Radiant Core: software tag

Joel Spolsky Eats Dog Food

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:41:00 GMT

Way back in the dinosaur days, I used to work for IBM trying to make DB2 a more usable product (which is a little bit like saying that I was on the tiny little team responsible for making sure that the faucets on the sinks in the bathrooms in a Boeing 747 had good hand feel). Despite our valiant efforts, almost every user of DB2 completely ignored the beautiful Graphical User Interface that we painstakingly built and relied instead on the super-fast and highly efficient Command Line User Interface, into which they typed gobbledy-gook like:

quiesce tablespaces for table dogfood

and magic ensued. We were never entirely sure how to convince them to abandon their command lines and flock to our world, and so I spent a lot of time scratching my head and drawing things on white boards and buying users dinner in an attempt to find the secret sauce. I left IBM well before the mystery was cracked (if it ever was), but the wisdom of the many moons which have passed has granted me some insight I wish I'd had back then. After today's talk by Joel Spolsky, I can safely say that it's insight Joel shares.

They key is that you have to eat your own dog food. We talked the talk a lot but we weren't really Database Administrators (DBAs) so much as we were a bunch of Human Factors Specialii trying to penetrate the remarkably High Priest like mentality of the people who manage the incomprehensibly large databases that run our lives. When I needed to try something in DB2, I started it up on my laptop and did something in the GUI and then puzzled about why our users wouldn't just do the same, but I also didn't do that task a hundred times a day every day or else I would have written a handy CLUI macro I could invoke in two keystrokes. Joel and the good folks at Fog Creek Software get that, which is why FogBUGZ is such a fantastic piece of software. Those of you who read Joel on Software regularly will know that Joel has some pretty sharply defined viewpoints on how to manage teams of developers and keep software projects on track, gained largely through his many years of experience in the industry on big and small teams. His insights and opinions are baked right into the product, which means using it is like having Joel perched on your shoulder, guiding you and your team at every turn. I paid close attention during his demo, looking for all of the places where I could see his advice manifested in FogBUGZ, including:

Building software is a three phase process (the Art of design, the Engineering of the actual product, and the Science of debugging â see Seattle). This manifests in the way FogBUGZ breaks down into separate components (Wiki for specs and other documents created during the design, Project Management and Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS) for managing the development, and bug tracking and email/discussions for handling the debugging).
Joel has spoken at length about how to pick a release date for your project which is reasonable and which you stand a good chance of hitting (see Picking a Ship Date and Painless Software Schedules among many others). This used to seem a bit like black magic, particularly if you were trying to pick a date that you had some faith in rather than just, say, throwing darts at a board. The new Evidence-Based Scheduling features in FogBUGZ 6.0 are pretty remarkable in that they provide a very realistic view of your probability of meeting your ship date as your project progresses, based on the ability of your team members to accurately estimate the time required to complete their tasks. Joel explained how the calculations work (Monte Carlo Simulations!) and it's all quite clever, but the important thing is that it lets you look at a graph that says our probability of shipping on January 3rd is 8% while our probability of shipping on April 20th is 98%.
He told a story about how they've been using FogBUGZ internally for many years, but even up to v5 he noticed that he would come in every morning and open a little Notepad window to track the two or three things he needed to do rather than actually open cases. So they ate their dog food for v6 and created a method to open new cases which is as easy as typing lines into Notepad, and now he stores everything in FogBUGZ properly.
FogBUGZ doesn't support the idea of pooling people into a single resource for handling a task, largely because they feel that you should have a single person responsible for every task. Likewise, you can link cases together but there isn't a concept of dependencies like there is in Microsoft Project, because they believe that they don't actually occur that often in software (which led to a funny story about how the Project team at Microsoft doesn't use Project to manage building Project because when they tried, it produced a Gantt chart 9,000 pages wide).

We've been using a combination of Project, Mantis, and an internal time tracking application to manage our process, so we were very interested in whether FogBUGZ could replace our current mishmash of apps with a single tool. We'd need seven seats now so would likely go with a ten pack ($999 until November 1st), plus a service agreement for the same ($182.50 per year), so it's a non-trivial decision to make the switch. It looked like it was frustratingly close to what we need but missing the ability to analyze estimates and probabilities across projects (i.e.: the EBS features are based on a single project rather than looking at tasks assigned to each employee in every project). You do have the ability to define what percentage of time each team member spends on FogBUGZ tasks but it's for all projects, rather than being able to define a percentage of time spent on each project. All the same, I think we might give the 45 day free trial of FogBUGZ On Demand a try. I'll report back on what we love or hate and whether we make the decision to switch. Stay tuned!

Dr. Richard Stallman Speaks

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:46:00 GMT

From our good friend Greg Wilson:

Here’s the official announcement:

World-renowned activist and free software developer Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, will speak on “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks” in Matthews Auditorium, Room 137, Kaneff Center, University of Toronto, Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Rd. N., on Thursday, July 5th at 5 pm.

The talk, which is being co-sponsored by the department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences and U of T’s Knowledge Media Design Institute, will be non-technical, and members of the general public, along with computer scientists and engineers, are encouraged to attend.

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright—to promote progress, for the benefit of the public—then we must make changes in the other direction.

While still a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the fabled ‘golden age of hacking’ in the 1980s, Dr. Stallman foresaw the growing centrality of software to society and culture, and in particular the importance of preserving software users’ rights and freedoms. In 1984, he drafted his now-famous GNU Manifesto, in which he laid out the ideals of ‘free software’ software that the user can freely use, copy, distribute and change - and founded the Free Software Foundation to promote these ideals. His work led to the development of the GNU/Linux system, now in use on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Currently, as our arts and other forms of expression become increasingly digitized, Dr. Stallman is at the forefront of the movement to ensure that our culture itself remains free.

Dr. Stallman is author of the book Free Software/Free Society (GNU Press, 2002), and numerous papers. He has received many honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a.k.a. ‘genius award’), the Grace Hopper Award of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Pioneer award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment. He also has several honorary doctorates.

Photoshop CS3 and a MacBook Pro

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:00:00 GMT

As one of the lucky ones, I had the chance to grab a beta copy of the Photoshop CS3 about a month ago. Like many designers, I have been struggling using CS2 on my shiny new MacBook Pro due to the brilliant yet somewhat boggy Rosetta translation software engine.

First off, I would have to say that I am a fairly heavy duty photoshop user: as we speak I have five two hundred megabyte files on my desktop, and I have been known to shoot off the odd three gigabyte file. So I felt that I was the type of user to put this new native version through its paces, especially since it had been so long since I had achieved the speed I was once used too.

Interface Changes

At first glance the freshened up interface was just wonderful to me. All the palettes have been cleverly compacted into small movable icons which, once you get the knack of them, allow for amazing expansion of your screen real-estate. This is very handy when you are working on the limited dimensions of a notebook. Kudos to the interface designers - if they utilize this front-end for the full CS3 suite, we all will be working happier!

The initial load times are about the same as the CS2 load time on my Intel mac, which means slow, but the similarities stop there. Once inside I am easily zooming and moving around my large files like I am once again working on a desktop rig. Progress bars zip by and wait times are easily cut in half for functions like image loading or running any of the math intensive filters. Layers are flipped and moved about in real-time and gone are the wait times for the layers palette to catch up to what you have been doing.

The only problem I noted was that the type tool seems to crash the beta once in a while, usually when I am flying a little too fast and getting snappy with the mouse. Doing due diligence I checked the forums and found that Adobe has identified this problem and will hopefully correct for the final release.

It would seem that Adobe, for all the griping I have been doing for the last year, is aiming to really please us for our patience. The learning curve is slight and the differences are amazing. With the purchase of Macromedia in the last few years, maybe some of that user driven intelligence has also crossed over, and now Adobe is truly listening to us, and our wants and needs.

New Features

“Zoomify” is a new way to export your larger graphics to the web. Effectively creating a flash file that loads an image and allows you to zoom and move about the pixel eating behemoth with quick load times and high detail. Zoomify is a great way to present your larger print projects to clients over the web without the need for any downsizing of the image, allowing clients to see the full detail of the ad or zoom out to take in your breathtaking layouts. For those of us familiar with working on print, this could be a very beneficial tool to speed things up with your more far off clients.

“Auto Alignment Layers” can remove or add elements from a series of photos you choose to overlay, without having to airbrush for hours to get your desired result. So if you had a few shots of your friends all taken from a similar angle, where in one of your friends wasn't looking at the camera, or not smiling you can use this tool to select the parts of each image you want. Then you can piece them together in almost flawless fashion adding or subtracting to add the smile. For any of us who have tried to paste someone’s face into another photo before, this is a great timesaver, and the final results will look as good as your old-school 4 hours of airbrushing.

"Smart Filters" creates another layer for you to go back and re-edit your filters, so there is no more backing up a spare layer in case you mess up. You can go in and re-adjust the filters after the fact, just like you would a new layer. Clever.

The "Quick Selection" tool allows you to “paint” your selections in realtime by simply holding down the shift key. If the four lattés you gulped down in the morning cause you to accidentally shift out too far past your selection, you simply hold down the option key and gently ease the selection back. The difference between this and the old magic wand is that this tool actually “learns” where you are trying to go. It isn’t just based on just the colours you go over either: it just selects where and how you want it, and feels like magic! You can control the quick select brush size as well, allowing getting in close for much more detailed selection work. Once you have finished selecting what you want, a new refine edge tool allows you to contract or expand, add feathering or tighten up the final selection. For whipping up a fast mockup, or photo montage this tool is going to give you some new found speed.

Speculation for Adobe’s full CS3 Suite release is on or around May 1, 2007.