taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Work: I took a look over at Edd Dumbill’s weblog recently, and came across this posting on planning programming projects. He links to another article and mentions:

My recent return to managing a team of people has highlighted for me the difficulties of the arbitrary deadline approach to project management. Unfortunately, it’s also the default management approach applied by a lot of people, because the concept is easy to grasp.

The arbitrary deadline method is troublesome because of the difficulty of estimation. As John’s post elaborates, you can never foresee all of the problems you’ll meet along the way. The distressing inevitability of 90% of the effort being required by 2% of the deliverable is frequently inexplicable to developers themselves. Never mind the managers remote from the development!

I’ve been considering why my experience of working with open source seems generally preferable to commercial work, and this may be one of the key elements. Commercial software development is deadline-driven, whereas most open source development has not been, in my experience; ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’.

Edd suggests that using a trouble-ticket-based system for progress tracking and management is superior. I’m inclined to agree.

Tags: approach, deadline, development, dumbill, edd, experience, look, management, source, weblog, work

Dublin: Lean forwards on this story from today’s Irish Times. Sadly, it’s behind their subscription firewall, so I’ll just snip out a few choice quotes from Philip Shaffry, the current owner:

‘(The Stag’s Head) has been part of my life for three decades and I’ve been running it for 10 years,’ he says. ‘I’ve two small children and I’m living 10 miles out of town, so I’m hoping to find a pub a bit out of the city centre. But of course I’ll miss this place. I have got really attached to the clientele and the crowd that comes in.’

Looking around at the Victorian bar, opulently decorated with mahogany panelling and a red Connemara marble bar counter, Shaffry is confident there will be no changes to the building.

‘They won’t be able to touch it. This is the crème de la crème, the jewel in the crown, of Dublin pubs. It has been here since 1760, although it was completely refurbished in 1895. This is a grade-one listed building.’

But the bad news?

There are no State laws regulating some aspects of the pub, namely his family’s refusal to allow music - live or otherwise - or television in the bar. Any new owner could change this tradition, says Shaffry, which is a source of concern for some regulars. (….)

A spokesman for CBRE Gunne, which will auction the pub this afternoon, says there had been ‘enormous interest’ in the premises from Irish and international buyers.

Eeek! The guide price is 5 million Euros, if you fancy a shot.

Thanks for Philip for his excellent stewardship — here’s hoping any new buyer will keep his approach. That approach made the Stag’s what it is today — the best pub in Dublin. (In my opinion, at least ;)

Tags: approach, bar, building, crme, dublin, irish, owner, pub, stag, story, today

Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:

It uses a fairly rough and ready ‘brute force’ approach. Nonetheless, it can identify significant strings that have been regurgitated from Text A in Text B.

Anyway, he decided just for fun to fire the program at the website’s astrology predictions for the previous 18 months or so. The program churned away, and duly spat out the results. And - well heavens above - hadn’t the astrologer been copying and pasting very large chunks of his own predictions, apparently at random and nothing to do with ‘Uranus being in the ascendent’ or other such drivel that horoscopes concern themselves with.

Tags: approach, entry, force, fun, funny, pal, plagiarism, program, text, today, website

Spam: Craig is publishing SPF records. Worth noting that I’ve been publishing SPF records for jmason.org for a month or two, even though the protocol hasn’t even stabilised yet — working on the ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach ;)

Anubis looks great; I’ve been meaning to hack up something like that. Nifty!

Tags: anubis, approach, jmason, month, org, protocol, something, spam, spf, the, worth

Science: EU broadside at GM firms’ ‘lies’ (Ananova):

‘They tried to lie to people, they tried to force it upon people … it is the wrong approach and we simply have not accepted that and European citizens have not accepted it. You simply cannot force it upon Europe.

‘So I hope they have definitely learned a lesson from it and especially when they now try to argue that this will try to solve the problems of starvation in the world. After all, why didn’t they start with such products, so they could prove to the world that this was exactly what they were interested in doing?

‘It will solve starvation among shareholders, but not the developing world unfortunately.

That’s the EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, launching a broadside against ‘US biotech companies’, accusing them of ‘forcing’ unsuitable GM technology onto Europe.

Ouch.

It’s interesting to note that much of their biotech companies’ tactics seem to work well in the US, but overseas, the tactics play out predominantly as blatant strong-arming, astroturfing support, and being ‘economical with the truth’, as the phrase goes.

Some rethinking of their strategy might be helpful — although really, IMO, some thought as to how to make their products relevant to consumers, instead of money-spinning for their shareholders, might work best of all. Making some moves towards the much-vaunted ’solving starvation in the developing world’ might just be the best way to that.

Tags: ananova, approach, broadside, cannot, commissioner, environment, force, lesson, science, starvation, world

EU broadside at GM firms’ ‘lies’ (Ananova):

‘They tried to lie to people, they tried to force it upon people … it is the wrong approach and we simply have not accepted that and European citizens have not accepted it. You simply cannot force it upon Europe.

‘So I hope they have definitely learned a lesson from it and especially when they now try to argue that this will try to solve the problems of starvation in the world. After all, why didn’t they start with such products, so they could prove to the world that this was exactly what they were interested in doing?

‘It will solve starvation among shareholders, but not the developing world unfortunately.

That’s the EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, launching a broadside against ‘US biotech companies’, accusing them of ‘forcing’ unsuitable GM technology onto Europe.

Ouch.

It’s interesting to note that much of their biotech companies’ tactics seem to work well in the US, but overseas, the tactics play out predominantly as blatant strong-arming, astroturfing support, and being ‘economical with the truth’, as the phrase goes.

Some rethinking of their strategy might be helpful — although really, IMO, some thought as to how to make their products relevant to consumers, instead of money-spinning for their shareholders, might work best of all. Making some moves towards the much-vaunted ’solving starvation in the developing world’ might just be the best way to that.

Tags: ananova, approach, broadside, cannot, commissioner, environment, force, lesson, starvation, world

The RID-Spam Act chugs through Congress. This one’s very much toothless; according to CAUCE, it’s not actually anti-spam really — CAUCE says:

(it is) ‘a gross misnomer to call them ‘anti-spam.’ ‘Anti-consumer,’ sure. ‘Pro-spam,’ even. But not ‘anti-spam.”

Amazingly, DMcC notes that it may even de-fang the stronger state laws if it gets passed. Wow.

And check out this quote from the CNet story:

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., defended the bill’s opt-out approach. Goodlatte said that of the physical junk mail he gets, ‘maybe 10 percent of it is something that I have some interest in. For that reason alone I think an opt-out approach is the best solution here.’

Good for him. The way he’s talking there, he’s looking forward to receiving 700,000 mails per year that ‘he has some interest in’. Earth calling Goodlatte — direct email is not the same as physical junk mail. There’s a fundamental economic difference — with email, the recipient pays. That means you cannot compare the volumes so simplistically. Just say no to One Bite Of The Apple!

US Politics: Rod notes this story: The Guardian coming to the US. Excellent! I think that’s a fantastic idea, and they’ll clean up.

Consider this — the only large-circulation print media that (a) people over here read, and (b) had the nerve to really treat the war in Iraq critically, as far as I know, are those two flaming-red anarchosyndicalist rags, the Economist and the Financial Times. (Not only are they not even written in the US, they’re quite conservative by Euro standards.) The US media needs more liberal voices.

Actually, I’m exagerrating heavily here. As Craig has pointed out before, the Christian Science Monitor is a pretty good paper, with some critical journalism — and one with a great story behind it’s provenance to boot.

But the Guardian has a pretty much wide open field all the same — here’s hoping they can get the distribution side sorted out.

E-Voting: Some good comments on this Slashdot story regarding e-voting systems.

• The Brazilian legislature mandated a retrofit ‘of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the ‘Mercuri Method’).’

• Georgia noted that the e-voting systems ‘were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year’s off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004. No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.’

Tags: act, approach, cauce, email, guardian, interest, junk, mail, rid-spam, story

Robin Cook, who resigned from the UK cabinet last week:

… If you take a response to 9/11 as being a driving force of the American approach to international affairs, I would strongly argue that one of the greatest assets that came out of that was the extraordinarily rich and powerfully diverse coalition against international terrorism.’

That coalition, according to Cook, has now been shattered on the altar of pre-emptive diplomacy. America has long planned to attack Iraq and splits in the UN, Nato and in the European Union were a price worth paying.

‘Now, I’m not an American politician but if I was I would be inveighing against the extent to which the Bush administration had allowed that terrific asset to disintegrate,’ Cook said.

‘Instead the US is left embarking on military action from a position of diplomatic weakness, unable to get any major international organisation to agree with it. We are heading for a very serious risk of a big gulf between the Western and Islamic world. That seems to me to have thrown away a powerful asset for the US which relates to its number one security concern.’

Also, some history (thanks to Dan Brickley for forwarding this): Ireland as the pivot of a league of nations, written by Michael Collins in 1921, shortly after Ireland’s declaration of independence from the UK:

Into such a League might not America be willing to enter? By doing so America would be on the way to secure the world ideal of free, equal, and friendly nations on which her aspirations are so firmly fixed. Ireland’s inclusion as a free member of this League would have a powerful influence in consolidating the whole body, for Ireland is herself a mother country with world-wide influences, and it is scarcely to be doubted that were she a free partner in the League as sketched the Irish in America would surely wish America to be associated in such a combination. In that League the Irish in Ireland would be joined with the Irish in America, and they would both share in a common internationality with the people of America, England, and the other free nations of the League. Through the link of Ireland a co-operation and understanding would arise between England and America, and would render unnecessary those safeguards which England wishes to impose upon Ireland and which by preserving an element of restraint might render less satisfactory the new relations between the two countries.

It’s incredible to consider how much has changed in world politics since those words were written 82 years ago.

And finally, some humour: Power Phillips Home Page:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a courtroom.

Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can’t complete a sentence without the words ‘I object’ or ‘I demand another extension on that filing deadline.’ Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only three of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, and Tamara Vincelette are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.

And it gets worse from there on.

Tags: approach, asset, cabinet, coalition, driving, force, league, response, week, world