bob mcwhirter - Opinion

Theft!

bob — 2004-09-03T05:00:41+00:00

i-neighbors has popped up as the next social community meme. Nice logo.

Looks somewhat familiar...

Anti-Spam Idiots

bob — 2004-07-15T02:03:25+00:00

0Spam.com - A Virtually 100% Effective Free Anti Spam Service is a complete piece of crap. Nope, I don't use'em. I'm just abused by them.

One of the many worms out there is sending its crap and spoofing the From with my email address. We all know it happens, right? Well, these idiots don't bother to check to see if it's bogus email, instead, they send an automatic verification email to me, for me to prove that I really sent the mail. 30 times. For the same recipient. Of course, they provide no way to anti-verify it. So, I continue to get assloads of their verification mails in my inbox. Helping to solve the spam problem? Not from my perspective.

update

Just received a reply to my complaint...

OK, your address is now blocked. You could have setup filters in your mail client to block us as well.

Doesn't that seem like an odd response to someone providing services to keep your inbox clean? Not even an opt-out response, but more of a "just delete'em" response. Yep, idiots.

Happy Birthday Jason

bob — 2004-05-11T15:08:16+00:00

Jason van Zyl, the original guy behind Maven turned a robust 32 yesterday. Here's to hoping he continues to increase the ROI of his life.

Big Ol' Jed Had a Light On (Seattle)

bob — 2004-04-06T18:50:54+00:00

Going to the Mecca of domestic coffee next week. Seattle and I have a weird relationship where I only stay in town for 23 hours each time. Though, luckily, I've only ever seen Seattle with blue skys and 70 degree weather. As far as I know, the whole "rainy northwest" is just a ruse to keep tourists away.

Read this

bob — 2004-04-01T07:32:47+00:00

I wrote something here

So long, and thanks for all the fish...

Happy Birthday, Ben

bob — 2004-03-04T14:39:52+00:00

Happy birthday to Ben. Ben is my arch-nemesis from bizzarro world and a valued hausmate/despot. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his lovely wife in Amsterdam last year.

!time
The time is Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:29:14 +1000 in Bensland, Australia. Happy Birthday Ben! (subtle I know...)

Bath and Bodyworks Buffet

bob — 2004-01-14T07:11:37+00:00

My wife smelled nice tonight, and I asked her what it was. Her response was something along the lines of "Warm vannilla spice perfume from Bath and Bodyworks." I've always thought that we should throw a party where the snacks and beverages were simply Bath and Bodyworks products.

You could mix the Strawberry and Rice Shampoo with a little ginger ale to produce a lovely beverage. Slices of the Oatmeal and Walnut Body Bar would go well with a cup of coffee. The Lavendar and Mint Bath Beads in a dish for guests to freshen their breath. Maybe even roll up and smoke some Pure Hemp Exfoliating Cloths.

Mainstream Foo

bob — 2004-01-09T19:31:15+00:00

Foo Camp was written up by CNN. I was invited, but instead I was off in Amsterdam organizing the first irregular Haus Party. Sounds like Foo Camp was good geeky fun also.

The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot.

Wake up!

bob — 2003-12-28T22:20:02+00:00

MyCalls.net bills itself as Wake Up Calls and Reminder Calls. In order to get to the airport in time to eventually be denied boarding on a flight to Canada, I used this service. Was nice to have my phone ring at 5am with a wake-up call and even call back 5 minutes later since I'd snoozed it. Definitely worth the $0.99. And for future reference, a certificate of adoption is not sufficient evidence that the 6-year-old travelling with you and your wife is an American if you're going to Canada. After jumping through a few hoops, we're finally actually enjoying the Great White North.

Book Review: Slack

bob — 2003-12-23T04:58:21+00:00

Slack : Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is a nice, quick read. I'm glad it was only $11 and change, though, as it's not one that I'll be reading again anytime soon. DeMarco's main point is that an efficient organization has no room to maneuver into being an effective organization. He then spends 200 pages providing examples and specifics along with some remedies. While not specifically a handbook of how to fix your organization, I think that by helping bring some of these faults to light, we can all start getting better. After all, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

Another entry in the small but growing management library that suggests purposely slowing down and smelling the roses could actually boost productivity in today's 24/7 world, Tom DeMarco's Slack stands out because it is aimed at "the infernal busyness of the modern workplace."

Elements of Style

bob — 2003-11-24T01:55:34+00:00

I've been doing a lot of writing lately, and I've also learned that many folks simply are not familiar with The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Everyone seems to own a copy of The Elements of Java Style or The Elements of UML Style but are somehow blissfully unaware of the origins of these books.

If you write, you need a copy of Strunk and White sitting right next to your Websters Collegiate Dictionary.

The fact is, the vast majority of so-called book doctors are garbage. An exception would be Strunk and White's classic Elements of Style. It was originally written during WWI by William Strunk who was then a professor at Cornell, and it has since been updated by E.B.White, one of his former pupils. Strunk's strategy was to edit down the complexities of English grammar into those few basic elements which would help people to improve their writing skills. His central rule is simple:

Involuntary Switch

bob — 2003-11-17T00:19:13+00:00

So, my mother-in-law called me the other day, asking me to diagnose her Windows Millenium Edition machine that'd freeze after running for about 10 minutes. Now, I'm completely Windows ignorant, but I poked around anyhow. Basically, all I could come up with was "ayup, you're right, it freezes after ten minutes." I figured maybe I could upgrade to WinXP as a solution. Upon further thought, I decided that was just a bandage to a bloody head wound. After doing a cost/benefit analysis, considering the hours of my time over the lifetime of the in-law relationship, I simply decided to amputate and replace.

So, I knocked upon the door today with a bag of new hardware and said "congratulations, you're a Mac user now!" She's now been vaulted into the 21st century with a G4 iBook, Airport Extreme, Wifi route/WAP combination and a bundle of new software. It was easier than dying a slow death diagnosing Windows.

Business Rules (Opinion)

bob — 2003-11-07T17:42:17+00:00

So, I'm finally back from the Business Rules Forum and have one thought about what I witnessed. One of the BoF sessions I attended was all about rule management, addressing concerns about rule authoring, permissions, analysis and deployment. 98% of the audience came from "the business side" of the enterprise. A repeated theme was that they don't trust their business people necessarily to write and deploy rules. They still want the IT staff involved to do rule analysis and the actual deployment. Some audience members raised concerns that folks on the business side don't know how to write business rules. This scares me. If you're on the business side of the enterprise, your job is to write the rules, whether they are implemented via IT resources or if they are merely policies in a manual or the way you deal with customers. Business rules are the way you do business, and IT is certainly not (or shouldn't be) the expert in that regard.

I'll admit that currently there are technical limitations to allowing business folks to write and deploy rules on IT infrastructure without the intervention of IT staff. But ultimately, IT should be transparent and the people who write the rules (ie, who run the business) on a daily basis should simply be able to do so. If a business person can't write business rules, perhaps he should be flipping burgers down at Krusty Burger.

Of course, I'm also fully aware that some/many business folks don't know how to write rules and only can keep their jobs because it takes IT quite a while to realized bogus rules in code, and by then, it's assumed that it's IT's fault the system doesn't work or make sense. A transparent business rule facilitating technology will make the business side of the enterprise more directly accountable for their decisions. Be careful what you wish for.

My Head Is Going To Explode

bob — 2003-11-05T16:59:28+00:00

As noted previously, I'm attending the Business Rules Forum in Nashville (insert obligatory "yee-haw!" here). In addition to being in the hotel where the Country Music Awards are taking place tonight, the BRF has been a veritable motherlode of knowledge. This is the absolute first conference that has been beneficial to me. In my head (and soon in some LaTeX) I've been sketching out some future directons for drools including rule management, repositories, deployment and analysis.

I've learned that the rule engine is but a small portion of the entire space of "business rules". There's plenty of room to grow. Nothing quite like a swift kick in the ass to get excited about a project again.

Agile Methods and Enterprises

bob — 2003-11-04T20:09:25+00:00

So, I am attending the Business Rules Forum in Nashville this week (yee-haw!) and heard this quotable quote:

Agile methods don't produce agile enterprises because you're still writing code.

The context is, of course, that a business rule approach and technology can move a lot of your logic out of code entirely, allowing the enterprise itself to be agile. If you're using agile methods to write code, you're still locking business logic up in a form that's not easily mutable. Somewhat similar to doing agile brick laying instead of reconfigurable cubicle farms.