Lars Pind

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

Simplicity-the art of maximizing the amount of work not done-is essential.

Just beautiful!

http://www.economist.com/search/search.cfm?qr=bush+gore+election+florida&area=5&keywords=1&frommonth=11&fromyear=2000&tomonth=09&toyear=2001&rv=1

I was watching Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and recalled a leader in the Economist in the aftermath of the election that pointed out all the weird things going on—as pointed out in another leader:

All of the supreme justices who backed Mr Bush were appointed by Republicans; the wife of one is helping the president-elect choose his staff; Florida is governed by his brother; its election was certified by his campaign chairwoman.

But I recall one where the leader even pointed out that, had this happened in any other country, the UN observers surely would’ve judged the election to be rigged, and call for a re-relection.

Can anyone find that article today?

I (or rather, Caroline) has an old iBook, the white dual USB model, but her hard drive is about to give up.

What does it take to replace the drive – apart from that little screw driver, which I don’t have yet.

Will any normal 2.5” drive, like a 40Gb Seagate model ST94011A, that I have lying around, work with it? Can I just swap it out, then have the OS X installer reformat it (it has a Red Hat Linux installation on it currently).

I found this, which seems to suggest that you have to be a little careful, but he’s referring to another model.

Thanks for your help :)

Update: After borrowing tools from my neighbor and two trips to the hardware store for more, the operation is now complete, thanks to the detailed PDF linked to in the comments to this post. The old iBook now has a 40Gb drive, Panther, and it’s running Software Update right now, so I can get iTunes with AirTunes :)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html

Joel has hit the nail on the head with his notion that designing the (computer-mediated) human-to-human interaction or interface is much more important than simply designing the computer-to-human interface — particularly when you’re writing software for human-to-human interaction, in other words, collaboration software.

I’m lacking a little substance, though, a few tricks of the trade, perhaps, over and above the already widely publicized example of showing the spam post to the spammer, but not to the rest of the world, which is definitely clever, but perhaps a little overused as an example in Joel’s articles. Some details on concrete design decisions from FogBUGZ or other applications (not necessarily Joel’s own) would be great, please.

Update: Changed “head on the nail” to “nail on the head”. See comment below.

... now the only problem is that I bought my iPod “back” when I was still a Windows user, so obviously now I want all my music on my new Powerbook. Except, there doesnt’t seem to be a way to do that. I can play music from my iPod through my AirPort Express just fine, but I can’t copy the music from my iPod to my new Powerbook. Damn.

Update: I figured out how :)

So a couple of people probably saw this happening … definitely a few people saw it happening over the past few days … some even helped me get set up with everything I needed to get up and running. Anyway, I’m posting this from my brand new PowerBook, and I’m about as excited as I was the first time I ran Linux on my desktop for the first time some five years ago.

It’s a thrill to see how things are actually shifting in this industry for the first time in many years, what with Microsoft looking confused over Longhorn, while Apple just keeps on pushing out really useful, usable products. It’s a pretty neat strategy, they have going, what with the lean adoption curve of getting an iPod, like I did in the fall, which, eventually, leads to a full-blow switch. Sweet. Good going. No step three… (oh, and thanks to David for suggesting I just cancel my Apple store order and run down to the local Fona 2000 to pick one up.)

Although most search engines seem to have updated their links to my blog, I still get a lot of hits for URLs that now longer work. I’ve now taken the time to implement a small redirector, which will bump you to the corresponding new page with a 301 code (Permanently moved). Hope this helps a bit. The old links to articles still don’t work.

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail119.html

It strikes me how Bruce Schneier applies the exact same logic to security – am I getting my money’s worth – as Bjørn Lomborg does to the environment.

He’s pointing out that more people died from malnutrition in 2001 than died in the terrorist attacks. Yet, the US has spent truckloads securing airlines, and none helping malnutrition. Basically, both Bruce and Bjørn are asking for how cost-effective the various measures of saving human lives against the varios threats surrounding us are, and then picking the ones with the most bang for the buck first. It would seem logical, yet what we’re doing is quite something else.

As an aside, to illustrate how bad we are at evaluating risk, he points out that more people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks. I’d like to see just how those pigs kill those people. Anyone got any pictures?

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail58.html

I’m still listening to IT Conversations – Stve McConnell yesterday, and now Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP.

Rasmus explains how the first version of PHP would just recognize special tags and replace them with calls to C code. Then he started adding conditionals, and the parser got immensely more complicated, because he didn’t know about compiler theory. Then came along these guys from Israel saying “hey, we’ve just taken a college class in compiler theory, why don’t we write a proper parser and interpreter for PHP”, and they did. Now, it takes experience to apply theory to practice, and so they weren’t quite happy with the result, and redid it for the next version of PHP. And now, with PHP5, they’ve added “some” object-orientation to the language. But it still carries all the baggage, and it’s just not designed from the ground up to be anything, really.

What I realized listening to Rasmus explain the accidental story of PHP is this: When the web sprang into existence, it also created a new kind of software development, where the cost structure and risk structure is much different from the shrink-wrapped software business. Fast response to changes is also much higher on the agenda in the web world: When you’re running an online store, you want to be able to respond more quickly to changes in the market than the typical two-year release cycle for software.

The response to the challenges of the “old” world of software was compiled languages, particularly C and C++. The response to the new world is interpreted scripting languages like Perl and PHP.

The depressing fact is that, while C and C++ are proper, designed languages, at least PHP, according to Rasmus himself, wasn’t even intended to be a programming language. Decades of experience with language design has been ignored. PHP has added all those things over the years, and PHP5 “behaves as if it was object-oriented”, whatever that means, according to Rasmus.

I think the “scripting” (or Agile) way of developing (or growing) a large class of software (operating systems, computer language interpreters, and space shuttle control software not included) is the right one. It’s not to be snickered at in any way. It’s simply the most appropriate tool and approach for the job.

So it would seem that what we need is a proper programming language to do this. One that has been designed as carefully as C#, from the ground up, to incorporate the best of modern langauge design, including obviously object-orientation and garbage-collection, and it needs to be a fully dynamic, interpreted scripting language. After David’s demo Monday of Ruby and Rails, I’m starting to think that Ruby might actually be that language.

Why would professional software engineers work in accidental languages like Perl and PHP, when there are real languages out there that do the job. Python might be an equally suitable alternative.

As an aside, Java surely is not. It’s a static, compiled language, which is not what’s called for in the world of Agile web development. I would think that C# has the same limitation, though I’m not sure.

yon)

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail175.html

Dalager pointed me to this interview with Alistair Cockburn yesterday, and I’ve been listening to it on my iPod on my way home last night, and back to work this morning.

Several great things about it. Not only can you get, as they say “New Ideas Through Your Headphones” while you’re doing other things – like commuting – where you can’t be reading.

The best thing, though, is that hearing the person speak tells you more about the person behind it, the history behind it, etc. Alistair tells you things about how this all came about, his relationship with Kent, Ward, and the others, things that you normally don’t see in written form.

It’s about bandwidth. In terms of efficiency of communicating a fixed, limited message, written form is definitely better. You can typically read faster than the other person can speak, so in that sense, the bandwidth of written language is higher. But speaking has much higher bandwidth in the areas of emphasis, personality, phrasing, etc., which tells you a lot about the person, what he’s thinking, what he’s really excited about, what he’s a bit bored with, etc.

Thanks for the hint!