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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2005-10-13Agile Scope-Creep and How to Detect ItMartin Fowler’s Bliki: FivePoundBag. I had to laugh at this apt characterization of the danger of scope creep and how it is overcome by the operational-level, week-by-week planning at the heart of eXtreme Programming (and Agile methods that have followed). First, I have seen that work on operational development (though in my case it was through preserving the weekly build and user-test schedule and not allowing last-minute changes to the code base). Secondly, it reminds me that my M.Sc project dissertation approach was a definite failure at scope management, one that I needed to have recognized and addressed 4–5 months earlier instead of well-beyond the point of no return. I haven’t fully internalized that lesson. I am currently operating week-to-week and it is still heavily randomizable activity. Solo processes, in my case, are not trustworthy as committed efforts. I am also girding up for a real development project and we’ll see if I can manage not to do it my habitual way, but with early scope management and reality-tracking. Sounds good, right? I have no clue. Really. Cross-posted from Numbering Peano. I don't know why I put it there [;<) Update: I mangled the very first sentence and had to fix it. Sending Orcmid to (Code) CampThanks to Ted Neward, I finally found details for the Seattle Code Camp on October 22–23. I figure it is time to send Orcmid to camp. I am not taking bets that Blocco, the Tablet PC, will be back in time for me to have reloaded everything in time to take it along. I figure that I have satisfied the entry requirements by figuring out how to put their “small but annoying badge” on this page.  They found a place practically in Tacoma (Tacoma would have been easier) to hold it, and the earliest public-transit arrival near DeVry’s Federal Way Campus is shortly after 9am on Saturday, 10am on Sunday. The final departure of the hourly weekend service is at 5:52 pm. I guess I could be installing software during those three-segment bus rides to make up for the sessions I’ll miss. I find it interesting that Microsoft has its own TLD (check it out: Another other odd quirk is that while registering I had to check “other” in specifying the platform I develop on. Out of the six non-other other choices, Win32 isn’t there (nor Win64 either). It’s either Pre-.NET VB or .NET or Java or other things, but not Win32. Funny. So I get to be the Ghost of Christmas Past? I intend to have fun. 2005-10-11Relaxing Patent Licenses for Open DocumentsW050601d: Microsoft's IP-Infringement Specter - Analysis 0.50. Updated Information: The table, below, has been updated in Analysis 0.75, Toward Open-Format Adoption. The 2005–12–06 blog post, Lining Up Formats for Office Documents, summarizes the later analysis. In June, I made some examination of the move by Microsoft to open up the Microsoft Office document formats as part of moving to XML-based default formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Other components of the suite also support XML but this full-up default format is for the three key applications in the Office “12” development scenario announced so far. I had already been studying the relationship between intellectual property (especially patent licenses) and practices that I have in mind for open-source development. The exploration of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats is instructive in that regard. My own investigation along with discussions about the licenses on various blogs was valuable in sharpening my own thinking on safe use of differently-licensed intellectual property as part of an open-source contribution. I’ve completed my personal appraisal of the licensing conditions around Microsoft Office Open XML formats (OX) and the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF). I have enough to formulate the approach that I will be employing in patterns of TROST and contributions under ActiveODMA. Also, in June, I posted a comparison of the license and use restrictions that apply between OX and ODF. That comparison depended, for part of its analysis, on the Sun Microsystems IPR statement on OpenDocument from December, 2002. Sun made a dramatic improvement with a new Sun Patent Statement that was published on September 29. I have updated the original comparison to reflect the impact of that as well as further explorations in OX (to the degree publicly known) and the ODF specification. The changes resulting from the new patent statement are summarized (in my words) in the following extract from the new comparison table.
The full table provides references to all of the materials as part of an extensive discussion of this and other aspects of the two approaches. As part of my latest review, I have also noticed some features of OpenDocument that make me wonder how conformance for interchange of documents across products is to be assured. I don’t know how materially OpenDocument’s intentional “looseness” will interfere with successful preservation of public records, for example. This situation reminds me of the “floor=ceiling” debate that surrounded the specification of the COBOL programming language as part of nailing down the ANSI standards and building conformance tests. This was a momentous challenge, witnessed by the act of Congress that it took to bring Grace Hopper back to duty for creating the Navy certification process for COBOL compilers. If you consult the full table you will see that I have no information on how Microsoft’s Office Open XML format will work in this regard. Since the standard to be met is consistency of Microsoft Office products with themselves, it is not clear how that will translate to an appropriate public agreement for achievement of interchange and legacy preservation. It appears that ODF is going to be the incubator for how meaningful interchange and preservation of electronic documents are established. |
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