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November 2011 Blog Posts
Talk Talk – The Rainbow and After The Flood, not remotely live

Trying to describe what the later works of Talk Talk are like is difficult to do.  They are…different.

As a quotation from Wikipedia states, (they are) “the kind of record which encourages marketing men to commit suicide.”  Depending on how you feel about marketing, this might be seen as a positive or a negative.

Listening to one or two songs, you are likely to find that you like most or all of it, or feel something quite the opposite.  Not because all of the songs sound the same, but because there’s a common sensibility to them, whatever that means.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I don’t look to song lyrics for deep meaning.  If I want to find deep meaning in the written word, I would tend to read Shakespeare or the Bible.  That said, the lyrics for these songs are…interesting.

From “The Rainbow”:

Unfound corrupt
This song the jailer sings
My time has run

Or, from “After The Flood”:

Shake my head
Turn my face to the floor
Dead to respect
To respect to be born
Lest we forget who lay

Right.  Let me get a pencil and write that down.

Enjoy.  Or not.

After The Flood

 

The Rainbow

posted @ Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:14 PM | Feedback (0)
Repost: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

This is a very interesting read.  I like this line in particular:

“Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?”

Take a look.

posted @ Thursday, November 17, 2011 11:53 AM | Feedback (0)
John Mellencamp – What If I Came Knocking (Live)

At least I think it is live.  The sound is so tight that it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some over-dubbing involved, but it doesn’t appear to be so.  Fantastic guitar work in this one.

So let's just say it worked out
Like a storybook dream
And we lived happily ever after
Fa la la la
But what if I came crying
After just a few weeks
And I said misread my heart
This is not really meant to be? Yeah
Enjoy.
 
posted @ Tuesday, November 15, 2011 8:22 PM | Feedback (0)
A nice Veteran’s Day moment

“Every now and then, a video comes along that can cut through even the iciest, most cynical heart.”

Technically, it was the day after Veteran’s Day.

Enjoy.

posted @ Monday, November 14, 2011 7:04 PM | Feedback (0)
Chicago Alt.Net Presentation, 11/16/2011: Poor Man’s Kanban

The evite is here, the description is here.

Meeting is Nov. 16th at 6 PM at the usual Redpoint Technologies space at Willis Tower (what everyone else knows as Sears Tower).

The phrase “poor man’s kanban” is something I introduced (well, I guess Chris Matts introduced it) on the yahoo group to differentiate between the very basics of kanban from the much more sophisticated versions that existed then and exist now.

I’ll be describing the differences between traditional waterfall, scrum and kanban.  Hopefully, it will be of benefit to some.  The presentation will be recorded and materials uploaded.

posted @ Thursday, November 03, 2011 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)
cqrs for dummies – cqrs guidance coming from microsoft

I don’t remember exactly how google groups work, so I don’t remember if you have to be a member of a group to lurk, but a post came out from Microsoft that they intend to release guidance on cqrs.  The thread is .

The roadmap for the guidance is here and a related post about how cqrs supposedly works with Azure is here.

With my usual skill at people development, my response was:

“Oh dear god. Nothing can possibly go wrong with that.”

A lot of stuff then went on in the thread.  A lot of it was around the idea that “we haven’t produced the guidance yet, why are people being so negative?” 

Fair enough.

Tom Janssens summed up some of the key points:

“It is very odd to see such an opinionated and aggressive slowchat on this usually very constructive and welcoming forum. Many of you here are truely experts in the field with years of experience in CQRS; let us try not to judge and be negative, but create an open an welcoming atmosphere for MSFT as well. “

Fair enough.

“I assume that a lot of the persons in this thread are or have been software architects somewhere in the past. Do you still recall how hard it was to convince the others of using this whole new approach? Do you remember the learning process you had to go through - both you and your collegues- ? I made a lot of mistakes, and I assume I will be making lots more of them.”

Fair enough.

“Here is something very appropriate for this thread IMO: one of my mentors always said: "the person saying it can not be done should not interrupt the person doing it". “

Not so fair enough, but actually bullshit.  I’ll get to that.

“The guidance is going to be there no matter what, so let us try to make it as awesome as we possibly can. “

To which I responded, “Yep, sums it up.”

So, here’s the skinny

The irony here is pretty thick.  Way back in the day, Bellware (among others) used to accuse me of being a bought-out lackey and shill for Microsoft, which I always found funny.  Though I haven’t changed much since then, the following will seem really funny.

Regardless of all that, the issues here are pretty clear.

To Microsoft’s credit, they have said that they are being asked more and more about what cqrs and what it involves, and what it would talk to implement this.  This is perfectly understandable.  They want to respond to clients.

Also, they have said (through Glenn Block) that they want to engage with people such as Greg Young to get a clear grasp on what cqrs is.  This is good.  Glenn and Greg are good at what they do.

Where things start to go off the rails is pretty easy to identify:  are they going to offer ‘guidance’ for cqrs along the lines of Oxite, well understood to be garbage?  Are they going to offer ‘guidance’ for cqrs along the lines of N-layer app sample, also well understood to be garbage?  Are they going to be able to transcend the failed patterns and practices guidance that has given us the ‘joy’ of the Enterprise Library, a set of largely inadequate tools (in their pre 5.0 versions) that plague us in the industry?

"the person saying it can not be done should not interrupt the person doing it".  Um, no, the people who have already done it are trying to interrupt the people who’ve never done it before and spew out ‘guidance’ that tells people how to do it incorrectly

“The guidance is going to be there no matter what”   Exactly.  Greg Young might be involved, and we hope that he is.  But if he isn’t, or if he is and ignored, the ‘guidance’ is coming out regardless.  You have been warned.

Hoping for the best

I hope that p&p releases guidance (and not ‘guidance’) that is accurate and supported by the people that actually understand what cqrs is (in other words, not me, but true industry leaders).

But, as they’ve stated/threatened, it’s coming out regardless.  Color me cynical if that isn’t something I find encouraging.

posted @ Wednesday, November 02, 2011 10:10 PM | Feedback (2)
Repost: Relaxed attitude towards the pragmatic delivery of okay software

Rob Ashton has a post up about how he’s addressed his development of a current project.

There’s tons to quote here:

“…this time I made a real effort to drop any up-front 'zomg my code must be perfect' aspirations from the get go.

What does this mean? Well I pretty much decided that technical debt should not be something to be overly avoided, overly organised code-bases stifle creativity and I really just wanted to deliver something.”

“A couple of months later how does that leave me? Is the code-base a huge unmaintainable mess? I would say no - it is not. “

“Even those seeking to do more vertical testing of a unit within their system (across several internal components) aren't really testing anything meaningful, they're not really spending their time on anything really meaningful either - I wonder if we do a lot of this stuff just to make our jobs more interesting because LOB apps are at a micro-level... quite boring”

There’s a Wittgenstein-ian notion about how you use a ladder to allow you to rise to a certain level, and then discard the ladder.

I think this fits here.

Enjoy.

posted @ Wednesday, November 02, 2011 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)