Alston Grove

Do you remember LinuxToday.com from 5 years ago before they were bought by Internet.com? Remember 2 years ago when you could read the latest Linux Weekly News without paying for a subscription? Do you know what these news sites had in common?

Dave Whitinger. Last month Dave started another news service, called LXer, and it’s turning out to be pretty good. Go check it out.

I was reading the About Us page where he says “January, 2004 marks an important milestone in my history with Linux news, and this is the month that I have been planning my re-entry into this field.” I wonder if he was bound to an 18-month non-competition agreement that kept him from the Linux news biz? Don’t get me started on NCs …

If you’ve never read Joel’s 12 Steps to Better Code, you should have a look at this classic Joel On Software article. Some of these may seem trivial to some managers, like “Do programmers have quiet working conditions?” But I think it should be expanded to also include, “Do programmers have spacious work areas?” Since noise is directly proportional to density, it should seem obvious that you need more space to have more peace, but sometimes you have to point out the obvious.

In Peopleware, the authors discuss their Coding War Games study where pairs of programmers from dozens of organizations completed coding and testing tasks while recording their time. The best people in the study outperformed the worst by 10:1. At the end, the programmers filled out a questionaire about their physical quarters. Here are some of the results:

You can’t tell if it’s the spacious, quiet work area that leads to productivity, or if the best people are simply drawn to organizations with those environments. In the end, if you’re a manager, does it matter which one it is?

Unfortunately, while I’ve experienced every one of Joel’s principles at different clients, I’ve never seen all of them consistently at one place. However, when I think about the best projects I’ve been on, they rate high on Joel’s test. How does your workplace add up?

I just spotted a Geek Squad car on the northern outer belt for a second time. Although their website doesn’t proclaim it on their national map, if you search on ZIP code, they claim to service Columbus. And apparently they’ve had business lately.

Even though tech support is a lousy job, these guys make it fun. First, you get a sweet company Geekmobile. They are completely web-based, so you drive right to your first call in the morning, and straight home after work. You also get a smart phone running a mobile app to access your schedule, process credit cards, and log your time and mileage.

It reminds me of the Black Team at IBM. It was a team of people who could test software just a little bit better than others. So you would expect a modest improvement in bug reports. But they went far beyond that. They became notorious for nasty testing that destroyed code and sent bug reports back to developers. They even started wearing all black to work and laughing horribly when they found bugs. The team had jelled, excelled at their work, and made something as mundane as testing fun all at once.

I read the book

Java Development on PDAs
by Daryl Wilding-McBride and it’s very good. It covers J2ME on both PalmOS and PocketPC devices.

My company is doing a “Mobility Blitz” initiative where we go around town presenting and demoing J2ME, compact dot-NET, and SOA technologies. So I’m doing the J2ME presentation and demo. My demo is a MIDP application (aka MIDlet) that I run on both a Tungsten C Palm device and a mobile phone. The MIDlet uses the
kSOAP implementation of SOAP to hit a web service across the network which accesses data in a
Hypersonic Database. I run the MIDlet in the phone emulator on the screen and walk around the room with the Palm device connected over WiFi. The demo is called “SalesForce” because it lets our sales people look up consultants and projects. They can even reserve a consultant who is about to become available. Here are some screen shots:

The compact dot-NET demo is really nice too. They use the “electronic ink” handwriting recognition built-in to the TabletPC platform. But the feature they have that makes me most jealous is their remote display control. It lets them display the PocketPC device on the screen so you can see what they are doing on the device. The guy walks around the room with an iPAQ connected to WiFi and you can see what he sees. I tried to find something similar for PalmOS, like maybe a VNC server (there is a VNC client actually), but nothing like that seems to exist. Perhaps PalmOS with its PIM heritage makes it too difficult to pull a hack like that.

[Updated 12/08/04: Source code can be downloaded
here. If I remember, I developed with Sun's Wireless Toolkit, then ran into memory problems using their MIDP4Palm on the actual device. I switched to IBM's Websphere Studio Device Developer to build and run it on a Tungsten with their J9 VM. Some of the stuff I coded is probably handled better in the new MIDP APIs (I remember using threads to update an on-screen status and timeout network connections).]

Donald Norman has a new book out called Emotional Design. He has a few chapters available for free on his website. I think I might read his classic book The Design of Everyday Things first.

There’s an interesting article from Ok-Cancel that makes fun of how the HCI (human-computer interface) gurus like Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Jared Spool can’t agree on things. They even have a comic strip portraying an urban-style battle between “Neilly” and “LL Spool J”.

Some people are linking this humorous article from Netcraft on how SCO could have used their DNS creatively for the MyDoom worm attack. The last suggestion is funny because SCO really don’t care about their website uptime.

There’s a good article on RFID at CIO Magazine. Retailers want to use radio frequency IDs to solve complex problems like loss, theft, and out-of-stock situations. They will be able to track their product through the distribution channel from manufacture to checkout and beyond (the last part worries some people). Walmart announced that its top 100 suppliers must put RFID tags on all pallets, cases, cartons, and high-end products by January 2005.

Putting some of the protests aside, implementing RFID may not be easy afterall. For one thing, most retailers’ systems have been written to hold 11-digit UPC bar codes, while RFID tags are composed of 13 digits. An initiative called Sunrise 2005 mandates that companies be capable of scanning and processing 14-digit bar codes by January 2005. Another problem is the shear amount of data generated from tracking RFIDs, especially at the product level. One idea it to distribute the intelligence and computing across a wider network called “edge computing.”

Meanwhile, RFID tags are a bit expensive at 25 to 30 cents each. But as the cost gets down to 5 cents, even that pack of gum may have an RFID tag. Big brother watching, or efficiencies towards less expensive and more available products?

Why’s everyone upset about this cute little worm? Click on the image for the full popup illustration from Reuters.

Of course I’m talking about the MyDoom worm, and there are two variations running around now, labelled MyDoom.A and MyDoom.B. MyDoom.A started attacking SCO’s website on Sunday (Feb 1), and will automatically stop on Feb 12. SCO removed their www.sco.com name record instead of trying to withstand the traffic or reroute it. They probably want to blame the worm on the Linux community, and by taking their site down intentionally, they make it appear like the worm wiped them out.

MyDoom.B was supposed to start its distributed denial of service attack on Microsoft’s website today, yet the site is up.

According to Information Week, the worm contains a message from its author who identifies himself as “andy” and says, “I’m just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry.” So was the worm written for-hire by spammers?