Dave W. Smith

‘New blog theme’ has been on my TO DO list for a lot longer than I’d like to admit. I’ve made several starts at building one from scratch, but an honest look at priorities pushed that off the back burner. So, I picked simple, clean theme from elsewhere as a starting point, and will fix breakage and iterate as time allows.

For the past few years, my reading group has started the year by making predictions. These were mine:

1. This year I will finally see a Zune in the wild.

Unless there’s one at the New Year’s Eve party tonight, this gets scored as WRONG.

I’ve been puzzled and amused that the huge amount of marketing and advertising money that Microsoft has poured into the Zune has yielded a complete absence of the devices in my corner of the world, except on a few store shelves. Granted, I live near the Apple mothership, but I do travel, and do noticed what people are plugged in to. When I asked around, friends who had seen Zunes had only seen them in possession of friends of theirs who work for Microsoft.

2. There will be a very public failure of ‘Cloud Computing’.

This was a ’shooting fish in a barrel’ prediction, since something, somewhere, was bound to happen. I was thinking along the lines of a cascading set of accidents involving a backhoe and a washed out bridge taking a data center offline, but the Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick fiasco lost a huge amount of ‘trust us, it’s safe in the cloud’ user data. This prediction gets scored as RIGHT.

3. Congress will step in, on the wrong side, to correct the Bilski ruling.

In re Bilski, the Supreme Court, in a moment of apparent sanity, threw a wet blanket on business practice patents. The ruling has since been used to toss out claims in several software patents.

I guessed that since so much money was on the line, and the players who stood to lose had so much political clout, that Congress would act. I underestimated both how long it would take for challenges to work their way through the courts, and how distracted Congress appears to have been by the huge food fight they’re engaged in.

I still think that Congress will get involved, but it’ll be a few years before this one makes it back on to my list of predictions. For 2009, unless I missed something in the news, this prediction was WRONG.

Flu vaccinations that cover the H1N1 virus (AKA “Swine Flu”) are supposed to be available in a few weeks. This is a vaccination to seriously consider getting.

I won’t be needing it. H1N1 just made a pass through my family, taking us out like dominoes. I was out of action for six days. And I mean out. This is not a virus that’s going to let you catch up on work at home.

On a flu scale of 1 to 10, I give H1N1 a 7. Fever, chills, fatigue, massive sinus drainage, a lot of coughing, and a seriously trashed sleep schedule. On the upside, no vomiting.

So do yourself a favor on this one and get the shot. If you decide not to, consider stocking up on chicken soup, tea, throat lozenges, and a stack of light reading material.

It’s been a year and a half since the last snapshot of what I’ve been reading. Since the pile is threatening to fall over again, now is a good time for an update.

The only active book in the pile is Algorithms in a Nutshell. It’s a good refresher on how to analyze algorithms, but isn’t a broad survey.

Lea’s Concurrent Programming in Java and Bloch’s Effective Java (second edition) came off the shelf a few nights ago so that I could refresh myself on multi-threaded programming in Java. (I’ve since ordered the second edition of Lea’s book, since a few useful things like java.util.concurrent have happened since the first edition.)

Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit came off the shelf last week for a reference check on Value Stream Mapping. If you’re an Agilist who hasn’t yet read any Lean literature, this is a good place to start.

The only book in the pile that I have any issue with is jQuery in Action. There’s a trend in technology references books toward lighthearted prose. In this case, I thought that wit and humor got in the way of clear, unambiguous writing. Still, it’s a good introduction to an awesome JavaScript framework.

Michael Feather’s Working Effectively with Legacy Code has been cycled in and out of the bedside pile several times. I highly recommend it if your life takes you near large piles of code that you didn’t have a hand in creating.

Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do was an insightful read, with interesting parallels to software development. I’ll have more to say about that later.

Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts is worthwhile if you do any work in the browser and find yourself swearing at JavaScript. Crockford sketches out a safe subset of the language. You’ve got to love a book that has appendices named “Awful Parts” and “Bad Parts”. And if you’re doing web work and don’t know about the various cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, stop now and get a copy of Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know. It’ll give you a good scare.

As evidence that I actually do read fiction, there’s Terry Pratchett’s Making Money, a fun read that explores the philosophy of the Gold Standard as it evolves into something else on Discworld. That one goes near the bottom of my top ten favorite Pratchetts.

Near the top right are several lateral thinking and math puzzle books that I got to keep the family occupied during some long plane flights this summer.

There are two management books in the pile, even though I’m not managing right now. It’s a hard habit to shake off.

The only unread book in the pile is Peter Walsh’s It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Rich Life With Less Stuff. Recommended by several friends. I’m kind of worried that my “stuff” includes way too many books.

The need to write multi-threaded code rarely comes up in my corner of the world. And I know from the admonitions of far better programmers than I that if the need to write multi-threaded code does arise, it is best to tread very, very carefully. But when a Java concurrency problem came up last week, my reaction went beyond being wary. I was unsettled at a gut level. Rather than treading forward with care, I backed away.

My first after-the-fact reaction was, “What the heck was that about?” followed by “That won’t do. That won’t do at all.” It was time to hit the books. I read the chapter on Concurrency in Effective Java (second edition) that I’d previously skipped. And I dug up my old, first edition copy of Doug Lea’s Concurrent Programming in Java. Notes in that book showed that I’d only made it halfway through.

Later, while walking the dog, my mind wandered and I remembered why I’d only made it halfway through Lea’s book. I’d taken it on vacation for airplane reading. Mid vacation, I wasn’t feeling well, so I crawled into bed early, taking the book along. Then, on page 168, the stomach flu hit and I started puking my guts out. Two days that could have been spent on a tropical beach passed most unpleasantly. That was eight years ago. I didn’t open the book again until this weekend.

So I wonder: Could that experience have imprinted a strong, negative association with Java Concurrency? There are precedents. After getting food poisoning from a freeze-dried Mexican meal while backpacking (and then having to hike 10 miles over a mountain pass to get back to the car), the smell of the spice cumin turned my stomach for nearly 15 years. And there was the unfortunate incident that has left me unable to get within smelling distance of Canadian Whiskey without getting queasy. Could the same effect apply to ideas? There are plenty of psychology experiments that show what a few well-timed electric shocks can do to anchor avoidance behaviors. Violent regurgitation at the right moment could probably have the same effect.

Fortunately, negative associations can be overcome. In this case, it means spending some quality time with multi-threaded code, some good music, and maybe a nice cup of tea and some cumin-free cookies.

I have a pretty good backup scheme for most of the digital bits in my life. Or so I thought until Friday, when my cell phone decided to lose its address book. Lose as in gone. Poof. “Selected memory empty”. Three years of accumulated phone numbers, vanished. I was able to recover some from the “recent calls” lists, and some really, really old ones from the phone’s SIM chip. And I’m sure that I’ll find more of the missing numbers by digging through email. But numbers exchanged at clients, conferences, workshops, and other chance encounters are all gone. (If we swapped phone numbers in the last three years, please drop me an email. Or give me a call. My number hasn’t changed.)

Figuring out some way to back up the address book on my old-skool Nokia has been somewhere on the TO DO list for a few months, but never made it to the front of the list. Oops. Oh, well, the next phone will have a sync/backup capability. And I’m sure that many of the numbers I lost were stale anyway. Losing them is just an extreme form of unplanned spring cleaning.