Author Archives: Karl

Some objections with Agile, in particular with Extreme Programming, methodologies

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I think in some environments, for some products, using XP and other Agile methodologies make sense. Read “The New Methodology” by Martin Fowler for why. However, some promote it as some kind of silver bullet. A panacea. Shelley Powers raises some good points to think about:

…what the makers behind the Manifesto are promoting is incremental releases–the continuous state of beta that we see at Flickr, Google, Yahoo, and other sites. Yup, that’s where it came from folks: agile programming.

The principle isn’t bad: release small, release often, and don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. However, the problem with the concept is that many applications can’t be released small, and beta is only cool in certain small circles. Most of us don’t want the systems we’re dependent on to be in a permanent state of change, of beta. I don’t want my income taxes managed by beta software. I don’t the hospital lab’s work to be managed through beta software. I certainly don’t want NORAD to use “Radar by Google”.

The release early, release often doesn’t solve the problems of managing larger and critical need software applications. As for applications that have followed this approach, such as Gmail and others of that nature, we’re already seeing a great deal of pushback against features appearing and disappearing without warning, and applications failing, and cute little plumbers popping up saying, “Ooops! Something broke”. It’s wearing thin; it’s no longer so fun.

The Two Webs

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Dare Obasanjo: The Two Webs:

This is an interesting distinction and one that makes me re-evaluate my reasons for being interested in RESTful web services. I see two main arguments for using RESTful approaches to building distributed applications on the Web. The first is that it is simpler than other approaches to building distributed applications that the software industry has cooked up. The second is that it has been proven to scale on the Web.

The second reason is where it gets interesting. Once you start reading articles on building RESTful web services such as Joe Gregorio’s How to Create a REST Protocol and Dispatching in a REST Protocol Application you realize that how REST advocates talk about how one should build RESTful applications is actually different from how the Web works. Few web applications support HTTP methods other than GET and POST, few web applications send out the correct MIME types when sending data to clients, many Web applications use cookies for storing application state instead of allowing hypermedia to be the engine of application state (i.e. keeping the state in the URL) and in a suprisingly large number of cases the markup in documents being transmitted is invalid or malformed in some ways. However the Web still works. 

REST is an attempt to formalize the workings of the Web ex post facto. However it describes an ideal of how the Web works and in many cases the reality of the Web deviates significantly from what advocates of RESTful approaches preach. The question is whether this disconnect invalidates the teachings of REST. I think the answer is no.

Happy Easter and Happy Passover

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Emma’s 1st Easter 🙂 We spent today catching up with Dante and his family. Tomorrow (well…today) will be Church, visiting my mom, then off to Richelle’s parent’s to spend time with mom, dad, Rose, Cindy, and Mike. The weather couldn’t be greater. We finished off the evening with Emma’s first stroll around the neighborhood.

Deleted my del.icio.us account, keeping RawSugar

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del.icio.us does not allow me to push my feeds to it, forcing me to spend effort using its service that is better spent elsewhere. The pattern emerged where I would post links on del.icio.us far more frequently then paradox1x or at Philly Future, which, in the end, is counter productive – I already have a publishing platform!

Many of these services have tools that enable you to post on them and have that participation pushed back into your site. Other tools exist to grab your data from these services and pull them into your primary space. That’s not enough.

I predicted earlier that these services will have to acknowledge and leverage what we already do in our own spaces, in our own environments. As each of us start our own blogs – our own publishing systems – what do we gain by posting twice? Three times? Four times? Not all that much when I should be able to post once, in an environment of *my* choosing, syndicate what I want, and be done with it.

RawSugar gives me this capability, saving me a lot of time in sharing what I want to share with a larger community.

I’m happy you kept after to to try it Bill, so I am going to stick with it for now.

Happy Birthday Richelle

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Yesterday was Richelle’s birthday, her first as a mom 🙂 It was a great day, beautiful weather here in Philly, and her family came over for some cake, pizza, and American Idol.

Love ya sweetie – happy birthday!

Oh, and the American Idol contestants butchered Queen didn’t they?

“It’s not like you’d find in on Google … right?”

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Philadelphia Inquirer’s Kristen A. Graham deserves credit for writing about teenagers and MySpace and not putting out yet another sexual-predator, obscenity, fear-fest as so many others have.

She parses the real issue that few fellow technologists address or want to concern themselves with – how MySpace has empowered millions of children to share their private lives in full public view, the repercussions of which are not yet understood.

In fact, I’ve only seen one post, by Scott Karp, and he was met with a chorus telling him he didn’t get it or that “no one has privacy anyway so who cares”.

One oh his critics attempted to reduce the concern to that of a parent allowing the child to ride a bike, and of course we let our children ride bikes. So why not allow them participate on MySpace? Shoot – we should be encouraging both right?

How great it would be if it were that simple.

When you address privacy concerns on MySpace (or Xanga, or any other social media platform), you MUST address the nature of the web – when you post you are not simply sharing that participation with those who visit your site, but you you are contributing to a store of information that is cached on servers you don’t know of, syndicated to places you have no control over, retrievable, sortable, and searchable again and again and in perpetuity. Forever.

Sure sexual predators are a concern, but threats to living so publicly – in such a scale – permanently – are manifold.

The job we mysteriously couldn’t get. The date who ditched us for some unknown reason. The apartment application denied. The business loan we were turned down for. The incapability of moving on from past mistakes since anyone can now retrieve them and use them for their purposes. That new ‘friend’ of ours telling us about the new shoes that we just have to buy.

Imagine if your credit report was in public view. If you could not get a report of who was requesting it. Think about it.

That’s small fry in comparison to what we are *willingly* doing here.

I’m not some Luddite. I’ve had a web presence since 1996 and a blog since 1998. I don’t know many who have lived so openly on the web. But I do keep somethings close to chest and off my blog, understanding, long ago, the responsibility I had to my employers, my friends, my family, and myself – long term.

I’ve attempted practice, over the years, the good advice Rebecca Blood gives in the article:

“people forget they are publishing when they are blogging. It feels personal, it feels like a conversation – but it’s not.”

In today’s TMI age, it’s a given that that new boyfriend or girlfriend, that recruiter for the job you desperately want, is going to Google you, she said. Then they’ll find out that you’ve written about how you keep multiple sex partners and play endless rounds of Minesweep on company time.

“Whoever you don’t want to read your blog – your mom, your boss – will probably find it. Keep that in mind,” she advised.

You need to wonder why others in the digerati don’t share her concerns… maybe she sounds too old fashioned? Too old school?

Maybe Rebecca Blood just doesn’t get it?

The price we’re all going to pay is huge.

Oh the irony

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Doc, I doubt you read me, but I wonder how you feel about Xanga and MySpace and the fact that for many, many 13 year olds these days, spending time participating is as important as what takes place in the lunchroom or in the school yard?

Because this makes me think you have no idea what’s going on:

I think letting small children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their most formative years need to interact with each other, nature, and themselves. They need to read and play and feed their curiousity about the world. They need to use their minds and their bodies to explore the Real World.

Is the Net real too? I don’t think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don’t want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. If you’re going to get sucked into an activity, let it be reading a book, shooting baskets or playing an instrument.

TV and computers have never been big in our 9-year-old’s life. Starting when he was about 5, however, we began limiting his TV watching (and ours as well) to an amount that rounds to zero. As a result, his main indulgence is reading. He plows through several books a week. He has a delightful imagination and an adult vocabulary. Yet he still has plenty of time to play. It’s amazing how much a kid can do if he or she isn’t watching 6+ hours of tube a day.

I think the time will come when we’ll look back on massive media consumption by kids in the same way we look back today on ubiquitous smoking and blasé attitudes toward drunk driving.

We’ve been building something that encourages people of all ages and background to share, to live their identities online.

I don’t think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don’t want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. Blogging and other social media services on the web are evolving to enable, empower, and encourage the web’s use as a primary social hub in our lives, that when disconnected from, we are disconnected period. And an element of this that gets short shrift is just how public all this is.

How will you handle it when your son starts to share not only what music he loves, but who in his classroom is “cool” and why? With oh… 20 million other people. Permanently. Cached and indexed. That day is already here for parents across the country.

Read Danah Boyd’s “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace”:

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree. It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online – it’s the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted.

In this context, there are three important classes of space: public, private and controlled. For adults, the home is the private sphere where they relax amidst family and close friends. The public sphere is the world amongst strangers and people of all statuses where one must put forward one’s best face. For most adults, work is a controlled space where bosses dictate the norms and acceptable behavior.

Teenager’s space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces. Teens are told where to be, what to do and how to do it. Because teens feel a lack of control at home, many don’t see it as their private space.

To them, private space is youth space and it is primarily found in the interstices of controlled space. These are the places where youth gather to hang out amongst friends and make public or controlled spaces their own. Bedrooms with closed doors, for example.

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends’ homes when their parents are present.

Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.