Stackoverflow.com

Stackoverflow.com is a free programmers Q&A site (it's only been out of private beta for about 3 weeks) where anyone can post programming questions and anyone can answer them.

Questions and answers are voted on by the community (free optional sign up via OpenId) and both questions and answers can be modified wiki-style (by users with sufficient reputation).

Good answers are voted "up" as in Reddit making high quality answers easy to find, and both questions and answers are tagged as in Delicious which makes searching effective.

The site is owned/created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (of www.joelonsoftware.com/ and www.codinghorror.com/ fame respectively).

Simple-Talk

Checkout the Simple-Talk (www.simple-talk.com) site for information & insights regarding MS SQL Server.

Eclipse As An End-to-End Platform

Please find below the URL for the Eclipse Foundation site and the Eclipse downloads.

http://www.eclipse.org/

Eclipse is the closest realization of the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern that I know.

One would almost wish to have Requirements and Test Cases be added as Eclipse perspectives and have the vendors deliver those perspectives through developing Plug-ins for Eclipse.

I am not a proponent of Eclipse (I dislike its "slowness" - courtesy of it being written in Java) but I think it is an example of a flexible platform that supports multiple views that inter-operate with one another.

Eclipse enables multiple views of the same underlying model (in the sense of MVC architecture).

For software development requirements engineering, inter-operability with Eclipse could be regarded as a requirement; i.e. one could ask the vendor “Is there an Eclipse Plug-in available for the product?”.

If so, then one could navigate from requirements to models to code to test cases seamlessly and within the same "integrated" environment. We already have rudiments of this; we can go back and forth between UML models and code and between CaliberRM (for requirements) and StarTeam (for configuration management).

Inexpensive PLM

If you have AuotCAD 2008 & SharePoint 2007 installed an deployed, then you have the basic ingredients for a relatively inexpensive PLM solution.

There is a piece of software called CADnection, currently priced at $6,995 for a bundle of 25 seats [plus a yearly maintenance fee of 18 percent of the purchase price to provide ongoing updates] that connects AutoCAD vaults to SharPoint.

Of course, one still needs to develop and deploy the related PLM workflows in SharePoint.

For details see: http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaamak.htm

Numenta

Numenta's approach to AI is based on the concept of hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neo-cortex.

There is an introduction available @ www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf

And a more detailed one @ www.numenta.com/for-developers/education/DileepThesis.pdf

Free Software Tools for RS-232

PortMon from Microsoft available @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896644.aspx

NETCommOCX available @ http://hardandsoftware.com/

WinWedge from TAL Technologies available @ http://www.taltech.com/

The Adventures of IP Man

The Adventures of IP Man is the new comic strip put out by Broadvox, a VoIP company. Designed, of course, to promote the benefits of Voice over Internet Protocol Technology, the strip is cutely drawn, but superficial & unimaginative.

Could "The Adventures of VAR Man" be that far behind?

Rock Star Programming

Valuable insights by Larry O'Brien on using highly skilled programmers to save projects that are in trouble:

"There are rare occasions, however, when it makes sense for a team to put its hopes on the shoulders of a single, skilled developer—an approach I call the "rock star gambit." The three critical components of using a rock star are having a very talented developer, a very short time frame and no domain discovery."

Record & Replay Debugging

TotalView Technologies has created a record and replay product that offers a back-and-forth debugging method. It is called ReplayEngine and you can learn more about it @ http://www.sdtimes.com/SearchResult/32823, There is also a white paper @ http://www.totalviewtech.com/pdf/whitepaper_replayengine.pdf

2 From Altova

Check out these 2 relatively inexpensive but very useful tools from Altova:

MapForce, a visual (and command-line) environment for file conversion. You can map input records (XML, CSV, EDI, OOXML and WSDL definitions, among others) to new layouts and indicate what transformations need to be performed as the fields are resequenced into the new data formats. The visual interface allows you to drag and drop transformations from a bundled library and test the output in a sandbox environment that supports output validation. And to avoid relying on XSLT transformations done quasi-interpretively, MapForce generates code in C++, C# and Java that can use standard libraries such as MSXML or Xerces and integrate with leading IDEs. MapForce starts at $299 and runs to $1,200, depending on the feature set.

UModel which supports all 13 UML 2.1 diagrams plus Business Process Modeling Notation. It enables code generation in Java, C# and Visual Basic, with full support for bidirectional (diagram to code, code to diagram) synchronization. It can export the diagrams in EMF and .png formats, and generate basic documentation using them. Pricing is similar to that for MapForce.

Large Hadron Rap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

iRex

I think it will be a good idea to consider using devices such as iRex 1000 family of digital reader/writer for JAD and requirements gathering activities.

Please see below:

http://www.itechnews.net/2008/09/23/irex-digital-reader-1000-1000s-and-1000sw-e-readers/

Pandora

http://openpandora.org/

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/pandora-the-preorders-are-open-today-160374.html

INCOSE

INCOSE is a good source for systems engineering - as distinct from purely software engineering - information.

They have a tools database team, whose current working reports are generally available to non-members. Requirements management tools, among others, are listed @ http://www.incose.org/ProductsPubs/products/toolsdatabase.aspx

Risks of Out-sourced and Off-shored Projects

There is an ACM paper that discusses these risks @ www.tinyurl.com/5wfzua.

The Top 10 Risks are:

1. Lack of top management commitment
2. Original set of requirements is miscommunicated
3. Language barriers in project communication
4. Inadequate user involvement
5. Lack of offshore project management know-how by client
6. Failure to manage end-user expectations
7. Poor change controls
8. Lack of business known-how by offshore teams
9. Lack of required technical know-how by offshore team
10. Failure to consider all costs

Cosmos

http://www.gocosmos.org/index.en.aspx

Usability Resources

A few useful web resources on usability:

http://www.usabilityfirst.com/

http://www.upassoc.org/

www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/usability_in_the_real_world/index.html

www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/usability_in_the_real_world/roi_of_usability.html

www.disambiguity.com/waterfall-bad-washing-machine-good-ia-summit-07-slides

Net Effect: Crash of Civilizations

From the September/October 2008 issue of the Foreign Policy Magazine:

"Researchers at Verizon spent four years examining 500 cases of corporate data breaches and found that different regions are developing different types of hacking expertise. Attacks traced to Asia, for example, tend to target personal information in common software applications. Eastern Europe, with its entrenched organized crime networks and a technically skilled, yet often underemployed populace, is a hotbed for lucrative identity theft. Middle Easterners often deface Web sites, fighting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict online. To Carnegie Mellon University expert Nick Ianelli, the parallels to the real world are clear. “If you look at the backgrounds of the respective regions,” says Ianelli, “it . . . reflect[s] what is going on in the physical side.” Still, says Bryan Sartin, Verizon’s director of investigative response, understanding these regional patterns hasn’t made solving crimes any easier. For investigators, that’s enough to ruin any meal".

On Data Mining

In the book review of "The Numerati", published on 09/15/2008 in the Wall Street Journal, we read:

"What then of our privacy? What if the NSA, having scrutinized my data trail and determined that I am not a terrorist, sees that I may be cheating on my taxes? Or that I am running for public office while subscribing to a pornography service?"


And in an article titled "Mistaken Identity" published in the Wall Street Journal on 09/20/2008, we read:

"Revenue Science and Acxiom, along with a handful of other companies in the field including Yahoo and Time Warner's AOL, make deals with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Web publishers for permission to collect data about visitors to those sites. When a person lands on one of the sites, the targeting technology places a "cookie," or small string of tracking data, on his or her hard drive. The technology can read the codes embedded in the cookies to see which other sites in the network the person has already visited. Based on that information, it automatically decides which ads to display."

In fact, data mining and the accompanying decision support systems (based on such AI techniques as artificial neural networks, decision trees, etc.) furnish the building blocks for potentially oppressive social organizations.

Such a social organization could be designed around the application of cybernetics (control-feedback theory) to society for maintaining a homeostatic state where Liberty is nowhere to be found. The distributed nature of data collection and cybernetic control will make it impossible to change such a system through the customary practice of a revolution that captures the central organs of the state. In fact, the system can only be changed by smashing it or waiting long enough for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to kick-in; the accumulated entropy causing it to finally fail

Starvation .Net

Check out www.starvation.net. I am impressed by the creative way that the world map in that site conveys grim quantitative information.