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.

Comic Life

This is a software tool for making comics. It is not free but is reasonably priced. Find it @ http://plasq.com/products/

Scenery from Brazil

Scenery from Switzerland

Pun Intended

1. The roundest knight at king Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

3. She was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

6. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

7. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

8. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

9. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

12. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

13. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other, 'You stay here, I'll go on a head.'

14. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

15. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

16. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, 'No change yet.'

17. A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.

18. It's not that the man did not know how to juggle, he just didn't have the balls to do it.

19. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

20. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

21. A backward poet writes inverse.

22. In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.

23. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

24. Don't join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects!

Flash of Genius

The Movie: http://www.flashofgenius.net/

Web Archive

Interesting site with all kind of material: old commercials, old books, etc. http://www.archive.org/index.php

Modelica

Modelica language is an object-oriented language for physics-based modeling — or physical modeling — for virtual prototyping of engineering.

It enables a very easy definition of a system model by graphically describing its topology. An electric circuit looks like an electric circuit on a computer screen: this circuit can then be easily connected to a mechanical system model through motor models, shafts, gears, and so on.

Learn more about it @ modelica.org

The language specifications may be found @ http://www.modelica.org/documents/ModelicaSpec22.pdf