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Massimo Morelli's Weblog
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lunedì 28 ottobre 2002
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Another clever quote from Tony Bowden Blog:
Curing the Addiction to Placating.
Placating occurs when self-esteem is low. Raising self-esteem - through management style, training, and affirming feedback - can help to block placating, but in itself cannot prevent it. For instance, IS customers often have high self-esteem, but not in the context of computers. Feeling technically incompetent, they must humble themselves to the sole source of technical help.
To understand their situation, picture yourself stranded in a remote hotel, and suppose that each meal offers a menu with only one selection. Having no other choice if you don't want to go hungry, you eat what the chef has prepared. If the chef is rude to you, you are polite to him. If he is rigid, you are accommodating. If he demands a high price, you bite your tongue and pay. This no-choice restaurant more or less describes the situation of the captive customer or an in-house software organization.
There is no particular reason for a restaurant with a captive clientele to maintain its excellence, which leads to the following principle: To prohibit placating, give customers alternative sources of services.
Although this principle is the foundation of American capitalism, it seems to unhinge the mightiest managers of internal IS organizations. They certainly agree wit the principle, but always for the other guy. The know (extending the dining metaphor) that if the customer ever has an alternative she may try to retaliate for the rude chef. In the IS world, when the customer finally decides to retaliate, she pronounces the dreaded word outsourcing. Outsourcing is to IS managers what a silver crucifix is to Count Dracula. But contrary to the internal manager's trepidations, outsourcing may be the best thing that ever happened.
-- Jerry Weinberg, Quality Software Management Vol 3, Chapter 13
[Tony Bowden: Software Engineering]
5:49:43 PM 
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venerdì 25 ottobre 2002
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Another pearl of wisdom from the ever interesting blog of Tony Bowden:
A major task of the software engineering manager is to help people in the organization develop their social skills, not just because the workplace is better when people are polite, but because social skills influence more and more the effectiveness of technical skills. Teaching social skills is an investment in problem resolution, but even more in problem prevention. As the organization learns to be congruent more frequently, the amount of time spent dealing with incongruence decreases.
Feeling unable to trade off either quality or schedule goals, managers are too often tempted to sacrifice the quality of human interaction, for which the soon pay the price in both quality and the schedule.
-- Jerry Weinberg, Quality Software Management Vol 3, Chapter 10 [Tony Bowden: Software Engineering]
10:15:31 PM
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mercoledì 23 ottobre 2002
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lunedì 21 ottobre 2002
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sabato 19 ottobre 2002
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ERP traps and pitfalls. Mark Cotteleer: via [Jinn of Quality and Risk] He stroke a point I care a lot:
Protect the data Information systems evolve over time in response to the demands of their environment. Managers presented with opportunities to expand an ERP solution or to provide targeted solutions for different constituencies across the firm must ensure that in executing these opportunities they do not allow IT infrastructure attributes to drift from the ERP-imposed standards that made them effective.
Most specifically, managers should protect data standards and integration. Departure from data standards introduces inefficiencies in communication and understanding as different parts of the firm must, once again, struggle to translate the information they obtain from elsewhere. Integration failures create repositories of information that may evolve along separate paths, serving different purposes. Eventually, the firm could find that, through a lack of discipline, its information systems architecture has once again evolved into a hodge-podge of non-integrated, non-communicating technology islands that hinder rather then support the business objectives of the firm.
11:51:42 PM
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venerdì 18 ottobre 2002
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giovedì 17 ottobre 2002
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The advertising section ruined it all!
Wired News goes XHTML. The Wired News site has undergone a major renovation and now uses the latest XHTML and CSS specifications. The result is impressive (smaller pages that load faster, better conformance to the accessibility guidelines, simpler maintenance) yet partial: the pages of the site are not well formed XML. [xmlhack]
9:05:27 AM
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mercoledì 16 ottobre 2002
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Mark Pilgrim on accessibility
The myths of web accessibility. Slashdot reviews Constructing Accessible Web Sites, by Jim Thatcher et al. I have personally read this book, and recommend it to everyone. [..]
The last myth (Web accessibility only helps people with disabilities) is the easiest, now that search engines rule the world. The next time someone stands up in a design meeting and claims that you dont have any blind customers, ask them if they care about search engine placement. Then remind them that Google is a blind user who reads the entire Internet every month, and then reports what it sees to millions of its closest friends. [dive into mark]
6:59:29 PM
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Bruce Schneier comments on one time pad.
So, let me summarize. One-time pads are useless for all but very specialized applications, primarily historical and non-computer. And almost any system that uses a one-time pad is insecure. It will claim to use a one-time pad, but actually use a two-time pad (oops). Or it will claims to use a one-time pad, but actually use a steam cipher. Or it will use a one-time pad, but won't deal with message re-synchronization and re-transmission attacks. Or it will ignore message authentication, and be susceptible to bit-flipping attacks and the like. Or it will fall prey to keystream reuse attacks. Etc., etc., etc.
9:20:02 AM
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A new article on Byte about threading (on pocket pc and palm os)
The most important design decisions you can make for your handheld solution are those that allow users to enjoy running your applications, because these same people will be buying your applications. Everything else is secondary. As handheld devices continue to incorporate innovative new features, software designers must always be mindful of the end user, and create responsive applications.
12:31:05 AM
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lunedì 14 ottobre 2002
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Fortune: The meaning of Google
"Larry and Sergey had tremendous scale in mind when they set up the software and the hardware," says Jim Reese, chief operations engineer. "They said we are going to be huge, and people will do millions and millions of searches using our tool" (hence the name Google, derived from the mathematical term "googol," the number one followed by 100 zeroes).
9:36:21 AM
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domenica 13 ottobre 2002
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Jon Udell on PKI
Remind me why I need a public key. Dick Hardt, founder and now CTO of ActiveState, was prowling around the digital ID conference asking a deceptively simple question: "Why do I need a key pair?" ...
Now Dick draws a distinction between my key, issued to me, managed in my certificate database by my software on my device, and a key that lives on a device (phone, PDA, computer) to which I can authenticate.[Jon's Radio]
10:20:24 PM
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sabato 12 ottobre 2002
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Funny.
In fact, Perl was so moved by C++'s eloquence, it felt compelled to speak, though normally at these gatherings Perl would sit quietly in a corner, consuming pattern after luscious mouth watering pattern.
PHP, C++, I sympathize with you both. My own state is a sorry one at times.
I match and match and match and match, first cryptically and now objectively, but still I match and match and match. And match after flawless match is taken for granted though I'd like to see others match with such style and elegance as myself.
Why, you can't mention "regular expression" without my name coming up.
But do I get any credit? No.
If Programming Languages Could Speak [Slashdot]
2:27:40 PM
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giovedì 10 ottobre 2002
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NYT: Malaria discovered in USA. This could be a good news. Maybe there will be some incentive to develop new drugs, now that someone could pay for them.
Two pools of malarial mosquitoes were discovered Wednesday near the Potomac River, one 4 miles and the other 6 miles from the Loudoun County homes of the two teenagers, who were given diagnoses of malaria over the summer, county officials said.
10:14:05 AM
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mercoledì 9 ottobre 2002
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Udell: The importance of email indexing
Someday we'll tell our grandchildren about those moments of epiphany, back in the last century, when we first glimpsed how the Web would change our relationship to the world. For me, one of those moments came when I was looking for an ODBC driver kit that I knew was on a CD somewhere in my office. After rifling through my piles of clutter to no avail, I tried rifling through AltaVista's index. Bingo! Downloading those couple of megabytes over our 56K leased line to the Internet was, to be sure, way slower than my CD-ROM drive's transfer rate would have been, but since I couldn't lay my hands on the CD, it was a moot point. Through AltaVista I could find, and then possess, things that I already possessed but could not find.
9:23:54 AM
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lunedì 7 ottobre 2002
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tilde
<character> "~" ASCII character 126.
Common names are: ITU-T: tilde; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; INTERCAL: sqiggle (sic).
Used as C's prefix bitwise negation operator; and in Unix csh, GNU Emacs, and elsewhere, to stand for the current user's home directory, or, when prefixed to a login name, for the given user's home directory.
The "swung dash" or "approximation" sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).
History of the tilde. So where does this leave us? Unsatisfied, no doubt. There is history here, but there are gaps. What happened at that watershed meeting in 1966? How did the tilde rise to prominence in the 1980s? When did it become a synonym for home directory? When did it migrate into the world of web servers to provide a cheap and simple way of giving individual users their own web sites? I dont know, and the lateness of the hour prevents me from continuing my research, a failing for which I apologize profusely. Goodnight, goodnight. May you dream of tildes, stars, and whorls. [ dive into mark]
12:38:52 PM
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giovedì 3 ottobre 2002
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Jon Udell praise the open source developers.
Open source release engineering: a higher standard. Suppose Microsoft, or any commercial software developer, had to package up not only the end product, but also the entire process for building it from source -- for dozens of slightly-varying platforms. The amazing thing is not that build processes sometimes need to be kicked or cajoled, but that they exist at all. It's a tribute to the power of scripting to automate wildly complex sequences of operations, and to the ingenuity of open source programmers who build and maintain all that automation in addition to the software that it supports. [Jon's Radio]
6:05:12 PM
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mercoledì 2 ottobre 2002
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Ozzie on Groove history. Happy birthday, Groove.
Five years ago today was my first day working on Groove - an incredible journey, and yet it's only just begun. In 1996, I had begun to feel some frustration within the Notes customer base as they were trying to push it in ways that it hadn't been designed for - particularly outside the enterprise - and as its eMail component began to dominate the usage model. Upon further analysis, this relentless drive toward eMail caused me to question the fundamentals of centralized, application server-based architectures as the basis for effective dynamic collaboration. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
11:04:15 AM
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martedì 1 ottobre 2002
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I did not tested before, but now I am the 53th Massimo in google. :-(
Demoted by Google.. From: Google To: Phil Message: You Suck.. It looks like our year of living abnormally high in Google's search results is coming to an end with this update. Ouch! I'm no longer on the first page either. Oh, well, I guess I need to find other ways to amuse myself then. [Sam Ruby]
9:27:09 PM
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© Copyright
2003
Massimo Morelli.
Last update:
27/04/2003; 16.17.29. |
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