Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

As a follow up to my idea about email attachments, today I had a thought about information overload in email. I subscribe to a good number of mailing lists, but once in a while there are threads which simply don’t interest me. It could be because I’m not interested in Whotzit Technology or because someone has set off a flurry of discussion about non-topical matters.

As I mind the little skinner box for new pellets of email throughout the day, I have the obvious choice of deleting each message as it comes in, but it would be nice to flag the thread and ignore it so that new messages in the same thread are automatically deleted. If memory serves, there are parts of the SMTP header which identify messages as part of a given thread, so it should be possible to do this reliably.

I suppose I could also subscribe to mailing lists in digest mode, but that does little to reduce the noise and makes it inconvenient to be actively engaged in topic. If some spare time emerges, maybe I’ll look into making a plug-in for Apple’s Mail.app (a dumb name for a program if there ever was one) in the coming months.

Some kind souls have put together a cheat sheet of direct phone extensions to reach humans at various corporations. This will be most helpful for certain occasions where personal help is needed, but I have a prediction:

Call volume will increase because people like to reach someone accountable to give personal help. Also, some people will be too lazy to try self-help methods, such as voice systems and web sites, but I think the majority will fall into the former category. Companies will notice the increase of calls and eventually notice that their byzantine phone maze has been subverted, at which point they will reconfigure the phone system or send threatening letters to web sites for publishing useful information.

Maybe one or two companies will consider that offering useful personal assistance is a competitive edge, but they will be the minority. It seems like a lost opportunity for the majority, but for now I will enjoy the benefit of streamlining my communications.

Update (15 Feb ‘06): The URL has been updated and it looks like the original will go away at some point.

A Slashdot article gave me pause for thought. The questioner asks:

We’re at the point where we want to build out first commercial implementation which will require a handful of developers for at least six months. We really don’t have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team “gelled” etc. What we’d really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with.

With businesses cutting departments or startups failing, which often results in jettisoning a capable development crew, it seems that there ought to be a match here. The questioner is correct about the high cost of building a new team. Could wholesale adoption of a team be a new model to pair these two situations?

I’m surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Maybe it should.

Sixty years ago on November 17th 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, said before an audience of Western ambassador’s in Moscow, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” The error of the statement is a forgone conclusion for most who have witnessed the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, but was he wrong? Is this the end of history, as Fukuyama predicted?

To recap, Francis Fukuyama made the following bold and controversial statement in 1989:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

This sentiment has held up for fifteen years and stands in stark contrast to Khrushchev’s expectations for a world dominated by Communist ideology. It would seem that society has struggled for thousands of years to organize itself and the job is done — western Democracy is the de-facto way to politically organize ourselves. It seems that Democracy is on the march everywhere.

But we know that history continues to unfold and after a period of pragmatism people will yearn for ambitious goals. If these goals include the abolition of poverty and gross inequality, it is hard to see how such ends will be met within the framework of Western liberal democracy. We may yet need to discover how to organize ourselves to overcome basic problems with the human condition. It is clear to most observers that Communism didn’t work, but I think it would be rash to conclude that it could never work.

By this I don’t mean to endorse central planning, statism or totalitarianism — the unfortunate side-effects of 20th century Communism. Rather, I think it would represent a colossal lack of imagination to assume that the only manner of self-organization for humanity is to “live and let live.” We can, and should, set the bar higher. Doing so without coercion is the conundrum that all socialists wrestle with.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the current political void is filled. While most American progressives were not advocates of Communism, the existence of the Soviet Union offered a counter balance and affected the political middle ground — a locus that has shifted dramatically to the right in the past fifteen years. Liberal policies could be enacted to placate the radical left and conservatives benefited from a definable opposing force. I find it telling how William F. Buckley laments the state of discourse among the right in the Wall Street Journal:

Conservatism is no longer sutured together by “the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union. . . . But in the absence of those challenges, there were attenuations. Those attenuations at this point haven’t been resolved very persuasively.”

For now we craft policy without the counter balance we’ve become accustomed to, but in sixty more years we may know whether Khrushchev or Fukuyama made the right prediction. Then again, the future has a way of working itself out in ways that no one expected. We are constantly reordering our social structures. “Men make their own history,” wrote Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, “but they do not make it just as they please.”

To all merchants:

As we approach the Christmas season I’m sure that you are eager to sell a good number of baubles and whatnot. I’m told that you do about half of your business during the holidays. This is a big time for us all, which brings me to my request.

If it isn’t too much trouble, would you kindly refrain from pitching Christmas-related items before I’ve properly enjoyed Thanksgiving? It is crass and poor taste to upstage the turkeys and pilgrims. They don’t like it, and neither do I.

And another thing — kindly stop reminding me how many “shopping days” it is until Christmas, as if shopping were the sole function of the holiday. I seem to recall a celebration of a birth, but amid the tinsel and secularism the memory escapes me. Maybe you can do something helpful about this.

A VNU Net article quotes Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group at SAP, with the following infamlitory remarks:

“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society,” he said. “And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP.”

Clearly he finds the communal ownership of software as a threat to SAP’s business, but his comparison raises all sorts of interesting points to consider. First of which, is what one means by an “IP-based society.” If one means that inventions are honored and that we grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, few would dispute the value of this. However, if one means that a business may patent the use of a knife and fork, for no other reason than the patent office may let it slide through, then champions of free culture have a valid argument for IP socialism, or whatever you want to call it.

The curious thing is that socialism has primarily emerged as a response to those who would control the means of production. Should it be any surprise that open source is a response to those who would control the means of software use and dissemination? Of course, open source isn’t synonymous with socialism or any of its tenets, but if Agassi wishes to claim they are one in the same, then I feel content to take the comparison to its conclusion. Which is — companies like SAP represent oppressive control over software process and society benefits from a legion of programmers who don’t buy into the idea that SAP owns a business process any more than I own a hopscotch rhyme.

Update (26-Nov-05): An excellent article in Slate puts the issue in clear relief:

Gates, Ballmer, and Agassi say that open source is software socialism that stifles innovation. But it’s the capitalists who have the tech world stuck in the mud. Microsoft’s ham-fisted control over its software has done more to set back technological progress than a thousand open-source projects. When was the last time there was a truly revolutionary advance to the computer desktop that Microsoft dominates? By pocketing licensing fees, it has slowed entrepreneurship. By leveraging its monopoly over the desktop, it has prevented competitors from introducing products that would have offered an incentive for Redmond to innovate.

Viva la revolucion, komrades.

In software development I’m rather fond of using unit tests and various measures to improve code quality. A Vanward Technologies interview with Cedric Beust touches on the issue of code coverage and I agree with his conclusion.

While I recognize their value, my experience with coverage tools is that they tend to make you obsessive about things that don’t necessarily matter. Coverage tools can be a distraction- you obsess over the last 10% of code that isn’t covered and you forget to test some essential functionality that your users depend on every day.

While it can be satisfying to cover all the code with unit tests, this as productive as using a profiling tool to address 100% of the code. Software has hot spots that warrant quality control measures as well as performance tuning, but it is generally a bad use of resources to chase after the last 10%.

I first came to know about Kathy Sierra’s work five years ago when I stumbled on to the JavaRanch. Her penchant for graphic communication is clear from her many projects, including the Head First book series at O’Reilly. This is my rather long-winded way of saying that her recent article on the value of pictures and words in describing software process speaks to me strongly. Her conclusion:

I’m always amazed when teachers do eleborate white board drawings, but never put them in their books or articles. Or when engineers can do fabulous napkin drawings to explain things to colleagues, but never put them in their books or articles.

I couldn’t agree more and I plan on making a concerted effort to make product specifications more visual in nature.