joker.iki.fi

I’ve been thinking lately of a problem that constantly seems to hit a lot of IT projects (and probably other projects) in the face. Basically, how to make the basic assumptions and done decisions most efficiently known throughout the team.

For example, if the lead developer or architect decides that a component called “engine” needs to do only thing A and B, nothing else, and he thinks that if anyone, ever, wants it to make C, they always need to understand the original rational for limiting the functionality to A and B, before making the decision to add C.

Problems like this can become tedious in larger organizations because many people only typically know that the “engine” exists, but nothing else. Without knowing the context and basic assumptions made when the original decision to keep the functionality to the bare minimum, that is, only to have A and B in the engine, many people waste a lot of time and effort to design stuff without complete information.

Clearly, traditional approach, meaning documentation and learning, is quite slow and inefficient. Worse yet, collective documentation and collective learning are even slower. People constantly are misaligned with their documentation and with the stuff they have learned.

Nevertheless, I think I have found out at least few items that can make this better and I hopefully can pursue them in the near future. Please let me know if you are interested in this topic, I’m surely going to need help.

During this week, a group of people has been gathering funds to publish an ad in the largest newspaper in Finland, that is, Helsingin Sanomat (well, ok, not in the main paper but still). The ad is not obscene or very provocative even. It basically says “These people (who are the ones now running for parliament) voted for the law, and these people voted against.” Read the scoop from the Vaalimasinointi.org, who are the ones behind the ad.

Since I believe that passing the law was a stupid mistake and Finland is going to pay dearly for that, it is very frustrating to see that Finland’s biggest newspaper which, grated, has a very bad track record of being truly independent and party-neutral publisher, turned down the ad.

Well. even though it’s morally wrong, I guess it’s their right to team up with the Finnish equivalent of the MAFIAA. Probably makes a good business sense if you optimize for the past and stagnation. Good thing that I don’t subscribe to expensive partisan probaganda that is the HS.

Today my wife forced me to tidy up my study. I have managed to delay this activity for years now but today I kind of had to give up as she gave me no options. I threw out two large bags of old printouts and a LOT of old papers and binders. Most of the stuff dated back to years 97-99 when I did most of my lab courses at the univerity. Lots of good memories there and a lot of information and work that went into producing those papers. I felt kind of sad throwing them away.

I had a lot of old Linux HOWTOs and magazines and whatnot, stuff that’s so deprecated nowadays and they are just a click away in the internet that makes no sense to keep those, but still I felt bad of discarding the stuff. The most memorable items were some of the old computer games and burned CD’s with faded out texts like “Red Hat 5.2″ or something like. It made me feel very nostalgic but at the same time the practical side of me was telling me that it just makes no sense in storing stuff that I’m never going to need again.
Well, now it’s done and I also did some housekeeping to my server. The old copy of joker.iki.fi has been running in the background for a few months now but the Drupal that it was running was so full of holes that I needed to archive the old version of joker.iki.fi. So, a lot of changes today here in my world. A spring cleaning even before spring.

During the time sun was setting I took a little cycling trip, a bit more than one hour and I have to admit that even though I don’t really like winter, it was actually very pretty outside.

A nice day in general.

Now I’ve been using the new blog for a while and I have to say that I really, really like WordPress.

With the old joker.iki.fi I had to constantly worry about comment spam and all sort of mishaps. It might be that the new system has been online for such a short period of time that I havent been spotted by as many spambots, but still WordPress does what it promises very well.

I am going to remove that last drupal binaries from the server quite soon and as a blogging software, I don’t think I’m going to be looking back. Not that Drupal is bad. It’s a full CMS and does a ton of tricks that WordPress does not do, but as a blogging platform, I think I have found my own.

My next projects will include setting up a easy-to-maintain photo gallery. Let’s see how WordPress can help…

Just watched Prison Break. For those from abroad, one of the commericial broadcasters, MTV3 is airing it here on tuesday night prime time. I have to say, todays episode was just about the most exciting episode of any TV series I have ever seen. Today they got outside the wall for the first time. The way they have created the atmosphere is just amazing.

Ok, there are always those who will say that this is just another American stereotype-ridden cliché series, but I have to admit that I really admire the writers, actors and others who make the show happen. It’s not very easy to make entertainment like this.

I wish we get even close someday.

This post I think I need to start with a disclaimer: The following that is said is in no way related to my employer or any other company for that matter. It’s just an interesting thing that happened to me during my free time and is in no way related to any person I have business affiliance with.

Just the other day I was discussing with one guy who has been involved with Symbian S60 platform development. I didn’t actually know that he had been involved with this stuff until this discussion took place. Basically, I complained to him about Symbian S60 as a development platform. The platform is just very hard to learn even if you know C++ and getting from initial concept to a working and installable product is very time-consuming and frustrating.
I have written quite a lot of software in many languages and platforms during the 20 years I have been coding. This includes also some very low-level things with C and assembler. I took to Symbian development a few years back and was first very excited about the platform. Now that I finally have S60 devices and have some time to actually do more complex development, the difficulty and pain of developing working software has really surprised me.

Then just as a proof to the points I made, I found a link to this article from Slashdot. I would not like to call it a piece-of-shit OS as the article does, but I think it’s in serious need of redesign. I do realize it’s just not very easy nor cheap to make an easy, fast and customizable mobile smartphone OS, but the things that the article mentions just don’t seem to be today (or future) anymore.

I also would like to see some statistics on how much resources the worst problems of Symbian, like the VERY frustrating “leaving” exception handling and the descriptor paradigm does really save. If just these few things could be fixed and I could actually write my apps using a language closer to C++, I would not complain anymore.

Well, that and starting to add support for Linux on the development tools side.
I just needed to write this as the coincidence of stumbling to that article was quite eerie.