W3C Talks in December

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W3C Team Talks in December

W3C Team Talks in December 12/02/2002 07:24 PM
2 December 2002: On 3 December, Hugo Haas presents at Iliatech Club Day on Web Services at INRIA Rocquencourt, Le Chesnay, France, and Charles McCathieNevile presents at LexiPraxi (in French) at the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie in Paris, France. On 5 December, Kazuhiro Kitagawa gives a keynote at Internet World Asia in Tokyo, Japan. Several Team members attend XML 2002 in Baltimore, MD, USA held 8-13 December. Browse upcoming W3C appearances and events. (News archive)

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: December 21, 2003 - December
27, 2003 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: December 21, 2003 - December
27, 2003 Archives 12/24/2003 12:40 AM
finds a real nugget .. points out .. blunts

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_12_21.html#002338
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1 December

1 December 12/02/2003 12:39 AM

Do something about it.

December 23, 2004

December 23, 2004 12/24/2004 01:14 PM

Brett has written up instru ctions for upgrading PHP to the latest version and getting it working with FogBugz. These instructions should be useful to anyone who needs to upgrade PHP due to the recent security flaw.

Happy Fifth

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of Joel on Software!

Job Openings

Organize my life and run the office at Fog Creek Software: Exe cutive Assistant / Office Manager.

And don't forget, when you're home for the holidays and you see all your cousins, siblings, and aunts who have been away at college: we have great summer internships, so please encourage them to apply!

December 15, 2003

December 15, 2003 12/15/2003 03:16 PM
This month's Book of the Month is an excuse for me to write a long treatise about how modern software development is a world mostly divided into two large ideological cultures: The Culture of Unix Programming and The Culture of Windows Programming.

For the record 1 December

For the record 1 December 12/02/2003 01:04 AM
It has been reported that top-ranked search engine Google will stop accepting advertising from unlicensed pharmacies, many of which have sold huge volumes of ...

December 25, 2004

December 25, 2004 12/25/2004 05:06 PM

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, by Paul Auster, was the inspiration for the movie Smoke.

 

December 01, 2003

December 01, 2003 12/02/2003 01:29 AM

Mazel Tov to the elder Spolsky on his latest book Language Policy. No, not computer languages.

Craftsmanship

Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship (though it can be), it's design. Design is that nebulous area where you can add value faster than you add cost. The New York Times magazine has been raving about the iPod and how Apple is one of the few companies that knows how to use good design to add value. But I've talked enough about design, I want to talk about craft smanship for a minute: what it is and how you recognize it.

Summer Internships

Are you a college student looking for a summer internship in software development? Fog Creek Software is the place for you! Details...

December 22, 2003

December 22, 2003 12/22/2003 07:49 PM

I've been sanity-checking FogBUGZ for Unix by installing various OSes under VMware.

Easiest Linux to install: RedHat 9. Mandrake is not bad but still uses some jargon that makes it not quite ready for prime time, for example, you would not be able to get through setup without knowing what "root" means. SuSE went to a lot of trouble to create a good setup, then they go out of their way to make it difficult and slow to install if you don't pay them for disks... my SuSE setup is still not done after several days of work. FreeBSD is pretty difficult to setup. Debian is very close to impossible, even for geeks.

The reason I need all these setups is because there are so many different ways to distribute software on Unix: we had to produce a .rpm, a .deb, a .tar.gz, and a .dmg for OS X.

(FogBUGZ for Unix system requirements: Unix, PHP 4, MySQL, Apache. It will ship in a few days).

joy (27 December 2002)

joy (27 December 2002) 12/27/2002 11:37 PM
[8 pm] Joy.

December 10, 2004

December 10, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

I didn't think I'd be changing my startup page again for a long time.

Looks like I was wrong. Check out Google Suggest.

Lemme explain why this is so cool. First of all, it saves you keystrokes entering your search terms. That's the externally cool thing.

The internal cool thing is that it's one of the first prominent uses I've seen of the IFRAME XmlHttpRe quest technique of going back to the web server for more data while the user interacts with a page. This has been possible for a long long time, but web developers have been mostly ignoring it. Rob Whelan exp lains how it's done.

The latency of web UIs, in which everything you do is a slow round-trip that requires completely refetching and rebuilding the web page, is one of the reason web UIs feel so clunky compared to native GUIs. Google is very publicly raising the bar on the quality of interfaces that people will expect from web pages.

The December Builder.com top 10

The December Builder.com top 10 01/04/2003 01:58 AM
CNET Jan 4 2003 1:02AM ET

December Builder.com top 10

December Builder.com top 10 01/07/2003 02:47 PM
CNET Jan 7 2003 1:02AM ET

December 31, 2003

December 31, 2003 12/31/2003 06:07 PM

I'll be DJing at the party tonight.

What you see here:

• Pioneer DJM-600 Professional DJ Mixer
• Two Pioneer CDJ-800 Digital Vinyl Turntables (acts like a turntable but plays CDs)
• Trusy Shure SM-58, mentioned earlier on this site
• Sony MDR-V700DJ Studio Monitor Series DJ Headphones
• Rotel RA-1060 Stereo integrated amplifier
• B&W speaker system
• Two IBM Thinkpad Laptops (one for visual effects and 2004 countdown; the other for playing MP3s)
• Harman Kardon DVD 25 Progressive Scan DVD Player
• (Offscreen) Pioneer 43" HDTV Plasma Monitor showing visual effects generated from the audio track using G-Force Gold

Looking busy in December

Looking busy in December 12/09/2003 10:57 PM
Sunday Times South Africa Dec 9 2003 10:24PM ET

December 02, 2004

December 02, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

Interesting seminar. We had about 700 people in the audience. From my P.O.V., it was way too short -- I could have talked about this social interface design for hours. And the Electric Cloud stuff was interesting enough but admittedly unrelated to my own topic which made the whole seminar kind of out of whack.

"December 14, 2003 05:59 AM"

"December 14, 2003 05:59 AM" 12/16/2003 03:14 AM

December 15, 2004

December 15, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

All these p eople gr iping about how writing software isn't fun anymore probably didn't notice that here in the northern hemisphere, we're only about a week away from the shortest day of the year. Install some bright lights, drink some coffee, take a vacation in Tahiti, and tell me in April if you still think software development is depressing.

Google Suggest

I had to change my home page back to regular Google due to a fairly blatant usability bug in Google Suggest. Repro steps:

1. Move your mouse so it's over the "Google Search" button
2. Type "Joel"
3. Click the mouse button immediately

The bug: often, the timing is such that the Google Suggest popup appears after I type Joel but before I click the mouse, so I think I'm clicking on the "Google Search" button intending to search for, say, Joel, not that I would search for myself, after all, I'm right here, but I'm really clicking on the popup listbox item for "Joel Turner", whoever that is. Any relation to Tina? Or Bachman?

I still think Google Suggest is important—I'm sure they'll fix this little problem. It's important not for searching, but because it's going to teach web users to expect highly responsive user interfaces:

• If you have a website that shows a map, and the user clicks to zoom in, they're going to expect the map to zoom in, quickly—they will no longer tolerate the full-page-reload-and-scroll-to-the-top that Mapquest has conditioned them to accept.
• If you show a list, and let people click on the column headers to sort by different columns, they're no longer going to tolerate the full-page-reload-and-scroll-to-the-top that certain unnamed bug tracking applications have conditioned them to accept.
• If you have an email application, and you show people a list of email and give them a button to delete email as spam, they're going to expect virtually instantaneous response time, not the full-page-reload-and-scroll-to-the-top that most web email programs have conditioned them to accept.

That's what I meant by "raising the bar."

More Google

Attention, FogBugz competitors: a court has ruled that you are welcome to continue to advertise your products when people search for FogBugz on Google. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with this although it does show a certain lack of class, mm, don't you think? You don't see Wal*Mart advertising when you search for Tiffany.

December 04, 2004

December 04, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

I just ordered a copy of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which, among other things, debunks the stories about how Eskimos have lots of words for snow.

Now for the bit that only Hebrew speakers are going to understand.

No matter how debunked Whorf is, I'm still convinced that Israelis are more likely to do things דווקא, simply because they have a word for it. And I have been forced to write entir e essays simply because I cannot find any other way to convey to English speakers the difference between ראש גדול and ראש קטן. All I wanted to say was that methodologies encourage ראש קטן and I need everyone on my team to be ראש גדול.

To someone who has never learned Hebrew it takes me two or three books to explain that. M SF is a fraud–an attempt to consolidate all the ראש גדול things Microsoft programmers do in a set of rules which are supposed to work if you force ראש קטן bizonim to implement them. And it’s never going to work.

I have been trying to translate this simple concept to English for years and am just about ready to give up. The Joel on Software award for excellence in technical translation will go to the person who can best express the preceding two paragraphs in English!

"December 2001"

"December 2001" 01/03/2004 07:07 PM

December 27, 2004

December 27, 2004 12/27/2004 12:57 PM
In response to the emergency in Asia, Fog Creek Software will donate 50% of all revenues earned this week (Dec 26 - Jan 1) to Oxfam. You can also make a direct contribution yourself.

December 13, 2004

December 13, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM
Upcoming Joel on Software meals: di nner in Bellevue, WA on January 18th and lu nch in Toronto January 21st. Please RSVP so I can get a count. These are always very informal geek-out sessions, lots of fun and a chance to meet other readers in your area.

December 06, 2004

December 06, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

Tamir Nitzan tries to explain.

First, the word he mentions (pronounced "davka") has a couple of different meanings, depending on context. But the slang meaning he refers to can loosely be translated to "in spite". For example - "why won't you let your little sister have the toy?" Answer: "davka" (embodying "I won't give her the toy BECAUSE she wants it so much").

As for the expressions (pronounced "rosh katan" - little head, vs. "rosh gadol" - big head). This expression comes from the IDF, and as most military language, doesn't quite translate into normal language. A "rosh katan" (literally "little head", and I actually think it is the original expression which derived most likely from "pinhead", the contrast later came in as a complement) is someone that does exactly what he's told. For instance, someone might be told to clean the barrel of their rifle. A "rosh katan" will strictly clean the barrel, perhaps leaving it useless because the trigger mechanism has sand in it, whereas a "rosh gadol" will clean the entire rifle and lubricate it so it's ready for use and doesn't rust. Another example: you tell a soldier to "go notify so-and-so that we will be ready for inspection at 1600". By 1700 you're curious, so you ask him "did you notify?". His answer might be "well I called his office and left a message". A "rosh gadol" would likely say: "I called his office but got his voice mail, so I left a message. I called back an hour later but still got voice mail, so I called his cell phone and left a message there too. I tried him again an hour after that and he assured me he will be here by 1600. I called him again 20 minutes ago and he said he was on his way but stuck in traffic" (a real "rosh gadol" would have notified his C.O. of all this without being asked of course).

Let me elaborate here... this is exactly right. Rosh katan is sometimes used in parts of the former British Commonwealth as labor action referred to as "work to rule." For some reason you can't go on strike, so you very carefully do your job exactly as prescribed, in a cussedly literal-minded way. "You told me to clean the toilet. You did not say to tell you when I was done. Therefore in accordance with your instructions I cleaned the toilet and stayed there in the toilet room waiting for further instructions." Someone who is working to rule can always demonstrate that no matter how many orders you give someone, they can probably make themselves 100% useless while still obeying every order you give them. This passive-aggressive behavior is quite frowned upon in the Israeli army where the slang rosh katan (small head) describes it. However, it is often one of the only ways to resist authority in a system which is likely to penalize direct disobedience with swift and harsh penalties.

For example, if I assign a bug to a developer I expect them to:

1. reproduce the bug
2. if it's not immediately reproducible, make a good faith effort to figure out why it's happening to me instead of just assuming that I'm doped up on anti-allergy medication and hallucinating it
3. find the root cause
4. do some searches to see if the same errors were made elsewhere in the code
5. fix them all
6. test the fix
7. think about whether this bug might be causing serious implications for a customer who needs to be told about the fix
8. etc.

That's the Rosh Gadol behavior. Possible Rosh Katan behaviors would be

1. resolved-not-repro. You can always get away with this once without even trying to repro the bug, because later you can pretend you didn't understand the bug report.
2. without even reproing the bug, make a change to the source code that seems like it would fix it and resolve it as fixed. If it wasn't, I'll catch it when I close the bug, right? And if it's really still broken, surely another tester will find it.

Rosh Gadol of course is quite the opposite: taking initiative and doing what is desired, not what is requested. Eric Sink alluded to it, in the difference between programmers and developers.

Back to Tamir.

Lastly there's MSF. The author's complaint about methodologies is that they essentially transform people into compliance monkeys. "our system isn't working" -- "but we signed all the phase exits!". Intuitively, there is SOME truth in that. Any methodology that aims to promote consistency essentially has to cater to a lowest common denominator. The concept of a "repeatable process" implies that while all people are not the same, they can all produce the same way, and should all be monitored similarly. For instance, in software development, we like to have people unit-test their code. However, a good, experienced developer is about 100 times less likely to write bugs that will be uncovered during unit tests than a beginner. It is therefore practically useless for the former to write these... but most methodologies would enforce that he has to, or else you don't pass some phase. At that point, he's spending say 30% of his time on something essentially useless, which demotivates him. Since he isn't motivated to develop aggressively, he'll start giving large estimates, then not doing much, and perform his 9-5 duties to the letter. Project in crisis? Well, I did my unit tests. The rough translation of his sentence is: "methodologies encourage rock stars to become compliance monkeys, and I need everyone on my team to be a rock star".

Exactly true. Daniel on the discussion group found a classic quote from Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny:

"The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, 'How would I do this if I were a fool?' Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you'll never go wrong."

The trouble with MSF is that it starts with a group of successful developers, who are successful because they are resourceful, intelligent, experienced, well-meaning, and have plush private offices with doors that close, and then attempts to claim that if impose some of their "best practices" on your team of unskilled developers, you will achieve the same results. It's like Daniel Boulud selling a manual to McDonald's fry cooks. "Out of potatoes? Try Yams. Throw in a bit of rosemary. Toss and serve with a lime-basil aioli dipping sauce. Yum." It's just Best Practices, right?

December 08, 2004

December 08, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

Scott Rosenberg interviewed me for Salon. “The connection between software and Yiddish humor may not have been evident until Joel Spolsky began writing his Joel on Software essays and blog in 2000.”

New TurboTax due in mid-December

New TurboTax due in mid-December 11/10/2003 11:27 PM
In addition to introducing Quick Books: Pro 6.0, Intuit Inc. has announced that the tax year 2003 version of TurboTax for Mac will be available in mid-December and will be compatible with Mac OS X 10.3 ("Panther").

December 03, 2004

December 03, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM
See that little picture of the books on the left hand side? It used to be 42,241 bytes long. 34,885 of those bytes were in a useless "application block" that some photo editing program put there. Thanks to Dennis Forbes, who posted an explanation and a free utility to remove the unneeded bloat, it's now only 7354 bytes.

December 16, 2004

December 16, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

“When you're setting a price, you're sending a signal. If your competitor's software ranges in price from about $100 to about $500, and you decide, heck, my product is about in the middle of the road, so I'll sell it for $300, well, what message do you think you're sending to your customers? You're telling them that you think your software is ‘eh.’ I have a better idea: charge $1350. Now your customers will think, ‘oh, man, that stuff has to be the cat's whiskers since they're charging mad coin for it!’”

Camels and Rubber Duckies

December 17, 2004

December 17, 2004 12/19/2004 03:24 PM

Mer cury News: “Accounting rule makers handed down long-awaited final guidelines Thursday that will force companies to deduct the value of billions of dollars of employee stock options from reported profits starting in mid-2005.”

Here's some old discussion of what this means.

The old Silicon Valley hands are unhappy with the general concept of expensing stock options, and one reason they often give for this is the difficulty of figuring out the value of stock options. But anybody in the investment industry, and indeed, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of financial accounting knows that accounting for the value of an illiquid asset is always a problem yet something you always have to do anyway, and just because the value of stock options changes over time or because it is not possible to fix exactly does not mean it shouldn't be accounted for consistently.

ham (2 December 2002)

ham (2 December 2002) 12/03/2002 06:53 PM
[5 pm | 4 pm] When bad ideas go wrong The Aventis website doesn’t work in Mozilla, which is a lucky break for Mozilla users, who’ll be

Stanford: Wednesday, December 1

Stanford: Wednesday, December 1 02/05/2005 09:37 PM
At many places there is a holiday-time practice called “Secret Santa” (sometimes de-Christianized to “Secret Snowflake” or something similar). Everyone…

Sit And Spin: December 2003

Sit And Spin: December 2003 12/23/2003 02:43 AM
The Straight Man's Guide to Enjoying Gay Sex (prolly NSFW)

sitandspinmagazine.com/1203/straightman.php
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Trip to Argentina from December 10-31

Trip to Argentina from December 10-31 01/07/2004 04:18 PM

I decided to push back the round-the-world trip and instead spend December in Argentina.  My flights into and out of Buenos Aires are fairly fixed but everything else is open and I would appreciate suggestions.  Here's the plan so far...

Dec 10:  leave Boston.
Dec 11:  arrive Buenos Aires at 10:07 am
Dec 12,13: sightseeing B.A.
Dec 14:  Sunday trip to Colonia, Uruguay via ferry
Dec 15:  leave B.A. for Iguazu Falls, stay at fancy Sheraton with view
of falls?
Dec 17:  fly from Iguazu Falls to Bariloche (Lake District), rent car
Dec 25:  fly to Ushuaia (the southernmost town in Argentina), take a few tours
Dec 31:  fly from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires in time to catch 10:55 pm
flight to Miami

Thoughts?

Stanford: Thursday, December 2

Stanford: Thursday, December 2 02/05/2005 09:37 PM
Ms. Snellman, the replacement sociology TA I have today, is very cute and funny and engaging. Its quite a contrast…

Robolympics games in SF December 13

Robolympics games in SF December 13 11/04/2003 11:03 AM
From antweight to sumo fights, expect an overdose of robotic fun in the RSA's biannual show, including movie robots, stormtroopers, and lots of competitions. Plus, a vendor area selling cool robot stuff. link

Star Proof for the G5 due in December

Star Proof for the G5 due in December 11/13/2003 10:01 AM
The first customer shipments of the Star Proof proofing solution for the Power Mac G5 processor are due next month. Star Proof is a Mac OS X application from Compose Systems that's designed for the delivery of contract quality screened proofs on large format inkjets and color proofers.

Stanford: Friday, December 3

Stanford: Friday, December 3 02/05/2005 09:37 PM
ASIMO, the walking Honda robot, is here to visit as part of some sort of tour. They’ve put together an…

Save 30% on 600 Spanish -- Buy Before
December 10

Save 30% on 600 Spanish -- Buy Before
December 10 11/18/2003 11:17 PM

cookiepuss (1 December 2002)

cookiepuss (1 December 2002) 12/01/2002 03:00 PM
[2 pm] You may notice that a tiny new tool bar has made its way into the right-hand subnav. Longtime readers will scarcely require an explanation.

Stanford: Saturday, December 4

Stanford: Saturday, December 4 02/05/2005 09:37 PM
Listen to a very low-quality recording of the conference: Introduction (with Ben Cohen) (7.6MB MP3), Speech (Andy Stein and George…
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W3C Talks in December

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