Edward G Nilges's blog

Apgar scoring cannot score the willingness to do what one knows is a bad job of work

Woz speaks. Nilges says, whussup with that Steve?

The Democrats have won Montana and in Virginia, the Republican candidate has conceded, creating Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Rumsfeld has resigned.

The defunct Reagan "revolution", a disaster for the American programmer, is over, it appears.

It was a disaster for the American programmer because it gave his control over his work product to managers who proceeded to use computers to fool the poor.

The doctor can start with observations of the patient that are more or less objective, although even in medical science, the observation of the patient factors out the patient's reaction. The problem in MIS development is that the starting point is not objective, consisting instead of texts which are a mixture of honesty and obfuscation, and the interests of a subset of the real stakeholders.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented a deliberate attempt by several major companies, including Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, to put Air America radio out of business! Traffic directors at ABC affiliates have received memos from several companies including HP and MS that specifically request that their ads not air on Air America with the result, of course, that Air America gets no ad revenue.

I got into work at ten after ten AM and settled down to read my email. At 10:30, Bob arrived with a sigh at his cubicle next to mine. As he was unpacking "his" laptop (the laptop that the company gives us to work on at home), Ted-the-manager emerged from his samesize cubicle and said, "Bob, do you have a minute?" Bob had a minute, of course. Ted settled his bulk into the chair adjoining Bob's desk and said, "I need to talk to you about your screen saver, Bob".

In this article in the New York Times James Glanz describes great waste in Iraq on the part of US contractors including Halliburton, whose overhead charges reached 35%. One abuse that caught my eye was the fact that as the Iraqis waited for promised electricity and water supplies, the contractors basically sat around while planning presumably had to be performed.

"I'm ready for my closeup, Mr DeMille" - Sunset Boulevard

A coworker last Friday asked me to be a "professor" extra at Hong Kong University for a new espionage drama by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), set in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1939.
 
I reported for work on time and was first kitted out as a prewar British professor, in a light-brown tropical tan three-piece, double-breasted, double-vented suit. My tie had to be retied in the Windsor knot favored at the time by British men.

...sound like white paper BS at first but then turn out to be very interesting as long as you stick to what you know and can prove! Orlink is onto something, and this is the plain fact that MIS decisions are indeed "bodies in n-space" from the purely mathematical view point.

Andy Tegethoff writes that his team must perform "the labors of Hercules" merely, if I understand him, to get to the starting gate of having management trust his new technology. In the actual legend, Hercules performed his labors on behalf of an ungrateful goddess, and when he returned home, he slaughtered his wife and his children...

Further comments on Ravi Mohan's blog post about enterprise software development vs. tool development, picking up where Part 1 leaves off.

I've read Ravi Mohan's interesting comments. First of all, enterprise software can be precisely as interesting, in an ideal world, as plumbing. If the "enterprise" is space exploration, then "enterprise" software is MORE interesting than Yet Another Compiler...

Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of the little boy who thought he was going to get a pony for Christmas. Christmas morning came, however, and there was no pony in his yard...only a pile of horse manure. His Mom found him shoveling furiously at the pile of horseshit, and asked him what he was doing. He said, "Mom, there's a pony in here somewhere!" The "pony" in this article is a tech suggestion. It's at the end of a broader social analysis of why caching can be harmful.

I stopped reading Hal Fulton's interview when he said it was a good idea to "sneak" Ruby into production. Part of programming professionalism includes self-discipline and creating solutions with tools that the corporation knows about. Not, passive aggressive technical games. Passive aggression merely makes actual social change, and even corporate change, that much more difficult.

It hasn't been remarked, but it is remarkable. World-wide, and most recently in Mexico, elections have been improbably close, and this phenomenon began with the 2000 US election. I say "improbably" because landslides were more common...prior to 2000. A preliminary, semi-mathematical theory: