Archive | August, 2005

Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions points to Joel on Software – The Project Aardvark Spec with the note “Joel explains why XP isn’t the answer to everything”

I can’t tell you how strongly I believe in Big Design Up Front, which the proponents of Extreme Programming consider anathema.

That would be fine if Joel was making a fair comparison. He’s not. He’s in the camp of detractors who view eXtreme Programming (XP) as “Code Like Hell and We’ll Figure Out What The Customer Wants Later” (CLHWFOWTCWL) which is certainly a less attractive acronym and idea. Reading through the rules and practices of XP, you’ll see that Joel was following most of the tenets of XP is his analysis and design. Good XP practitioners design up front, a sufficient design necessary to begin work and work up a series of user stories just as Joel describes, identifying the overall design and likely architecture of the work before the coding begins. This is just a cheap shot, and far below Joel’s usual outstanding efforts.

Joel’s “Big Design Up Front” is a 20-page PDF espousing some general design principles, coding and naming standards, a quick text-based mockup of the user interface and an overview flow diagram. This is the perfect starting point for an XP project, but completely misses the target of “Big.” Joel’s doing some aspects of XP, he just doesn’t know it.

Chris Date has an interview over on the O’Reilly site that’s well worth the time to read. A favorite quote, one of many:

To a first approximation, “object/relational” just means the domains over which relations are defined can be of arbitrary complexity. As a consequence, we can have attributes of relations–or columns of tables, if you prefer–that contain geometric points, or polygons, or X rays, or XML documents, or fingerprints, or arrays, or lists, or relations, or any other kinds of values you can think of. But this idea too was always part of the relational model! The idea that the relational model could handle only rather simple kinds of data (like numbers, and strings, and dates, and times) is a huge misconception, and always was. In fact, the term object/relational, as such, is just a piece of marketing hype … As far as I’m concerned, an object/relational system done right would simply be a relational system done right, nothing more and nothing less.

Recorded at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California on March 15, 2005, and available for you to download and/or listen online at IT Conversations, Shirky cites several examples of why hierarchical representations of the web (Yahoo, dmoz) don’t work as well as the freeform “tagging” of Google, del.icio.us or Flickr. Worth an attentive listen or two.

Database-centric application designers need to be thinking about this, too. We often present workflow and data entry entry that’s linear or branching. Relational database design by its nature is hierarchical. Think about how flat tagging can apply.

Computerworld News notes that Apple releases security update for Mac OS X. “Apple has released a security update for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” that updates several of the components and technologies in the operating system.” In Apple’s Software Update, it goes on to say:

“Security Update 2005-007 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. This update includes the following components: AppKit, BlueTooth, CoreFoundation, cups, Directory Services, HIToolBox, Kerberos, loginwindow, Mail, OpenSSL, QuartzComposerScreenSaver, Security Interface, Safari, X11, zlib For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798”

Yikes. Get patching

InfoWorld: Top News notes Hacker found guilty in massive data theft case.

(InfoWorld) – “A Florida man was found guilty of stealing data from customer information management company Acxiom Corp. Friday. The prosecution estimates that Scott Levine and his defunct bulk e-mail marketing firm Snipermail.com Inc. stole more than 1.6 billion customer records by hacking into an Acxiom server.”

… “Levine and other Snipermail staff downloaded around 8.2 gigabytes of personal data from the Acxiom server between April 2002 and August 2003, according to the DOJ.

… “Acxiom said in the statement… “There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches. It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom’s internal security firewalls or internal databases.”

Could someone please explain to me why Acxiom was storing 8.2 gigabytes of personal data in an external server!!!???