I'm not going to tell you what it says... You have to get a QR-Code Reader yourself.

special thanks to the folks over at kaywa.com

W.A.D.N.A.I is one of my best, most favorite acronyms. I came up with a few years ago in the face of... well.. a W.A.D.N.A.I. situation.

Definition:

W.A.D.N.A.I. - Works As Designed Not As Intended. (Pronounced Wad-Nye)
When the software you've written does exactly what it is supposed to do - it works as designed.  But, it does not do what the end user (or the fool who wrote the specification).  Does not work as intended.

It's a pretty easy to blunder into a WADNAI.   Either the client did a lousy job of telling you what they really wanted, either because they didn't know or because you didn't get to the heart of the requirements.

The only advice I have from my own WADNAIs is:  Don't accept all the blame, they helped you get here.  But don't think you're going to get off scott free - you gotta fix it.

This is really exciting stuff in the mobile space. I recently got an iPod touch, and I have to say it is a pretty compelling device. I interested to see how two players in the web enabled smart phone space drives innovation.

NYTimes: Technology: Smartphone Is Expected via Google
By LAURA M. HOLSON and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: August 15, 2008
T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, according to people briefed on the company’s plans.

T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

Executives for T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier, declined to comment on the new phone except to say it was on track to offer it in the fourth quarter. HTC, which is based in Taiwan, also declined to comment, although executives there have said they expected to deliver their phone by the end of the year.

Alley Insider is on about this as well.

So now we know that the first GPhone is indeed coming this fall.

Will it be a hit? It's hard to tell much from the supposed spy photos we've seen floating around on the Web, like the one to the right.

Well, here I am on a computer running Windows Vista using Live Writer to pound out a post.  I attempted to use Ecto with the new version of dasBlog I had deployed to no avail.  So, at this point my options are debug through why my instance of dasBlog is not playing nice with ecto or ditch the bitch (get it?) and move on.

Sadly, since my job doesn't really involve .NET any more I had hoped dasBlog would be a rewarding connection to my old flame.  But alas, it seems it will remain a reminder of how good it could have been.

So at this point I either bite the bullet and install Parallels on my Mac so I can run Live Writer - NOT.  Or I use my virtual windows box that lives inside my Linux desktop - meh, a bit better.  Or I ditch dasBlog and move on.  This is going to require some think.

Thanks to the kind folks over at worth1000.com for their 'great' photo of a dog.  I think it fits.

I have just finished upgrading this blog to the latest version of dasBlog. I have been trying to use ecto from my MacBook Pro and it kept barfing. I had looked at the source of the last version of dasBlog and decided it was too much of a hassle and that I would just use LiveWriter to do my post composition. But now, I no longer use a windows box at work and my primary carry-around computer is a Mac. So, if tomorrow, when I go to post with ecto against this blog it barfs... stand by for me to declare dasBlog a dog and move on. My buddy over at

Foo pointed this one out. After watching it It's pretty darn good. Just a lot to absorb.

I went ahead and embedded it here, but it's definitely worth taking a look at forgetfoo.com to keep up with what he's throwing down.

I have been using Gmail a whole bunch lately and getting deeper into the advanced functionality. One of my favorite features is the search operators. These Ginsu Knives allow you to both find and filter email.

I found a help page that gives a great overview of the search operators that I find really useful. It's not hard to find the page but I thought I'd link you to it anyhow - Click Here.

Example:
from:Dave(friday funny) - returns email that is from Dave with the words 'friday' and 'funny' in the subject

Until I started using Gmail more I had no idea these features are there, and I think most folks are the same way. Finding email is my second biggest feature requirement for an email and this makes my life easier.

Feeling like I'm neglecting both of my readers so I thought I'd offer a morsel on Patents (that I stole from Wired).  At any rate, Venice, March 19, 1474 the following law was enacted:

"Any person in this city who makes any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, shall, as soon as it is perfected so that it can be used and exercised, give notice of the same to our office of Provveditori de Comun [State Judicial Office], it being forbidden up to 10 years for any other person in any territory and place of ours to make a contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and license of the author."

Interestingly enough, according to Wired, it was about attracting foreign investment.

As a "Creative Professional" who does work for hire on a daily basis, Intellectual property law is something of great interest.  I've recently had to fill out a disclosure of all "prior works of authorship" to distinguish my own creative endeavors from things I've done for hire.

In that vein, I'll pass along some advice I received from a friend who conveniently happens to be an attorney:

When describing your works of prior authorship, cut as wide a [creative] swath as you can in as few words as possible.  Put the onus on them to get clarification to try and diminish the scope of what you're claiming.

So, to give you a bad example that is completely fictitious, rather than claiming my new sock knit as a work of authorship I would claim "new solution for sox".  Pretty wide swath, eh?

This is the part where I clarify the bits you've read above:  This advice from from my friend was offered as a courtesy to me and is being paraphrased by me to you as a courtesy.  This does not constitute legal advice to you and I make no representation that I have specific expertise in this area and I further make no claims as to the validity or utility of this advice.  Should you choose to act on these statements you do so at your own risk and are advised to seek competent legal advice prior to acting. This is posted here because it just sounds reasonable to me.

I just love legalese.

This post is long, but I've divided it up into sections so if you're only curious about specific portions you can find information, or you can consume a section at a time.  Otherwise, charge ahead.  I've tried to keep it compact and dense.

Keynotes:

Both Keynotes were good, but the Ballmer interview was the highlight. Now that I've had a few days to let my thoughts coalesce I am more impressed by Ballmer. Ballmer spoke with candor about key subjects to the future of Microsoft. Noam pointed out how impressively Ballmer answered audience questions about fine details of Microsoft's operations.  Another poignant moment was when Ballmer, addressing the crowd of software developers directly, said "I know you have a lot of choices out there.  Please pick us."  Reuters picked up the story of the keynote if you're looking for a quick upshot.

Sessions:

I did pretty well session wise this year, no real stinkers.  Here is what I attended with links (if it's worth seeing).  Here is a link to the Mix08 sessions page if you want to explore on your own.

Okay, that's really just a hook to get you in the door. Let me complete my thought:

TDD is total crap if you don't really do TDD, but get stuck on Faux-TDD

In the last four weeks the project I'm working on has grown from 3 libraries to 12 (it's probably a bit bloated).  It has gone from 30% unit test coverage to about 75% unit test coverage.  (The white-papers I've skimmed more or less say 70% to 80% is good and that getting above that is not cost effective unless you're writing fighter-jet or medical device software.)   We're successfully implementing an MVP based on the in-depth work Vijay did looking into approaches.  We are coding against interfaces not implementation classes, using an IOC tool and writing unit tests using a mocking framework.  And, most importantly, we're trying really hard to implement TDD.

I'm going to go ahead and say, we've done everything we can in he way of employing tools and patterns to make TDD happen - save one thing: writing tests before we code.  This is kind of the classic Software Engineer response: learn a tool, get some numbers, bang some stuff out to get it going.

Here is the link to Scott Hanselman's talk on the ASP.NET MVC at Mix08 this year.  The site REQUIRES Silverlight which more or less puts you into IE.  That IE only BS needs to change for me to truly buy into Silverlight - I can't get it to run with Firefox.   In my previous post I named Scott my top contender for best presenter (that I saw) at Mix08 and it looks like he's going to carry the day unless I'm blown away by either of the last two sessions.

I actually ran into Scott in V bar last night and let him know I appreciated his talk.  Be sure and check out his talk.  My take on the MVC stuff is basically: It's not my future, but it's really pretty* technology.

*pretty: crazy great detailed implementation that is designed around testing and neat functionality quickly, pretty is pretty high up in the superlative chain to the end all be all 'elegant'

VS

Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki squared off today for the keynote which consisted of a one on one interview (Kawasaki, interviewing Ballmer).  While I'm not up on the history, there was certainly a friendly water-under-the-bridge adversarial thing going on.  Kawasaki being a big proponent of all things not Microsoft asked some tough questions that went straight for the throat.

His first question out of the gate went straight for the - What's up with Yahoo? question. It's not worth me rehashing it when you should just watch it for yourself - here. It stayed very interesting and Steve answered questions with great candor.

My favorite part: when Steve got all "monkey boy" and gave web developers a shout out. He actually reminds me a lot of my friend Troy - Can I get a Wooo Woooo! ?

Well, they almost got there.  This is Jonk's blog in Firefox:

This is Jonk's Blog in IE 8 Beta 1:

Doh.

Ari represent, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Ari's demo was great, cut through the bullshit and straight to the code, run it, break point and show the money.

IE8 has firebug., originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

Well, not really. But they built something like it.

Actually the activities functionality through the OpenService stuff looks pretty cool.

Scott Gu is a rockstar, no really, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

So Scott comes on and the place goes a little crazy. Everyone starts snapping photos... Ooooh get on the stream, they are about to show IE8.

I am currently over Kearney, Nebraska ( I would throw in a link for you but I'm not connected to the inter-webs right now).  Two seats to my left is Noam of Blog.a.lish and right behind me is Jason of soon to be some blog somewhere.  We're on our way to Mix 08 in Las Vegas - Microsoft's Big web development conference.  The next few days will be dominated by posts about happenings at the conference.  Under a cloud of Wi-Fi, armed with a Wi-Fi enabled phone with and a post by email setup through Flickr I'm going to be a buzz with conference posts.

Last year at Mix07 the buzz was Silverlight followed by the Google-DoubleClick acquisition.  This year is certain to be Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo (is it safe to call it hostile yet? or just post bear-hug?).

This year has a few sessions about online advertising, an obvious subject of interest for anyone who knows why the web is "free" and/or want's a slice of the pie.  I'm also hoping to get some more insight into LINQ, Silverlight and the MS MVC. And, while it will be tempting to rant, I'm probably going to refrain from sharing my well earned opinion that WebParts are junk.

Actually, on a more non-specific front I'm going to quiz my MS friends about testability.  The project I am currently working on is using Sprint .NET as an IOC tool and N-Mock as a mocking tool. I'm curious what the MS boys have up their sleeve in this vein.  As I start to feel the effects of the TDD Kool-Aid these things have become more important to me as part of my daily work.

Sorry about the absence of links to the various subjects here-in.  I really am at 38,000 feet.  If only there were really Internet access on planes.  Then again, where else would I get to feel cut-off from the world in a cocoon of I-can't-affect-anything - oh wait, I ride the subway to work.  Thank you MTA for keeping me relaxed when I'm powerless.

I am a huge fan of Regular Expressions (Regex).  There are a lot of cool technologies, but no other technology seems as much like total hocus pocus.  I take most every opportunity to use Regular Expressions in my applications, and I'm pretty much a sucker when a friend asks me to figure one out.  I'll spend hours tweaking an expression in The Regulator, a cute little .NET regular expression utility.  Actually I just noticed that the last release is 2004.  What are other people using to do regular expression development and testing?

There is one rule of thumb I observe whenever I use a Regular Expression in an application: Make it overridable by a config setting.  Regular Expressions are forever a work in progress and very often the first slice needs some tweaking after you get it into the real world.  This little practice has saved my ass more than once, most recently I was able to fix a production application by just tweaking a config rather than pushing a whole patched release through QA and doing a full deployment.

At this point I just automatically do this when I put a regular expression into an application:

Some of you likely noticed that around late Thursday of last week, in conjunction with my lengthy post about my adventure into canning this blog went wonky and showed something that was an incomprehensible mix of two posts. The good news is no one wrote or commented telling me my writing had improved.

I think the problem had to do with using BlogJet. It seems to support dasBlog nicely but something went horribly wrong. This post is using ecto. I so, so so want to like ecto, and I do it's got that perfect mix of raw dork horse-power ( html-templating with keyboard short-cuts; solid html generation; and flickr/Amazon/YouTube buttons). But, and there always seems to be a "but", it was barfing on a post I was trying to make again my humble little dasBlog instance. I attempted to debug into the code on the dasBlog side, a big reason I chose dasBlog. In my initial look through I concluded that the problem was likely somewhere in ecto, not that dasBlog is a shining example of good code practices. 

I know, I know dasBlog is open source and I'm so critical, why don't I roll up my sleeves and dive in? The truth of the matter is, I'm not interested in writing a blogging engine, or even really fixing on this one. I've got other side-projects I want to work on and the list is already too long. While I don't believe blogging is fully mature, the issues I've been having with what seems to me a late teen set of technologies: blogging APIs and blog software) frustrates me a bit. And maybe this problem lies in the technology I've chosen. Blogging comes more or less from the PHP side of the tracks and .NET being my comfort zone I opted to use a .NET open source tool. Maybe it's time to learn PHP. (You hear that Bill?)

Back to the dangle-y loose thread holding this post together. I won't be using BlogJet on a live instance without further testing. Windows Live Writer (thanks for the suggestion Ben) hasn't really gotten a workout from me, will be making an audition on a laptop near me. And ecto, oh ecto... What am I to do? I went to your help page hoping you could tell me how to tune your software for dasBlog and this is what I saw:

Looks simple right? You'll notice I've included both the left and right edge of the browser window in the screen shot. In fact, I even went so far as to view source - there isn't an input tag on the page.

I'll give it another try, cause I like it so much, but it looks like Windows Live Writer might win. While it was fun to do raw HTML and I like the spell check and ability to have drafts of future posts.

So I've been toying around with ecto as a tool to compose blog posts on my local box before I post them to my site. Here is what they have to say for themselves:

With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.

There are a couple things I'm really stoked about. First the keyboard short-cuts for definable tags, so in the rich text editor when I press Ctrl-Shift-B it wraps the selected text with

<blockquote class="withquote"><p class="withunquote">[Selected Text]</p></blockquote>

Second, it has an in browser preview capability that I don't get now using dasBlog. I have to save the post as unpublished and then return to editing. Finally, I'm really stoked about the ability to have draft posts. dasBlog doesn't really support that concept at all. The only problem is it's not free. There is a 21 day trial and then it's going to run me $17.95 or so. It may be worth it.

I've more or less figured out that if I'm going to keep up any sort of reasonable pace I need to be able to start posts in one sitting and finish them later.

Finally the light has come on with me and TDD. I totally get-it from a process perspective. I totally get-it from a qualitative perspective. And as a software engineer, I am innately averse to fear-based coding. To be perfectly honest I'm not entirely there either. I've fiddled with TDD - in so far as most of us have. Exploring the novelty of writing a test, running it to failure and then coding it to success. There were/are several issues, but the one that was second on the list is best expressed: "so what, I have a lot of tests"

Well, due to some prodding by my adopted boss and some ribbing from a fellow blogger (Jonk), I've started to find TDD actionable. I've "seen the light" all along, but how to make it real was always the problem. The other day I wrote a method called CityStateZip() on an Address class. You get the picture, you always want that pretty one line of the address for display but constantly doing the string.Format() gets really old. Yes I am aware that some of you out there just realized that in your mind I 'adulterated' a business object with display logic. All I have to say it bite me. It's a standard format, standard to the domain of Addresses in general. So dismount your separation of concerns high horse and lets move on. Proud of myself (um, yeah) I checked it all in and went about my business (What no code review? Bite Me). The next day my adopted boss, let's call him Tony, said, "Hey, you guys gotta watch those tests. You checked in a method CityStateZip and didn't add a test for it."

Jonk asked me to write up this portion of a dog and pony show I do from time to time.  It’s the bit where I pretend to be a source control expert and tell other people what to do.  I’m usually pretty successful, but only because I am quick with a witty response while I compose a more suitable (read plausible but not necessarily correct) answer.

Today’s subject, “why we branch when we release” is some thinking around the problem – How do I release code and still have the ability to move forward on the next feature and yet not lose the ability to patch the release if I need to.

Let's break this down to the component requirements so we can be sure to address them all:

• a simple source control process around releasing code
• easy ability to continue development of new code after releasing
• ability to patch on released code and re-release without worrying about new development, after the release, will be included

I was reading a great post on Coding Horror, programming and human factors by Jeff Atwood, a great blog if you're looking for one, and came across some great think about the software development process. I'm being a bit coy because I am intending to make that post the subject of my next post, but I then happened over to Bruce Eckel's blog and read his post entitled Java: Evolutionary Dead End.

I got to reading and felt he makes some really great points about the thoughtfulness that goes into putting a feature into a language. I'm loathe to quote the whole thing here, but I'll give you a little sampling.

Since the beginning I've complained that, at the same time that it claims to be simple, Java is too noisy as a language. Code is read much more than it is written, and this noise directly translates to real costs in software development. Brain cycles are a very scarce resource, and anything that uses them up without benefit -- even something as seemingly innocuous as the extra verbiage in System.out.println() -- takes those cycles away from somewhere they could be useful, and reduces the programming efficiency of the language ( Steve Yegge recently wrote about this problem ).

In his presentation, Josh said that the last-minute addition of wildcards to Java generics may have pushed the complexity of the language too far. Neal Gafter has suggested that we reify generics. Both were originally unequivocal fans of Java generics, based on their responses to the criticisms I wrote about the topic. Now there seems to be a shift, and I've also seen other people begin to say "generics are still great but ..." (Although Tim Bray recently called them a disaster ).

People lived tolerably for many years, then suddenly it became essential that generics be shoehorned into the language. This was remarkably coincidental with the appearance of generics in C#, which also appeared to produce several other features in Java 5. It seems that the urgency of these features came not from solving true problems in the Java language, but in Sun trying to maintain the perception of competitiveness against Microsoft's C#. This is probably not so far off the mark, because the reason that Java had to be rushed out in rough form in the first place was the belief that there was a market window that must be captured. A programming language designed by following marketing impulses is eventually going to end up chasing its tail.

I don't pretend to be an expert on anything JAVA. Being generous, I'm a neophyte when it comes to JAVA. Being honest, I was going to pick it up this year, but never got around to it. I'm a C# guy who moved over from VB.NET who moved over after about 3 months from VB6 who had just realized that I had outgrown VBA. Quite a pedigree, I'm sure. And yes, I do give the JAVA developers at work a hard time at every opportunity, but one thing that I am sensitive to is the evolution of languages and what features make it in and what don't. I've recently started to work on .NET 3.5 after just getting used to .NET 2.0. And the way it looks from all the hoopla .NET has picked up a whole bunch of stuff that is "going to make my life easier" - and I'm sure some of it will. However I'm sure the list of things that I think are just stupid bolt-ons is going to get longer.

So as JAVA marches on and it's proponents start to proclaim to have heard it's death knell - it appears that Mr. Eckel is pushing Scala. I wonder how long it will be before I'm feeling the same way about C#. Now I know as a "Microsoft Guy" I'm supposed to drink the cool-aid and hook my WPF app up to my WCF endpoint to execute some work using WF and serializing the whole mess using LINQ, but my relationship with Microsoft is a bit more complicated than that. Sure I make my living by spinning their threads in to yarn and weaving a beautiful tapestry to fill my application space (that's for you Noam), but it's really more like:

Truly I don't get the MS zealots.

Actually, Noam had shared another post from Coding Horror entitled The Magpie Developer, also a good read, talking about the technology crush* and going on to rightfully making fun of the ramblings of some technology company blog I refuse to ink to here because of how closely their ideas correspond to Junior High social dynamics. This unnamed "thinker" (if you really want to know give codinghorror.com some traffic and the proceed at your own risk) spouts some inane drivel about the perceived ecosystem of "elite developers" fleeing to new technology as the "riff-raff" show up.

So I guess in that estimation I'm the riff-raff, wondering if my language is still what the cool kids are using. The amalgam of these two posts has inspired a technological malaise that will take several ticks to snap out of. Do I bother learning a doomed flawed language, JAVA? Is my current language of choice no longer cool? But seriously, JAVA dead or alive can pay my bills. If C# isn't being used by the cool kids anymore, what will us former drama dorks do?

Oh yeah, now I remember, if I smell something in the office, it must be the rotting corpse of Java...

*Technology Crush: if you write software you know the one - the feeling like we're close to every possible acro-nymonic combination of letters to indicate a functionally infinite number of technologies it's my business to keep abreast of, else I fall behind and have to support my family by shining shoes or apples (I'd shoot for the midtown location - shorter commute).

I'm a web developer, and while there is a constant march of new tools and techniques that have made my life better, one thing that still tops the list is FireBug (the Firefox plug-in). Seriously, if you're developing web applications without Firebug you're working too hard.

Now, I think I may have another top 5 item. It's called Xobni (inbox backward - pronounced Zob-nee, so I can tell). I've been playing around with it for about two days now and it seems to solve really well some of the most basic outlook problems. The first and probably most annoying is the age old "I know he sent me a copy of it but where is the email". Until now I've been using Google Desktop and/or the Google Desktop outlook plug-in to do my find, usually searching on the person or something about the conversation to find a list of emails from the person. Their search results are really weak, it give me the email from the person with a from line a subject, maybe a couple lines of text and an icon indicating if there was an attachment. This approach breaks down if you're looking for something in even the semi-recent past or if there were multiple attachments flying back and forth between you and the person. You have to poke around. Xobni solves this by pulling up a file list of everything that the person has sent you in an email when you select that person when they are selected - amen.

The other problem I run into occasionally is trying to track down a phone number for someone. I'm pretty picky who I put in my contact list in Outlook but at the same time I need to find a phone number. Xobni automatically extracts phone numbers from all the email someone has sent me and displays it with a Skype tool menu. And if I have a phone number for the person in my contacts, it displays that.

Here is their little demo video that is pretty thorough:

Check it out, I'm pretty happy so far (Day 3). The Performance is good on my desktop, a little lack-luster on my laptop, but it doesn't hang up Outlook. There is a bunch more to it that I've left out and am still discovering, but I think they hit the nail on the head. I don't usually gush about stuff, but digging around Outlook has got to be one of my least favorite things ever, and this may keep me from having to do it ever again. Whoop Whoop! Give me a week or so and I'll place it in my top 5 tools of now.
hat tip to Drit for pointing it my way

I had a nice surprise this morning when I arrived at my desk. A yet to be identified reader turn contributor to my blog left a copy of the Wall Street Journal Technology Section on my desk folded to an article entitled Glitches Bug Google's Android Software. The salient few lines for me are:

"Functionality is not there, is poorly documented or just doesn't work. It's clearly not ready for prime time," said Mr. [Adam] MacBeth, who earlier this year helped found mobile software start-up [omitted on purpose]

Looks to me like Mr. MacBeth got himself some free publicity by giving them the quote that they wanted. That being said, I have yet to really dive into the development portion of my Android efforts - still in concept stages. So I don't know how buggy or not it is.

At any rate, Anyone who's been around the block once or twice in software knows that the bleeding edge stuff is always fraught with pitfalls. There is a reason version 2 exists. Dare I tie this in to Agile Software development thinking around deliver something and improve as you go? If you gold plate everything you bloat and you'll never make it out the door. note to self - tell them about the software side project you've been working on for 5+ years because you've been compulsive about doing it all the right way. It's a bit embarrassing.

Thankfully, the WSJ decided to be even handed and get another voice:

Rick Genter a professional software engineer who is writing an Android application in his free time, said that while Google's mobile software is buggy, it isn't necessarily any worse than any other software at such an early stage.

Thank you also to my reader/contributor for bringing this in. I have purposely not linked to WSJ because frankly, they don't seem to want to let me have access to their content so I won't be giving them my "network effect" love. And I'm not really sure that a story about a new platform being buggy is news.

IntoMobile.com has a tidbit about an Android Device prototype reportedly by HTC in the wild. It's not pretty, but prototypes aren't about pretty...looks like they actually got their information from gizmodo.com : Google Android Prototype In the Wild

Our source, a Giz reader, had some feedback to add to the prototype, which he used for a day: Even in early form, it's light and fast, much faster than the desktop emulator at times. And as a longtime programmer, he thinks it's a lot more put together than Window Mobile 5 on the back side of things.

props to Dave for putting this on his Reader share and bringing it to my attention