Human Costs of a Bad Economy

I have been traveling around the country for the past 90 days through the Midwest, the east coast and the south and staying in a lot of hotels.  Most recently my hotel in Daytona Beach.

Now my hotel is right on the ocean.  In fact my balcony faces the ocean and the pool.  All in all not a bad place that I got for $32.50 a night.  Now Daytona Beach is a resort town.  All most all of the business here comes from the tourists.  With the state of the economy there are virtually no tourists around, the hotels and restaurants are getting almost no business.  Ditto for the tourist shops.  You can almost watch them close all up and down Atlantic Boulevard.

As a geek I make pretty good money.  As a matter of fact I probably make more then any of the cooks, house keepers or shopkeepers around here.  it is sad when you hear some have cut back on hours to less then 20 hours a week.  I mean they already don't make that much and now they make half of that and most of them are not that well off.

You can only hope it gets better soon for all of us.

Sunny Florida

Well, I am the second elgant coder to be outside of the Boise, Id area.  I have moved to Florida and am currently camped in a hotel on Ormond Beach. 

Although I enjoyed my 10 years in Boise it was time to move on.  After being riffed off from Micron I was pretty much at ends as to what was keeping me in Boise.  I had originally moved there in 1997 to be around my mom.  After she died in 2003 there was little keeping me in Boise except for momentum.  I had no real reason to change.  Micron's layoffs gave me a good reason to think about moving on.

I have always wanted to see a shuttle launch and wanted to be around a ocean again.  So with those two criteria Florida was really the only choice.   I spent two months driving across America seeing family I had not caught up with in years.  In addition I spent some time just seeing the country.  Something I have wanted to do for years.  I traveled 9000 miles in 60 days and went from one end of the country to the other.  A great trip for me and the cat (although I am not sure the cat would agree :-)).  I will be posting some blog entries about the trip over the next few weeks.

For now I am planning on staying on Florida for a while.  I will start looking for full time work next week.  I am excited about the change and looking forward to some new challenges.

The Tablet PC

I recently took a tumble (anyone who knows me will tell you I am clumsy) and hurt my right arm. Needless to say this is not good if you and a computer geek. Fortunately at the same time I was trading out my Dell 1720 for a new dell lattitude XT. So I am actually writing this blog entry. Literally! I am using the handwriting recognition features of the tablet PC.

So far I am very impressed. The tablet does a better job reading my handwriting they some of my friends do (hi joe!). It is interesting that it reads my writing better then my printing. For some reason all those years I actually thought my printing was easier to read then my writing. Guess I was wrong. I am pretty sure I actually can write faster than I can type.  This as is kind of sad knowing ] have made my living writing computer programs for the last 30 years.

I will have to bring up my visual studio 2008 environment and see how easy it is to code this way. l should point out I am doing this all on Vista Ultimate. I did not like Tablet XP any where as much as Vista.

Steve and Bill On-Stage

In case you have not seen any of these videos of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on Stage talking about our industry past, present and future.  A fascinating discussion.

Paraphrasing a classic comment from Gates.  We want a computer in every home.  We never thought about the fact that we would have to be a BIG company to do that...

Gates is the Rockefeller of our times

Interesting article on MSN on Bill Gates and how his foundation is changing philanthropy today.  He will give away more money then Rockefeller did at the beginning of the century.  How will this change education and medicine in the next few years?  For example the Gates foundation is:

"..a foundation whose combined assets will one day exceed the budgets of all but 30 percent of the countries in the world"

Talk about having to learn how to scale :-).  I it will be interesting to see how he takes on this challenge.

Am I asking for too much?

I am currently participating in a interesting thread on Matt Berther’s bog on my podcast. I commented on his post Blasting open source because I felt my podcast was not meant to pick on up source projects although part of it could be interpreted that way. So since then what I have been explaining is why I don’t see any innovation happening in software today.

Although I like .NET and Java I think there has been no real innovation in software in the last 30 years. The primary things I see as the backbones of what we use computers for are:

1. Databases - CODASYL defined the standard for network databases in 1969 (RDMBS were first described by Codd in the 1960’s and 70’s at IBM)
2. Word Processing - The Unix Concepts of text formatting for publishing came around in the 1970’s (as a matter of fact UNIX was first designed as a text editing and text formatting system). Although UNIX text processing is much more akin to HTML then WYSIWYG editors like MS Word
3. Spreadsheets - First patented in 1971, VisiCalc was actually being distributed for the Apple II in 1979
4. General Programming via high level Languages -
   a) Interpreted Languages (If you want the full deal Smalltalk was around in the 1970’s. Object oriented, dynamically typed and reflective)
   b) Compiled Languages (Cobol was created in 1959 and C in 1972)
5. WIMP Interfaces - (Pioneered by the Xerox Alto in 1973)
6. The Internet which started in 1969.

So if you take as a baseline of 1980 we have had these systems around for at least 28 years. Most have been around longer. Sadly I have been programming for 30 years so I have played with some of these at one time or another in my career.

Do I expect too much? I can’t help but see the feature set of these products though and say that on the whole the pace of innovation in computers disappoints me. Those advances we do see to have picked up come about more because of hardware advances then software advances. As Brooks says in No Silver Bullet

…the anomaly is not that software progress is so slow, but that computer hardware progress is so fast.

As I see it we continue to attack the accidents of software engineering. I quote from Brooks

If we examine the three steps in software technology development that have been most fruitful in the past, we discover that each attacked a different major difficulty in building software, but that those difficulties have been accidental, not essential, difficulties.

The three that he describes include:

• High Level Languages. Now this would include java and C#.
• Time Sharing.
Now this would be the entire concept or personal computers, laptops, PDA’s etc…
essentially ways to get the answer immediately.
• Unified frameworks. Here
he talks about UNIX, but you can also include in this the .NET framework and the
Java class libraries.

So my contention is that one of the reasons software innovation is so slow is we spend too much time reinventing what we have had since the 1970’s and not focusing on advancing the art of computer science. Am I wrong? So many of the things we see in the Open Source and Commercial World are clones of each other. Are we as developers taking the simple way out? Sure we can design a new enhanced WIMP interface, but that is because we already know most of the requirements except for that little tweak we are going to make? It is fun to do these kinds of projects because we don’t have to think about the hard stuff like requirements analysis, test cases and design. We just set down and code another build system, or IOC Container or OS.

We continue to attack the accidents because the essentials are so difficult. I was doing some reading on the System.Speech namespace in .NET and Natural Language Processing in general. One of the big things required to get these to work is to put together grammars for what we want the computer to do once it has recognized the words. The problem is almost no one is building the grammars. Why is that? Because it is hard. It would require us to step outside of the fun and simple things we do and take on some difficult tasks. The same thing could be said for coming up with systems that use common component architecture. How much simple would things be if we started building components and plugging them into applications. As David said in my Podcast, I want to drag and drop a CRM solution.

What does it take to get to these? We have to give up on some of the fun things we do and start attacking the essential problems in software development. Am I expecting too much? Are we as Software Engineers unable to tackle our discipline as a engineering science and start innovating again?

** Portions of this entry were posted a a comment on Matt’s blog ***

Founding Brothers

A friend of mine, Chuck Steffens, has convinced me to start reading Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis.  I must say this is a fascinating look at American history.  Specifically the time of the American Revolution and the founding of the republic.  I will do a book review in the next few days, but so far (up to chapter 3) it is a great read.

I downloaded it to my Kindle last night at midnight and started reading it.  The only thing I can say about the kindle is I am glad they don't have a ton of Computer Books available on it yet.  I would go broke every time I went to amazons web site. :-).  The science fiction and historical stuff us costing me a fortune.  On the plus side I have finally started to read Winston Churchill's series on World War II after having owned the books for years.