I happen to be re-reading parts of the excellent Code Complete book and noticed some startling similarities to married life.

With apologies to Software, Wives and author Mr. McConnell who most of this text is ripped from.

------------------
Wives have both external and internal quality characteristics.

External characteristics are characteristics that a husband of the wife product is aware of, including the following:

• Correctness - The degree to which she is free from faults in her specification, design, and implementation.




• Usability - The ease with which husbands can learn and use a wife.




• Efficiency - Minimal use of resources, including memory and execution time.




• Reliability - The ability of a wife to perform its required functions under stated conditions whenever required—having a long mean time between failures.




• Integrity - The degree to which a wife prevents unauthorized or improper access to its programs and its data. The idea of integrity includes restricting unauthorized user accesses as well as ensuring that data is accessed properly.




• Adaptability - The extent to which a wife can be used, without modification, in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.




• Accuracy - The degree to which a wife, as built, is free from error, especially with respect to quantitative outputs. Accuracy differs from correctness; it is a determination of how well a wife does the job it's built for rather than whether it was built correctly.




• Robustness - The degree to which a wife continues to function in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions.


External characteristics of quality are the only kind of wife characteristics that users care about. Users care about whether the wife is easy to use, not about whether it's easy for to modify. They care about whether the wife works correctly, not about whether she is readable or well structured.



• Husbands care about the internal characteristics of the wife as well as the external ones.




• Maintainability - The ease with which you can modify a wife to change or add capabilities, improve performance, or correct defects.




• Flexibility - The extent to which you can modify a wife for uses or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed.




• Portability - The ease with which you can modify a wife to operate in an environment different from that for which it was specifically designed.




• Reusability - The extent to which and the ease with which you can use parts of a wife in other systems.




• Readability - The ease with which you can read and understand a wife, especially at the detailed-statement level.




• Testability - The degree to which you can survive testing a wife.




• Understandability -The ease with which you can comprehend a wife at both the organizational and detailed-statement levels. Understandability has to do with the coherence of the wife at a more general level than readability does.


The point is that some quality characteristics are emphasized to make life easier for the husband and some are emphasized to make life easier for the wife. Try to know which is which and when and how these characteristics interact.


The attempt to maximize certain characteristics inevitably conflicts with the attempt to maximize others. Finding an optimal solution from a set of competing objectives is one activity that makes marriage a truly worthwhile discipline.

------------------

If you send this to your spouse you do so at your own risk, but my wife enjoyed it, your results may vary :)

The recent actions of Apple and Amazon to punish e-book publishers that had differing views and to further control over book consumption. As well as the death of J.D. Salinger and the issues surrounding his book The Catcher in the Rye lead me to believe we should be concerned about the future of books for all of us.

Both Amazon and Apple are moving to control distribution of e-books to their respective devices, and thereby dominating delivery and consumption as has happened to music. The music business has been very happy to get Digital Rights Management services on their itunes music and we should expect the same from the book publishers. You will not own your book but instead have a possibly term limited, third party controlled access.

The unfortunate thing is that people are more likely to try and break the controls on music and not on books. The very information that we have collected to advance our society will be exactly that which is locked away. The library industry is surely fretting at its ability to continue to delivery borrowable materials in a world where the false scarcity no longer exists. But we still need the library, we need the access and we do not need it limited.

Now what does Holden have to do with this. Well for anyone who doesn't know, the book has had a long history of controversy for its content. I quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye

  "In 1960 a teacher was fired for assigning the novel in class. He was later reinstated.[28] Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.[29] In 1981, it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States.[30] According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the tenth most frequently challenged book from 1990–1999.[9] It was one of the ten most challenged books in 2005, and has been off the list since 2006.[31]"

There were then, are today, and will be books that annoy parents and various groups. But maybe next time the material will exist in an e-book DRM vendor controlled format. That makes it only one short click from being filtered forever.

Who would do such a thing? Well this is where we get back to our vendors. Amazon had pulled an entire publisher Macmillan, and Apple is well known for filtering and rejecting Apps with little or no feedback or reasoning. And they both have this power as they are the only way to get to those users.

Someday, Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs companies will come under pressure to filter, or define material as inappropriate for their platforms. When that day comes I hope Holden and his future friends have also spilled some real ink and not just been as virtual as any other imaginary electronic world.

Techvibes.com has posted my thoughts on copying Silicon Valley -> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/why-we-dont-want-our-own-silicon-valley

I of course think it a reasonable read, so pop over and take a look. I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

In todays Guardian there is a bit about the dangers of intellectual property in science. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/26/science-shackles-int...

"The drive to commercialise science has overtaken not only applied research but also "blue-skies" research, such that even the pure quest for knowledge is subverted by the need for profit."

"For example, it is estimated that some 20% of individual human genes have been patented already or have been filed for patenting. As a result, research on certain genes is largely restricted to the companies that hold the patents, and tests involving them are marketed at prohibitive prices. We believe that this poses a very real danger to the development of science for the public good."

I personally cannot believe we are doing this to ourselves. I find the idea of someone owning a discovery ridiculous, there is no invention, there is no need to keep it for yourself. And in most cases, research is already funded through tax dollars and grants fron the public purse.

Imagine if you will other discoveries about the natural world throughout history if today's conventions applied.

So probably not my best examples. But the reality is that these are things that happened in nature. This is the world around us. Should anyone own gravity? Or be able to license breathing a given mix of air?

So what about the argument that discovery costs money? Microscopes don't just appear, science has a price. This is indeed true, but also why for thousands of years research has been performed both by the independent scientist and with the assistance of public money. Advancement of knowledge like the rising tide, lifts all minds for the better. Science must continue as a public good. Sell me your mousetrap, not license me the genes of the mouse.

As we continue the endless march into the future ask if it should be behind a pay wall and make sure to stock up on rocks.

Data Center Knowledge has a story http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/11/25/wows-back-end-10-... about the current World of Warcraft infrastructure

That is just awesome. The bottom of that story has additional links to information about Second Life and Everquest that are interesting too if you are into that.

If you have no idea what this is let me describe some things.

In the Massively multiplayer worlds you rarely have a single instance of a world with all of your users in it. So in this case what you will have is hundreds of world instances in clusters and you and your friends join a given instance to play together.

Imagine the game world like like this:

main game &
login servers ---> instance1 -------> server1/server2/db1/db2
                    |
                    |> instance2 -------> server1/server2/db1/db2
                    |
                    |> instanceN -------> server1/server2/db1/db2

And so on. Plus of course dozens and dozens of other servers for all of the non-world infrastructure.

At say 30 watts per CPU core assuming multicore processors and say at .10 kWh they are spending about $2 million on power alone. I am glad the players are sitting alone in dark basements, maybe it equals out on the energy production side :)

Here is an interesting story about learning from flies and simplifying the computational requirements of sight in order to better emulate vision and provide for a much lower cost way to detect motion and obstacles the coming generations of small robots.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/fly-eyes/

I was just in a conversation (or is IRC only ever a fight) this morning where I was arguing against trying to construct large exact models of things in order to replicate human biological behaviours without looking around at simpler implementations that could be the inspiration or answer.

I made sure to stop by the Calgary Technologies 10th Annual showcase to see and meet the local innovators.

There are a lot of neat things going on around here from a lot of interesting and smart people.

Some of my favourites from last night in no particular order:

• Circle Cardiovascular Imaging Inc - www.circlecvi.com - Cardio imaging evaluation
• Pysko Audio Labs - www.psykoaudio.com - Headphones with a surround sound so real my brain and eyes were darting around every corner
• Wedge Networks - www.wedgenetworks.com - Inline network filtering appliances
• Aksys Networks - www.aksysnetworks.com - A serverless plug and play office phone system
• Aqua Screen Corporation - www.acquascreencorporation.com - I don't know much about bacterial detection, but I remember growing things on plates and that took forever
• Preo Software - www.preosoftware.com - Get your toner expense at the desktop before the job starts

The music, food and beverages were very good. So congrats to CTI for a great event and a look into the exciting developments on the local scene.

Do you instantly reach for the search engine now? Did you flip instantly to the dictionary when you didn't understand a word? As with so much other evidence, using your brain is better than the alternative.

This story talks about research into getting better learning from mistakes and that being challenged increases the retention and outcome learning.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong&page=1

As a parent and a programmer I appreciate the energy of making repeated mistakes but then enjoying the excitement and learning that comes out of it when the Aha final mental gel moment comes and this new thing is truly absorbed into the gray matter.

I would think perhaps that the nature of trying to auto categorize, framing and the other narrowing things that happen in your mind when faced with new things must be encouraged to break or shift so that something new can be treated completely as such.

Then you get the chemical excitement from release of new information, and the cycle of happy brain continues.

So it's okay, go, get something wrong, be challenged. Just not too many times on the same thing, okay? :)

I seem to be on a theme of brain related postings, but here is another

"This is a demonstration that, over a relatively short period of time, patterns of brain activation while engaging in cognitive activities change,"

http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/10/19/web-surf-t...

Searching and exploring showed brain improvement. Which feeds my previous link about feeding your brain. It wants information, and learning makes it happy.

As should be expected, if you use your brain to think, it gets more exercise. If you let it idle it gets lazy and I suspect sad in a biochemical sense anyways.

I am sorry to inform you that you are addicted.

It would seem that you want information just the same as food or water. Your constant need to get your fix to reduce your feelings of uncertainty has impacted your brain.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-we-addicted-to-inform


I would venture too that my previous post on motivation is very connected to this need. Intrinsic motivation reasons and mental work that involves solving are pretty often hand in hand. Solving would of course feed the information addiction.


So go ahead, be motivated and feed your brain what it wants.