Month: June 2003

metaphorical tendencies

System Metaphor

What ExtremeProgramming (XP) uses instead of a formal architecture. A simple shared story of how the system works. This story typically involves a handful of classes and patterns that shape the core flow of the system being built.

Ask yourself, what more familiar things is this problem like? Is it really like ordering coffee from a fancy coffee machine? Is it really mostly like steering (tacking) a sailboat across a lake? driving from Toronto to Paris?

I always find metaphors useful for casting a problem in a more understandable light: non-technical people don’t always want or need the details or how objects are created and destroyed or what methods do what. Abstractions and metaphors are more helpful.

Yet, at my last technical job, in technical management, I was told by the VP to whom I reported that metaphors were Bad. I think he saw them as a sign of weakness, but it turns out they were more an indicator of his inflexible mind. if metaphors are good enough for the XP crowd (irony of ironies: the same VP was a big booster of extreme programming, though to my knowledge he had never written any code), it’s good enough for me.

analogies

Seth’s Blog

[Seth] believe[s] that there’s an inverse relationship between data and information–the more data we have, the less we know. Consumers can find out just about anything about just about any product or service, but we actually have less insight than we used to.

Some very successful politicians, organizations and corporations have broken through the clutter and succeeded by limiting the amount of data they offer. The result is that people end up with the information the marketer wants them to have.

The difference between data and information, as I have explained it, is that data is oil in the ground and information is gas at the pump: one is unrefined, not all that useful stuff, and the other, is useful for having been refined, sometimes essential.

Seth’s point seems to restate the old saw about specialists and generalists: the former knows a lot about ad one subject, while the latter knows a little about many. I don’t see how this informs his conclusion that “[s]ome very successful politicians, organizations and corporations have broken through the clutter and succeeded by limiting the amount of data they offer.”

The triumphs of marketing he alludes seem to be driven by cognitive dissonance, a lack of curiousity, or simple ignorance.

something ISPs and mail providers could do now

Gmane — Gmane Address Obfuscation

Not So Hard Encryption

While a real encryption algorithm is used, it will probably be possible to find the encryption key over time, since the number of encrypted/unencrypted pairs will be somewhat huge after a while. That’s not the point — the point is simply to make it somewhat harder for address gathering robots to get to the mail addresses.

If every entity that provided email addresses did this, I think spam would dry up quite quickly.

After all, encryption, even strong commerce-quality encryption, has been about making it harder, while not impossible, to get at some information. In the case of email, this scheme seems robust enough.

feeling good about what you do

/understand/ – what a tangled web we weave Archives

So, you know, I think I’m disappointed in Dave Winer. He is certainly entitled to his opinion, but he would have a more credible case if he didn’t twist words. His personal bias runs deep:

Since MS people so often require reassurance that they aren’t going to hell, I’ll also say (once a year, please) that most of them love their kids and their moms, and really want to make good software, and MS is about the only place you can do that now, and they have no control over what Gates, Ballmer and Allchin do, yada yada yada, but honestly it wears thin, they could read the damned transcripts too, but if I worked there I wouldn’t want to either, because I’d have to quit, because no one with a conscience could work for such a company.

This is a problem/question I have: I know the folks over at MSFT are smart, and I know they like their work and work hard at it. But do they see the big picture? Does it matter? Or is the next milestone all that counts?

There has to be some understanding about the products you’re making and their effects.

how we know a thing to be true

Ben Hammersley.com: Metadata and truth

Indeed, it is the presence of metadata in the first place that allows us to make probablistic guesses towards what data is to be trusted, and what isn’t. A document marked up with dates and topics and creators’ details has this many more points of fact through which to detect falsity. A document with nothing but a name, a date and some content has very little through which we can measure trust programatically.

This is another way to looking at how we manage relationships: the more we know about a person and their habits, quirks, and tendencies allows us to to know when they are acting out of character. So with a document or artifact attributed to them.

This brings to mind the section of “The Tipping Point (see link on main page) where we learn that primate brains are as big as they are for social purposes, to manage the relationships of society, remember faces and other identifiers.

brand awareness

As I was on my oh-so-brief vacation, I decided to update the name of this weblog. Since the name isn’t in the URL, my audience, both of you, should have no trouble finding me.