Belly Button Lint: Rick Ramsey's Weblog

Back when I worked a bit in product development, we were asked to optimize along three lines:

• Features
• Time to Market
• Cost

In other words, create a superior product fast at low cost. No matter how we looked at it, we could only optimize two out of three. That didn't stop management from asking for all three. :-)

Many years ago when Missus Wife and I were trying to find a place to live in the California Bay Area (where Sun headquarters is located), we faced a similar problem:

• Quality Home
• Short Commute
• Low Cost

We simply could not find a nice home close to work that we could afford. Didn't stop us from trying, though. :-)

Now it's a different set:

• Professional
• Passionate
• Authentic

You simply cannot be professional, passionate, and authentic at the same time. Hasn't stopped me from trying. But it can't be done. If you don't believe me, try it. You'll wind up putting your head or someone else's head through a wall. Which, by the way, is not very professional. :-)

... flows downhill.

From the archives....

CRYING WOLF: Hmm, Bellowing Elk's last smoke cloud looks a little strange...

BAYING DOG: You're right, Crying Wolf, what do you suppose he means by that?

CRYING WOLF: Hmm, it's a little bit bigger than the smoke clouds before it and after it....

BAYING DOG: You're right, Crying Wolf, do you suppose he intends to emphasize something?

CRYING WOLF: Hmm, isn't the convention for emphasis a darker cloud?

BAYING DOG: You're right, Crying Wolf. It is. So why is his cloud bigger?

CRYING WOLF: Hmm, perhaps he proposes to change the standard?

BAYING DOG: Or perhaps he really, really wants us to return his squaws.

CRYING WOLF: More than usual?

BAYING DOG: Mm-hmm.

CRYING WOLF: Hmm, you may be right, Baying Dog. Perhaps that's what he means.

BAYING DOG: It would be a shame. Bellowing Elk's squaws are so friendly.

CRYING WOLF: Hmmm, send him another message.

BAYING DOG: What should it say?

CRYING WOLF: How about "This page intentionally left blank."

BAYING DOG: Ooh, that's a good once, Crying Wolf. Good one."

The long hard grind wears me down so that I sleep-walk to the pantry and when my fingers happen to stumble onto a bag of chocolate kisses hidden in the shadows, I suddenly wake up from my soul-less stupor and find myself smiling wicked big. Wow. I am still alive.

My theme song for the week, courtesy of Todd Rundgren....

I-IIIIIIIIIIIII don' wanna work.
I just wanna bang on de drum all da-ay!

I-IIIIIIIIIIIII don' wanna play.
I just wanna bang on de drum all da-ay!

You can buy that tiki drummer sticker from http://store.drumbum.com/skuD-32.html.

I just switched the mouse to my left hand. Don't ask me why. Not enough aggravation in my life, I suppose.

Navigating is a whole new experience. Hey Lefties, you know what? Websites and applications are right-side biased! Something's gotta be done! My mouse covers so much ground, now, that its gonna wear a rut in my desktop.

RFE for application developers: add a button that swaps the controls from right to left. I would dig that.

Not all of Ferguson's analysis is as turgid as the first passage I quoted below, so perhaps I'm making an unfair comparison. Nevertheless, it was while reading this particular passage (about the causes of World War I) that the contrast with the second passage struck me.

First Passage:

Nor is it without significance that Schlieffen liked to sign himself, 'Dr Graf Schlieffen' in correspondence with academics; many elements of pre-war militarism and radical nationalism clearly had their roots in the universities as well as the churches. This should not be overstated, of course. German academics were far from being a homogeneous 'bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern'; and Wilhelmine media dons, like the Pan-German Dietrich Schafer, were in many ways exceptional in striking radical nationalist postures even in their inaugural lectures....

From The Pity of War, by Nial Ferguson.

Second Passage:

...[W]hat as a boy had seemed to me a lingering disease, I now felt to be the quiet before the storm. [T]he Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up...But then came the Balkan War and with it the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay across the chest of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as a feverish tropical heat, so that due to a constant anxiety, the sense of approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Heaven at last give free rein to the fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mightly lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven mingled the roar of World War batteries.

From Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, quoted in The Pity of War

There's been a lot of talk lately on both liberal and conservative radio stations about our prisoner of war or prisoner of terror camps. The conservative stations accuse the liberals of wanting to release all the captured terrorists and give them jobs in our nuclear facilities. The liberal stations accuse the conservatives of wanting to yank out your local first grade teacher's fingernails for the sake of national security.

Although wonderfuly entertaining, both extremes are misguided. If we wanted to make alleged terrorists not only give up their entire terrorist network but exchange their AK-47's for Boy Scout Eagle badges, we would force them to run a less than optimized application over VPN.

Click the button..........watch the button grey out.......watch the drop down menu appear.....click the menu item.........no, wrong one.......watch the wrong menu item become highlighted......feel blood pressure rise.......watch the drop down menu go away.......you know the wrong window is going to appear........take a deep breath........take another......wrong window appears........click the Close button.......watch it grey out........

I've taken to running those applications with the American Heritage Dictionary on my lap.

aggravation n. 3. A thing that irritates or makes worse, more troubleshome, or more irritated.

exasperate tr. v. 1. To make very angry or irritated.

annoy v. 1. To bother or irritate.

torment n. 1. Great physical pain or mental anguish.

suicide n. 1. The act or instance of intentionally killing oneself.

I didn't find an entry for "software-assisted suicide."

The other day my daughter told my wife how nice it was to come home after school and find us both home every day. She brought a friend with her, a friend who usually goes home to an empty house and waits for her parents to arrive by 6:00 or so. 3 1/2 hours is a long time for a kid. iWork is the most significant improvement in the workplace since they forbade smoking indoors, maybe even more.

Here's an RFE: develop an architecture, an API, a set of best practices, whatever, to help developers eliminate or reduce latency in applications that run over VPN. Email over VPN has virtually no latency. Same with browsers over VPN. Why can't all applications be like that? Is there a secret to eliminating latency? Let's get the word out. I'm not sure my kids would understand if they came home one day and found me with the business end of a double-barrel shotgun in my mouth, while in front of me the Open button.........remained............frozen...........in ............grey.

With the launch of our new and improved internal bug tracking application, we introduced a new term: CR. That stands for "Change Request." I must be getting old and crotchety, because instead of inventing new terms that irritate the old timers, I'm getting irritated by those pesky youngsters who feel the need to discard words that are near and dear to my heart for something that makes more sense to them.

This movement to replace a term that is clear with a term that is more accurate happens every 10 years or so, doesn't it? That's OK. I've spent a few decades creating or adapting to change, so it's not something I'm going to forget how to do just because of a few grey hairs. In fact, I'm going to beat them at their own game. If we're going to retire my good friend the "bug," let's retire a few more. Here are my recommendations.

Bug = change request
Code = standards-based digital instruction set
Product = coalesced best practices
Engineer = implementor of notions
Tech Writer = interpretive language compiler
Quality = customer expectation enforcement

Then we can make much more accurate statements, such as, "The customer expectation enforcement implementor of notions discovered a change request in the standards based digital instruction set of the Java 2.2 coalesced best practices. Quick! Call the interpretive language compiler!"

I shouldn't pick on the customer expectation enforcement implementors of notions, though. My all time favorite is still the classic of management-speak:

Problem = opportunity.

Ever since they came up with that one, I've been hearing Tom Hanks drone from inside the space capsule, "Houston, we have an opportunity."

What Is It?
Information architecture is the structure and organization that makes content manageable. It is essential to information's authoring, production, delivery, and viewing environments.

Why Is It Important?
It's always been important. I simply existed behind the scenes. Before high tech, it was called library science. Without it, a library would be a giant pile of books. In the early days of high tech, it was as simple as chapters, sections, paragraphs, tables of content and an index. Two developments have made it more significant over the last decade. The first is the exponential rise in the amount of content. The second is the variety of distribution mechanisms used to access it. In short, high tech has made content unmanageable.

What's the Biggest Impediment?
Two, actually. One is believing that it's not necessary. Between google, blogs, and the user community, won't the useful content rise to the top on its own? I'm certain that some of it would, but I'm not so sure about the rest. Take the classic example of the typing chimpanzees. (Not to imply that bloggers and user communities are like chimpanzees....it's just a useful comparison.) The theory goes like this: give enough chimpanzees enough typewriters and enough time, and they will create the complete works of Shakespeare. Given my limited understanding of infinity and probability, I'm not going to argue with that.

The problem I will highlight, however, is the difficulty of finding Shakespeare among all the pages filled with QWERTY and !@#$%^! I can only imagine the number of hits google would come up with.

The other impediment is making the architecture strictly a top-down affair. In my experience, the best designs have both a top-down and a bottom-up component. Information architecture might be developed more quickly in a dark room behind closed doors, but it won't be as effective or flexible as it needs to be. It should be developed in a partnership between the designers and the implementors. Just like good products are the result of cooperation between the designers and the builders.

I invented it.
No, I invented Java.
Get out. It was me.

O mini kernel
To you owe their combustion
Ships of midnight oil

Gosling, 'Bo Gosling
He da man who do da thang
Wid da Java lang'

The web would not be
Without the Java VM
And J2EE

Classes and applets
Buttons, text, pictures, and sound
Java for Dummies