A solution to software maintenance from long ago?

Communications of the ACM: You Don’t Know Jack About Software Maintenance:

Software maintenance is not like hardware maintenance, which is the return of the item to its original state. Software maintenance involves moving an item away from its original state. It encompasses all activities associated with the process of changing software. That includes everything associated with “bug fixes,” functional and performance enhancements, providing backward compatibility, updating its algorithm, covering up hardware errors, creating user-interface access methods, and other cosmetic changes.

In software, adding a six-lane automobile expressway to a railroad bridge is considered maintenance–and it would be particularly valuable if you could do it without stopping the train traffic.

Related: Slashdot thread

A Thank You to Sesame Street

The Muppet Newsflash: Sesame Street Celebrates 40th Anniversary with Two New History Books

Old clips of Elmo with Kermit on YouTube helped me expose Emma to the Muppets a few years ago. Now Muppets are part of the Sesame Street universe for her, as it was me and Richelle when we were growing up. Here are two great ones:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit Reports News On Elmo’s Idea:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Kermit And Elmo Discuss Happy And Sad:

Gotta love Cookie Monster:

YouTube: Sesame Street & The Origin of Om nom nom nom:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Cookie Monster Sings C is for Cookie:

Or Ernie:

YouTube: Sesame Street: Ernie and his Rubber Duckie:

I could post a million videos but you’re better off just visiting the Sesame Street channel on YouTube

And as Emma knows, Kermit’s my personal favorite. Its great that we can watch the old Muppet movies with her and she loves them is so much fun.

YouTube: Muppet Movie – The Rainbow Connection:

Lately on YouTube, the Muppets Studio has been posting new videos, this one is genius!

YouTube: The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody:

And one last one, not to show to kids, but too funny not share:

YouTube: The Song of the Count – Lemon Demon Version:

I wonder, now that the Muppets and Sesame Street are owned and operated so separately, will there ever be a moment in any future movie like the wedding chapel in Muppets Take Manhattan? When Emma saw Big Bird and crew in the pews, she yelled with surprise and joy.

I think we used Sesame Street as a guide for what constituted ‘good’ children’s television for us. The Backyardigans, Jack’s Big Music Show, The Wonder Pets, Blue’s Clues (did you know Blue’s Clues was created by former Sesame Street writers?), Dora and Diego, all are in its spirit. No Baby Einstein, and nothing that had more quick shot cuts than Sesame Street for example, Yo Gaba Gaba. Good songwriting, flow, encouragement of imagination and *thinking*. That’s what we were looking for in children’s television. And I think we can say thanks to Sesame Street for that.

Related Articles:

NPR.org: Lessons Of ‘Sesame Street’: Letters, Numbers And TV

NPR.org: 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’

NYTimes: Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40

NationalPost: 101 Muppets of Sesame Street

Links related to the changing economy for November 24th, 2009

Douglas Ruskoff: Video Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.: We are at a crossroads. Right now we have the ability to optimize our systems, our technologies, and our currency to humans, rather than optimizing humans to them.

Metafilter discussion of previous: “The Plague of Free.”

Awful Marketing: St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired: In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn’t be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper’s online comment boards.

HavardBusinss.org: The Digital Economy’s Coming Subprime Crisis: Uh oh: it’s the economic equivalent of the subprime crisis. The parallels, to me, are too striking to ignore.

Anil Dash: The Web in Danger: We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say “nobody saw this coming”.

Susan Ohanian: It’s the Poverty, Stupid, Not Pre-K Skills: If our corporate-politicos would look at the November 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, they would see that half of American children receive food stamps, which means they live in food insecure homes, and studies show that Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.

Joe Bageant: Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers: At heart, it’s a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman’s democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.

Philly.com: USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.: Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: “This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children.”

Time: The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell

Newsweek: Partying Like It’s 1999: Think the U.S. economy has come a long way? Think again.

NoSQL, Relational Database, ETL Link-a-rama for November 25th, 2009

Jon Moore: NoSQL East 2009 Redux

Dare Obasanjo: Building Scalable Databases: Perspectives on the War on Soft Deletes

Explain Extended: What is a relational database?

Explain Extended: What is the entity-relationship model?

Data Doghouse: Data Integration: Hand-coding Using ETL Tools

Data Doghouse: Data Integration: Hand-coding Using ETL Tools Part 2

Smart Data Collective: ETL tools: Don’t Forget About the Little Dogs

Smart Data Collective: Data Integration: Hand-coding Using ETL Tools

Communications of the ACM: Extreme Agility at Facebook

Dare Obasanjo: Facebook Seattle Engineering Road Show: Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook

Research: Software development roles and responsibilities

Trying to answer the elusive questions of:

What is a Software engineer?

What is a Lead Programmer?

What is a Tech Lead?

What is a Principal Engineer?

What is a Software Architect?

What is a Technical Project Manger?

What is a Scrum Master?

Links:

Wikipedia: Lead programmer

Wikipedia: Software engineer

Wikipedia: Software architect

IBM developerWorks: Characteristics of a software architect

Magpie Brain: A Tech Lead Manifesto

vanderbilt.edu: Project Roles and Responsibilities (Word .doc!)

it’s a delivery thing: Agile Project Roles and Responsibilities

Stack Overflow: Does a software architect have a role in agile, esp. Scrum?

Wikipedia: Scrum Roles

InfoQ: Mapping Traditional Software Development Roles to Scrum

Code Better:Classic Technical Lead Blunder

Atlassian: Tech Leads Talk