YTechnology

A friend posted this image, and naturally, I laughed.  I shared it with other friends, and they laughed too.  That this situation was so widely recognized, however, made it cause for crying rather than for laughing. Stating the obvious, estimates are not deadlines, and buffers -- proper spacing between milestones -- are needed for good  project management.  In practice, this advice is lost, and the result is bad software. Failure to implement buffers ignores the unexpected: people leave, requirements change, a show-stopping bug is found. Without buffers, one unexpected problem cascades to all the milestones downstream. Some project managers play it "close to the vest."  They really do have buffers in the schedule, keep them a secret, and hope the developers continue to work hard to meet the original deadlines.  The hazard here is that the developers will make (unnecessary) compromises to meet them. "Do we have time to add an extra field in the dat...

Einstein : So Mr. Simpson, what makes you say the universe is shaped like a doughnut and is expanding?  Homer : Mmmm, expanding doughnut. Einstein : Do you think the expansion is due to dark matter and dark energy? Homer : Dark matter? Oh, you mean chocolate. There's lots of energy in chocolate. Einstein : Hmmm, chocolate? Homer:  Mmmm, chocolate.

Pi day (3/14) was 10 days ago, and my blog post is late.  Modern scientists tell us, however, that there is no such thing as free will, and that my lateness was pre-determined, unavoidable, and thus arguably, "not my fault." The "no free will" thought experiment goes as follows: imagine we are all physical systems where every interaction can be known and measured.  Given enough data and computational ability, identifying cause and calculating effect delivers predictable outcomes with 100% accuracy.  If we accept determinism, that our lives from birth to death have already been set, where does our moral responsibility go?  Why try at all? The Atlantic wrestles with these questions in There's No Such Thing as Free Will (But we're better off believing in it anyway) . The sub-heading gives it away, indicating that scientists have publicly walked back their argument, "Ha ha, we were just trolling all of you," but privately still think we have ...

Where did that idea come from? How difficult was it to bring the idea into reality? What does it feel like to develop a major program? Susan Lammers interviewed 19 programmers along these lines to capture and understand what spawned the microcomputer industry.  With such an eclectic group (click on cover image), Lammers touched on the popular platforms, languages, and applications of the day, including CP/M, BASIC, and VisiCalc.  She also explored the boundaries where programming met music , mathematics, and gaming. One of my favorite quotes in the book came from the  conversation with Bill Gates where he talked about "technical inversions": GATES: The old rule used to be that a manager of a programmer was always a better programmer, and there were no what we called "technical inversions," where a programmer works for somebody who doesn't know how to program. We still follow that philosophy: At certain levels we've got business managers, but we don...

Limit Up Limit Down Calculator in Beta Luldcalc is an iOS app I wrote to calculate price bands in accordance to the rules put forth by the LULD Committee:  http://www.luldplan.com/index.html In addition to being a basic calculator, there are buttons to select tier 1 or tier 2 stocks, and also buttons to double the bands for market open and close. For Testers A public beta is now available at: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gWOth57S The link will introduce you to Apple's TestFlight app which is used to gain access to the beta version of LuldCalc.  You'll need an iPhone running iOS 8 or later. Install the TestFlight app and you'll find an icon that looks like this: Open the TestFlight app, and you will be presented with a screen to redeem LuldCalc: Have fun and let me know your thoughts. Privacy Policy It is more than rude to sell information about you without your permission.  We don't do that and we'll find another way to make a ...

When Google Fi first rolled out, what was notable was its pricing scheme.  Paying only for bandwidth you use, the plan was well suited for light to moderate data consumers.  Unfortunately, Google Fi was exclusive to select Android phones, and as an iPhone user, I could only look on with envy... until recently.  Sometime around November or December 2018, Google Fi became available for iPhones, and I was ready to switch from my current carrier, VirginMobile. When I signed on with VirginMobile, it started out as a great deal: "unlimited data" for $1 per month for the first 6 months, and then $50 per month thereafter.  The average monthly price over the course of a year came out to $25.50, but the longer I used VirginMobile, the higher the average price would be, and what began as a great deal would eventually become a bad deal, especially for someone who doesn't use much data. Moving to Google Fi was mostly a matter of ordering the sim card, having an unlocked pho...

It's not unusual for computer people to also be car guys and gals.  Cars are another form of hardware to explore, test, optimize, and modify.  My TSX Wagon review below first appeared on Edmunds' enthusiast car website under "InsideLine: Readers' Rides."  Edmunds have long since changed their format and the article is no longer there.  I am republishing it here with a few updates. First Impressions My wife tells me the first thing women notice about men are their shoes. Shoe size not withstanding, she explains that the kind of shoes, and the condition they're in, say a lot about who a man is, and hint at what he hopes to be. The shoes on our base trim 2012 Acura TSX Sport Wagon are 17 inch Michelin Pilot HX MXM4. In the Michelin lineup, these tires slot between the MXV4, which lean toward comfort, and the Pilot Sport A/S, which are geared for performance. Does this wagon live up to its luxury sport aspirations? On the outside, the wagon's ov...

Quincy Larson, a teacher at freeCodeCamp, wrote an excellent post on Medium, Why is hiring broken? It starts at the whiteboard .  I nspired, I wrote my own essay about the whiteboard problem and shared it on  Medium  back in May 2016.  I've reproduced it here partly for posterity, and partly because hiring software developers is still a broken process and worthy of discussion.  See my December 2018 post  The Best Selling Tech Book on Amazon Is ...  for more thoughts about this. A long time ago, when I applied for my second software development job after college, I was thrust in front of whiteboard and asked to code a rudimentary strcpy() function. I felt uncomfortable, with one hand grasping a marker, and the other hand — fingers really — improvising as an eraser. I wasn’t doing very well, as one interviewer looked unimpressed. The other, however, apparently saw something more in me, and put me in front of his PC and fired up the editor. ...

Anyone involved in computer programming should be familiar with the works of Donald Knuth (the K is hard and the name is pronounced Ka-Nooth).  If not, the New York Times can remedy that, having recently published a profile on Knuth titled The Yoda of Silicon Valley . Wise he is.  Show he does, the dark and light arts of algorithms: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms Volume 2: Semi-numerical Algorithms Volume 3: Sorting and Searching Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms A very important concept, however, can be found in the title.  While students study computer science , Knuth reminds us it's still an art .  In that sense, I would compare his books to the collected works of Shakespeare -- creative, insightful, but difficult to read and better understood in a study group or book club.  Whether Knuth or Shakespeare, their works are rarely read in their entirety, but their impact can still be felt throughout society. Programming is a science, ...

The trackpad felt firm and did not click readily.  Channeling Sherlock Holmes, I deduced the culprit was a slightly swollen battery pressing up from underneath.  Well, that and an alert ⚠️ on the menu bar clued me in that it was time replace the battery. A trip to the local Apple Store confirmed my findings.  But Apple couldn't replace the battery because they didn't repair machines older than five years (something about keeping parts in stock).  My MacBook Pro was a late 2012 model, or six years old.  The Apple Tech referred me to a third party authorized repair center, but in that moment, I decided to try the DIY route with iFixit . On their website, I looked up my model and purchased the appropriate battery, along with the Apple specific tools I needed to complete the swap.  I also found well written tutorials, a difficulty rating, and feedback from other do-it-yourselfers.  This battery replacement was easy and at $102.89, cost effective. M...

The Borg were a fearsome adversary introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  With a collective hive mind, they assimilated entire worlds, stealing their technology and enslaving the population to serve as drones.  Able to adapt to and neutralize any defense thrown up by their victims, the Borg were relentless. While much has been written about the Borg, here are some little known facts about them. Earth's first Borg was Earnest Borgnine. His name should have given him away, but he looked human and was very likable. A very distant descendant of his was Annika Hansen, better known as Seven of Nine. Earth did eventually succeed in capturing and containing the Borg.  Below is a monument to this achievement. And turning the tables, we see Christmas has assimilated the Borg. Happy Holidays!

After reviewing some books I considered classics¹, I wondered what tomes were popular nowadays.  I was disappointed to learn the #1 best seller on Amazon, in the category of data structure and algorithms, was Cracking the Coding Interview . Was this a direct result of raising students on "teaching to the test?"  Were companies so confused about hiring, they needed to administer a programming puzzle to find a suitable candidate? The reviews ranked  Cracking the Coding Interview highly, and the contents were substantive, not fluff.  Yet, glancing over to my bookshelf, I would want candidates to be acquainted with titles like these:  More Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley, The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick, and a classic-to-be, Joel On Software by Joel Spolsky. When software development was novel (circa 1980), a popular notion was that the skills required for programming were similar to the skil...

While not a book, it is a classic. Published November 1983 with 720 pages, the magazine featured articles describing the innards of the IBM Personal Computer. The clever cover art shown here was created by Robert Tinney.   Byte's Robert Tinney era spanned from the mid-70s to 1990, and his covers showed an uncommon thoughtfulness.  Think vinyl record album sleeves of the day, where the artwork could have meanings on multiple levels. Inside, you can find an interview with Philip Estridge, president of IBM's Entry Systems Division, and it included a discussion about keyboards. IBM was renowned for building high quality keyboards , and the unique tactile and audible feedback carried over to the keyboard for the IBM PC.  But the atypical placement of the left shift key and the return key, along with the function keys being on the left instead of across the top, prompted Byte to remind Estridge that " some customers were upset. "  The layout didn't match the keyboa...

Having already written about hardware tools , this post examines one of my favorite software tools, namely vi (aka vim ). I've chosen the photo essay format, because vi, like a clever joke, an amazing magic trick, or a masterpiece of art,  is ruined if you try to explain it.

Back in the monochrome days of PC computing, our choices were green on black, or amber on black.  The amber monitors actually cost a bit more because European studies of the day showed amber was easier on the eyes. Apple's Macintosh Computer introduced the black text on white paper look.  In emulating paper though, I found my eyes fatiguing more quickly.  I expressed to a friend and colleague that it felt like a swath of electrons beaming into my eyes, in which he replied, "okay." To this day, I'm not sure if he was in solid agreement, or patting my head and humoring me.  Judge for yourself with the sample color schemes I've created at the end of this post. With macOS Mojave, Apple introduced Dark Mode, which in essence, is a return to the calm and focused energy levels of green, amber, and black. I really like it, but one cannot live on dark chocolate and dark coffee alone.  We can switch between Dark Mode and Light Mode via the System Preferences. ...

More than 250,000 copies were printed, and yet, that was not enough to spare me countless programming and management fads.  So popular was this title that it earned a 20th Anniversary Edition and still, buzzwords like "pair-programming," "open workspaces," "test driven development," and "military style management" forced their way into my vocabulary. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., in 1964, managed the software side in the creation of the IBM 360 Mainframe Computer.  Working on the famed project also afforded him a view of the hardware management side, and by way of comparison, he noticed that no developments in software could, or ever would, improve productivity, reliability, and simplicity in the same way hardware improved with advances in electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration.  Noting Moore's law, Brooks writes " We cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years ."  The essays in The Mythical Man-...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ... it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair ... Sundial outside Goldwin Smith Hall Sundial in the Engineering Quad With apologies to Charles Dickens, I am writing about two sundials on Cornell's campus. One is outside Goldwin Smith Hall in the Arts Quad while the other is in the Engineering Quad. As an undergrad, I didn't pay much attention to either of these works of art.  Apparently, neither do current students as they hurried past me while I was taking pictures. But these two sun dials merit contemplation.  One is from the past, and with the gravitas that a layer of patina brings, provokes thoughts of time and mortality. The other looks outward, and with modern, shiny arms, seeks to embrace a future where the sky's the limit. When family and friends talk about college, and when college bound students ask me what they should s...