Project management, deadlines etc.
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
PVR Build Log
TV: I’ve taken a little time to throw up my PVR build log.
If you’re hacking on one yourself, or curious about what it takes, or just like reading cut-and-pasted UNIX command lines — go take a look!
Annoying anti-arab Republican talking points, pt. xxviii
Politics: This moronic comic from Pat Oliphant came up in my comics page the other day, and, after a few days of hearing this particular talking point through the usual propaganda channels, I just saw it again. It pissed me off enough that I took a look at the stats.
Naturally, it’s bullshit. The top 50 governments pledging tsunami aid, per GDP:
- Qatar (#2)
- UAE (#5)
- Kuwait (#9)
- Bahrain (#10)
- Saudi Arabia (#15)
Given that the USA’s at #29, and the UK at #22, I think the arab states are coming up with a pretty good result there.
I guess it’s hard to look beyond today’s talking points when you’re still drawing cartoons at the age of 70.
Tags: bullshit, comic, day, look, oliphant, page, pat, point, politics, propaganda, talking
RFID Security
Security: It looks like the security people are starting to take a look at RFID, and it’s not pretty.
I link-blogged this the other day — RFDump is a tool to display and modify data in RFID tags — including deployed ones, at least in some cases. (Think rewriting the price tags in a shop, scrambling the tracking numbers on a warehouse full of goods, or corrupting frequent-shopper data on a card.)
It looks like this was also discussed at USENIX Security ‘04 in an RSA presentation (those notes are swarming with typos, but the content’s there ;)
That talk has some interesting stuff — ‘blocker’ tags which spoof readers with gibberish data, or crash the collision-detection network protocol; while that’s being discussed as a security tool here, if the protocol is that hackable, and the hardware is available, I could see that having additional interesting effects in a supermarket. Of course, range is an issue — but that hasn’t stopped Bluetooth hacking, wardriving, etc.
If you ask me, it looks an awful lot like RFID is chock-full of security holes, and the features that make it so attractive (low power use, low cost, tiny size) will be the very features that militate against adding security. We could be in for interesting times here…
Tags: day, look, price, protocol, rfdump, rfid, security, shop, tool, tracking
Email Usability List updated in light of GMail, given new home
Mail: I’ve dusted off my old e-mail usability wishlist, made a couple of changes to reflect the current situation now that GMail has implemented some of them, and Wikified the page.
There’s still a couple that I think would be valuable, so anyone looking at new usability ideas for email is welcome to take a look ;)
Tags: anyone, couple, email, gmail, look, mail, page, situation, usability, wikified, wishlist
The Wright Brothers and Patenting
Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.
The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.
Fantastic article. If you’re curious about the history of patenting, and its many fundamental failures, I can’t recommend it enough.
Weblogs: Guardian’s ‘best of British blogging’: good set of winners this year.
Tags: airplane, angle, case, fortune, good, innovation, litigation, look, patent, prospect, wrights
Warren Ellis on pop
Music: Warren Ellis on pop:
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
Tags: gear, head, hentai, industry, look, music, obsession, paedophilia, pop, schoolgirl
Warren Ellis on pop
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
Tags: gear, head, hentai, industry, look, music, obsession, paedophilia, pop, schoolgirl
the melting-pot that is blogs.linux.ie
Just taking a look around blogs.linux.ie to see who’s set us up the blog recently; here’s the results:
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unfortunately quite a few folks seem to have got bored and left off around mid-April. Ah well.
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Quite a few lively blogs to add to the blogroll.
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There’s also a burgeoning population of teenage Malaysian blogs, bizarrely enough! planet_aiie, whoelse and corexified. Big slipknot fans it seems.
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Malaysia’s not alone in this — here’s a Jamaican guy. Must be the flag on the favourites icon; green and gold on a black background — that’s more linux.jm than linux.ie. ;) Unfortunately for my patois, he stopped updating in April. Sufferation! Oh well, I’ll just have to stick with the Sizzla for my lessons.
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a Phillipino blog, too!
Just figuring this one — it seems linux.ie is free and easy to set up a blog at, doesn’t have ads, and does decent RSS with full <content:encoded> blocks. All in all, that makes it a pretty good blog platform when you think about it. Fair enough!
Tags: aiie, april, blog, blogroll, linux, look, mid, planet, population, whoelse
EMusic.com vs. Apple
a message on Dave Farber’s IP list tipped EMusic.com as a little-known alternative to Apples new music store. So I took a look, and whaddya know, it’s incredible! Here’s the key points:
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A fantastic selection of my favourite genres: roots reggae, dancehall, ambient and drum and bass. This is exactly the stuff you can’t find on P2P nets nowadays, and it’s not on Apple’s store either. EMusic is not so hot for the top-40 stuff, but let’s face it, I will never want to listen to Britney’s latest anyway.
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‘Try before you buy’ 30-second track tasters, so you can listen to
- the tune just enough to see if you like it before committing.
- A flat monthly rate of 10 bucks, for 50 tracks a month.
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Download as plain old un-DRM-encumbered MP3s. So it’ll work fine on my Linux desktop, and pretty much any music-listening device you can possibly imagine for the next few years.
Wow. I’m so signing up for this. I think in 10 minutes I’ve identified my next 6 months’ listening material…
Tags: alternative, apples, com, emusic, list, look, message, music, store, stuff
1.4 gigabits per second
Take a look at the BitTorrent bandwidth graphs if you get a chance. The BitTorrent release of Red Hat 9 resulted in a nice smooth ramp up to 1.4 gigabits per second of download traffic, which has been trailing off slowly over the following 20 hours… wow.
Tags: bandwidth, bittorrent, chance, download, hat, look, ramp, red, release, second
Dmitry Sklyarov gives evidence
If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.
Tags: afoul, blog, copyright, dmca, elcomsoft, entry, look, non, trial, us-resident
