Rodolfo Ruiz Blog

Nuevo Blog

2006-07-17T09:59:00.000-05:00

Para todos aquellos (como 2) que reciben mi RSS, este post seguro será una sorpresa después de tantos eones sin escribir. Bueno, es nada mas para decirles que apunten su rss reader a http://rodoblog.adoxis.com que es la dirección de mi nuevo blog.

Saludos!!!

360, PS3 and Revolution

2005-12-21T23:08:00.000-06:00

As the number of days left for Christmas shopping dwindle, it becomes harder and harder to find one of the most popular gifts this season - the XBox 360. If you can't find one, don't worry - it may turn out that the XBox (and the PS3 for that matter) are missing the boat when it comes to video games.

When you think about the "Jobs to be Done" regarding video games, perhaps the most important job is allowing the game player to escape from reality for a while and become immersed in a new world. Sony and Microsoft have decided that the best way to do this is to make the pictures and graphics on the screen as realistic as possible. Both are moving along the sustaining curve in that the traditional measure of performance for video games has been graphics. Both the XBox 360 and the PS3 have incredibly sophisticated graphics processors and support High-definition outputs. Both produce stunning graphics. And both have hefty price tags.

Nintendo has decided to go a different, and perhaps disruptive, route. No high definition for the new console, the Revolution. And while the graphics processor will be capable, it's not the cell processor that's going into the PS3. The price? Estimated to be half of a fully loaded XBox 360 or PS3. So what's the big deal? The controller.

The wireless controller eschews the typical joystick controllers used by the PS3 and XBox 360 in exchange for motion sensitivity. Imagine your character walking in the forest and encountering a dragon - a quick slash of the controller results in your character making the same slash with his sword. A lunge forward and your character lunges. Don't aim your gun with a joystick, aim it with your hand like a real person would do.

Nintendo is betting that the way to a more immersive experience is not through higher quality graphics. They believe that the graphics capabilities of the new systems are overshoot. Instead, they argue, make the gaming experience more real by having the player get more physically involved.

It's a new approach in an industry that has been focused on graphics for a long time. While it remains to be seen how successful Nintendo will be, they have to be commended on their attempt at disruption.

So if Santa doesn't bring an XBox 360 to your house this Christmas, it may not be the disaster that Microsoft would have you believe.

xUnit and testing frameworks

2005-12-08T14:48:00.000-06:00

Kent Beck published a unit test framework for the Smalltalk language in 1999. The architecture of SmalltalkUnit (or SUnit) represents a sweet spot, an ideal balance between simplicity and utility. Later, Erich Gamma ported SUnit to Java, creating JUnit.
JUnit in turn begat CppUnit, NUnit, PyUnit, XMLUnit, and ports to many other languages. A dizzying array of unit test frameworks built on the same model now exists. These frameworks are known as the xUnit family of tools.

All are free, open source software.

xUnit Family Members

Some of the most popular xUnit test frameworks are listed next, with brief summaries of their target language and testing domain. This is just a sample of the many xUnit-derived test tools. Anything else to add?

JUnit
The reference implementation of xUnit, JUnit is by far the most widely used and extended unit test framework. It is implemented in and used with Java.

CppUnit
The C++ port of JUnit, it closely follows the JUnit model.

NUnit
The xUnit for .NET. Rather than being a direct port of JUnit, it has a .NET-specific implementation that generally follows the xUnit model. It is written in C# and can be used to test any .NET language, including C#, VB.Net, J#, and Managed C++.

PyUnit
The Python version of xUnit. It is included as a standard component of Python 2.1.

SUnit
Also known as SmalltalkUnit, this is the original xUnit, and the basis of the xUnit architecture. It is written in and used with the Smalltalk language.

vbUnit
vbUnit is xUnit for Visual Basic (VB). It is written in VB and supports building unit tests in VB and COM development.

utPLSQL
utPLSQL is xUnit for Oracle’s PL/SQL language. It is written in and used with PL/SQL.

MinUnit
A great example of a minimal but functional unit test framework. It is implemented in three lines of C and is used to test C code.

xUnit Extensions

Beyond the xUnits themselves, many add-on tools are available that extend the functionality of existing unit test frameworks into specialized domains, rather than acting as standalone tools. A representative set of popular extensions is listed here.

XMLUnit
An xUnit extension to support XML testing. Versions exist as extensions to both JUnit and NUnit.

JUnitPerf
A JUnit extension that supports writing code performance and scalability tests. It is written in and used with Java.

Cactus
A JUnit extension for unit testing server-side code such as servlets, JSPs, or EJBs. It is written in and used with Java.

JFCUnit
A JUnit extension that supports writing GUI tests for Java Swing applications. It is written in and used with Java.

NUnitForms
An NUnit extension that supports GUI tests of Windows Forms applications. It is written in C# and can be used with any .NET language.

HTMLUnit
An extension to JUnit that tests web-based applications. It simulates a web browser, and is oriented towards writing tests that deal with HTML pages.

HTTPUnit
Another JUnit extension that tests web-based applications. It is oriented towards writing tests that deal with HTTP request and response objects.

Jester
A helpful extension to JUnit that automatically finds and reports code that is not covered by unit tests. Versions exist for Python (Pester) and NUnit (Nester).

Anything to add?

CMMi in a box???

2005-12-06T19:05:00.000-06:00

From microsoft's website:

"MSF for CMMI Process Improvement provides process
guidance designed to accelerate the achievement of
Level 3 - Defined Process - in the staged representation
of the model. Using this process template is no guarantee
of receiving a level 3 appraisal, indeed only 17 of the 21
process areas are covered. However, this process template
has been designed to enable a software development
organization to achieve level 3 with a minimum of
bureaucracy and the lightest possible
documentation set."

This whole "Process Improvement in a box" idea wigs me out.

Using a "Process in a box" will give me a requirements template, but it
_CANNOT_ ensure that I will fill out the template _WELL_, and that is the
real goal, right? One of the KPA's for CMM level 3 is Organizational
Training Program, and I don't see any process in a box providing that out of
the box. So processes in a box that promise level 3 are ... I'll let you
fill that in.

I am ESPECIALLY concerned when people try to pair CMMI and Agile.

Those two concepts have very different value systems; trying to mix them
is kind of like making a peanut butter and fish sandwich - yeah, it's
technically possible, but why would you want to do that?

Personally, I am much more interested in accomplishing "People Improvement" to create CMM-X level CULTURES.

Wallace, Gromit & an Engineer?

2005-12-01T08:40:00.000-06:00

Tea has never been the most exciting of products. In fact, the most exhilarating
thing to have happened in the tea industry in the last hundred years was the
invention of the tea bag - that universal, ubiquitous repository for the stuff
that finally put an end to that revolting experience of finding leaves on the
end of the tongue. Nevertheless, even the creation of the tea bag could hardly
be called a revolution.

And sadly, consumption of tea has been declining too. It has been eschewed by
the great British Public, of all people, by that other noteworthy beverage -
coffee. They have, it would seem, been enchanted by the smells of the Ethiopian
Sidamo, Sumatra and Gold Coast blend wafting its way out of one or more of those
US transplants along the local high street.

So what to do if you are unfortunate enough to be a tea manufacturer? Is this
the end of the great British cuppa? Not at all. Not if you are as clever as the
marketing folks at PG tips, that is. They didn't just sit and cry in their beer
and watch their market slowly evaporate, did they? Not at all.

By enrolling the help of the Nick Park's distinguished creations Wallace and
Gromit, this noteworthy division of Unilever shipped an incredible two and one
half thousand million tea bags in the space of one month.

That's right! By inserting a limited edition ( is 1.5 million a limited
edition?) Mug with the likeness of Gromit the Dog into its 160 pack boxes, the
tea flew off the shelves like hot cakes. And put tea back on the map for good.

Since the launch of this highly successful marketing campaign, the Gromit Mug
has been a sought after item world-wide, with collectors in Oregon even paying
over $25 dollars to one underpaid editor who bought entire consignments of the
things from Sainsbury's. (No names, please! - Eddie.).

So what does the success of the Wallace and Gromit characters in the tea
business have to do with an engineer's industry? Quite a lot, actually.

You see, like tea, many industrial products - such as bearings, pumps, memory
devices, air conditioning systems, computers and sometimes, some software
offerings - have also become commodity items. And they've also recently come
under fierce price pressure from far eastern manufacturers in China, Korea and
Taiwan. The makers of such products are clearly in the same hot water 'space' as
the people in the beverage business were.

But taking a leaf out of PG Tips' books, here's their chance to differentiate
their products. And make some money too. All they need to do is to put the same
sort of magic back into their products - to personalise them, to mass customise
them, to create an air of value if you will - in much in the same way as the
folks at PG tips did.

Now I'm not suggesting that a licensing deal with Nick Parks, the gifted creator
of the Wallace and Gromit, is the answer to everyone's problems. But thinking
along the same lines as the marketing folks as PG Tips possibly couldn't do any
harm.

We are the web

2005-11-30T16:54:00.000-06:00

I love this description of the World Wide Web of today, from Kevin Kelly in his recent Wired article We Are the Web:

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn’t everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Woa! Sounds like an awesome achievement, doesn’t it! But we’ve only scratched the surface. Remember, we’re in a world of accelerating change, so this is just the beginning. Strap in folks, we’re in for a wild ride!

Ringtones by Stephen Wolfram

2005-11-29T13:27:00.000-06:00

Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read two years ago, and one year ago and last summer, but instead just stared at it each day.

Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.”

Nerd heaven.

No more Slashdot for me (yes, you read right)

2005-11-22T15:13:00.000-06:00

Three sites I use often are Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular. If you want to find out what’s hot right now on the Internet, those sites will tell you (although Memeorandum usually gets the news even before these sites).

I saw a blurb on Programmable Web about DiggDot.us, which launched yesterday. Diggdot.us combines results from all three of those sites into one very clean interface. Stories have been de-duplicated, and they claim to have additional content as well.

Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.

If you are a news junkie, this is for you. Or at least, it will be once they have an RSS feed. Shame.

You read it here first

2005-11-22T15:09:00.000-06:00

MicroSoft’s Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) last Monday´s morning, a “specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.” And, wow, is Microsoft starting to get with it. They’ve released it under Creative Commons license, the same license that covers the RSS 2.0 specification. Anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon the specification even for commercial reasons.

See Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer and the FAQs.

For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.

SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.

New companies will be built on the back of SSE. And you heard it from me first!

What agile programming is not

2005-11-22T14:38:00.000-06:00

In the immortal words of Dilbert/Scott Adams, "Agile programming doesn't just mean doing more work with fewer people." See the cartoon.

Trend Spotting

2005-11-22T14:15:00.000-06:00

Wired Magazine has a great article this month on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard Tim’s name was in 1994 at NetGenesis when GNN appeared on the scene. I remember when it was acquired by AOL for $11 million and I thought to myself “holy – there could be real dollars in this Internet stuff.” The article reflects the way I think of him and the business he’s created.

Wired also had a short fetish review of the super-bitchin Optimus Keyboard. I’m ready for about five of these when it finally ships.

7 Questions to ask

2005-11-10T11:52:00.000-06:00

Due to recent experience, I wanted to post on some thoughts about recruiting and things to consider when trying to enter a small, mid-level company. Keep in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive list, merely a suggested seven.

If you are receiving employee options, what is the number of fully-diluted outstanding shares? Typically, option grants are a key component of compensation in a start-up and are often promoted as such. But the details surrounding stock options are often complex and confusing for non financially-oriented individuals. It is best for employees to understand as much as possible about their option grants (this subject could be the topic for an entire series), but the first place to start is to ask how many outstanding shares there are. From that point, one can calculate the percentage of the company an employee will own and a better gauge of the magnitude of this compensation component. It surprises me how many startup employees I know who are excited to have received a grant of x number of options, but never bothered to ask what relative percentage of the company that translates into.

Has there ever been a down round, a flat round, or a CEO change? Any of these three events are an indicator that the startup has faced some difficulties in the past and may not be on track moving forward. If one of them has occurred, prospective employees should seek out as much information as they can the context of the situation. After all, there are exceptions to blind the assumption that these are a black mark (e.g. a founding CEO stepping aside to make room for professional management could be an indicator of successful growth). However, if any of these issues have arisen, it is a signal to dig deeper into the health of the business.

What is the burn rate and how much cash is in the bank now? Even if a start-up is successfully executing, it could still face a cash crunch if it is not yet profitable. Employees should ask to find out how much longer the company will ride without the infusion of another round capital. While the actual answer to this question won’t necessarily provide a definitive answer about the ability for the company to access both cash and capital, it will open up a discussion about it.

What is the plan for exit strategy and its timeframe? The answer to this question is a soft one with many factors, and can always change depending on circumstances. However, it is best to find out management’s view of a possible exit strategy. Is the company pieced together for a quick flip, building for multi-year significant value creation, or plan on holding for the long term as an eventual cash cow (for founder/investors)? These expectations will affect not only how long employees may be working for the company as it exists today, but more importantly, the resulting surrounding corporate culture.

Could you meet the CEO, the founder(s), and those on the management team? Start-ups are all about the people involved. And there are a small number of people who are largely going to affect the organization. Even if an entry-level employee is going to work in engineering, I think it makes sense for him/her to meet the VP Sales; likewise, a marketing manager should meet the CTO. Yet it might not happen unless the prospective employee requests it. The handful at the top are going to have a profound affect on the future of the company as a whole and the position (regardless of function), and therefore it is best to meet as many people possible in the company possible before joining.

Are there plans in the next six months to hire anyone along the chain-in-command between your position and the CEO? Start-ups often have key vacant positions open as the companies expand and grow quickly. I recommend explicitly asking if there is an anticipated change in the reporting structure in the foreseeable future, as any modifications or additions (even those a few rungs up in the ladder) could significantly affect employees’ roles and responsibilities.

How many employees did/does/will the company have six month ago, now, six months from now, a year from now? Employee count is a strong (but not a perfect) proxy for management’s and investors’ outlook on the business. Start-ups hire ahead of growth (or at least predicted growth), which translate into a viable company, a healthy work environment, and future internal opportunities. Financial figures and projections are helpful indicators, certainly, but are often a distortion of the full picture (especially early on in a company’s cycle). The growth in employee count (or lack thereof) directly signals how much work needs to be accomplished how rosy the expectations are.

How Much Software can be Developed in a Year?

2005-11-07T14:13:00.000-06:00

QSM, a company that maintains a vast database about software projects, looked into how much code we can develop in a year. Click here(PDF) for the full report.

Only about 10% of projects they studied delivered more than 75,000 SLOC
in 12 months. But those efforts spent a pile of money cranking so much code so fast. These big projects burned 117% to 419% more cash than a similar 139,000 SLOC project delivered over a longer period. Fast is expensive.

About 60% of the projects shipped under 10,000 SLOC in a year.

The report concludes that the biggest program practically possible in 12 months runs about 180,000 SLOC, and will use a team of 70 to 100 people. It will cost two to four times more than the same project with a more relaxed schedule.

That works out to 150 to 214 SLOC per programmer per month.

Now, that is a men's room *TGIF Post

2005-11-04T16:02:00.000-06:00

Am i wrong?

Beat your competition, do not eat the crumbs

2005-11-01T16:04:00.000-06:00

Sorry that it took me so long to post again, but I have been preparing and learning about an obscure art in which sometimes we engineers cannot handle our big, fat brains. Marketing and sales.
Being confronted with some new soon to have responsibilities, I've been extensively studying and learning from the market.
And so, I began to wonder what do credit card services, mobile phone carriers, and financial services all have in common? An extreme dedication to the practice of arbitrage marketing.

Arbitrage marketing is used when you know that your products and your competitors’ products are equally unhelpful and hard to use, and that for every customer you tick off so much that they leave your fold for your competitor’s, that your competitor has done the same and their ex-customers will be coming your way. It is a strategy that forces customers to change lanes, but knows that since the road wasn’t built correctly, no one is going to get anywhere any quicker.

Example. Should I hold a BBVA credit card, or one from Santander? As far as I’m concerned, the service is equally bad, the interest rates are equally preposterous, the web-sites are equally as hard to navigate, down as frequently and calls to technical services are equally poorly responded to. So the only reason I would pick one over the other is because the other one ticked me off. And then when the new one ticks me off, I move again.

Every week I get about three offers from BBVA and SAntander’s competitors, so when I feel like it, I’ll move beyond them. It’s a commodity and no one is providing differentiated service.

Example. Mobile phone carriers. I use Telcel. Why? Because my father used Telefonica and had horrible coverage, a friend or two uses Unefon and hates her service, and another friend uses Iusacell and is always complaining about her network outages. Those are obviously not representative situations and I’m not meaning to speak badly about any carrier. My point is, I chose my carrier based on minimizing an expected poor result.

What though would I think about carriers, credit card services etc if I just made my judgments from advertising?

Iusacell is a hard worker and is always making sure I am taken care of, Telcel has a very attractive spokesperson (not sure how this would influence me, but they seem to want to stick to this strategy), Unefon is cute and the logo always looks to be having so much fun, and Nextel is the thinking-person’s carrier, just look how clever their ads are.

Citibank makes my world possible in a way no other credit card could do, American Express is relevant to me, just witness the introduction of the urban-oriented ‘black’ card, and the rest of the banks are always smiling.

The images projected by the advertising are beautiful, but totally irrelevant. I already have an opinion about carriers (or credit card services, or cars, or banks...) based on my experience and the experiences of those close to me. Their reputations have preceded them.

So all the money they spend advertising during baseball playoffs or anywhere else is in support of the arbitrage marketing strategy. They need to make sure that when I’m at my wit’s end with Telcel, that I choose them when I switch.

What though would be the opportunity if you decided that arbitrage marketing is not the correct strategy any longer, and you decided to follow proximity marketing?

Seth Godin describes proximity marketing as the opportunity to differentiate yourself in a crowded category by being BETTER than your competitor.

And how do I learn that you are better than your competitor? I certainly do not learn that from the latest creative campaign, no matter how fun-loving, image-relevant or attractive. I learn that because I experience your product as being better or, even maybe more importantly, I am told by someone I trust that your product is better.

Think about it from your customer’s point of view. Think how powerful it would be if your customer chose you not to minimize an expected bad experience, but because they are glad to engage with your product and company?

Arbitrage marketing is widespread and it is ridiculous, and wasteful. But it opens opportunities for those who are willing to walk away from it.

Why I don't write cook recipes

2005-10-20T14:57:00.000-05:00

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1) 532.35 cm3 gluten
2) 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3) 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4) 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5) 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6) 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7) 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8) Two calcium carbonate encapsulated avian albumin coated protein
9) 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10) 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 BTU/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radical flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six and seven until the mixture is homogenous.

To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredients nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 X 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnson's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

VC Fundraising Up 62%

2005-10-18T10:39:00.000-05:00

The latest Venture Economics Report is out. Venture capitalists rounded up another $5.4B during the third quarter. The total amount committed to 45 venture funds during the three months ended in September represented a 12% increase from the $4.8B collected by 54 funds at the same time last year.

Read - U.S. venture firms raised more in the first three quarters of 2005 than all last year (Red Herring)

Weblogs.com now belongs to Verisign

2005-10-17T18:03:00.000-05:00

Boy, the scent of money is in the air these days. The latest report is that Dave Winer has sold weblogs.com to Verisign for $2.3 million. This is an interesting one because it seemed crazy (see below) when I first heard about it, but now that I've heard it from multiple sources, who knows?

Verisign is interested in blogs and RSS (another of their acquisitions in this space will be announced soon) and it's not hard to see why Dave would sell weblogs.com (the site needs some firm financial backing to keep from buckling under the ever-increasing strain of all those pings), but to Verisign? To me, Verisign embodies the idiocy and ineptitude of the BigCos Dave often rails against...the BigCo to end all BigCos. If true, those are some odd bedfellows indeed.

Todo a 12

2005-10-13T10:59:00.000-05:00

One of the most recent success stories in the retail business in my country is the fast-growing dollar store franchise, Waldo's Mart. It goes all the way to the edges and tells a compelling low price story. Bringing in the Pesos from October 6th's LA Times talks about the onslaught of one price retailing.

From the article:

One-price retailing is winning converts south of the border as Mexicans discover the joys of snagging mini-blinds, underwear and a six-pack of root beer for about a buck each. Like their American cousins, the Mexican chains offer food, beauty products, cleaning supplies and other staples, along with a grab bag of name-brand goods and novelties....

"People are not afraid of going into these dollar stores because they know how much they'll spend," said Monsonego, a managing director at Neoris, a consulting firm....

"It makes perfect sense" that the stores are catching on in Mexico, said Todd Hale, a senior vice president at AC Nielsen. "Rich people love low prices, poor people need low prices."

The low price story, when told transparently and honestly, is a powerful powerful message. WYSIWYG is also a failsafe.

Michael Moritz in the Holy Land

2005-10-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz goes to Israel and freaks them out saying that while Israel is nice, China and India are where it's going down.

Read - “Internet entrepreneurs can call us any time” Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz tells Israelis to realize that the new world is China and India. (Globes Online)

How will we die?

2005-10-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

David Brooks in the New York Times (if you have acces to TimesSelect, you can access the op-ed article here) explains how we are going to die:

"Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corporation study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition and we'll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another 20 percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We'll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few
life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die.

But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer's disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take 8 or 10 or even 20 years, during which we will cease to become the person we were. We will linger on, in some new state, depending on the care of others.

As the population ages, more people will live in this final category. Between now and 2050, the percentage of the population above age 85 is expected to quadruple, and the number of people with Alzheimer's
disease is expected to quadruple, too."

Bottom line: Neurological diseases and psychiatric illnesses represent the greatest threat to our lifestyles and economy. Beyond the untold human suffering, the economic burden of brain-related illness is already greater than $1 Trllion. What will it be in 2050?

What's Google really up to?

2005-10-11T11:36:00.000-05:00

Finally, somebody has figured it out.

Finding time to fix bugs before release day

2005-10-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

Pundits (and many other sources) predict Microsoft's Vista (neé Longhorn) operating system will comprise at least 50 million lines of code… assuming the troubled OS is ever released.

50 million lines of code. The scale is staggering. Expect a staggering number of bugs.

Though it’s easy to poke fun at Microsoft, I’m impressed with the company’s recent performance. Windows XP is, at least for me, a very stable product. The much reviled update service seems to be working; reports surprisingly suggest Internet Explorer has fewer security vulnerabilities in recent months than Firefox. But any 50 MLOC program is a monster. How will they test it?

Well-written C and C++ code contains some 5 to 10 errors per 100 LOC after a clean compile, but before inspection and testing. At a 5% rate any 50 MLOC program will start off with some 2.5 million bugs.

Testing typically exercises only half the code. It’s hard to devise tests that check rarely-invoked exception handlers, deeply nested IFs and nested loops. So the 50% test coverage number suggests Vista could ship with some 1.25 million bugs.

There are better ways to do testing that do produce fantastic programs. Code coverage, for instance, can insure every branch and conditional has been taken. It’s required by the FAA’s DO-178B level A standard for safety-critical avionics.

But the costs are unbelievable. It’s not unusual for the qualification process to produce a half page of documentation for each line of code. A 50 MLOC program’s doc might be 25 million pages long, consuming 50,000 reams of paper - a stack 2 miles high. Will Vista undergo this rigorous evaluation? Probably not.
Maybe Microsoft routinely uses a very disciplined approach to software engineering, including the mandatory use of code inspections. Again, the numbers are interesting. Since good inspections typically find 70% of the system’s mistakes, after inspection Vista might have 50 million * 0.05 bugs/LOC *0.30 defects left after inspection, or 750,000 bugs. If testing finds half of those, they’re still shipping with some 375,000 problems. Bummer.

What if Microsoft were certified to the highest level of the Capability Maturity Model? Level 5 organizations employ a wide range of practices to generate great software. A CMM5 project typically ships with 1 bug per thousand lines of code. For Vista that works out to 50,000 bugs.
This isn’t an anti-Microsoft rant. It’s a peek inside the problems any organization has when building huge programs. Though we do indeed have ways to build better code, the costs are huge, and scale exponentially as the program size increases.

The largest commercial embedded systems I’m aware of are some cell phones which have around 5 million lines of code, generally a mix of C, C++ and Java. Though few if any of these companies work at CMM level 5, that 0.1% bug rate would yield 5,000 defects, a hopelessly buggy product. One can only hope that the most important features (like making a phone call) work well enough for most users most of the time.

Firmware size doubles every 10 months to two years, depending on which surveys one believes. Programs are gigantic today, and will be simply unbelievable tomorrow.

Here it comes

2005-10-03T12:22:00.000-05:00

For a few months now, I've had that feeling of the impending rush, the way you might feel just before a thunderstorm or at the beginning of a much-anticipated play. I used to feel that way when a copy of Wired or Fast Company hit my mailbox in 1996...

The web is changing, and so fast it's almost impossible to keep up.

But Emily is trying.

Check out: Emily Chang - eHub.

In just a few weeks, she's collected literally hundreds of new companies/projects that are examples of things that are turning the web upside down.

Warning. If you are a buzz lover like me, this page can cause serious addiction.

Hang on, web 2.0, here we go.

Google's monthly secrecy

2005-09-30T13:40:00.000-05:00

Only 400 of the leeter than thou will be in attendance. It's by invite only and they're going to announce something that will change everything!

So is anyone else terribly excited for google's announcement?

I figured it would be best if I left speculation till a later date. I have been contacting some of my sources relentlessly in an effort to know a little more. Well, thus far I have come up with very little information.

I will stay on top of this for all you loyal readers out there... I have been searching the web for different clues; and I already emailed a friend I know who works at google. A peon, but a peon that is closer than I am to the google empire.

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