Topical Tropical

I got up this morning and rearranged some energy to affect the world. That's what I do for a living according to Ron Burk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzUuCwyk5DA

Here's an interesting video explaining how navy mechanical computers used to work -

Part 1 - http://www.eugeneleeslover.com/VIDEOS/fire_control_computer_1.html

Part 2 - http://www.eugeneleeslover.com/VIDEOS/fire_control_computer_2.html

I remember playing with gears as a kid and discovering some of their mathematical properties. But I never went as far as using cams to compute trignometric functions!

I like the minimalistic look of this blog - http://blog.nuclearsquid.com/

Markus blogs mostly about coding - the look works very well for that purpose.

I found this an interesting read. Mostly because it resonates with my own experience -
http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2009/12/stuff-ive-learned-at-microsoft.html

Here's something new I learnt yesterday about the middle east - every house has a little indicator stuck on the ceiling pointing towards Mecca. My Emirates flight had a Mecca locator up on the projector every so often. Many people carry a Mecca locator GPS device on them. Every one is quite aware of the direction to Mecca as their primary direction.

All that orientation means that more people know the direction towards Mecca than the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W). This has some interesting implications for an application we're developing for here. We can't for example show a layout of a house and orient it to North and ask people to pick where they want their network points installed. People would just get confused. We have to orient our maps towards Mecca, or show a little Qibla arrow as they are called.

Someone did the leg work and found some real evidence about software metrics:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/nagappan-100609.aspx

The results are interesting, but not surprising if you've developed software for a while:

• "Code coverage is not indicative of usage" - Your hot spots need good code coverage, but not your cool spots.
• TDD projects take 35% more time to complete, but are 60 - 90% better in terms of "defect density".
• Confirmed that having more assertions reduces defects. However, you can't just mandate their use. Developers must have a culture of using them.
• Organisational structure matters a lot (herding your cats)
• Geographical distance doesn't matter much if your distributed team feels like they're working on the same team. Here's an interesting quote - "Most people preferred to talk to someone from their own organization 4,000 miles away rather than someone only five doors down the hall but from a different organization."

Finally a reasoning that makes sense to me about the question about software as an art or science.

When I tried to get to gmail.com, and Safari wouldn't go there, I blamed Safari!

So here's how it happened:

While waiting for my turn with the bank teller I started googling define:teller. Why are they called Tell-ers I pondered.

A frail voice from the right asked: What's that?

me: An iPhone

I looked at the voice, and it came from an old woman - no younger than 70.

frail voice: What does it do?

me: ummm… I’m browsing the Internet. It has the Internet.

frail voice: Hmmmm… You’re on the Internet? Over here?

me: Yes, it has the Internet. This is a web browser, but there are other things it can do too.

frail voice: Is it a phone? Can you make calls on it?

me: Yes, it’s a phone too. You can make calls.

And so we went. Her eyes lit up every time I did something unexpected like scrolling or zooming with my fingers. She liked the way my fingers glided all over the pretty screen.

When I told her how much I was paying for it every month her eyes lit up even more. Apparently she was paying $50 for her home phone, and about the same for the Internet… and it was all stuck at home!

Her partner sitting next to her grumbled something to her. My time with my teller had come. I smiled at her confident that she was going to get an iPhone soon.

I should go into sales. I'll find out about tellers some other day :-)

This looks like an expensive race condition at a casino.