Republic Day

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." ~~ Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

This Sunday evening it'll be Monday morning in India where they will be celebrating Republic Day. Last August I had the opportunity to experience life in India first hand. It is a land of wild extremes -- big business cheek to jowl with abject poverty, fabulous art and architecture surrounded by squalor, and ancient icons of culture and religion upstaged by garish billboards and cell phone transceivers, just to name three. Even though I was warned to expect this, the reality is never quite like you imagine. My biggest surprise, however, was of the pleasant sort -- finding out just how friendly the people are. I guess nobody thought to warn me about that. Other than the street beggars (who I must say were really annoying), I didn’t meet a single unpleasant person during my entire stay in India. Indeed, almost everyone went out of his or her way to help me, to explain things to me, and to otherwise just wish me well.

So, to my friends in Mumbai and Bangalore, may you have an outstanding Republic Day. I hope it finds you healthy and happy.

Inane E-Mail Footers

I don’t know what’s worse, those inane e-mail footers that go "Attention: This message is intended only for the individual to whom it is addressed, blah, blah, blah," or the fact that they come attached to everything from I’m-on-vacation auto responses to chain letter emails that promise years of bad luck if you don’t immediately forward it to 50 strangers. Not only are those footers pointless, they’re often incorrect. (For example, say that you accidentally send an e-mail to the wrong person because your mouse wiggles while you are trying to pick John Doe out of your address book and you get Jack Doe instead. Off it goes, to the "individual to whom it is addressed," but NOT to the person that was intended.)

If adding such verbiage to e-mails was ever effective, that effectiveness has got to be diluted 1,000 fold by now. Remember those 2 questions the airport attendants had to ask us about whether or not we packed our own luggage? After 7 years, the FAA finally quit making them ask us, because there wasn’t a single time when it did any good. I’ve never heard of those e-mail disclaimers doing anyone any good, either. Isn’t about time we stop cluttering up each other’s in-boxes with them?

A Brave New World Wide Web

"We don’t know what the web is for but we’ve adopted it faster than any technology since fire." -- David Weinberger (co-author), The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, 2000

According to Cluetrain, the magic of the Internet is that we are all finding our voices and communicating directly with each other. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 69% of American adults were users of the Internet in 2003 (as opposed to just 9% in 1995). What are these 146 million people talking about? Everything. We’re comparing notes and sharing first-hand knowledge. Cluetrain co-author Christopher Locke calls the Net "a powerful multiplier for intellectual capital." We are talking on many levels in many roles. We are doing it instantaneously and without filters.

One of the ways we are communicating is consumer-to-consumer. I probably don’t need to tell you the worth of reviews posted to www.amazon.com and www.epinions.com. You may have even found one valuable enough that you wanted to "pay it forward" by posting a review of your own, right? Us consumers collectively know more about any given product than the manufacturer does. After all, we have the company’s employees drastically outnumbered. Now that we are talking directly to each other, we are rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with. Companies that decide to listen and join in on the conversation with an open and honest attitude will keep our business. Companies that don’t won’t.

One of the first causalities of this Brave New World Wide Web are monolithic computer software companies that don’t know how to give their customer’s what they really want. Enter open source software. Check out the first four winners of the newly announced Open Source Awards. Whether or not you find those projects to be useful, personally, you will certainly find it interesting to see the motivation behind their existence. What do they portend? Will all software go open source? Hardly. But the ones that remain commercial will have to be just as adaptable in their own way.

TextPad (shareware) Keeps Getting Better and Better

There is a fabulous shareware text editor called TextPad. We have a site license for it at work and everyone uses it all of the time. Some of the more interesting features recently added (in 4.6 and 4.7) are:

• New features for cutting and pasting as HTML.
• Sped up many functions, especially when dealing with huge files.
• The Clip Library now includes a Clipboard History.
• A new command that duplicates the active line (or paragraph).
• Now takes advantage of the extra keys found on an Internet/Multi Media keyboard.

"Tae-Bo Flex" DVD is Inflexible

The Tae-Bo concept is wonderful, but Billy Blanks' Tae-Bo Flex is the worst sequel to come along since The Scorpion King. It's a major step down from the classic Tae-Bo VHS tapes I bought 4 years ago. First of all, I have to question if the "flex" aspect of the workout really does any good. I'm no expert, but just standing on one foot and holding a pose doesn't seem to be useful either from an aerobic or anaerobic perspective. But, whether or not the content is worthy, the presentation of it certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Billy Blanks' performance was pathetic. He kept screwing up his lines and had to be corrected by his assistant. This is clearly something that they whipped out in one take with few rehearsals, if any.

And then there's the brain-dead formatting. This production of Goodtimes Entertainment doesn't even take advantage of the fundamental features of a DVD! There is only one item on the menu: "Play." What's the point of that? It may as well just start playing. Better yet, how about a few more menu choices, like scene selection. Hello?! The 45 minute program isn't broken down into chapters at all, so the Skip Ahead button doesn't work. (You can't even use the Skip Back button to restart at the beginning.) This is supposed to be a DVD that we'll wear out watching over and over, yet they expect us to sit through the introduction every time. If it were up to me, I would have put in at least 4 chapter breaks: intro, warm-up, workout, cool-down, and credits. ( I don't need to be reminded how to warm up, and would rather do that while watching CNN, then skip straight to the workout.)

I bought Flex in a 3-pack with Flex Express and Cardio. Cardio isn't as bad content-wise, but it's not compelling either, and it still suffers the same poor production quality.

Unfinished Projects = Costly Excess Inventory

Speaking of Mary Poppendieck (see below), the Feb '04 issue of Software Development magazine carries a great article about measuring the maturity of a software development organization -- specifically why assessments are better than certification. In it, Poppendieck mentions another of the 7 wastes of manufacturing, excess inventory, and how it maps to software development. "The level of inventory in your system is the amount of stuff you have under development. The more inventory of unfinished development work you have sitting around, the greater you're at risk of it becoming obsolete, getting lost and hiding defects. If you capitalized it, you also bear the risk of having to write it off if it doesn't work." This is the focal point of her analysis of why Dell succeeded in putting Zeos out of business. Zeos was named as a finalist for the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (which would be the equivalent of a CMM Level 5 certification for us software developers). Yet, all of the so called quality-producing “capability” enshrined in the Zeos procedure manuals couldn't hold a candle to Dell's simple 2-pronged vision of keeping inventory to a minimum and delivering product to the customers as quickly as possible.

Mary Poppendieck on "Lean Software Development"

During my discussion with Gloria Mark last Thursday about multitasking work habits (see below), I mentioned a concept I learned from one of Mary Poppendieck's lectures at the Software Development West 2003 conference. The lecture was from her new book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In a nutshell, the book takes a whole slew of best practices that have been used in manufacturing for decades (collectively known as "lean manufacuring"), and applies them to software development. In chapter 1, Poppendieck introduces us to the "7 wastes of manufacturing" and proposes a way to map each of them to software development. One of these wastes is extraneous movement (e.g. when a tool crib is too far away from the position on the assembly line where the tools are often used), and Poppendieck likens it to extraneous task-switching on the part of a software developer. Every time a developer has to "ramp up" and "ramp down," she says, it's a sunk cost. I think it's quite interesting, therefore, that Professor Mark's research shows that Poppendieck is fighting an uphill battle on this front, since everyone's natural tendency is to switch tasks often.

Multitasking Madness

I was at a reception last night for the UC Irvine School of Information and Computer Sciences (www.ics.uci.edu) and had the opportunity to chat with many of the professors there who are doing fascinating research. Gloria Mark told me about some work her student, Victor M. González, is doing to study the work habits of software developers, software architects, and software managers. He's found that the average person naturally juggles 11 different tasks at one time and switches between them every 4-1/2 minutes (not counting time in meetings). It's too early for any conclusions, but I'll be interested to see what recomendations they make in the way of new tools and such that bow to the inevitible and support this behavior, perhaps even allowing us to juggle more.