Great article on why good requirements are so important for building software, and why creating good requirements is a flexible, collaborative, dare I say iterative process; not about control and having someone to blame.

Success in software is delivering products that meet business needs, not in delivering requirements that enable you to enforce a contract.

via Dr Dobbs – Q&A: What’s Behind Good Requirements.

This blog now uses Disqus for comments.

Blog comments are a funny thing. If you have something to say, do you leave a comment, or create your own blog post? Or share something on Facebook or Twitter or any of the myriad sites for that sort of thing? And as a blog owner, do I really want anonymous (probably spam) comments, or do I want people to become part of my social network and share their comments?

With Disqus, I can let people sign in with an account (Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, and others) they probably already have, share their comments on one of those other services if they want, and generally getting all the networky goodness that we love the Web for in the first place. I no longer allow anonymous comments, but if you don’t want to relate your comment to your Facebook or Twitter profile (and even then, you can just establish you identity that way without posting to your profile), you can just create a Disqus account not linked to anything else. (There’s probably some societal value to truly anonymous comments, but there’s only so much I can do with this blog.)

Sometimes people use a comment to try and contact me, and it’s not really something that needs to be published, so I’ve also added a new contact form.

I finally redesigned my blog. (See before and after pictures above.)

I changed the tagline to match one I’m using on Facebook. (“Repairing the world” is a reference to tikun olam as well as to fixing bugs in computer software as my day job, if I’m being cryptic.)

Color Scheme Designer was very helpful.

Otherwise it’s just visual changes, no new features (yet!).

Comments welcome.

Pope Benedict wrote yesterday:

Priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different ‘voices’ provided by the digital marketplace….
No door can or should be closed to those who… are committed to drawing near to others. (The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word.)

Aside from the specifics about Jesus, I pretty much agree with his message.

Are Jews similarly obligated to spread a religious message through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other new media? (That is, mainstream Jews–Chabad obviously considers themselves obligated.)

Should we even be reading much less caring about what the Pope thinks?

Can we survive if we don’t?

It seems like you can find everything on the Internet. Which is why it’s so important to point out when things that matter aren’t on the Internet.

Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.

via Takedown Hall Of Shame | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Today, 9/9/09, is my 35th birthday. Some thoughts:

Twitter pushes “less is more” (a principle I usually agree with) way past the point of absurdity and is adored by lots of smart people.

Wired asks “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess” and concludes “the public is a motherfucker” (their word choice!).

You can’t make sense of the world as rational place. Public discourse is mostly righteous indignation masking self-interest or fear of change, not reasoned debate.

You can only see the edges. Facebook and Youtube show us how things really are. A Youtube video going viral on network news does not, however.

The world is big. Really big. It used to seem smaller, through an accident of history, when, in the 20th century, the flow of limited petroleum temporarily exceeded the infinite flow of information. You will never know most people. You will never go most places.

The “tip of the iceberg” is a bad metaphor. A better truth may be that 80% of reality is nothing like the 20% you see. If almost everyone you know is doing or thinking something, 99.9999% of the world quite possibly isn’t.

There are ambivalent choices. There is not one right answer. But you have to pick!

At a small company someone is the guru and he reads or listens to the industry guru and you think you have mastered your craft, that you know the right way to do it. Then I went to a large, heterogeneous organization and had to relearn: there is always another way to do it. I thought I knew that, but there are so many completely different ways to do it. If I thought the debate was between C# vs. Java, it was really between C# and Java vs. things you’ve never heard of.

If there are eight levels of programmers (of course not really) I am somewhere in the middle: I have a good job; I do important but not sexy work. I could get another job with my skills, but maybe not a better job right now. 50% of software developers don’t want to be managers—which leaves the remaining 50% of us hoping we are the 1% that gets to be CTO some day. In the meantime, how do you stay ambitious while staying where you’re at?

Which brings me back to the first point, which is a paradox. My job is to bring order to things, to make them not broken and behave in predictable ways. But engineer things too well, and they don’t work, either. Adam Bosworth says it better than me: “It is an ironic truth that those who seek to create systems which most assume the perfectibility of humans end up building the systems which are most soul destroying and most rigid…. Conversely, those systems which best take into account the complex, frail, brilliance of human nature and build in flexibility, checks and balances, and tolerance tend to survive beyond all hopes.”

I’d like to think there are connections in the above, but it’s a human trait to see patterns where none exists – the “Triumph of the Random.”

Also, Hannah starts kindergarten today. I remember liking kindergarten at Laurel School. It’s a new feeling to be a parent when I can remember my being my child’s age myself. Good luck, Hannah!

*In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is 42. That is also my house number and significant street in New York, but now I’m really seeing patterns…

One of the things I found challenging about voting this morning is that you are confronted simply with the candidates’ names. There are no graphic clues to help you choose which one to vote for. They are not organized by party or any other characteristic.

Moreover, they are not in the font and color we’ve come to associate with the candidates: McCain in the Optima font with a gold device on a navy blue background; Obama with his rising-sun-over-fields logo and heavy use of the Gotham font on a lighter blue background (although I realized while looking for an image to place above, his name is usually in a complementary serif font). So, I have to stop and think about it, and I think there must be a certain amount of human error that this causes.

We are used to this from store packaging – if you are looking for Tide you grab a bottle with certain shades of orange and yellow, and if the store-brand detergent wants to compete they make their package as close to the same shades as possible. Maybe candidates should be allowed to submit a logo and their names in a specific font. While it might seem like too much marketing, it might actually help ensure people vote for the candidate they intended.

Why is it that someone else talking on a cell phone in public is impolite, and when you’re the one talking on a cell phone, it’s an important call? I find it curious that people will pass judgment on someone without knowing the caller’s situation.

Recently I went to an urgent care appointment at a very large group medical practice. I was irritated by signs in the waiting room telling you to turn off your phone when you enter the building. There are many legitimate reasons to be on the phone in the waiting room:

• Your spouse dropped you off at the front door since your foot was hurt, and you need to tell him where to find you once he parks the car.
• You need to tell a babysitter that your appointment is running late.
• To tell your boss a family emergency has come up, you’re at the doctor, and you’ll miss that meeting it took two months to set up.
• You need support after a bad diagnosis. (Or, you got a good result and need to tell your mom to stop worrying.)

Whatever the reason, it’s more important to you than anything going on in the waiting room. Yes, you should respect other people waiting, but is being considerate to strangers really more important than showing respect to people you know by keeping them informed as you deal with a medical issue?

(Maybe this is “sign inflation”–they don’t care if everyone turns off their cell phones, so long as it keeps the volume down, and they can point to the sign if they have to tell someone to be quiet. Not my idea of compassionate care, though.)

There’s an idea that medicine is such a serious matter it must be more important than whatever you’re talking about; some hospitals have banned cell phone use for fear of radio interference with medical equipment. Today, major hospitals use mobile phones, and even WiFi, for communication among doctors and nurses, and recognize that patients and families need to keep in touch. As with anything, the technology isn’t the problem, it’s a question of how you use it.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I like my my new Windows Vista computer and my new Windows Mobile phone.

Alas, they don’t like each other.

The phone came with a USB cable and software for syncing files, etc. between it and a PC. This is one of the reasons I got a smartphone, and also so I could find new uses like installing new programs, syncing calendars, and general tinkering with a mobile device platform.

I had heard that Vista came with a new Windows Mobile Device Center, so I wasn’t so surprised when the link to install the ActiveSync software on the CD supplied with the phone was disabled. I figure Vista already had the software it needed, and it would just be plug-and-play.

Unfortunately not; and it was several hours and a few scary “blue screens” before everything was working.

When I connected the phone to the computer, the computer seemed to recognize a new device was connected at first. But, it didn’t open the Device Center, and when I opened the Device Center from the Start Menu (is it still called the Start Menu in Vista–it doesn’t say “start”?) it said “waiting to connected,” and didn’t find my phone.

After a quick Google I was able to download a new version of the Device Center from Microsoft, but installation didn’t go so well, apparently because I was logged on as a non-Administrator. Eventually, it just got hung at a screen that said “0 seconds” remaining. If I left it long enough, the computer would go to sleep and not wake up: the light on the computer stayed blue, but the monitor stayed asleep (orange), so I had to hold down the computer power button to force it off. Not something I want to do.

After logging in as administrator, I installed the device center, but when plugging in the phone got an error about a “malfunction” in the USB device. This is a pretty serious accusation – my new phone is broken, and it’s not just a software issue? Unlikely.

At this point I installed the ActiveSync software on my Windows XP laptop, where it just “worked.”

Somehow all of this caused an even more critical problem with my computer because it wouldn’t shut down or restart cleanly, hanging on the “Shutting Down” screen and eventually crashing with a blue screen. A blue screen crash, on my new Vista computer. The honeymoon is over.

So, I decided to run System Restore. I tried a couple restore points and the operation timed out. Eventually, I had to run the system restore from safe mode. Apparently this is a sort of best practice, but not some I was aware of.

Finally, I found some good information at pdaphonehome.com forums. The end result was that I needed to uncheck “advanced network functionality” (in phone settings), perform a “hard reset” on device (although I’m not sure I really did this, because it didn’t go back to factory settings) and then I connected the phone again. The interesting thing is that this time, when the computer popped up a balloon “installing device driver” (as it has the very first time I installed it) is found a driver named “Samsung MITs USB Sync” instead of some sort of “RNDIS” driver.

So, I suspect there is some problem with this RNDIS driver with Vista; however I don’t think I need whatever advanced functionality this driver has for what I’m trying to do.

Syncing a PDA with a computer is a really typical use case for non-technical users, who don’t have time to deal with these issues; and it’s a use case that’s been around for years. It’s too bad they haven’t got all the bugs ironed out.

Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press. Maybe some people were expecting Microsoft to pull a Linux-and-Mac-killing rabbit out of its hat, which Vista is not, but it’s an improvement to Windows in its own right. A few weeks ago I got my first Vista-equipped PC and here are some of things I’m liking about it:

User Account Control–yes, I like it. UAC means simply that you are prompted before you can make a change that will affect other users. I don’t see that as a nuisance; that’s a security feature I want, so I can decide who and what gets to install new programs. This is the first computer where I’ve actually set myself up as a standard user, because I can always input an administrator password (without logging off) when needed. Maybe some software vendors and their users were caught off guard with programs that always needed to be run as an administrator, but running as administrator for is a bug, not a feature (certain administrative utilities excepted).

I like how in Vista the real path to user files is (for example) C:\Users\Public\Photos vs. “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Photos.” It’s a much more elegant way to say the same thing, reminding me of short DOS and Unix file naming conventions without being cryptic. It’s like they don’t need to show off long file name support any more–names are just as long or short as needed. I also like how the links to these folders are simply displayed in the Start Menu.

I like that the computer goes to sleep and wakes up much faster and more reliably than XP. This is the first computer where I don’t dread a long boot-up to quickly check an e-mail or search–I typically just let it fall asleep, and when I come back it only takes a few seconds to resume where I left off. The Windows Vista Team Blog says “everyone knows that turning a TV off doesn’t really turn it off,” and they wanted to Vista to work the same way. There are reasons some users might want it to work differently, but getting the real TV and cable box to turn on and off together reliably is more of a nuisance in my life right now.

Also, it’s a minor thing, but I think Microsoft has done a better, if not award-winning, job on the visual experience. I like the analog clock, and the way the screen fades in and out quickly when logging on and off. There’s also clearly been some engineering work to support this without compromising response time.

So, should you get Windows Vista on your computer? There are reports of people actively downgrading computers from Vista to Windows XP, which I think is pretty silly. In my judgement, Vista isn’t a reason to go out and buy a new computer (or upgrade one you’re not planning to replace). Vista is an improvement over Windows XP, and it’s helping me enjoy computer, so I’m happy with it.