(A rant) Is it just me, or...

...is anyone else already throw-up-sick of "OMG, the iPad doesn't support Flash!!!" like, four full days after the release?

Drop-dead-seriously, I hate-Hate-HATE being sucked into what passes for "discussion" in a world of fanboys/fangirls and haters--not to mention the people who don't care either way, but can't stand to be outside the [cough] "conversation" [cough]. In true-green-and-gold-Wisconsinite terms, it's as pointless as listening to the post-game analysis of the Bears-Cowboys game--and a blow-out at that.

Get it through your heads, haters and fans: Apple is the rock star of rock stars (link NSFW) in the personal electronics market. Which basically means that it's making obscene amounts of bling and marrying Hollywood blondes for doing whatever the heck it feels is "the right thing" for its career. Up to and including hiring/firing its managers/roadies/backups based on their Celtic Zodiac signs. (Adobe, in keeping with the rock star metaphor, played/sang backup before the sellout became too obvious, and wants to know why it has to have a lawyer on speed-dial to see its royalty checks these days.)

That's the bad news. The good news is that the odds are inexorably against any AAA-list rock star. Sooner or later, the groupies and coke and trashed hotel rooms and awards show meltdowns will catch up. Personally, I don't have a horse in this race: I despise Adobe and Apple equally for their kindred attitude problems. So the day when both are in their Spinal Tap phase can't come soon enough for me. And if the iPad is Apple's "Stonehenge" (or even "Hello, Cleveland!" moment), so much the schadenfreudier.

In the meantime--and I'm fully aware that I'm tilting at windmills here--would the web's taste-makers please shut (the heck) up about it already?! Ultimately, it's the democracy of the user that decides these things, not the aristocracy of the punditry.

A down-to-earth use for cloud storage

I've been sceptical of cloud computing, and to an extent even cloud storage, simply because of the well-publicized outages experienced by the 8,000 lb. gorillas in that spaced (Google, Amazon). If I had to be responsible (horrors!) for any start-uppity programmers other than myself, it would still be worth the bling and nuisance of hosting my own data/applications.

But, between them, my husband and @CyberCowboy demonstrated the usefulness of a "freemium" service called Dropbox. While I carry the critical (albeit periodical) backups on a couple USB drives, files that need to be backed up daily--meaning every day that I change them) are finding their way into the Dropbox folder.

But in the last couple of days, that's taken on a slightly different twist. I have any number of slips of paper or printed copies of snippets of code that I've found useful once in awhile. Not often enough, mind you, for them to be hard-wired into my brain. That's where DropBox comes in. Code snippets that would normally be slipped inside textbooks are being typed into descriptively named text files and synched up into the cloud.

Maybe someday I'll get fancy enough to write an upload application that supports all sort of tagging and search algorithms, but for the time being, this has the potential to be a huge time-saver. Someday maybe network latencies and uptime histories will hit a threshold where allocating hard drive space to workaday applications like word-processors, spreadsheets, photo editors, code development environments, etc. will become something that hobbiests and tinkerers do. Me, I can't hold my breath for that long.

But in the meantime, I'm rather pleased with the more modest use I've found for a convenient (and, at my level, free) cloud application. If the service crashes, there's still the flash drive--and, of course the omniscience of Google.

Frivolous Friday, 01.29.2010: A poem for The Scope Creep*

In this world dwell many creeps
And I've likely met my share.
Some have merely freaked me out,
Others, though, have greyed my hair.

I've been fortunate enough
To have worked with but a few--
Even those were far between
In an excellent work crew.

Since I started programming
For my trade (and daily keep),
Jobs and bosses may have changed,
Yet I still work with a creep.

This creep is neither guy nor gal
Nor a title does it hold.
From its name you might infer
That its methods are not bold.

For all that, it's deadlines' bane;
On morale it havoc wreaks,
Turns release into death-march,
To cram months' work into weeks.

It begins with some small tweaks
(Trivial at the time, it seemed)
Multiplying costs as these
Changes make their way upstream.

But by then the word's gone 'round:
"The design phase isn't done!
Coders are like Santa Claus
Granting wishes by the ton!"

Thus the team with much alarm
Sees the feature-list accrue:
Needs (and wants) so often change
While the deadlines seldom do.

When the tab is tallied for
Bells and whistles duct-taped on,
Bloat and bugs are rife in code
That before could do no wrong.

Some creeps might convince themselves
That their world (or job) will cease
Should their darling feature not
Be a part of this release.

For all I know, creeps believe
That they do no harm or wrong
Choosing to believe instead
That "It shouldn't take that long."

Creeps must come from somewhere else--
So most everyone believes--
Spawning features faster than
Even rabbits can conceive.

But I've yet to meet one who
Was deliberately hired.
Thus the flip-side, sadly, is
That the Scope Creep can't be fired.

There's a bit in managers
In their vision confident.
QA and Tech Support both
Lend a user-centric bent.

To be fair, from time to time,
I confess the creep I see,
Guilty of the self-same crimes,
From the mirror peer at me.

- - - - -

* For those who both work and play outside the software industry, the term "scope creep" refers to features (and sometimes even design and/or infrastructure changes) added to a software release (i.e. a version) after the deadline has already been set. To add injury to insult, Management has been known to compensate by assigning more people to the project at crunch-time...with predictably disruptive results. See Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month for the definitive smack-down of such "wisdom"--along with other sound insights that have been blithely ignored by B-School grads for well over two decades.

The "itchy spot" theory of open source software

First and most importantly, big, Big, BIG props to @couleeregion for her Drupal presentation for the La Crosse Programming Users Group. Clearly, a great deal of work (not to mention soul-searching) went into narrowing so many possibilities down to one concrete example.

For context, Drupal is a highly configurable content management system. It's open source, and @couleeregion uses it not only to power her own website (www.couleeregiononline.com), but has also given back to the Drupal community by contributing her customizations to the code-base. Those donated "modules," as they're known, have thousands of users. From where I sit, that's pretty darned amazing. It's even more amazing in historical context. She mentioned that when she started with Drupal five years ago, it had around a hundred modules. Today, they number over five thousand.

Stupid analogy time: My husband has dry skin, and typically nowhere drier than a patch on his back in the vicinity of the right shoulder blade. So when he asks, "Would you mind hitting the Traditional Itchy Spot?" my fingernails know the terrain well. My Traditional Itchy spot, in contrast, is a band across the middle of my back. (That being said, neither of us would be so silly as to turn down a full back scratch from the other. That's just crazy-talk.)

Understand that when a programmer sits down to write software for which s/he has no expectation of ever being paid, it is overwhelmingly likely an exercise in auto-scratching an itchy spot--with first priority given to the Motherland of all itchy spots. Thus, s/he invents the software equivalent of a back-scratcher to highly customized specifications. Then s/he might show it off to other programmers, and they just might envy it enough to want one of their own. But...inventing your very own back-scratcher (from scratch--no pun intended) can entail a lot of work. And if your itch is both immediate and acute, it's merely logical to customize extant work. Or, in a fit of forward-thinking, adapt it to accommodate multiple Traditional Itchy Spots.

And thus open source software proliferates. Because for those who can auto-scratch, its just takes too darned long to wait for the Microsofts and Apples and Googles and Dells of this world to finish squabbling over:

• Whether the standard itch threshold should be measured in metric or Imperial units
• Whether to use zero or one as the starting-point on the itch scale
• Whether the contact surface of the back scratcher should have barely-rounded or fully-rounded edges
• Whether to thumb their collective nose at existing industry standards or full-out moon them
• Etc...

In the meantime, awesome folks like @couleeregion have already scratched and returned their fingers to the keyboard...where they can better scratch the itches of thousands, if not millions of websites and their users every day.

Thanks again, Ma'am! I hope to be more like you when I grow up.

Cynical synergies

I used to think that that the gleeful writing of "infrastructure" code at the outset of a shiny new programming project was really an exercise in spoiling the exuberance with piffling details like what the end-user actually wants. In other words, it can be viewed as an exercise in postponing the (inevitable) clash of one's confident, shining vision and the messy reality of what the end users actually find useful.

But lately I've started to think of that burst of enthusiasm as something akin to the energy that nature squanders on the young. In the case of a programming project, such explosions of optimism and creativity see one (and possibly one's team-mates) through writing and debugging a lot of code that will be frantically cut, pasted, and tweaked when crunch time rolls around.

So perhaps optimism and cynicism, if properly timed, don't necessarily have to pull in opposite directions, at least not in software development.

My Muse of Debugging, the water tap

There I was this morning, spinning my wheels trying to figure out why code I hadn't even touched--yes, yes, programmers all say that, but in this case it was really true--was no longer applying the filtering criteria just selected on the web page. The stream of consciousness flowed something like this:

1. Grumblegrumblegrumble...
2. Y'know, I might be a little thirsty...
3. Pick up the coffee cup but it's empty...
4. Now I feel a lot thirsty...
5. But I've already had close to my limit anyway...should go get a glass of water instead...
6. But I'm probably getting close to the answer. Let me just inspect the value of this variable, 'cuz it's just gotta be the problem child...
7. No, no it's not.
8. I'm still thirsty...
9. But now I think I'm onto something...just let me check out this variable value...
10. No--that's the value it's supposed to have...Grumblegrumblegrumble...
11. Repeat Steps 5 - 10 more times that I care to admit.

Finally, thirst wins out and I head for the break room. I've barely stuck my glass under the water tap of the office fridge when I realize what the problem actually is. Fortunately, I still have enough wits about me that I don't forehead-smack with the glass in my hand.

Of course, let's not give the tap all glory: The coffee pot and the rest-room have been known to have remarkably similar effects. Now, if only the Muse of Stepping Back from Problems would stop by occasionally, it would be even better. But, somehow, I've never seemed to live along her route. Sigh.

Leadership & authenticity - with a twist

Last Saturday night, my husband & I managed to salvage some "couple time" from the long hours at work, and watched The Bridge on the River Kwai over dinner. (Sir) Alec Guinness' Colonel is supremely portrayed--indeed, so well that you find yourself in awe of his stubborn rectitude even as you increasingly despise his peremptory manner. (And, in my case, all without a single Obi-Wan Kenobi flashback, which is saying something, yo!)

But I digress. When it became obvious who was actually running the prison camp responsible for building said bridge, I thought (with inward cringing) "Gack--I wonder how many "leadership" books of the sixties and seventies cited this movie." But it wasn't until today that the full ridiculousness of citing fictional characters in managerial self-help books really clobbered me. (Btw: That also goes for books about leaders from "history" when documentation was too scanty for any serious analysis of character or managerial traits.)

So far as I'm concerned, there's absolutely no difference between "leadership" and raw charisma...until the leader wanna-be walks (or trips) into her/his very own flavor of Kobayashi Maru and leads the team out of it without coming unglued en route. Now, I'll cheerfully 'fess up to the fact that I (probably) haven't met my own Kobayashi Maru yet. But that doesn't stop me from expecting such from anyone who wants to wear the Leader Hat.

That, and they have to be non-fictional.