Development

I've talked before about the importance of getting children into computers early, not just using them, but programming them too Most kids today can use computers pretty instantly. Even those of us in the IT trade can be outclassed by some kids who seem to grasp the fundamentals of computing (and perhaps more importantly the importance of playing and stretching computing in ways us adults don't normally think about), but even with this supposed advantage, most kids have little interest in programming them to do what they want.

Click to activate IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft removes the restriction on ActiveX controls caused by its patent dispute with Eolas. Not to mention where the nuts come from...

Microsoft's Pete LePage offers the good news:

Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls ... Some sites required users to “click to activate” ... Microsoft has now licensed the technologies from Eolas ... Because of this, we're removing the “click to activate” behavior from Internet Explorer! It’s important (and cool) to note that this change will require no modifications to existing webpages, and no new actions for developers creating new pages. We are simply reverting to the old behavior.

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Are we ready for a civilization that's based on pervasive computing and increasingly complex "systems of systems," all dependent upon software written by unlicensed people calling themselves programmers? In this Computerworld interview, software guru Grady Booch, chief scientist at IBM Rational, talks about the enduring difficulties of software development and the complexity of today's systems:

Software [development] has been and will remain fundamentally hard.

 

Most of the interesting systems today are no longer just systems by themselves, but they tend to be systems of systems. It is the set of them working in harmony. We don’t have a lot of good processes or analysis tools to really understand how those things behave. Many systems look dangerously fragile. The bad news is they are fragile. This is another force that will lead us to the next era of how we build software systems.

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Yes, No, No ...

Pilot fish gets an opportunity for a week of training, room and board paid for by the training company. All he needs is money for travel and approval from his boss. "I sent an e-mail to the boss asking for his approval to apply," says fish. "I received a reply in the affirmative. Then I sent another e-mail asking how to go about getting travel to said training. Travel denied. I explained that the training was free and that the room and board was free -- I just needed to get there and back. I included the documentation, and I even offered to pay my own way if I could have an authorized absence for that week. Denied again. Result: Opportunity lost. Why am I leaving this job again?"

What happened to American engineering over the last 20 years?  It used to be such a great profession.  It used to be a secure profession where an engineer could spend his or her entire career at one company.  They were valued as the brain trust of the company where all the inside knowledge resides. 

I'm SO TIRED of new windows that are missing their menus or toolbars that I just want to scream. (Oh wait, I just did.)

Can we make it illegal to use "toolbar=no, location=no, status=no, resizable=no"? Please. Pretty please.

I can handle the new window. I can't handle the loss of functionality.

What is the deal with kind of nonsense?

Do you, oh, high and mighty, control-freak of a web developer (and I use that term lightly -- petty minded user of FrontPage is probably more accurate) think I don't know how to use a browser? Do you think I'll do something horrible like type a different URL in the location bar and go somewhere else? Do you think I don't know how to close the window and accomplish the same thing in another browser window? What did you gain by removing the functionality from the software on my computer?

Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and inventor of UML, is using his position to preach the gospel of moral responsibility to software developers. During an interview with Charles Cooper at Cnet, he says that it's not simply a question of whether or not something can be built, but whether it should be built.

Good point, so far as it goes. And it doesn't go very far.

Sitepoint is offering its very useful Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications book free for 60 days as a PDF download. If you're at all interested in playing around with Ruby on Rails, or want to know what all the hoopla is about, I'd strongly recommend the download.

This is the same book I used as a key source for my piece Hands on with Ruby on Rails.

The headline says it all: here is a four-part YouTube video of computer legend Chuck Peddle, speaking at VCF East back in June, remotely from Sri Lanka to New Jersey via Skype.  The receiving PC with Skype crashes at the end, which is sort of poetic... Grab some popcorn and enjoy!  (Note: Chuck's lecture begins around 15 or 16 minutes into the video.)

Woof! It's Tuesday's IT Blogwatch: in which IBM and Google help teach students how to use cloud computing paradigms. Not to mention making a Theremin...

Grant Gross reports:

Google Inc. and IBM have teamed up to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six universities signing up so far. The program is designed to help students and researchers get experience working on Internet-scale applications ... [using] the relatively new form of parallel computing, sometimes called cloud computing, [which] hasn't yet caught on in university settings ... techniques that take computational tasks and break them into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across many servers at the same time [which] allow Web applications such as search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly ... A cloud is a collection of machines that can serve as a host for a variety of applications, including interactive Web 2.0 applications. Clouds support a broader set of applications than do traditional computing grids, because they allow various kinds of middleware to be hosted on virtual machines distributed across the cloud.

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Happy Thanksgiving, Eh? It's Columbus Day's IT Blogwatch: in which Target gets a spanking for not being accessible to the blind. Not to mention why grass snakes can be deadly...

Linda Rosencrance and Dan Nystedt are very much alive: [You're fired -Ed.]

A federal judge last week ruled that Target.com, the home page of retailer Target Corp., must be accessible to blind persons under California laws. The ruling could extend state and federal disabilities statutes to the Internet, experts said. At the same time, Judge Marilyn Patel, of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, certified a lawsuit filed against Target by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a class action on behalf of U.S. blind Target.com users.
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The national and California NFB organizations, along with blind college student Bruce “BJ” Sexton, filed a lawsuit last year alleging that Target had failed to make its Web site accessible to the blind and then ignored the issue when confronted with complaints. The lawsuit contends that Target.com violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ... [which] require retailers’ Web sites to help blind patrons shop in a company’s physical stores ... and two California statutes ... [which] require that commercial Web sites allow handicapped persons to perform the same tasks as other patrons.

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Babson Insight has an interesting interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on what it takes to design and develop great high-tech products. The passage below is pure gold -- relevant to IT developers and anyone who strives to innovate. Can I convince you to hang it on your bulletin board?

Wozniak: I think design and development should always be done from a point of view that believes the human being is worth more than the technology. You just have to have it in your head that you will apply a lot of effort to bend your hardware and create your software design so that the user has a nice easy flow in using this product. In this way it fits their life as they live it now. The opposite way is where someone decides to put in all the functionality in a way that causes the user to modify the way they do things. This difference is where the huge value is, at least for Apple.

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There-there. Don't cry, it's only Thursday's IT Blogwatch: in which Microsoft releases the source to .NET. Not to mention a periodic table table, made of wood...

Paul Krill feeds the whales: [You're fired -Ed.]

Opening up to developers, Microsoft Corp. is releasing its .Net Framework libraries under the Microsoft Reference License, which allows viewing of source code but not modification or redistribution, the company said on Wednesday. The release gives developers the opportunity to better understand the inner workings of the framework's source code, Microsoft said. Microsoft's efforts fall under the company's Shared Source initiative, which allows for sharing of source code; Shared Source has been viewed as Microsoft's answer to open-source, in which users can view selected source code.

Microsoft also plans to introduce a capability in the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 developer tools package to allow .Net Framework developers to debug into .Net Framework source code ... The final release of Visual Studio 2008, which is due later this year, will support the ability to configure the debugger to dynamically download the .Net Framework debugger symbols and corresponding source code from a Web server hosted by Microsoft ... Visual Studio 2008 also will include support to automatically retrieve .Net Framework source files on demand from Microsoft. This means source code for the ASP.Net GridView and BaseDataBoundControl classes cited by Microsoft do not have to be already installed on the machine before the debugger is started.

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That’s not our headline. It was suggested today by someone on the Department of Homeland Security Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report mailing list after it started a spam-like inbox flood. 

Here’s the story: DHS provides a daily summary of news items for its mailing list subscribers,  which includes people with security and disaster response roles, vendors and news media. But its mailing list was misconfigured today. Anyone who hit "reply all" reached everyone one the list,  triggering some 200 emails -- and counting.   The temptation to reach out was too much.  It quickly became a big networking party. (Although as time went on, frustration mounted prompting more and more people to send emails to everyone on the list asking everyone to stop sending emails to everyone on the list.)

TDT 3D has put together a comparison of six 3D modeling tools. I am not going to get too deeply into the finer points of the products and what the TDT 3D reviewer thought of them, but many readers got quite worked up about one of the tools, Blender 3D 2.45.

What was the problem? Certainly not the price. Blender is a free, open-source tool that is compatible with all major desktop operating systems and even a few relatively obscure OSes -- Solaris, FreeBSD, and Irix. The features also got high marks. The reviewer gave Blender props for UV tools (a 3D texture-mapping technique) and fluid simulation, among others.