It took a good deal of time, but at last, it made it and it’s not Java. Also it proves that Microsoft was right. Back in the 90s Microsoft was darn right to fear Netscape and the web browsers for they would have stolen users away from Windows.Maybe it is thanks to Microsoft efforts to take Netscape off the scene (or even thanks to Netscape mistakes in riding the browser wave) that it took so long, but eventually we are about to no longer be bound to a specific OS or even a specific computer, everything is going on-line, accessible from every Internet node around the world. gmail, writely and irows are the forerunners of the next frontier, the on-line application that looks exactly like your desktop application. But as long as new toolkits and frameworks are developed more are to come. Until now I had a look at a couple of framework that looked very promising yet quite clumsy in performance. But have a look at Bindows. It is pretty fast, slick and responsive, it also looks and behaves exactly like a desktop application.
Ironically, although Microsoft fought Netscape and Java, it was Microsoft itself that developed the base components for Ajax technology. Funny, isn’t it?
Digital Fortress (Crypto)
If I had to pick an adjective for this book I would be in doubt between irritating and disappointing. Book publishing is a sort of time machine – first the last book of an author is published, then, if the book is successful, every writing of the author, going back to the youth works, is published. This is a nearly zero risk strategy for the publisher (since it fully harvest top money in a short time), while it is highly risky both for the reader (that can quickly became dissatisfied and lose the trust in the writer) and for the writer himself (that is going to lose his readers and therefore his income).
So what’s wrong with “Digital Fortress” (apart from being retitled into “Crypto” for the Italian translation)?
Most of the book. Let’s start from the beginning, the NSA is one of the American secret services. In this book, Dan imagines that NSA has developed a supercomputer that exploits the massive parallelism of one gazillion of CPUs in order to decrypt any message by brute force.
Then the writer proves his deep ignorance of every the most basic aspect of cryptography. He messes up bits with characters. Then he shows that he hadn’t spent a couple of seconds for looking up what the Caesar cipher is and presents a wrong description. Also he hadn’t a clue about computation complexity and that just adding a bit to a keyword the time needed for a brute force attack doubles.
He hadn’t the palest idea of how computer security works, what network security is.
If you succeed to get through all this jungle of ignorance then the story is that a hacker sends a code that cannot be decrypted by brute force (!!) to NSA to black mail them in order to reveal the existence of the supercomputer to the world (!!).
The hacker dies in the beginning and a civilian (the boyfriend of a cryptologist employed by NSA) is sent to investigate (!!).
Anyway the code is eating up the supercomputer resources because the NSA CTO is willing to break it (!!).
Aside from this technological nonsense, there are the usual Brown strengths and weakness. More of the last since this is an old writing by him (1998!) and for sure his technique has improved with time.
The book is not hooking as the others, has an intriguing rhythm, but it is not a page turner.
About the weakness, as usual characters are not developed, they are flat, doing their brain-work and acting like SWAT agents. Also, as already found, the reader is tricked away from the solution of many puzzles pretending that skilled professionals don’t see the obvious solution.
The plot is always the same. Four books, the same plot, the same main character betrayed by what he/she thought was a friend. So the usual upturn near the end, when the hidden plot is revealed.
Don’t buy it, unless you are doing some research work on this author, don’t read it either.
The Italian Way to Managing Programmers
Software project management… I read a number of books about this since, as I said in one of the previous post, it is an intriguing matter. One of the most frustrating aspects is how far are the best practices preached in those books from the industrial realities that I have experienced or that my friends and ex-coworkers tell me about.
I am quite confident that the techniques and approaches proposed in my readings are correct and proper, but everything has been written by Americans, based on researches in the US companies and deeply rooted in the US working culture.
Sometimes this is not applicable here in Italy. E.g. if in your team you have a person with a negative attitude toward the work and the team, at least one book suggests to fire him/her. This works in US where employees have not the right to be fired only for Good Reasons, not just because the employer changed his/her mind.
But this is mostly about details. There are stronger issues.
One could argue that part of the approach to working and to solve problems is part of the culture. I mean, every (US) study reports that programmers are by far more productive when they have their own private office. Peopleware suggests team-oriented (quiet) offices with no more than 4-5 people. In Mediterranean culture, people is considered much more socially oriented, so it could be possible that an Italian programmer would be more productive in an open space environment.
In the same way it could be possible that those, who would considered bad managers by the current literature standards, would be instead the best managers for Italians.
There is just one possible answer: try different approaches and measure the outcoming.
Given the current state of the Italian software development industry (which industry?) I am really doubtful that this could happen. Our industry is composed by ridiculously small companies that could face bankruptcy at every project gone wild. In this situation daring to risk a new approach that is known to work elsewhere, but could possibly not work here.
From my experience I could tell that I am much more comfortable (and productive) when the office is empty, rather than when it is crowded; also I am quite annoyed by interruption, not always, but I’d like to have a flag “do not interrupt” to have consistent time to concentrate. But… ehy I don’t like soccer, could I be considered Italian? 🙂
Apart from jokes, what do you think?
Sea, Sun, Sleep, Souvlaki
Just uploaded the pictures of my last holidays in Naxos, Greece. [images/photoalbum/Greece/200608/index.html|Have a look]!
Behind Closed Doors
According to the Dilbert’s rule everyone gets promoted to his/her highest level of incompetence. In the computer programming field this is dramatically true: brilliant programmers, after few years or less are turned into management. First they are promoted to lead programmer roles and, if they have the double DNA, they could grow in the management career. Why is required a double DNA? Because programming has to do with machines, while management has to do with people. And people tend to get upset when treated like machines.
Moreover programming is about reaching a goal worrying about the smallest detail, while management is about setting goals for other people letting them sort out the minutiae.
When I became a lead programmer I hadn’t a clue about this and no one cared about telling. I just was asked about when my team would complete the application.
The project was rather successful, but it could have been far better. That’s why, with the next job I started reading books about management.
This book is the first I read about the next level: it is about managing lead programmers. The book is simple, easy reading and well structured. It is not as brief as “One minute manager”, but is very concise; you can read it in a couple of days. More than once I wished that my boss had read it.
The authors use a fictional character to make their points and providing a running example. This character is a just hired manager to which six lead programmers are reporting and who has the goal of reducing costs and increasing the value of his departments work.
Authors propose a number of techniques for managing proficiently. As implied in many parts the job of the manager is to facilitate the work of people reporting to him/her, removing obstacles and providing support.
One-to-one is a meeting held weekly during which the manager meets just one lead face to face. The meeting lasts about one hour and the manager gathers information, provides supports, sets skill development goals and coaches the lead.
Team meetings are held weekly too and the goal is to provide integration between teams, exploit synergies, and prevent inefficiencies.
Coaching is to help leads to develop skills that are beneficial both to the company and to the lead herself.
The manager is encouraged in:
- Assess attitudes and interests of the lead teamers. It doesn’t make sense to force someone to do something that she’s not interested in;
- Managing by walking around, that is taking some time just to wander around in the teams to taste the mood of teams and the rhythm of work;
- Enabling the lead team jelling;
- Give feedback immediately. Do not wait to the next event (end of week, yearly review or the like), people need to know if they’re doing right or wrong immediately.
- Delegate
- Acknowledge good work
The book also instructs the reader on influencing and resolving contrast. Influencing is for the best of the influenced one, it can’t work in the long term otherwise. Resolving contrast is much sticking with facts and trying to put in the other one shoes.
The planning is dealt with a weekly resolution for a couple of month. It is defined by leads and their teams and can be arranged in terms of priorities or delegation by the lead meetings. Beyond two month the planning is very rough. Also the planning is suggested to be kept is a meeting room in the form of a panel with sticky notes so that it is clear for everyone that it isn’t carved in stone.
Problem solving techniques to employ in meetings are proposed. Many of them relies on the brain storming techniques with some modification to ensure that everyone (even shy people) could participate.
The book contains a great deal of tips and aids to do management things. Usually there is an example, the motivation, a ‘to-do’ list for the technique and then there is a recap frame at the end of the book.
I highly recommend this book to all those managing lead programmers or the likes. I still recommend this book to lead programmers since many of the presented techniques are still applicable in the smaller context and can be helpful to back-coach the manger in a more sound behavior.
Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception
As most engineers I know I have a rather childish part of me that refuses to grow up with the rest of the body and the mind. I still like to play, I like cartoons, I am fascinated by toys and so on. For the same reason I usually lurk in the teen section of bookstores because I’m sure to find some hidden pearls. Sometimes I get burnt (Time Stops for No Mouse was way too childish even for me), other times my research is successful.
Artemis Fowl is one of those successful cases. Although it is not at the same level of Harry Potter (here Good and Evil aree pretty distinct and the Evil one has no good intentions) it is an entertaining reading.
This is the fourth book in the series. The plot is following from the previous book: Artemis and Butler (Leale in Italian) have undergone a mind-wipe and they don’t recall anything about the people and LEPrecon. Opal is in coma, and Holly Short (Spinella Tappo) is about t be promoted.
In this book you’ll find the usual wealth of futuristic gadgetry, Artemis will be back in full… mind and will begin to grow some sentiments.
Opal plan is astute and well thought.
I found Folay (Polledro) character to be a little underutilized and he’s doing the idiot-savant a bright guy that cannot think about the obvious.
I am not fully satisfied by the dwarf Mulch Diggums (Bombarda Sterro). It seems like that when the writer finds no way out for a given situation he forges a new secret dwarfs ability. A cheap Deus Ex Machina gimmick to solve problems. I have not checked, but it is possible that this brings some inconsistencies to the previous books.
An easy book that flows in a couple of days full of techies and action.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
What happens when Terry Pratchett and the tale of the magic flute meet? The answer is this book. Of course this is not a story, so the magic boy, his cat and mice are a well organized mob that sets up mice infestations just to collect money to free towns from rodents. But Überwald is a county where chilling things are bound to happen. So the new town looks pretty strange even to this oddly assorted gang.
The usual Pratchett humor and wit are in this book as well. Although this is not one of my favorite Pratchett’s book, this is nonetheless a pleasant reading and some thoughts of the writer about intelligence, conscience and consciousness are really good food for thoughts.
Bajki robotow
Robots. Much time has past since the definition of “robot” although the idea of an artificial being created by men dates a long back. The current idea of robot includes electronics and software supplanting what was considered back in the fifties and in the sixties (of the past century) when a robot was built from gears, springs and occasional electricity wires. The brain was made by something yet to be invented then, so every author imagination could go wild on this. In this book brains are either made by mercury or by antimatter…. well to be honest still today we don’t know what exactly is supposed to fill the cloud depicted on robot schematics labeled with “brain”. We know how to build simple mechanism… basically computers on wheel, but we are quite far from devising a fully featured robot as presented in sci-fi literature. This is the fourth book by Stanislaw Lem that I read. I found the first two (Eden and Fiasco – “Il pianeta del silenzio” in Italian) to be really great. They are mainly focused on how much alien can be alien. Beings living in remote and insulated region of space could well spoil behaviors that we could hardly identify as rational or intelligent.
The third book was “Solaris” although focused on the same subject the narrative pace is extremely slow. The story is much oriented to introspection and character psychology.
My expectations for Robot Tales were quite high, so I was rather disappointed to find a collection of children stories. Robots are just and excuse for telling space stories. Some of the stories are pretty well written and touchy, some are just variation of the king-promising-his-daughter-to-the-one-who-will-do-something.
One of the main features of the book is being precise about astronomy science. Stars, nuclear reactions, radioactivity and so on are woven in the stories with a good degree of accuracy. This is intriguing (at least for the engineers within me), but is untuned with the robot description that is far from scientific accuracy.
It is hard to find a reader profile for this book. Children can be easily bored by scientific description, while teenagers are surely dissatisfied by the plots.
Note that the book is published in Italy with the title “Fiabe per Robot” (Tales for Robots) while in english has been translated into two volumes – “Mortal Engine” and “The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem“
Elianto
I should be wiser. Having a reading queue the length of a mid-sized transatlantic and being easily captured by a book, I should avoid bookstores like hell. This time I am delighted not to be so wise because otherwise I wouldn’t have stumbled in Elianto by Stefano Benni and I would have lost this good reading for God knows how much time yet. Usually, a book hooks me through the back cover lines (or the inside cover leaflet in case of a hardback). This time I opened the book and found a strange, hand-drawn map covering two pages. Wow seems something like “Lord of the Rings”! Then I turned to the back cover but I was already hooked and I already knew in my heart that soon some money would have left my wallet.
Benni always satisfied my reading taste and this time was even better. The story of Elianto is so poetic, evocative, and dramatic that the fact that is so well told is just its natural consequence.
The story takes place in a country named Tristalia (in English could sound like “Sadtaly”). The country is run by a computer and every year twenty presidential candidates challenge themselves in a sort of living (well ‘deadly’ could be more appropriate) reality show, the one who survives wins and can rule the country for a year.
Every few years sorts of tournament games are held to recognize the autonomy of counties. These games (as with everything else) are cheated to create the best outcomes for better ruling the country.
Moreover every day every family is called to vote in the daily poll. If they guess the majority of the answers they get electricity, water, TV, and warming, otherwise they are excluded for the day from the usual supply.
This is not so different from the background of other books by the same writer, where the Italian sociopolitical situation is exaggerated and distorted with a humorous, but chilling effect.
Elianto is a young teenager badly ill. He is in a hospital for terminal diseases. He is the only boy who has defeated the pluri-awarded Baby Esatto the current government champion for the next autonomy games.
Elianto is dying, but his friends want to save him. So wants the Devil, yes the Evil One (but no more evil than the worst human), because doing evilness in Tristalia is so widespread that there is no longer an intriguing challenge to tempt humans from that country.
A great warrior is sent after another yet greater warrior to defeat the government champion of Evil Fight, Rollo Napalm.
Elianto’s friends, three devils, and the cloud warrior Fuku with two bonsai-sized yogis will go, every group its way, searching for what they consider the remedy. Meanwhile, Elianto will be endangered by one of the doctors who run the hospital under Baby Esatto’s influence.
There are many strong points in the book: there are many unforgettable characters so well defined into their roles. Hard to read the death personification (a Flamenco dancer) without feeling anything. The background is satiric and frightening. The idea of parallel universes is not new per se, but it is approached freshly. A map is needed to travel from one universe to another. This map is either cast by a full moon through an old tree onto a wall in Elianto’s room or found on the back of an eel can (and the eel inside is not only alive but forecasts the future). Or it is found on a micro piece of paper obtained by processing a single grain of rice. Or it can be found tattooed on the butt of a devil.
Well, until now, if you have to read just one book by Benni, read this. If in doubt with another writer, read this. Highly recommended.
Ice Station
Some days before leaving for holidays my wife and I go to the library to borrow some books for her. While waiting for my wife choice I skimmed though the books. Being in a library is always a strong feeling for all those, like me, enjoy reading. Having recently read “deception point” by Dan Brown that tells about polar station and the like, I was promptly attracted by this “Ice Station” by Matthew Reilly.
I was quite curious to see how the same core idea (an alien evidence found in Antarctica) would be treated by two different writers.
The idea is simple, there is this polar scientific station where somewhat that could be an alien spaceship is found well below the sea level. The cave where the artifact is found is reachable only via scuba diving for some 900m.
The first divers group loses the radio contact with the base right after reaching the cave. The second team with rescue purposes follows the same fate.
The personnel in the base decide to call for help, but a solar activity severely hampers the communication. In the help request the wireless operator talks about an alien spaceship.
Although no answer is received, the call has been listened by three different countries – USA, France and Great Britain. Antarctica is not really under any jurisdiction and basically no law is enforced.
The story focuses on the marine commander “Scarecrow” Schofield who heads the US mission with the goal of defending the spaceship.
The premise is intriguing enough and the book is written pretty well and the story is full of action so I have been hooked in pretty fast.
There are a couple of minor glitches: first the plot is excessively based on coincidences. Beware of the spoil: the base is built over an old and forgotten military base. A few miles away another abandoned ice station is located and this base is in the iceberg were Schofield and another pal found themselves after a fighting. In this base, lost more than 30 years before they found two perfectly working scuba sets.
Other examples of this are: founding the right weapon or being at the right place.
The other glitch is about science. Diving in a bell requires the bell itself to be pressurized to balance the pressure of the water (otherwise the water would fill the bell). Moreover 900 is quite a high pressure for a scuba diver. If it is not beyond human capabilities is right away. Then, at least as far as I know, scuba divers must be extremely careful on decompression because of embolism while the writer is more concerned about compression.
Anyway these are just minor annoyances the book is really good ad I appreciated it far more than Dan Brown’s.