This essay argues that business accounting "has no model appropriate for software or programming."
"The intangible but extremely complicated patterns of thought are that software has value only when it's accompanied by the programmers who write it. No company can treat programmers the same as a factory because programmers demand continuous attention and support well beyond any factory."
It almost makes Alan Cooper sound like an advocate for agile methods.
My employer let me go this week. Not as part of a general layouff, but more over a difference of style. The good news is, I have a lot of (now former) co-workers that I enjoyed good working relationships with. Aside: managers are not highly represented in the group I got along with well.
I got a good severance package, so I'm going to take the rest of August off. I'll work a bit on some of the projects I've too stressed to focus on. I'm especially interested in FIT FrameworkForIntegratedTest and Fitster, as well as my own AntFit.
All the papers and transactions are done and I'm officially registered for the O'Reilly OSCON 2003 in Portland, OR. I signed up for a Perl tutorial with chromatic. I look forward to meeting fellow Advogatons.
It's starting to look more and more like my employer will pay my way to O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2003. The convention is slated for the Marriot just down the street from my office in Portland, OR. It would be great to have an Advogato BOF, at least informally. Do I hear interest?
sarum asks about the crappy TCP/IP stack in Windows. Years ago, a company named FTP Software had a nifty TCP/IP stack for DOS. They were the lucky owners of the ftp.com domain, now bought by NetManage (along with the rest of the company). FTP Software's stack worked with Crynwr packet drivers, NDIS and ODI drivers. It was an old-school TSR and when HiMEM/EMM and all that fun stuff was around it knew all about tricks to play to reduce its memory footprint. Then Windows 3.0 came out, and they supported that, with VxDs and other painful stuff, and the WinSock API was borne, in part through contributions from engineers at FTP Software. Yes, it was a commercial product, but it was damn good, and the programmers hung out on UseNet if you needed help. They had things like ICMP router discovery, TCP/IP Slow Start, Van Jacobson compression and a slew of other advanced TCP/IP RFCs before MSFT even know how to spell IP. Did I mention one of the founders of the company wrote the SLIP RFC? If you bought the dev kit, you pretty much got full source, assuming you could fathom the hairy C, x86 assembly, and interrupt mess that was the legacy of being DOS-based.
Some time after, Microsoft started shipping Windows 3.1 with a built-in TCP/IP stack. People started asking why they should pay for a stack when Windows shipped with on "for free". Well MSFT's stack was based on the BSD code, and it was a crappy port. With the release of Win95, third-party tcp/ip support was all but dead. The WinDOS implementation is still a crappy port, with bad default settings for MTU, RTT, TCP window size and so on.
In short, MSFT Borgified FTP Software and TCP/IP.
So now, you can't get a decent TCP/IP implementation for Windows. The WinNT/2000/XP isn't much better, but hey, MSFT and their partners get to charge consulting fees to help people configure their stacks to have half-decent performance.
How do I know all this? Do a search on the web for ugopher.
Like nymia, I too struggled with getting my brain around the Mozilla code. There are some tests -- make sure you do not have ac_add_options --disable-tests in your .mozconfig when you build, and you'll see them built in the dist/bin directory. Also, many components have a test directory, and the tests are in XUL, rather than C/C++. Using the xpshell program in the dist/bin directory you can execute arbitrary javascript, and the very simple viewer executable can also run test XUL.
To amars: IANAD, but your symptoms sound very much like acute migraine with visual components and perhaps transient ischemic attack. See for example http://imigraine.net/migraine/basilarm.html. Have you been under a lot of stress or overworked lately? Probably harmless, but you might want to go see a doctor, if for no other reason than to get some good painkillers in case you get the same kind of headache again. Actually, any time you lose consciousness for any reason other than natural sleep it's probably a good idea to see a doctor.
I've had visual migraines myself, with weird flickering effects in the corners of my vision and lost visual field, but I've never passed out or been nauseous.
Please take care of yourself.
In like mind with raph, I'd like to express the strongest possible opposition to the violent aggression against Iraq by armed forces of the United States and Great Britain.
My last posting in the Defect Tracking Patterns series is not really another pattern, but instead a discussion of loose ends and other oddities that don't fit elsewhere.
Capture Bugs With Tests
Simple advice: When you have a bug, write a failing test that demonstrates the bug. Write it before trying to fix the bug, and then add it to the test suite permanently. Then write the code that makes the test past. If that bug ever pops up again (that never happens, right?), the test will start failing again, immediately, before the rebugged code gets put into a release.
No Bug Database
From the XP world comes the idea that instead of having a list of the bugs that need fixing, capture the bugs as new or changed requirements, and have the customer prioritize them along with the ongoing development. There's some wisdom in that, because it helps the to remember that nothing is truly bug-free, and that making important features work well has more payback from a business standpoint than fix a lot of minor defects, and the team gets to estimate how long it will take to fix something and add that time to the overall schedule.
Thanks to everyone who commented on these, please do send me your comments, or visit the version on the wiki at DefectTrackingPatterns, and thanks especially to Brad Appleton and Linda Rising for their help with the early revisions.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
