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

Hardware: Slashdot: Nokia’s Linux Handheld. It’s to be called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and runs on an open source development platform called Maemo.

This looks really nifty. ARM processor, 800×480 pixel resolution, GTK+, 2.6 kernel, wifi, 3 hours of active battery life, and a clever panning system to get around the clunkiness of scrollbars on a touchscreen.

I note particularly that they seem to have planned to include an RSS reader based on Liferea.

The Maemo site looks interesting, in that it’s clearly a bunch of switched-on, open-source-comprehending developers who set it up; it’s built using Apache Forrest, they use Bugzilla for issue tracking, Mailman for lists, the terms of use for user contributions explicitly call out OSI-approved licenses as a requirement, there’s plentiful references to Debian’s apt as the preferred means of installing developer platform software, and Maemo apps are distributed as Debian packages.

There’s clearly been quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes. There’s already some third-party apps out there, such as those on INdT’s Maemo apps page, and the the SDK tutorial contains copious detail, suggesting it’s been seeing some use.

That SDK tutorial is full of tantalizing glimpses into Maemo’s operation.

It all looks very promising, and nicely hackable! I’m looking forward to a closer look at one of these. It’s especially good to see such a solid comprehension of the open source model by such a major company. (If only they could have a word with their patents department ;)

Update: They’ve ported WebCore to GTK+. Mobile Gazette has more info, too, including this worrying line:

And although Nokia hold several patents for (the Maemo development platform), they intent to open up access to their intellectual property to aid development.

(My emphasis.) That line is not encouraging, seeing as it seems to be a pretty typical cross-compilation platform as seen in embedded systems development. But hey, let’s see the patents first.

Tags: debian, development, gtk, hardware, maemo, nokia, platform, sdk, source, tutorial, use

Patents: Oh, come on. USPTO: task list window for use in an integrated development environment. Here’s claim 1:

1. A computer-implemented method for managing development-related tasks, the method comprising:

   during an interactive code development session, evaluating source code to determine whether a comment token is present;

   in response to determining that the source code contains a comment token, inserting a task into a task list; and

   in response to completion of a task, modifying the task list during the interactive code development session to indicate that the task has been completed.

There’s 74 more claims that are about up to that standard, including the usual ‘an input module connected to the knee-bone’ mumbo-jumbo that means it ‘isn’t a software patent’.

This is just quite simply absurd. Are we really supposed to believe that nobody had thought of what is essentially a list of tickboxes, displaying the output of ‘grep TODO *.c’, before March 6, 2000? You have got to be kidding. This /. comment suggests that Delphi 5 (released 1999) did it.

(update: looks like there was a provisional patent application, so that may have to be Mar 5 1999.)

William Chiles, Anders Hejlsberg, Randy Kimmerly and Peter Loforte should be ashamed of themselves for filing this joke. And the USPTO examiner who granted it should be fired.

(PS: a factoid from the slashdot comments: IBM receives (note: not even ‘files for’) nearly 10 patents every day.)

Tags: code, comment, development, list, method, patents, response, session, source, task, uspto

Perl: I’ve been writing a few convenience web-scrapers recently using WWW::Mechanize, with great success.

So the latest development, HTTP::Recorder, looks very nifty too:

HTTP::Recorder is a browser-independent recorder that records interactions with web sites and produces scripts for automated playback. Recorder produces WWW::Mechanize scripts by default (see WWW::Mechanize by Andy Lester), but provides functionality to use your own custom logger.

… Simply speaking, HTTP::Recorder removes a great deal of the tedium from writing scripts for web automation. If you’re like me, you’d rather spend your time writing code that’s interesting and challenging, rather than digging through HTML files, looking for the names of forms an fields, so that you can write your automation scripts. HTTP::Recorder records what you do as you do it, so that you can focus on the things you care about.

No SSL support yet, though, as far as I can see, but for simple scraping – or as a good starting point for a more complex Mechanize script — it looks like it’ll work great.

Tags: automation, convenience, development, http, mechanize, perl, playback, recorder, success, web, www

Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he’ll be discussing DIY-IT — the ‘real’ Linux story (’how the demand side supplies itself’). That presentation is great — strongly recommended.

(If you’re in a hurry, just skip to the funny part.)

Patents: op-ed article in the Sydney Morning Herald about patents and US-Australia ‘free trade’ talks.

… The cost of fighting a patent litigation battle in the US has dropped considerably. “Claims are now actually decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial,” he says. “Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, costs are less than $US2 million.” (jm: my emphasis)

The question remains as to how many small Australian technology companies can afford to put up that sort of money if they believe their patent has been infringed or, worse still, if they have been accused of infringing a patent. (jm: exactly! the playing field is tilted dramatically.)

…

Local software developer Jeremy Howard believes that the US-Australia free trade agreement legislation has the potential to stifle local development. Howard has created two software systems with global potential, a portable email product called Fastmail (jm: hooray Fastmail!) and an insurance-industry package called Profit Optimising System. He believes two particular provisions of the FTA could be devastating to local software development. One is the requirement for Australia to have legislation similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the other is the stringent enforcement of software patents.

“The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering to make products compatible with existing products,” Howard says. “There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing proprietary software. It’s also bad for security and privacy: people won’t be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they’re secure because that’s considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as competition.”

Howard considers DMCA as a serious threat to the local software industry, but he believes a potentially even greater threat from the FTA will be a requirement for Australia to stringently enforce software patents.

“Many US software companies have huge portfolios of patents,” he says. “It costs millions to fight a (disputed) patent suit, so small companies will be forced to pay licence fees to patent holders or be shut down. This means that it will clearly not be practical for small software businesses to try to become established on the world stage. We’ll be spending more time worrying about patents instead of innovating.”

A very, very clueful article. Here’s hoping EU-based journalists are taking notes! The data about software patents being of much greater benefit to US companies than local exporters is a big deal, so I’ll write about that in the next posting.

Tags: development, dmca, doc, fastmail, legislation, linux, patent, potential, software, trade, us-australia

Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’

Sure enough, it’s true. But that’s not all he did — he was also involved with the Windows 2000 Customer Love Team. No smutty jokes please, I’m being perfectly serious here…

Tags: customer, development, love, manager, microsoft, names, popbitch, project, server, sez, windows

Insults: Tom takes issue with my assumption that ‘anyone not living in a hole would know that SpamAssassin includes a probabilistic classifier’. Hmm. OK, I should have made it clear I meant anyone following anti-spam filter development. Henceforth I’ll over-qualify every statement on this weblog accordingly.

But at least I know that badgers are CLEARLY down, since they do live in a hole. DO YOUR RESEARCH, FARRELL.

Tags: anyone, assumption, classifier, development, filter, henceforth, hmm, hole, insults, issue, spamassassin

Open Source: Edd Dumbill on the Planets. It seems the latest thing for open source development communities is to syndicate their weblogs together on one site, viz. PlanetGnome, Planet Debian, Monologue, and PlanetApache.

Interesting results — I quite like it. It’s very Advogato Recent Log-ish!

Tags: development, dumbill, edd, open, planet, planetgnome, planets, site, source, thing, viz

Software: How Funcom Squashed Bugs With Bugzilla (GamaSutra, free reg required).

There’s some differences between the commercial and free-software development styles; writing games is probably one of the most extreme of the commercial development environments, with extremely aggressive schedules and a single, long-term product development arc building up to one really big release.

A really good way to use bugzilla is to track development — essentially, using it to track work instead of bugs. In other words, when work is planned, a bug is created to track that work’s progress and provide a forum for discussion of the work’s design, implementation details, etc.

This article gives a great overview of the additions Funcom have made to Bugzilla to do this, including time estimates, MS Project integration.

Tags: arc, bugs, bugzilla, development, extreme, funcom, gamasutra, product, software, squashed, work

E-Voting: Do not miss this fantastic round-up on the e-voting situation in the US. It contains these amazing quotes from the leaked Diebold memos:

”Over (the past three years) I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.’ (Source: ‘Resignation’, announce.w3archive/200110/msg00001.html, dated 5 October 2001)

‘It does not matter whether we get anything certified or not, if we can’t even get the foundation of Global stable. This company is a mess! We should stop development on all new, and old products and concentrate on making them stable instead of showing vaporware. Selling a new account will only load more crap on an already over burdened entity. … You are taxing the development team beyond what they can handle. … Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss managed (sic).’ (Source: ‘Fw: Battery Status & Charging—and too much bull!!’, announce.w3archive/200110/msg00002.html, dated 20 October 2001)’

I’m speechless. At least the NEDAP system planned for Ireland isn’t this bad — or is it? We can’t tell.

Support the calls for a Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail. There’s no other way to continue to have a trustworthy democratic system with widespread use of e-voting in place.

Tags: archive, company, development, e-voting, html, msg, october, practice, source, system, time

my ex-employers, IONA Technologies Announces Chris Horn as CEO — again:

In a series of further moves, Mr. Barry Morris, CEO since May 2000, Mr. Steven Fisch, COO, who joined the company in August 2002, and Mr. David James, Executive Vice President Corporate Development, who joined in 1997, have resigned.

‘The Board of IONA Technologies is responding firmly to the challenges and opportunities of the changed marketplace, to position the company for profitable growth and to take advantage of market opportunities through business and new product development. I want to thank Barry, Steven and David for their enormous contributions to IONA and I wish them well in their next challenges,’ said Dr. Chris Horn.

Good to hear it!

Tags: announces, august, ceo, company, coo, development, executive, may, series, vice

let’s ask Googlism some hard questions.

Googlism, what is the web?

• the web is like canada

• the web is dedicated to breathing life into women’s

• the web is crippling

• the web is ruined and i ruined it self

OK, what about the internet?

• the internet is falling

• the internet is not printed on paper

• the internet is like is like a penis

• the internet is no substitute

And Ireland?

• ireland is dedicated entirely to development aid

• ireland is at an end

• ireland is again the “dirty man” of europe when it comes to

• ireland is not disneyland

• ireland is british (what?!)

• ireland is looking for a german inhouse translator

Right. That’s quite enough I think…

Tags: canada, development, googlism, internet, ireland, life, paper, self, substitute, web

I’ve added a few more folks to the blogroll — Jeremy Zawodny (who now hosts one of the SpamAssassin primary sites), Rod, who contributes regularly to SpamAssassin, and Joel, who just writes cool articles about software development. ;) Where? yonder over rightwards…

Tags: blogroll, development, software, spamassassin, yonder

A message from David Prior quotes the FCC’s Michael Powell, stating that “the amount of money BT spent on a 3G licence, plus that which will be spent on development and roll-out, could have funded (fibre-to-the-home) deployment to 95%+ of households in the UK.” Sickening.

Tags: amount, deployment, development, fcc, licence, message, money, roll-out, sickening