Head On

Mathias just sent this video of Boston Dynamics Big Dog. If this is the next level of mechanized warfare, the future will most certainly be scary.

The Ahnve family spent the afternoon at the Stockholm Technical Museum. It was the last day of the Vintage Gaming exhibition, and man, did they have hardware to reminisce about.

I first stopped by an old Commodore Vic-20, my first computer which my dad bought me in 1983. It was running a Tetris clone, programmed by the computers owner two years ago. He also showed me the flash card add-on card I suppose he soldered himself which replaced the tapedrive. Awesome.

I then met Niklas whom I worked with at TeliaSonera a few years ago. He showed me an Atari 800 and some Nintendo 3D thingy. They even had an original Atari game console from 1976. Wow.

I found a Donkey Kong Game and Watch on sale for SEK 800. So cool.

All this time my wife stood confounded and suggested that they should have a designated place for bored spouses.

I cannot help myself from making a small comment on Rick Hightowers post on Groovy vs JRuby. In short he thinks Sun should support Groovy instead og JRuby, because the syntax is familiar to Java programmers.

To support his case he presents a chart showing language popularity according to job postings. And since Ruby is at the bottom and Java is on the top, Sun should support Groovy. Which by the way is not even on the chart.

One thing I did recognize was this:

Notice that between Java and Ruby/Python there is a wasteland of languages that you will not see running on the JVM in any near future. So if Sun wants to expand the developer base for the JVM (not Java the language), I believe they are making a very wise decision to support the largest languages available to them outside of Java.

Supporting Groovy would probably be popular among the already converted, but Sun has to appeal to new markets to expand the JVM usage. I believe that is what they are doing.

There is one thing that strikes me in the Sun MySQL thingy - what about Sun’s previous commitment to PostgreSQL, where they say stuff like: “PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 is the open source enterprise database platform of choice”?

Tim Bray comments on the deal and totally dismisses any alternatives:

MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For databases, nothing that matters.

I strongly prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL, and I have previously used Sun as a reference for it. Perhaps no more.

They actually do say that, here in Sweden. In a brochure handed out at SIME07, Google provides a little glossary for the technically challenged, and to my amusement JavaScript is described as follows:

JavaScript - scripting language for those who are not programmers, in first hand intended for creating web pages.

The translation is mine. The original text in Swedish: “JavaScript - skriptspråk för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett för att skapa webbsidor”

This is of course a mistake, and my guess is that mistakes like these are inevitable if you have local offices like the one is Stockholm without technical knowledge. I find it funny, but I wonder if Sergey and Larry would laugh if they were to find out?

I just talked to Sid Pinney and Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks, and it seems that ThoughtWorks might open an office in Sweden. That would be a welcome injection to the swedish consulting market where too many players favor quantity over quality.

I have absolutely no clue as to why David Heinemeier Hanson would hold any suspicious thoughts toward Sun. To me, given the big boys in the playground, they are the good guys. But reading it made me realize that I have not heard of IBM in a very, very long time.

Big Blue was quite quick to join the Java bandwagon, remember VisualAge for Java? But in the new world of dynamic languages IBM, apart from a few developerWorks articles, is not to be heard from.

And this from a company who once was a strong proponent of Smalltalk? In my mind, if there is a mystery man, he and his cat is sitting in an IBM campus somewhere.

I am currently on my way home from northern Dalecarlia, and I am making full use of the 3G card. I had received a couple of update mails from our central Mercurial repo, so I tried to do an ‘hg pull’, and expected it to take a while. Lo and behold, I got all changesets within 15 seconds! This says a lot about Mercurials protocol, as the reception was so-so; no surprise as we are driving here:

I was listening to the podcast of the interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and this one thing struck me. When asked to predict the future, Bill Gates provided some insightful guesses, while Steve Jobs simply answered “I don’t know”. Twice. Steve’s explanation was that five years ago he would not have predicted what we have today, so therefore he does not trust himself to say what the next five years will look like.

I have previously spotted Apple to be early agilists, and Steve’s position here enforces my claim.

One important aspect of grasping agile in my mind is to accept the fact that you cannot predict the unpredictable. Instead of making detailed plans to support the illusion that you know what is going to happen, you say “I don’t know”, but then let that knowledge, that you actually do not know be the base for how you approach your work.

I have many times been faced with the quest of predicting the future, “how long will it take?”. As I have become more experienced I have learned to say “I don’t know”, of course at the same time offering an alternative iterative approach that will eventually provide knowledge for better estimation. Sometimes that is not a popular answer, and the question is forwarded to someone who will answer it. Of course, they do not know, but the illusion of control is very powerful, so their answer is better received.

I guess that many CEO are pressed to predict the future, by employees, share holders etc. And many times they probably provide an answer that they themselves do not believe in. It appears to me that Steve Jobs does not fall into that category.

We’re using Google Apps at Re:mind which is really, really great. So great in fact that I wanted to move my private mail there as well. So after setting the domain up, I created the webpage that was needed for domain activation, put it on my server, clicked the “verify my domain”, and got the usual “this may take 48 hours to complete”

It has now been almost two weeks or something like 300 hours, slightly more than 48. I have sent Google a support email asking what is happening, but I have yet not received an answer. To that mail that is

You see, today I got this mail:

Hello Marcus, You’ve been invited to use Google Apps for ahnve.com, but we noticed that you haven’t started using any services yet. To activate Gmail, Google Calendar, Page Creator or the new start page, log in to the control panel with your administrative account. At any time, if you get stuck or if you want to tell us about your experience with this service, you can find more information and get in touch through our help center (https://www.google.com/support/a). To make room for other domains, we will remove ahnve.com from our system if you don’t activate any of these services in the next two weeks. If you need more time, just click this link: [link] and we’ll extend the deadline to 30 days from now. Alternatively, you can sign up again at a later date when you’re ready to use the service. Sincerely The Google Team

Now, isn’t that ironic?

I am trawling for a hosting company and came across this gem of a web page:

The page won’t load at all if Javascript is disabled, has no doctype, won’t render umlauts in Firefox on Mac (and this is Sweden, we actually use them.)

The final nail in the coffin is that it states “Web hosting for gourmets”.

Given what I have previously written about SOA, I really like these facts.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to make the switch and start using online apps, but there has always been reasons that have kept me back. It seems that Dion and I share the same opinion on this one, and he sums up the problem very well.

Almost all large companies I have come across have some standards regarding the technology stack that they are using.

The main reason behind this is economy, that developers should be able to rotate between projects and that operations should only have to worry about a limited number of software products. Something like that anyway

However nice this seems, it never delivers on its promise. It is much like the Gantt charts - looks nice, promises a lot, delivers zilch. Not counting the enormous upgrade cost when the whole stack is upgraded after 20 years - COBOL anyone?

It is like a bakery standardizing on a given type of flour, salt and sugar and keeping all ovens at the same temperature, so that the bakers are familiar with the environment should they start working in another part of the bakery.

So you have your chocolate cakes baked using the same ingredients as your sour dough bread, and of course the whole thing is a mess. After a while the bakers start changing oven temperatures without telling anyone - not out of rebellion but because they have to. Different cakes are baked in different ways, and software is just the same.

There is hope though; I was delighted to read this interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon:

Developers of our services can use any tools they see fit to build their services. Developers themselves know best which tools make them most productive and which tools are right for the job. If that means using C++, then so be it. Whatever tools are necessary, we provide them, and then get the hell out of the way of the developers so that they can do their jobs.

That is one man that understands development.

While writing this, Matt wonders how to get stuff past the acceptance red tape. I have no good answer. Guerilla coding is the insubordinate way. Nagging for a very long time has worked a few times. But I probably lean towards Alistair Cockburns analogy with the old joke:

Paddy stopped cutting the hedge as the big car drew up beside him and an English visitor enquired, “Could you tell me the way to Balbriggan, Please?” Paddy wiped his brow. “Certainly, sor. If you take the first road to the left… no still that wouldn’t do… drive on for about four miles then turn left at the crossroads… no that wouldn’t do either.” Paddy scratched his head thoughtfully. “You know, sor, if I was going to Balbriggan I wouldn’t start from here at all.”

Meaning, Matt might be in the wrong place to do what he wants to do.

Finally - if an organization should standardize on something it should be protocols. HTTP for example. Build it, make it accessible with external API’s, and implement it the way you see fit. Just like Amazon does it. Loosely coupled large grained components the way EJB’s never were.

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Here in Sweden, Microsoft has an inexplicable stronghold, even in the server room. The last time Craig Larman, Valtechs Chief Scientist, was here he noted that nowhere did he see as large proportion of server side windows as in Sweden - and Denmark.

I don’t know what makes swedes pay for stuff others get for free. Perhaps the high taxes have made us used to money disappearing?

For the love of software development - what the hell is this about? IBM, anyone?

IBM vs. Amazon: “

The Internet has been amazingly quiet about IBM’s litigation against Amazon. It feels to me like maybe the biggest Internet story of, well, maybe, ever. I haven’t gone and read the IBM patents yet, because reading patents always depresses me. If the titles mean anything (not always a sure bet), this might mean that IBM has finally managed to figure out how to set up that Internet Tollbooth that we’ve always been afraid of. If you’re interested in ‘Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service’, ‘Storing Data in an Interactive Network’, ‘Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service’, ‘Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities’, or ‘Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue’, apparently IBM thinks you need to pay them for the right to do any of those things. If the courts agree with them, it’s time for me to find a new line of work.

“

(Via ongoing.)

I'm moving out of here, and into my own home. Thanks a lot freeroller.

Joe is asking for ideas regarding time estimates.

First of all, read Planning Extreme Programming by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck. Even if you don't want to do XP it provides excellent ideas for planning.

The book promotes “the gummi bears principle” meaning that estimates should not translate to calendar time. Instead stories should be measured relatively to each other. So if story A is a 2 and story B is slightly harder, then it is a 3. This requires an upstart period where you “calibrate” your measures. But after a while you get quite good at it.

To really get away from calendar time thinking, we give stories “time points” which can be from 1 to 5. This helps developers to not think in terms if time, but instead sort of grading the stories.

At the end of each iteration, we sum up how many time points we did. This is our velocity and stories for the same amount of time points are planned for the next week.

It is by no means perfect, but better than any other technique I've tried.

I realized that after defending PP vigourously, it would be a good idea to second what Jon wrote about XP and the synergies of the practices. Which of course, Kent Beck stated already in the white book. (The XP'ers know what I'm talking about. To the rest, it's the first of the commie XP books.). PP is a part of a bigger, grander scheme, and seeing is believing. (Now, this might be mistaken for some Scientology offspring. One of the main differences is that you are allowed to read the books.

The pair programming thing turned up on TSS and ended up with the usual “You suck” enlighments with the occasional, surprisingly non-embarassed, opinions on whether or not the Struts API is easy to understand (sic).

Whatever.

If you don't like to pair program don't do it. I am not going to tell people what to do.

Unless of course you work where I work. In that case, share the (wireless) keyboard. The reason being code quality, and development speed.

We used to have a problem with code quality. Not code resulting in bugs necessarily, but code that was not 100% in terms of maintainability etc. We did of course have code reviews but it seemed that we could not get enough of them. Enter PP, with continuous code reviews. Code quality has never been better. Of course, all of you people out there who don't like PP are probably very, very good programmers who don't never had this kind of problem, right?

PP answers our need for speed. No, I have no benchmarks, but take my word for it. At our place development is faster since we switched to PP. Cedric, normally somebody whose opinion I highly respect, has started sharing the managerial opinion of two people at keyboard equals half the productivity:

[…] the combination of developers + QA engineers can work wonder, and you will get twice as much done than XP will ever allow.

Please! I don't know who said it first, but the speed of development hardly depend on how fast you can type, whatever the superpowers of your QA department. I can accept a lot of reasons against PP, but that one is, in my very humble opinion, plain rubbish. Sorry.

Rickard is from what I understand an ultra talented programmer.

The point of pair programming, as I've understood it, is not actually the programming itself, but the exchange of ideas.

However, he's missed the full point of PP. Exchange of ideas is good, of course, but in my opinion it's the notion of continuous code reviews, which incorporates a lot more, that does it.

This almost turned into one of those TSS rants. Ouch.