eric.openflows

I had a bunch of things to say today but I've just run out of steam. It's been a long day and I can't focus enough to write anything substantial.

So, I offer you these two links to images that are pretty cool. A woman was on a commercial flight high above Florida when the Space Shuttle launched. She posted two photos of what it looked like from her seat as the shuttle pierced the clouds. I hope she and the folks on the shuttle enjoyed their flights.
http://twitpic.com/4yg4ur
http://twitpic.com/4yg6hs

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and for today's photo(s) from here in NYC

back in the day, this stack would have been gone in a couple hours to be used for various construction purposes (stairs, walls, tables, etc.).
 
 

nothing within reach is safe from graffiti

http://www.businessinsider.com/burson-marsteller-facebook-2011-5
PR FIRM: Facebook Asked Us To Do Something Sleazy And We Never Should Have Done It

This is just too funny.

Burson Marsteller, the PR firm that found no problem with representing brutal tyrants and dictators like Augusto Pinochet and Nikolai Chauchesku is saying that they only did something "distasteful" because Facebook asked them to.

Now, let's ignore that there was a lot of money that changed hands so saying that facebook "asked" and not "paid good money" for whatever is a bit of a stretch -- just focus on the idea of Burson Marsteller making a claim to have any conscience at all.

Spinning the Bhopal disaster so Union Carbide would keep its stock value was ok, but putting out news stories about google is somehow going to far? Seriously?!

I'm just speechless.
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and speaking of mixed messages, I somehow think that the primary message of this paint job is "hi officer, I'm stoned. pull me over"

A friend passed this one on to me. It's a nice rant about how buzzwords and their associated process is destroying the world of computer programming.

So much of the process that is popular these days is not what it appears to be, and to me seems designed to increase billing at the expense of creativity and flexibility.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/process-kills-developer-passion.html

In short, you're spending a lot of your time on process, and less and less actually coding the applications. I've worked on some projects where the test cases took two- or three-times as much time to code as the actual code, or where having to shoehorn in shims to make unit tests work has reduced the readability of the code. I've also seen examples of developers having to game the tools to get their line coverage or code complexity numbers to meet targets.

The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion...

...the blind application of process best practices across all development is turning what should be a creative process into chartered accountancy with a side of prison. While every one of these hoops looks good in isolation (except perhaps Scrum ...), making developers jump through all of them will demoralize even the most passionate geek....

... And as an aside, if you're going to say you're practicing agile development, then practice agile development! A project where you decide before you start a product cycle the features that must be in the product, the ship date, and the assigned resources is a waterfall project. Using terms like "stories" and "sprints" just adds a crunchy agile shell, and it's madness to think anything else. And frankly, this is what has led to the entire Scrum/burndown chart mentality, because development teams aren't given the flexibility to "ship what's ready, when it's ready."

Unless the problems I'm talking about are addressed, I fear that the process/passion negative feedback loop is going to continue to drag otherwise engaged developers down into a morass of meetings and metrics-gaming.

The NY Times City Room blog reported today about a creative approach the City is going to take towards driver education about the speed limit this summer. see http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/a-spooky-reminder-to-obey-t...

It's a bit silly and too cute, but it might just work. You've seen those automatic signs that tell you how fast you're driving. They don't do much. In a strange way, they might even backfire.

So this summer, instead of showing you how fast you are traveling, if it detects your are moving faster than the 30 mph speed limit it will simply say "SLOW DOWN!" (with a stupid graphic of a skeleton walking across a street).

Why this story needed to divert for so many paragraphs onto a survey about attitudes towards bike lanes is not clear. I guess that these days any story about transportation is a reason to suggest that the biggest issue on the roads is bike lanes and not cars.

As morbid as it is to contemplate death, today's link is the new leader in how I want my corpse disposed of (hopefully not for a long long time).

A Spanish artist has developed a way of taking your remains (I assume as ashes), mixing them with ground coconut shell, peat and some other ingredients and a tree seed so that you become fertilizer.

http://www.martinazua.com/eng/design-nature/bios-urn/

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today's image is, well.. I have no idea what it is