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Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome |
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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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Saturday, February 10, 2007Dear Microsoft: No Thanks for the Updates
This morning, I declined to accept the “High Priority” update that Microsoft Update wanted to download and install for me: Visual Studio 2005 SP1. I already knew this update was available, and I have been waiting for the smoke to clear on how well it handles the Express Editions, especially the Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. {tags: orcmid Microsoft Update Visual Studio VC++ 2005 Express software engineering} There are enough reports of instabilities and screw-ups around redistributables and other integration edge cases that I want to wait. In truth, I would wait in any case. I am in the middle of a project and all of my development tools are working just fine thank-you-very-much. I am not about to risk destabilization of anything until the project is at a point where I everything is delivered, buttoned down, and I have an easy fall-back mitigation in place. That means no installing hot graphics adapters, new sound fixtures, or upgrading to Vista on my main development machine. What I will do is obtain the download/installable version, not the one that Microsoft Update installs automatically, and keep it around until I am ready to use it. Since it must be run once for each VS 2005 flavor that is installed, including each separate Express Edition on each machine, I want one I can keep, backup, move around, and re-rerun if I do any re-installs in the future. Hmm, it is interesting that the SP1 does not appear to be in my MSDN distribution for January 2007. I think I’ll just wait for the little treasure to show up in my postal mailbox, no downloading required. Some place around my project’s 0.90 beta (I’m building 0.60beta right now) and the hardening of my project and its regression tests, I will use variations of VC++ 2005, Platform SDKs, and Java SDKs so that I can verify that the source code, scripts, and builds all on the latest-available tool bases as well as the ones I started with. After that I can give myself leave to make other interesting upgrades to my systems. Oh oh, I did download some non-priority upgrades, including .NET 3.0 and new root certificates. I will know shortly whether that was prudent or not. [update 2007-02-10T20:37Z: added tags and a cross-reference on security.] Comments: Post a Comment Sunday, February 04, 2007Raymond Chen: What Feature Did You Remove Today?
Raymond Chen’s second book-promotion interview is available. He hasn’t arranged to make an author book-signing appearance yet, but the topic comes up in this podcast. {tags: orcmid Raymond Chen Windows software development} Raymond is a great advocate for all of the reasons that compatibility is maintained between versions of Microsoft Windows. His stance is so well-articulated that Joel Spolsky used Raymond as an archetype for two kinds of Microsoft Developers: the Raymond Chen Camp (representing backward-compatibility religion) and the MSDN Magazine Camp (representing the out with the old, in with the new sprituality of the day). You might surmise where my allegiances are. I mention this because the interview is by friends of MSDN and Raymond is not quite that enamored of being the poster child for the backward-compatibility camp. So, naturally, the topic comes up in this interview; for a moment it was more about Joel on Software than The Old New Thing. Raymond confesses that he has matured beyond building great features to discovering features that can be removed. (Yes, I am also thankful that the “unused desktop icons” sheriff is banished from Vista.) This is not exactly a nod to the “other camp,” and it is a very interesting notion. Anything that reduces the code surface simplifies testing and documentation and deployment and, most-of-all, support. That sounds like goodness to me and another fine way to have earned a day’s pay. I don't listen to podcasts much and many are longer than I want to listen through. I just discovered, however, that the little Windows Movie Maker utility that comes with every Media Center PC and every useful version of Vista (oops, it won’t run on my only Vista machine right now because I don’t have the right/enough graphic hardware acceleration, which I guess is why my Toshiba Satellite Tablet PC has a Windows Experience base score of 1.0). Ahem. Well, what I learned about Windows Movie Maker is that it is perfectly capable for editing audio files (e.g., podcast MP3 files) and resaving them. In this case, I chopped the first ten minutes off of the Technet Podcast right at the pause before the Raymond Chen interview begins. I can see doing some chopping of audio and video downloads where I want to preserve a particular piece. I’m always happy to save on disk and backup space. Comments: Post a Comment More Spolsky Gems: Open-Source, the Desktop, and Supporting Customers
I needed to get back on the rowing machine after avoiding exercise for almost two weeks. This gave me a chance to listen to the Joel Spolsky interview on the micro-ISV Podcast. {tags: orcmid Channel 9 Joel Spolsky Michael Lehman Bob Walsh micro-ISV nano-ISV} Early in the interview, Joel talks about having now graduated to mini-ISV with a dozen employees that tend to 24 when the interns arrive in June. It is fascinating how much, and how well, Fog Creek does with interns. I think it provides great resume chops for the interns too and most of all an early experience at successfully delivering product. In the course of the conversation, Spolsky explains that the original vision for Fog Creek was to produce a comprehensive software [I thought he said “content”] management solution. Joel now thinks that there is no such distinct category as content management, but out of that vision FogBugz, the main Fog Creek product, emerged. FogBugz is a bug and feature-tracking package that is an instance of workflow management and was, it seems, intended to be part of the infrastructure for the grander product. I am fascinated by the following harmonies in how Fog Creek grows as a business. The first product was something that was useful in its own development and deployment. It is also valuable to other companies like Fog Creek itself, in providing an important workflow package for their own bug and feature tracking. The Copilot package for remote on-line assistance came out of a similar situation: making it easier for their customers to install an on-line assistance package so that on-line troubleshooting and assistance could take place. Copilot exists so that the setup for assistance doesn’t itself become a problem requiring assistance and getting in the way of resolving the customer’s original problem. The key is how this is all around supporting users and customers and part of establishing a reliable relationship with adopters of Fog Creek products. It also underscores the message at the end of the interview about needing the business person as well as the developer in a micro-ISV, and needing a clean vertical focus for the initial product(s). In the discussion of Copilot, Joel talks about the value of developing Copilot as an open source product and how they learned that there is nothing to fear from people cloning the product, after seeing clones of FogBugz come and go. What cloners failed to copy was the know-how related to application and support of the product. (I once observed a team’s attempt to clone a purloined compiler onto a different computer. With no understanding for the principles of operation of the original code and how to unravel and re-engineer the code-generation model for the second computer, there was no useful result of any kind, not even understanding of what failed to be understood.) There is more discussion about how much ISV staff (at least half, in Joel’s view) must be devoted to non-development activities and how that ratio grows ever greater with larger companies. The discussion also turned to Joel’s current view that the web, not the desktop, is the place to do application development these days. There is presumed to be a hefty environment provided by the browser of course. He wasn’t asked about the “smart client” case, where deployment is supposed to be as easy as using a browser, but he’s probably right in supposing that Ajax (and perhaps PF/E, I wonder) makes dedicated desktop applications increasingly unnecessary. This doesn’t dissuade me as an user, but it gives me pause as a developer. Comments: Post a Comment |
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