Tag: technology

I’ve never been much impressed with any of the “best practices” concepts, from Six Sigma to Agile. They strike me primarily as a way for midwitted bureaucrats and technical workers of modest talent to cover their asses and claim failure can’t be their fault because they are Doing Everything The Right Way:

The Twelve Principles of Agile Software

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5.  Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6.  The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7.  Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8.  Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

My thoughts on each point:

1.  Sounds good in principle. In reality, the customer seldom knows what he really wants. The good designer has to anticipate his user and provide him what he doesn’t know he wants yet. “Early and continuous delivery” sounds like more ass-covering stuff. “It’s not our fault, he approved the deliverable” is what this sounds like to me.
2. Bullshit. That’s fine in the early stages. In the middle to late stages, this is what is known as “mission creep”.
3. Good for testing, but against, strikes me as more CYA, especially if it is going out to the customer.
4. No. Hell no. While the biggest failure of which I’ve been a part was the fault of the chip engineer failing to listen to the marketing guy, I did talk to him on a bi-weekly basis. Talking to him daily wouldn’t have helped. The key is that the technical people must LISTEN to the business people, not see their faces on a regular basis.
5. Yes.
6. No. I run into this problem frequently. Most companies would rather have an inferior employee they can talk to face-to-face than a better one who is external. This makes no sense, especially if they then leave the position vacant because they can’t find anyone local who is good enough.
7. Yes.
8. Dubious. Sounds like snake oil to me.
9. True, but obvious to the point of being tautological. “Program good code that works properly!” Okay….
10. True. But I prefer “don’t reinvent the wheel”.
11. No. A certain amount of flexibility is desirable, but there must be someone who is accountable for the vision and someone to make the hard decisions. Which is to say a designer and a producer. The best designs most certainly do NOT emerge from self-appointed committees.
12. Yes, this is reasonable.

Overall, the entire concept stinks of being little more than client-marketing to me. “Hey, we’re AGILE-CERTIFIED, obviously we are much better than those guys over there who don’t have CREDENTIALS. All they have is a proven track record of delivering successful products, and we all know how little that means.

This could bring a rapid end to the continued growth of the global data-mining business:

The European Commission has warned EU citizens that they should close their Facebook accounts if they want to keep information private from US security services, finding that current Safe Harbour legislation does not protect citizen’s data.

The comments were made by EC attorney Bernhard Schima in a case brought by privacy campaigner Maximilian Schrems, looking at whether the data of EU citizens should be considered safe if sent to the US in a post-Snowden revelation landscape.

“You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” Schima told attorney general Yves Bot in a hearing of the case at the European court of justice in Luxembourg.

When asked directly, the commission could not confirm to the court that the Safe Harbour rules provide adequate protection of EU citizens’ data as it currently stands. The case, dubbed “the Facebook data privacy case”, concerns the current Safe Harbour framework, which covers the transmission of EU citizens’ data across the Atlantic to the US. Without the framework, it is against EU law to transmit private data outside of the EU. The case collects complaints lodged against Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Microsoft-owned Skype and Yahoo.

Schrems maintains that companies operating inside the EU should not be allowed to transfer data to the US under Safe Harbour protections – which state that US data protection rules are adequate if information is passed by companies on a “self-certify” basis – because the US no longer qualifies for such a status.

Fortunately, we can be certain that the federal government would never sacrifice economic growth for centralized regulatory power, right? This could prove a rather serious problem if the one of the proposed engines of US economic recovery turns out to be intrinsically illegal in most of the rest of the world.

I’ve noticed that between Russia’s move away from SWIFT, the support for the Chinese alternative to the IMF, the fall of Yemen, and the complete lack of European support for the USA’s adventures in Ukraine, the world appears to be increasingly disinclined to follow the US lead. This does not bode well for the US if it indicates that the global perception of its effective power is on the decline.

Why developers are terrified of speaking truthfully about Apple:

According to Ian Parker of The New Yorker, “Apple has made missteps, but the company’s great design secret may be avoiding insult.” It seems curious that they are able to avoid criticism and instead create a “reality distortion field,” in a way that so few other companies have been able to.

Some might explain this fear away as standard corporate procedure. Developers in relationships with Apple are argued to have been required to sign NDAs in order to test prerelease software. Indeed, some developers felt pressure to take down blog posts critical of iOS 7 because they did not want to go against their contractual obligation to secrecy. On the other hand, there are plenty of public screenshots and walkthroughs available during any of Apple’s releases and journalists and public commentators have made hardly a squeak when it comes to criticism of Apple, particularly relating to design. Non-disclosure agreements cannot be the explanation.

James Allworth, a former Strategist for Apple currently with the Harvard Business Review who partners on the Stratechery Podcast with Ben Thompson, sheds light on how Apple has gone about avoiding insult, and it has been anything but a passive strategy. He explains: “I’m generally pro-Apple. I love what they do, I’m completely invested in their ecosystem, I loved working there previously.”

You are surely noticing a pattern here where would-be critics are preemptively apologizing for admitting publicly that Apple is imperfect. Allworth was brave enough to continue at this point: “at the same time, it [Apple] shouldn’t be above criticism. But anytime you think about wanting to write something like this [anything critical] you just pause before pulling the trigger.”

In his days at Apple, Allworth recalls having been a member of a mailing list led by Apple’s Chief Evangelist at the time, Guy Kawasaki. It was on this mailing list that a brigade of devout Apple employees and fanatics would go about promoting Apple’s interests by destroying the opposition. Allworth described what was expected of him when Kawasaki would rouse the mailing list:

    I was one of the ones that used to send emails to journalists that said anything other than kind things about Apple. Like they used to post negative articles about Apple and a whole horde of Apple proponents would bear down upon this poor unsuspecting soul.

This is why you’re a fool to buy into their walled garden. It’s like volunteering to live on the wrong side of the Berlin wall. And it’s why they’re never going to own the game market that they threw away after the Apple II. Android will eventually beat out iOS on all mobile platforms for just that reason; game developers are among the few developers where the users are essentially platform-independent.

Eventually someone is going to figure out what Intel did back in the late 90s and realize that they can dominate the mobile platform with killer game applications across the various game genres. And it’s not going to be Apple. Because fApplism.

The Germans aren’t exactly known for it, but when they do it, they do it well:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the
Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for
Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted
all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back,
particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club.
And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a
restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that
he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of
the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop,
cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in
latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club
magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their
readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all
over Germany, which they did.”

This points out the only way one can reasonably expect to gain any privacy, which is by flooding the system. It is a known fact that figuring out what information is valuable is much harder than obtaining raw data in the first place, so rather than futile attempts to lock things down, one’s focus should be in flooding the data collectors with vast quantities of meaningless information.

A lot of people have laughed at me over the last few years because of the Warmouse, but I have to say, the 18-button brute is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to editing books. One of the new van Creveld books has nearly 500 footnotes and the process of adding them would be considerably more time-consuming if I couldn’t so easily cut, paste, backspace, space, enter, page up, page down, and delete with one hand.

I know that our tests reliably proved one could work 2x faster with the Warmouse interface, but on this particular task, I’m definitely going at a pace about 3X faster than before.