Mac History

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It's strange that I've had a long relationship to Apple's products - or perhaps not if you're a believer and consider their reach unremarkable...

Growing up in Nairobi, a missionary's kid next door had an Apple IIc he'd occasion to let me use (more often I'd simply watch him using it). A few years later, I spent time in my high school computer classes using Apple IIe computers - for the most part it was typing but I had moments of the extracurricular.

My freshman year of college (1993), after many months hovering around the computer store, drooling and daydreaming, a family gifted my sister and I with a Powerbook 160. The little Powerbook that could took us through the college years although by the end it was on its last legs -

... after which I took a long departure from the Apple universe. I began working with PCs and forgot how much fun it was to pick icons, leverage a trackball, and use the Finder.

After talking my boss into it, however, a year ago I got the priviledge of using Macs again with a company owned, David leveraged iBook G4. It's still a foreign environment but it's nice to return to - especially last week after my HP laptop needed to be reinstalled after catching a virus.

All this to post that there is this interesting graphic of Macs in time, with most of my old friends along the way.

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Yegge, NBL

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John Lam reports that Steve Yegge revealed a Javascript implementation of the Rails framework at this weekend's "Foocamp." Having just finished Yegge's most recent post Rich Programmer Food this weekend, and following his NBL (Next Big Language) post from a while back, the dots seem to be connected. It seems early even among technical blogs but I suspect information will start to seep out in the short future.

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NDepend vs Me

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I didn't manage a blog post during TechEd but I'll take a stab at a few things that have swilled in my mind since then. The first thing I've been working on is understanding NDepend, the tool for static analysis. I went to a "Birds of a Feather" spearheaded by some folks from Corillian and had to keep my mouth shut tight so as not to look a fool. Luckily many of the folks there were like me: they knew about static analysis as a concept but were trying to figure out how they could make good use of it.

It will be quite some time before we have static analysis as a part of our build process but I'm most interested in using a tool like NDepend to take the emotion out of code reviews. That is to say that while I do love a vigorous discussion on style and preference, there are concrete measures one can look at objectively to evaluate the well being of software design.

While I'm shaky on the exact meaning of all the metrics (it was suggested to run repeatedly looking for trends) I ran it against a project that has pretty much taken my thirty first year on this earth. For a while that's been on my "to do" list but I think there's always a bit of hesitancy on my part when I'm about to be brutally honest with myself; I designed this software and wrote quite a bit of the code.

The results weren't great, but they weren't horrible. When I used it on the libraries by themselves, the visualizations of the dependencies seemed clean and tidy, and many of the metrics weren't too badly outside of some of the pointers in the cheat sheet we got.

However.

There are some obvious weaknesses that came to light. First and foremost, we were solidly in the zone of instability for most of our assemblies. There are two things that were suspicions now confirmed: first, we didn't have a very formal design process. I need to get better at perceiving my job at an architect level versus as a coder. The second is that we rushed. The rush was not just a schedule thing, it can also be attributed to our short release cycles. The agile folks recommend these, but it should be balanced with a period of silence at the beginning when overall design decisions are being made. The final item, which NDepend would have helped us with in a continuous integration cycle, was showing unused code. After a year's worth of work it's hard to look at so much and except oneself to clean it up, but as a weekly task it would be an easy way to keep things healthy and tight.

Final note: running NDepend is ridiculously easy. The hardest thing besides looking at metrics and trying to understand them is having the courage to look objectively at what you've done.

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Slowly Back

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After a weekend with a virus, and a horrible waste of time, I've got a clean installation of XP. The upside was that it forced me back to the iBook G4 that's been a little lonely without me.

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Programming Personality

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This programming personality test was interesting.

Your programmer personality type is: PLSC

You're a Planner.You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best
solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

You like coding at a Low level.You're from the old school of programming
and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer.

You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5%
performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.The best way to program is by yourself.
There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you
to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.The less code you write, the less chance
there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets
the job done efficiently.

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Free Powershell Book

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All I can say is that I'm loving powershell right now. Hopefully some more goodies will ensue upon this blog but if you're learning like me you can get a free book by leveraging the full length help that is offered on objects. You can print in the following steps:

Get the cmdlets and send the documentation of each to its own file:
get-command % {man $_ -full >"C:/Power/$_.txt"}

Now make an index page so you can navigate to the individuals:
$cmd = get-command % {write-output "<a href='$_.txt'>$_</a><br>"}
"<html>$cmd</html>" >C:/Power/index.html

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Partying with Palermo

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Going to Party with Palermo tonight. Looking forward to meeting the jedi and getting TechEd started right!

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