing and we can push through to having an open-source society where software is freely available and the rate of software development increases to the point where we can have developers going back to their garages to just write code for people.  Maybe it’ll be a hybrid of corporate software with the open-source community.  Companies are very good for large-scale systems.  I just don’t think that our personal computing experience needs to be dominated by the large corporations anymore.  Case in point:  I have an Apple macbook and aside from the Operating System, I have not paid for one bit of software on this laptop (Besides games, and you can even get away with just playing open source games–they’re really good).  Everything is either on the web, opensourced, or I’ve written on my own.  Just something I thought I’d bring up as an interesting question about the future of software.  If anyone’s out there, I’d like to know your feedback.

Hey.  I’m back.  Did I miss anything?

Now that I am solidly in place at my new job, I feel I can take the opportunity to burn some bridges and take some loving (or not-so-loving) swipes at our good friends at Microsoft.  For those of you who don’t know, I had an interview with M$ last fall.  I’m guessing it didn’t go well, since I never heard back from anyone–just an automated message to recoup my expenses.  They really do have an odd culture at that company.  The median age of the people working there seemed to be right about my age, which leads me to worry.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I want someone in the software shop with a long grey beard that talks endlessly about when he programmed his first FORTRAN compiler.  (That’s not sarcasm, that’s a fact–you need guys like that on the floor to tell you what to do sometimes.)  Everybody is walking around like they’re still on a college campus, with a Zune plugged into their ears, drinkin Starbucks.

The interviews I went through were dreadful.  I had one guy ask me to write some code, which I hate doing on the fly.  However, I managed to come up with what Knuth would call a “literate programming”-based solution to the problem that was easily readible and did the job.  The guy then started criticizing me saying it was too slow and wouldn’t be good in a production environment.  Oh!  And I didn’t mention this-you’ll love this one-I had to use C strings.  That’s right, they think the pinnacle of programming is to guess how big of a string they’ll need and let the hackers blow right through the stack.

My second interviewer was a nice woman but she asked me the question of what would I do if I had to arrange a meeting and prepare a presentation to give to a VP about what position a company should take about a particular sales acquisition.  This is obviously a test to see how well I think on my feet and handle a difficult problem but she kept interjecting humorously that “things like this have happened.”…….you know?  As a potential stockholder in the future (or not) of Microsoft, I’d suggest you’d keep that little nugget of information to yourself.

My final interview was over lunch.  No. No.  I know what you’re thinking.  A nice pleasant conversation with someone asking me what I thought of the company and whether or not I had any questions.  No.  An actual third interview with a guy asking me non-stop questions.  When he was done with his meal, he asked, “Are you ready?”  “Sure.  Yeah.  I haven’t eaten since last night but boy the bread sure was good.”  The guy kept asking me question after question about Vista and if there was anything I’d like fixed on the user interface and how I’d do it.  Seeing as how I haven’t used Vista, along with the other 5 habitable continents on the planet and parts of this one, I had a hard time coming up with answers to his questions/root cause analysis.

So, ultimately, it sounds like I probably didn’t get the job, which is ok since I got a better one anyway.  You know what the oddest part about the whole experience was?  They never asked me if I had any questions about the company.  They never asked if I wanted to know more about what I’d be doing.  Sure, I’d make smalltalk with the person on my way to the next interview but not anything that would get me hopping up and down about the company.  Normally, you get done with the interviewer’s part of the interview and then you get to ask them some questions.  The arrogance!  Let me make this abundantly clear to you, Microsoft–YOU.  ARE.  NO.  LONGER. THE. ONLY. SHOW. IN. TOWN.  You need to finnese me a little bit to convince me to travel across a continent to work for you.  A microsoft internship can actually carry a stigma with it now, depending on who you talk to so you need to convince me why I would want to work for you.  Not necessarily the other way around.  I’ll admit, I’m not the best programmer on the Earth and there were probably people better qualified for the internship but, hey.  As long as you’re there, why not make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Microsoft?  Dispel the myths?  Oh, well.  Guess they’ll never learn and that is a good segue into my next blog entry.

A while back I posted some forum messages to the Prelinger Archive about reviving the September 11 Television Archive.  It was a website that was developed very shortly after 9/11 and included all of the television coverage for 9/11-9/13 for FOX, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and other networks.  It disappeared in 2002-2003 and I was somewhat disappointed but around 2007 they came back online and I bookmarked the site to my del.icio.us account.  Today, for some reason, it appeared on the hot list of del.icio.us!  You probably won’t be able to see it by the time you read this (that page is rather dynamic) but, hey, I thought it was pretty cool.