February 16th, 2007
David Weinberger’s JOHO blog pointed me to this one — hilarious! But in many ways, not that different from the befuddlement that many novice computer users face when first introduced to the ubiquitous “mouse” on today’s computers.
February 15th, 2007
The annual checkup with my doctor is always unpleasant, because (a) he makes me get on the scale right away, and (b) he offers no “silver-bullet” quick-n-easy solutions for the inevitable bad news:
“You’ve gained ten pounds this past year, Mr. Yourdon.”
“What?!?” I exclaim, with just the right amount of shock and righteous indignation. “How could […]
February 15th, 2007
My daughter passed this one on to me this morning. If this is at all representative of the intelligence of average Americans, then perhaps we really should let the computers take over. Watch for yourself:
February 15th, 2007
Michael Mah sent me an email message about his presentation at the New York SPIN meeting, with a comment that I thought was so important that I snipped it out of the email and posted it here:
“One thing i hope i conveyed - that you can be *agile about getting measures* that yield meaningful insights. […]
February 15th, 2007
I’ve gotten various comments in response to the software productivity/quality metrics that I cited from Michael Mah’s presentation to the New York SPIN chapter the other night — ranging from “Of course! It just proves what I knew all along” to “Baloney! I don’t believe a word of it!” All of this reinforces one of […]
February 13th, 2007
Don’t shoot the messenger, okay? I didn’t generate these sobering statistics myself, and while there’s an underlying rationale that makes sense to me, I haven’t had a chance to personally validate them. If you want more details, you should contact Michael Mah himself; I’ll provide more details on who he is, and where he got […]
February 13th, 2007
I plan on attending tonight’s monthly meeting of the New York City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) tonight, where Michael Mah will be speaking on “Extreme Programming (XP) and Productivity Measurement.” For details and directions, see the NYC SPIN website here. Michael is a great speaker, and the topic is an interesting one; among other […]
February 13th, 2007
Another day, another chapter: I’ve now read through Chapter 3 of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, and will offer a few comments and observations. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might want to skip back to some earlier blog entries that discuss the preface and initial chapters of the book; links […]
February 11th, 2007
As promised, I’ve digested another chapter of Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, and will do my best to make my comments much briefer than in the past.
Before I discuss the chapter itself, let me emphasize again that Scott has posted an online version of the endnotes for the book, which you can find here. It […]
February 9th, 2007
I don’t usually blog about photography, and I’ve never disagreed with technology pundit (and Mac aficionado) David Pogue before; but his recent New York Times article (”Breaking the Myth of Megapixels,” February 8, 2007) about the irrelevance of megapixels in digital cameras made me grumpy. Very grumpy. Very very grumpy. I snarled at my dog, […]
