Gary’s Tech Thoughts Blog

Happy Mother's Day

Things were not easy for us when I was a kid.  When my parents split up, it was still a somewhat unusual thing, whereas today, it seems the unusual case is for parents to stay together.  It was just my Mom and I back then, as Dad was stationed on the other side of the globe.  She taught high school during the day, adult ed at night, and worked on her master’s degree during the summer.  At one point, she had 3 different jobs I recall.  This was all fairly transparent to me.  We never had a lot, but we had enough.  I’m sure I wasn’t as appreciative then as I should have been, just as today it escapes my own daughters just how fortunate they are.

When I, like all sixteen year old boys, wanted to get a job to buy a car, she said no.  “You’ll have plenty of time to work in your life”, and told me she wanted me to focus on my grades.  I had friends working at McDonald’s and Bill Miller’s, making money and driving cars - I really wanted the “financial independence” that fast-food job would bring.  Boy, was she ever right about that one.  We filled out endless scholarship applications and the grades / test scores paid off; I basically won a paid ride thru Texas A&M.
To this day, she still works harder than anyone I know.  Now just one job, but still 80-100 hrs a week at Alamo Community College where she is a full professor.  At an age when most people are thinking about retirement, Mom went back to school to start work on her doctorate.  And, about 5 years ago, at 60+ she earned her phD.  Since starting that journey 10 years earlier, she buried two parents, and then unexpectedly a brother.

A hundred times she could have quit through the years.  Through all those long nights of grading papers, writing papers, helping me with my writing and projects, working literally all night more times than I can count just so we could have a normal life.  I doubt I could ever say thank you enough for your sacrifice Mom.  I can say now that I truly appreciate you.  Happy Mother’s Day Mom.

Were you worried about the April 1 Conficker worm a few weeks ago? While this virus got plenty of media attention, an attack by cyber terrorists might be much more effective on phone, internet, banking, and maybe even our electric grid with the cut of a few fiber optic cables. The prototype of such an attack may have taken place last Thursday in the SF Bay Area as ten fiber optic cables were cut in 4 places around 4:00 AM.

This could have been a probe of our defenses (non-existent) or perhaps a labor protest by CWA union members who have voted to strike (which they deny).  Either way, Dvorak has it right when he calls into question Obama’s proposal of a “Smart Grid” controlling the nation’s electric distribution.  Terriorist, disgruntled union workers, or otherwise, one thing is certian: these criminals knew exactly what they were doing, exactly what manholes to climb down, and exactly what cables to cut.

Today, Amazon announced their Amazon Elastic MapReduce cloud web service.  A natural extension to their EC2 cloud services on one hand, and a somewhat startling event on the other.  In a recent post, I spoke of the global implications of the readily available low cost cloud computing infrastructure.  Now, it seems this service has entered the realms of massively parallel computing.

Not clear at this point what the limits of this service are, but the possibilities are staggering.  Not enough computing power in Pyongyang?  No problem, run your nuke simulations right here Mr Kim Jong-il. An extreme case, and perhaps too complex / compute intensive for this offering, but the point is never have resources of this scale been so readily available.  Amazing.

A better fit for tasks like SETI@Home, these distributed networks are useful in solving very large data intensive types of problems like web indexing.  Google even provides a nice tutorial on mapreduce.  This is also a nice class lecture on mapreduce from Cal Berkeley.  Enjoy.

Last week, the Austin Agile development user group, AgileAustin, published a online poll of tools that teams in the local area favor for agile planning.  In response to the email announcing the poll, a couple of members emailed the list saying their favorite tool is no tool at all.  Some said index cards.  I shook my head a bit and emailed a good friend of mine who also leads development teams for his thoughts.  We came to the conclusion that it must be nice to work in a project so small you need no tools to help the team plan a sprint.

Actually, I don’t think it would be that nice.  I’d submit that if your plans are so simple that you need nothing to track them, or index cards suffice, you’re probably not doing much interesting.  For my team, Rally Software’s Rally Enterprise has been very successful in helping us plan very complex agile projects.  I recommend it without hesitation.

In many cases, our product management team enters user stories (sometimes we use epics for very large user stories) while the development, QA, and docs team breaks these down into stories and tasks.  We plan sprints as a fully integrated feature team across all these disciplines.  It’s not perfect, but it works and works well.

You can keep your index cards, thank you.

As you can tell by the frequency of my posts, things have been very busy at work - no complaints though, I know of friends and associates that would like to have such a problem. I wanted to follow up on one of the thoughts in the prior post regarding the global ramifications of effect of freely / very affordable cloud computing services.

With services like google app engine and amazon’s elastic compute cloud offering free and low cost resources that would have previously required investment of at least six zeros, the bar is substantially lowered to take a good idea to market.  To build out an idea, you now really just need a handful of expertise and time - not to mention a lot less time that you once did.

This opens competition up on a global scale never seen before - certainly there are many excellent and bright developers in India, China, Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, you get the picture.  The value increases for innovative ideas, domain knowledge, and the ability to market the solution.

I firmly believe America remains the cradle of innovation; it is in the very core of our society and our DNA.  I’ve had the privilege over my career to work with some of the best and brightest, and feel very blessed that I still do every day.  It is heartening to see the innovation coming out of Apple and my own company.  Still it is going to be a very different world when my daughters enter the workforce.   Change is coming and it is coming even faster than we can imagine.

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting to the Texas Community College Teachers Association on this post’s subject.  I’ve posted the slides on slideshare for reference.  I’ll be sumarizing a few of the more salient points in an upcoming blog post.

Do you know what this is?

load AX, BX

Then chances are you know how computers really work, and chances are you are, what’s the word, old?  I’m currently working on a presentation for an upcoming conference that describes how Software as a Service, cloud computing, and web services are changing the landscape for education.  The thought occurred to me recently when working on the outline of the presentation that many of today’s computer science students have no idea how computers really work.  Systems level knowledge of programming and operating systems seems to be arcane. Maybe that’s good in a way.

No you can build full-on applications in scripting languages, deploy them in the cloud and not worry about load balancing, firewalls, and nusiances like memory management.  Maybe in 10 years, developers of the future will laugh at us when they recount, ” yea, you used to have to write applications in this complex language called Java, now you just drink it, ha, ha, ha”.  I used to laugh at the PL-1 and FORTRAN programmers.

Maybe this is good.  Now, developers can focus on solving business problems and spend less time on the nuainces of programming.  Or, maybe they actually have less control and are forced into the confines of what is offered in the toolbox of Google, Amazon, Salesforce and the like.  And, since soon they will lack any real systems development skills, maybe they give up all chance of getting outside of those boxes?

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to speak at an Rally customer success tour at the Renaissance.  Tonight, I am reflecting on the leaders I have a privilege to serve with on the panel, Israel Gat, Jack Yang, Torsten Weirch, and Eric Huddleson.  These gentlemen are all significant leaders in the Austin Community and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

I’ve chosen the topic of “Agile in the Large” since the real power of Agile is evident when you turn loose the teams to run at their full speed in a self directed agile process.  Agile gets really interesting with development teams over 50, and also holds its most promise.  We believe that the best way to scale a team and continue to deliver successful software projects is to build it as a set of Agile teams.

Here’s few things we’ve learned along the way.  Interestingly enough, in comparing notes with the some of the development leaders at salesforce.com, it seems they have learned many of the same things.

• There’s no replacement for a great technical leader in the Agile team - effective team leads are priceless.  You should always be growing and recruiting for leaders.
• Great Product Owners are hard to find.  I have the pleasure to work with some of the best, but to scale the teams, you need more.
• An Agile team must be composed of all the skills they need to produce a shippable result.  In our case, it is the product owner or manager, usability, dev team, QA team, and tech writers.
• You run into problems when you depend on other parts of the organization that may not be Agile.  Just for an example, if you have a supporting organization that is still working on the Hero principle, or the waterfall process, there is going to be trouble.
• Tool support is critical and everyone must adopt. For large teams, roll up views and quick reporting is absolutely essential.  Rally gives us this capability.
• Test automation is absolutely key to keeping the product shippable.  As each sprint there is significant new functionality being delivered, the QA team must at the same time deliver automated tests so that doing regression testing onthe whole product is a swift process at the end of the release.  There’s just not time to regression test the whole product.

We have even been able to extend Agile to expose our feature teams to end clients through the Rally Agile tool.

Veteran’s Day was this week and I received an email from my Dad, the Colonel, that I wanted to share with everyone.  No, it has nothing to do with technology, but it has everything to do with being an American, and being grateful.  Things that I believe are in short supply these days.

“Each year on Vets day and/or Memorial day, I normally send out a greeting to my fellow veterans and loyal American friends.  For various reasons this year, I have not been in the mood and have not been very moved.  I cannot pinpoint precisely why.  I have not changed in my firm belief in this great nation and all that it stands for. Having personally spent over thirty years in support of and defense of a set of values, I am not likely to change my mindset.

What is finally getting through to me is that there are a measure if folk who claim citizenship to this nation that I dearly love who do not feel nearly as committed to it as do I.  Most of these citizens have never done anything in support of this country but rather have gone to great effort to verbally and by their actions demeaned and disgraced it.  While I have always been aware that such folk were there, I had them fixed on the fringe and that we loyal and patriotic citizens were in the mainstream.  By nature I have always been optimistic, yet for the first time, I now harbor some lingering doubts.

In awful places all over this earth good and patriotic servicemen and women stand in support of this wonderful nation, putting themselves in grave danger by their own choice.  This knowledge gives me reason for hope.  Yet, I see large segments of our population who either are ignorant of this concept of service or who chose to ignore any responsibility to defend our nation by word or deed.  When we reach a point where there are few willing to support our values but many who are willing to damn them, we fail to function as a nation and are reprehensible as a people.  As Vets, we must insure that we do all that we can to keep those who love our nation in the forefront.  We must teach well our children and grandchildren.

When the next catastrophic attack occurs, let us pray that another generation of warriors are out there like a sleeping tiger ready to come forward.  It is my belief that we will likely need those young warriors and very soon if our leadership wavers or shows weakness.  Amid the gloom, there is always cause for hope.  I wish all of my former comrades in arms a wonderful Vets day and hope that my remarks did not throw cold water on an other wise wonderful day.  I feel that we must remain very vigilant in the next few months/years to insure we do not loose our moral fabric and thus our way as a nation.”

Thank you Dad.  Thanks for the many times you risked your life for our country.  I am so proud of you.

The 30 day experience of a life without windows is off to a fast a furious start.  Some early conclusions are clear.  If you are a technophile, read on, otherwise stop and head to Apple and buy a Mac.  (Does anyone like the new MacBook Pro keyboard?  What were they thinking?)  Still Apple is the only way to go right now if you are not seriously technically adept.

Installing Ubuntu was very easy.  First though, you have to convince Windows Vista to free up some disk space so you can shrink the Windows disk to make room for your Ubuntu disk partition.  This should be easy in Vista with the first version of Windows that includes built in tools to allow you to shrink a partition.  But, like the IRS, there is always a catch with Vista.  It just doesn’t work.  You have to jump through many hoops because Vista writes certain system files at the end of the disk and then tells you you can’t shrink the volume.  Here’s a great write up on the many, many hoops you need to jump through to eventually convince Vista to turn loose of some disk space.  Aarrrggh.

Once you convince Vista to resize the partitions, you will still have a huge chunk of free space left on the Windows disk, but you can then at least create the Ubuntu partition.  The Ubuntu install instructions are very straightforward on what to do.  (again, if you aren’t pretty tech savvy, buy a Mac, you’ll be happier any way).  At the end, you will be able to boot Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Next challenge is VPN - an indespensible necessity in the corporate world.  I could never get the Cisco VPN client to work, though it seems it works for most people in my googling.  I kept getting “Remote Peer Not Responding” blah blah blah.  Thank goodness for this post that shows how set up VPNC.  It worked perfectly the first time and everytime since.

Since your network probably has files shared from Windows servers, you’ll need to get to them too.  Here’s how to do that.

But the big one is Outlook.  The corporate world still largely revolves around the Exchange server.  Connecting from Linux is somewhat of a challenge.  If you are a light email user, and don’t have a complicated calendar, try the Evolution client that is built into Ubuntu.  It is a mail/calendar/contacts client that connects to the Outlook Web Access service on Exchange.  For very light duties, it seems to work ok.  It didn’t work for me at all.  It hung, stalled, and just generally ground to a halt no matter what I tried.  The only real option out there is Outlook for dealing with Exchange.

A pretty good solution here is Crossover - a program for Linux that emulates Windows.  These have been around for years and are getting to the point they actually work - mostly.  Under Crossover, you can install a variety of Windows programs, including believe it or not Office 2007.  It actually works.  Mostly.  More on that later.

All over North Austin, the new Microsoft “Life without walls” billboards have popped up.  You may have read before in my blog what an awful experience I have had with Vista, clearly one of the worst experience I’ve ever had with a piece of software.  I even went so far as to by a MacBook Pro last year and absolutely love it!

Still there is this issue with the Vista laptop on my desk at work. Its on my desk because that is the only place it consistenly works.  Mobility is not something you want to experience with Vista. Unreliable wireless and endless frustration with VPN make it just not worth the pain.

So I was inspired by Microsoft’s billboards this weekend.  Life without walls to me means Life without Windows.  I’m going to see if it is possible, in a business world ruled by the Microsoft Exchange Server.  This insidious strategy is definitely to be admired.  The truth is that most businesses run on Exchange for their email and calendaring solution.

So, this is my inspiration from the Microsoft sloganeering - I am going to see what it will take to have a life without windows.  within 30days, I hope to be completely switched over from Vista to Ubuntu linux.  Can it be done?  Its not a slam dunk - surely there will be challenges.   More to come on these pages…

At the Dreamforce, everywhere you looked, there was the ubiquitous “No Software” logo.  It was even embodied in SaaSy the Salesforce mascot who was frequently on stage with Benioff.  I found it quite illuminating that so many of the sessions I went to were about Building applications with Apex, Salesforce’s Java-like programming language, and the new Visualforce presentation language, akin to java server pages.  There was code everywhere.  Even at the Monday Night Sites competition where contestants had 2 hours to build the coolest Salesforce sites page they could.  Boy, it sure looked like we were all programming.  Hmmmm….  I use an IDE to write code like software, there’s objects, classes, and simple inheritance like software, it even has bugs like software!  Smells a lot like software to me.  I think software engineers are safe.

What it should say, but this would be problematic for their sales, is no IT.  That’s what Salesforce really enables - no IT infrastructure, at least in the traditional sense.  No application servers, no databases, no backups, no security auditors.  Host your business email and calendars on Google domains and no Microsoft Exchange.  I assure you Redmond is damn worried.

So, here’s my new suggested Salesforce logo.  What do you say Marc?

This week finds me at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce show where a number of very interesting developments are coming to light.  In Marc Benioff’s keynote yesterday, he emphasized the role of cloud computing in the future of all application development, throwing jabs at Microsoft all along the way.  Benioff cast the cloud into these sets of services:

• Amazon is the server plumbing and storage - their EC2 elastic computing cloud providing all the virtual servers you need while S3 provides boundless very low cost storage
• Google is the Microsoft Office and Sharepoint alternative, offering shared applications like calendaring, documents, and spreadsheets, with the capability to share all three, plus adwords that can feed into salesforce leads
• Facebook offers the social graph where new applications can leverage and integrate to spread virally
• Salesforce’s force.com is the application layer to develop business apps and tie all the above together on every platform, mobile to all browsers

This staking out of claims on the cloud computescape is a fascinating thought to me.  While I’m not sure that all other other companies would agree with the above positioning, there has never been a more exciting time to be in software development - the cost  of building a truly scalable application that can service tens of thousands of users  is truly in every developer’s reach.  I woke up at 1 am this morning with my mind racing about how the applications I and others could build!  This clearly has implications for global software development, lowering the bar for anyone in any country who has a great idea to build it out with a small team and bootstrap an effort self funded.

It also means that if you were thinking of corporate IT as a long term career, you should think again.  These services are going to consolidate into a few very large providers, at the end of the day, this is good for our industry. It allows the great ideas, the great innovations to be born more quickly, removing unnecessary barriers and hurdles.

We just returned from Smith Point Texas where we witnessed feats of ordinary heroism that warrant recording here.  Lets start with Fred, president of the volunteer fire department, and his wife Jennifer, who the next day after the storm return to Ike’s bullseye to assess the damage, and took pictures of everyone’s home and posted it on the web so that all the neighborhood could see the condition of their home.  And Fred, heeding the calls of a desperate voice far off in a quagmire of mud dredge up from the bay and deposited all over Smith’s Point by Ike, found and rescued a man who floated on a tank 11 miles from Port Bolivar.  Fred and Jennifer are a force at the Fire station every day, handing out meals to those returning to dig out.  Did I mention, Fred and Jennifer’s home is a total loss?

And Louis, tirelessly helping neighbors rework broken pipes so that they can get water flowing again in their homes.  And Ben, fixing, hauling, and building everything in sight, for anyone, even though he doesn’t have a home there.  And the countless trucks of linesmen from Virginia, North Carolina, and Michigan, who had new lines up and power flowing after a week back to the remote community of Smith Point.  And the stories go on, and on, of neighbor helping neighbor to dig out of 8 inches of mud in their homes, hauling out water heaters, washer, dryers out of yards, cutting up fallen trees, hauling away dead cattle, and searching for lost memories among the flotsam.

The American Red Cross has won everyone’s heart in Smith Point.  Their providing of meals, MREs (boy have these improved since I was a child in the Air Force), and clean water.  I am a donor for life at http://www.redcross.org.  In our little neighborhood, probably 1/3 of the houses are simply gone without a trace, boats are everywhere, the woods are full of homes demolished in Crystal Beach or Port Bolivar, no one escaped unscathed.

More than anything, the story of Smith Point is a story of a community drawn closer by tragedy and adversity.  A story of human determination and the quiet, resolve of Texans picking up the pieces, helping their neighbors and starting over.  It makes you proud to be an American.

Recently, we evaluated several Agile Project Management tools.  Having used XPlanner for years, it was time for a change.  XPlanner is great in some ways - fairly lightweight and easy to use for developers.  It really falls apart though when you start to consider multiple agile teams working together to deliver a release.  It is just really problematic to get a group view of where you are, what progress is being made by the team, and where the hot spots might be.  To accomplish this, you need to drill into the details of every scrum team and study the metrics / charts.  I even went so far as to change the source code to build a dashboard - that’s when we started to approach diminishing returns.

The other shortcoming of XPlanner is the management of the product backlog and release planning.  Yes, you can work around this, but intrinsically, the tool does not support building a backlog and then moving stories into a sprint.  Yes, this can be done, but it is arduous.  The interface also is stuck in Web 1.0 land, making data entry into a form submit after form submit affair.

So then what?  Surveying the market and talking to many of my longtime friends developing software with agile process, we quickly build the short list to replace XPlanner. We looked in detail at Rally, VersionOne, and FogBugz.  Though FogBugz had some very interesting capabilities around predicting the accuracy of estimates, it didn’t really seem to support agile planning methodologies and the scrum process.  Also, though the predictive capabilities are interesting, this really isn’t a huge benefit in my opinion if agile is really used and you know your people.

So, it was down to VersionOne vs Rally.   Both companies did extensive demos for our leadership team and key stakeholders.  Both tools intrinsically are built around the scrum agile process.  Both were priced around the same level with VersionOne being just a little less per seat, per month, but Rally matched and beat this price point in our negotiations.  The huge gaping hole in VersionOne for us was that it really didn’t assist with resource planning at all.  That is, they don’t enable you to enter the amount of available resources in terms of hours, days, etc, and then in the planning cycle show you where you are in using those hours as you take stories from the backlog and add them to the sprint.  Both tools track burndown during the sprint of course, but only Rally lets you know if you are planning too many stories in the sprint.  Even XPlanner supports this, so it is a big miss for VersionOne.  We can only assume they are working to add this capability.

Also, the rollup reporting for an entire release is more powerful and flexible in Rally.  This was a big plus for us.  To be sure, Rally isn’t super sophisticated in resource planning.  It doesn’t allow the individual team members enter their availability and then sum it up for the sprint.  (I would like this feature - I need to add this to the Rally Community.)  Rather, it just allows you to add the total number of hours available for a sprint at the beginning of the planning cycle.  How you figure this out is up to you.  After you add the total number of hours available, it shows you hours remaining as you add stories.

In coming blogs, we’ll talk more about the pros and cons of Rally as a Agile management tool.