Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

On the way to work this morning, I got the idea for an analogy in my head.

You can compare the U.S. Constitution to a software project. First, there was the Articles of Confederation (a prototype, one to throw away) in 1777. Then in 1790 the Constitution came into effect (v1). Article five of the Constitution describes “the process neccessary to amend the Constitution” (the Change Control Process). Article seven of the Constitution talks about the process of ratifying the Constitution (deployment plan).

After the Constitution came into effect, there were immediately 10 amendments made (the Bill of Rights or bug fixes to those of us in the biz) that were added in response to initial criticism of the Constitution (users unwilling to change). Since the original 10 bug fixes amendments were made, there have been 17 more hacks amendments added to the Constitution. Since 1789, more than 10,000 amendments have been introduced, but few ever get proposed to Congress (triaged).

So what does this all mean? Clearly, the Constitution is an ugly hack, and the framers would have been wise to bone up on some good object oriented design before starting

I saw this headline come through my rss reader yesterday, its from a local news channel’s web site:

“Mpls. Workers Brave Frigid Cold, Some With Coats” (link to story)

This seems a little disconcerting.

Only SOME people were wearing coats? With temperatures below zero, I would guess that EVERYONE who went outside had a coat.  And, I’m willing to bet there was a high percentage of people with hats and gloves or mittens too, you just wouldn’t know it from the headline.

It did mention that some people also drank warm liquids to fight the cold, which is comforting to know. We get this insightful quote about the benefits of hot drinks:

“It works. It helps.”

So there you have it – if you’re cold, try a hot drink, it will work, it will help.

This is a pretty pessimistic outlook on an install – I suppose it is nice to see that they aren’t beating around the bush either – “….several minutes to several hours….”, yikes.

I got a pretty flattering email today from a recruiter:

“Unknown,
Good morning, I thought you might be interested in a programming opening we have available……”

They must have misinterpreted my name from “Ben” to “Unknown”, it’s a common mistake. But seriously, if anyone is looking for work in the Twin Cities, contact the company below, they probably pride themselves on the personal touch the bring to the table.

On-Demand Services Group, Inc.
12400 Portland Avenue South, Suite 105, Burnsville, MN 55337
952-894-9039

I have to laugh as I write this. I’m sitting in a local Dunn Bros. coffee shop, doing some studying before my certification test later this morning. Dunn Bros has replaced Caribou as my favorite coffee shop because of the free Wifi they’ve got at most locations.

As I sit here and study, there is a woman sitting across from me with one of those nice Apple wide screen laptops. The problem is, she can’t get connected to the Wifi for the life of her! She asked me if I was connected, and I said “yeah, it just picked it right up.” She’s been moving around the coffee shop trying to find a better signal or something, it’s funny I guess sometimes an Apple doesn’t “just work.” It’s even more humorous because it’s a completely unsecured wireless network, something that you should be able to connect to by accident

UPDATE: The woman asked the staff for some help, so a cashier and a manager both came out to hack on her laptop to try and troubleshoot, I wish I had a camera

Ha! I just now learned the term “JFGI” from Jason Bock, which I agree should replace RTFM.  I can’t even tell you how many times this pops up on mailing lists

There was no wikipedia entry for this, so I created one.