Some lessons:

Perfect isn’t important. When you’re ~2,000 pieces in and you realize something is off by one lego bit, the important thing is being able to backtrack and figure out the off-by-one mistake. Lesson: Debugging skill is more important than Developing skill.

When you’ve got 80 of some tiny 1×2 piece coming out of one bag set, it takes zen-like skills near the end to trust the 3 year old hasn’t lost one of them. The lesson here remains: Trust the Lego QA above all else. Perhaps a more generic lessons is “know the quality of your upstream QA”. In this case – global supervillain quality (ie: awesome and let down by the megalomaniac pointing the device in the wrong direction).

The SSD uses a huge amount of usually core architecture pieces as cosmetic features. Usually you know that this piece and that piece are going to be a hinge and you wait to discover how they’ll lock into place. With this set I have no clue. The rule of thumb seems to be that the more versatile the piece, the more likely it’s there for the cosmetic look of skyscrapershipness. Lesson: Sometimes your best practices are going to hold you back.

It’s big. I tend to work through the manual for a while building pieces and then go back to the main piece to add them. I try to minimize how often I have it sitting on the floor waiting for the next block to add on. Lesson: Don’t keep Lego on the floor? . It does make me wonder what it’d look like if built with agile methodologies.

“Lord Vader, we have the throne room built. See how it flies around very nicely and can go into production immediately. “
*force choke*

Lastly, the new Dengar sucks. He looks like he just finished swabbing the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean. Lesson: There’s always a bug

–

Now to build a table size curve of the Death Star and video the SSD crashing into it.

Go forward a few weeks. Things generally fine, but every now and then I get redirected to a comcast/xfinity signup page and told to download software and activate my computer. Grr. Finally, tonight, I click on the "talk to a support specialist" button. Below is the transcript, comments are in bold. ]

user HENRI has entered room

HENRI>
analyst Gustavo has entered room
Gustavo>
Hello HENRI_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Gustavo. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Gustavo>
Welcome to Comcast Self – Install Kit Activation support! My name is Gustavo, it is a pleasure to have you on chat. I hope you haven’t waited long to be assisted. How may I help you today?

HENRI_>
I had a modem swap a couple of weeks back [all going well there]. I’m having problems going to websites occasionally where it tries to send me to xfinity install-kit. How do I stop being sent to that?

Gustavo>
I am really sorry to hear that.

Gustavo>
So I understand that you are having problems with your Internet service, am I correct?

HENRI_>
my current approach is to hit refresh until it goes away, but it’s a nuisance.

HENRI_>
not problems with the service; more that something seems to want to sign me up to xfinity.

Gustavo>
I know how important for you is to get your service working, so do not worry about it, I will be more than glad to help you and will fix this as soon as possible.

Gustavo>
I would just like to inform you the process could take 15 minutes or more. Do you have the time right now to go ahead with it?

HENRI_>
sure.

Gustavo>
Just for security reasons, may I have your full name, full address and the phone number related to the account please? They already know my account number at this point as it showed on the previous page, and they know I’m connected from the client side of the service they provide

HENRI_>
no clue on the phone number. name is Henri Yandell. Address is #### (though you can Google for this easily enough…awesome security system)

Gustavo>
May I have your city, state and zip code please?

HENRI_>
#### (also in Google – pathetic security, not that I’d have given them anything given that I didn’t trust my network connection due a man-in-the-middle situation (even if Comcast were the man in the middle) )

Gustavo>
Thank you very much for the information Henri.

Gustavo>
Henri while I work on your settings, I would like to remind you about the Setup Guide that were given to you with the Self Install Kit. There we have a diagram that is easy to follow and will assist you in case you have problems in the future with connections of our equipment. If you do not have this setup guide, you can get it in any Comcast Center. No, I wasn’t given such a thing

Gustavo>
Please allow me a moment while I check the status of your modem.

HENRI_>
why do I need to setup? I’m already setup and working fine.

HENRI_>
2 installers installed the modem etc.

Gustavo>
Henri while checking your account, I found a great opportunity for you to try. It’s the Comcast Triple Play package for only $119.99, you will be able to enjoy during the next 12 months, High Speed Internet, the finest cable services and the #1 clarity phone service. By taking advantage of this offer, you will save a considerable amount of money. Isn’t that a great opportunity? The great thing is that it has a 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. I highly recommend you to take advantage of the awesome price.

Gustavo>
Would you like to take advantage of this great offer?

HENRI_>
no thankyou. (I’m so polite)

Gustavo>
Henri I see your point of view but I strongly believe that you should take advantage of this package, especially because the promotion rate is amazing. Besides, you will be able to experience the best out of the best in a very low rate. Why don’t we do something! Try it out for 30 day and if you don’t like it, I will give you the money back guarantee. Should I sign you up with a 30 day money back guarantee?

HENRI_>
no thankyou. (really, I’ve got this English polite thing down pat. Drag me through hot coals and I’ll thank you for keeping me warm. I don’t at any point point out that their service is overpriced and not a money saver or a low rate)

Gustavo>
No problem, thanks for your time Henri.

Gustavo>
Now I will send a signal to your modem as part of our activation. You might be able to catch the lights in the modem turn off then turn back on. It will cut off our connection for a few seconds so we might not be able to continue to send messages to each other during that time. Just make sure not to close our chat, thanks.

user HENRI has entered room

analyst Gustavo has entered room

Gustavo>
Henri can you open a new browser such as this one, click here please —> http://www.yahoo.com Let me know if you are able to get online.

HENRI_>
yup.

Gustavo>
Are you able to? At this point I’d read about 3 articles on the BBC waiting for Gustavo, so yes I was able to

HENRI_>
yup

Gustavo>
Great! your internet service is active now.

Gustavo>
I would like to recommend visiting http://www.comcast.com/security
It’ll take you to one of the great deals we have for hooking up comcast internet in your home. You’ll have the option to download Norton Security Suite to protect your computer when you surf the internet. It’s the full retail application you can get absolutely for free, I guarantee it.

Gustavo>
Also I would like to recomend you visiting http://www.comcast.net/help ,in case you have any problems with your services this link can help you.

Gustavo>
Henri as a recap, you have contacted us today to fix your internet service, we have verified your account information, then I have sent signal to your modem and now your internet service is active and working properly.

Gustavo>
Would there be anything else I can assist you with today?

HENRI_>
what was wrong before?

At this point Gustavo was typing, I tried to type something but the next message I got was a new page saying “No room provided” – ie) I was cut off

WTF Comcast. What scares me is that Gustavo might be a human. I hope, really hope, that it’s an automated system, but given that 9/10 screw ups prefer incompetence, I bet it’s a real person who sits and copies blurbs without reading what the customer says. Localized monopolies SUCK.

Here’s hoping that going through ‘activation’ will stop it trying to activate all the time.

“NO”

The cloud kills part of one extortion model (GPLv2). I love that no one mentions Hadoop while they’re bemoaning the death of MySQL. There are many successful BSD/MIT/Apache licensed projects that haven’t relied on forcing their users to contribute (and are excited by any increase of use the cloud might drive) and there are new extortion models (GPLv3, Affero GPL) that seek to maintain the status quo. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Expertise in Open Source can make money – be you a consultant (IBM, Thoughtworks etc) or a support company (of which Red Hat is the big player). The products themselves don’t, unless you resort to extortion, which sadly far too many startups seem to (i.e. here’s my open source license that I know you won’t want, and here’s my ugly commercial license that you’ll have to pay once my “first one’s free” open source product has stuck its teeth into you). I hate the extortion companies, they are proprietary companies who abuse the open communities from within; wolf in sheep’s clothing if you will.

This is all seen as a terrible thing. In the startup world [which sadly is far too noisy at conferences simply because loud marketing and building brand is an important tool for small companies] not being profitable is bad. There are places however where profit is not king.

Firstly there are loss-leaders. Small corps can’t afford these, but with its one cash-cow product Google can afford many loss-leaders; and with its two cash-cow products, Microsoft can afford just as many (or twice as many? ). Presumably other companies can; it depends on how you structure the company related to your income and whether you are a big-margin or small-margin company. Big margin companies can afford to play more than small-margin imo; BEA for example with their ’12 big wall street’ customer strategy could afford to do such as the 13th big customer will pay for a lot of giving away of shareholder value [12 and 13 are random numbers here].

Secondly there are non-profits themselves. I don’t mean the open source foundations; but those out there doing good in the world. Sadly they don’t have much developer time to offer and Open Source has always worked best when the user can become a part of the solution instead of expecting a customer/vendor relationship. Governments are a non-profit with lots of developer cycles, however putting that to valuable work looks difficult. The United States structure (very independent state government) creates a lot of inefficiency in this area and probably means there are not enough developers working in a single ecosystem to support communities easily. Looking at the report card (OSS for America) I think there’s a correlation with higher scoring departments generally being the ones without state-wide redundancy.

Academia is a third area. Sadly universities seem to be driven towards being profitable entities; there’s a lot of potential here and it’s unfortunate that so many new open source projects from academia are pure crap [I don't include the 70s->90s internet creation projects in this, different era]. The issue seems to be that these projects are the brainchild of some professor, but worked on by an ever rotating set of students. Keep changing your employees every year and you’ll find that your product too is rotten swiss cheese with an identity crisis.

Lastly there is the huge community of individuals. So many projects are esoteric and the interested individual could be working in a shoe store for all we know. Put enough interested people together and you’ll have a successful project.

For each there is a different item the Open Source world needs to be working on:

* Commercial entities. Filter out the noise. Learn to avoid brittle Open Source products from a single entity. If the answer to “How can I become a committer?” isn’t there, consider it freeware.
* Non-profits. Get in there and educate. This has been the focus for a couple of years (with individuals doing it for decades before that) and seems to be going fairly well. NASA are getting it (though as always their budget is squeezed while the massive military budget remains inviolate), and Open Source for America seems a positive item. Do other countries have the same? Has anything come of the San Francisco and California Open Source pushes? I know there are lots of pushes out there to get governments to use Open Source, but for Open Source users are easy, it’s contributors that are important.
* Academia. I keep an eye on Ross Gardler and OSS Watch in the UK here, they seem to have the right drive. I wonder if there’s a US equivalent, or if this is one of those ‘anything that smells socialist must be evil’ items.
* Individuals. I wish you could measure this one. Has the move from blogging to twitter & facebook made it harder to find projects?

A lot of waffle. What’s my one line twitter message?

“Open Source. It’s all about contributors. What’s your contributor recruitment strategy?”

• Late 20th Century: Grow up in the UK. Get great fresh milk delivered to doorstep everyday. Have no understanding of this golden age.
• Later 20th Century: Have to resort to UK supermarket milk as it puts good milk out of business. Other things going on, don’t really notice.
• 2001: Move to KY, USA. Hate the milk. Blaming the hormones.
• 2002: Continue to hate the milk; it’s always sour.
• 2004: Discover that organic milk doesn’t taste as off.
• 2005: Decide that organic milk is in the region of UK supermarket quality; faintly happy. Introduce firstborn to cow’s milk.
• 2006: Find better brand of organic milk that’s comparable with UK supermarket quality.
• later 2006: Move to Seattle. Re-find brand of organic.
• 2007: Find a different brand of organic milk; unsure which I prefer. Taste tests inconclusive.
• 2008: DISCOVER GOLDEN GLEN CREMERY! A NEW GOLDEN AGE ENSUES. WIFE DECLARES “Tastes like ice cream”.
• 2009: Introduce youngest to Golden Glen.
• 2010: Happiness. Peak milk is a myth, Golden Glen is a shining light of our future civilization.
• 2011: Golden Glen move to Cheese. Cheese is, and tastes like, sour milk. Future children will never know the taste of Golden Glen milk, their future is grey and bleak.
• 2012: The Mayan’s were right.
• Late 21st century: Eyes closed, rocking back and forth and muttering, no one listening. Telling of a better time, a golden age, a summerland, when the milk was fresh and bees flew under their own power. No one will care and the memories of a once brighter summer will fade from this world’s realm.

Golden Glen Milk: http://www.goldenglencreamery.com/Fluid.html.

One classic rule we’ve had is ‘no religion’; by which we mean that the user should not have to buy into a specific way of coding. Typically that means ‘no interfaces’. I danced around this rule recently when rewriting the StringEscapeUtils code to sit on top of a Translator structure. I’d added religion, but the general user didn’t need to learn it as it hides behind our ‘boring’ API approach of a bunch of static methods.

Another rule is ‘no magic’. We abhor APIs like this:

public String doSomethingToString(String foo, boolean doWayOne, boolean doWayTwo)

Instead we flatten that to doSomethingToStringWayOne, doSomethingToStringWayTwo etc. Sure its a long name and you should make effort to shorten it, but not by hiding the method name in a boolean option. The other way, which is rarely needed, is to use an Enum. You can see this in UnicodeUnescaper; its constructor takes (UnicodeEscaper.OPTION…).

Of course we still have private methods with boolean parameters – so while ‘no magic’ is a rule for an API, I think ‘do magic’ is a rule for a library. Lang’s big negative (per se) is that it doesn’t do much magic. You could write it yourself (and did, Lang is the definition of community coded and doesn’t rely on one over-active coder).

As I ponder along, this is a critical point for reusable code. You have to split into the API and the implementation. The API should be born of ‘keep it simple’, and both ‘no magic’ and ‘no religion’ are children of this. The implementation should do magic, but it needs to be magic that works with seven 9s. It’s hard to debug/fix magic, so it had better work.

More interesting to ponder; how to balance stability and invention in reusable code.

The first simply shows the participants in World War I (green for one side, orange for the other, and grey for neutral): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/WWI-re.png.

The second goes one step further and shows participation over the course of World War II. It’s a great example of an animated map telling a historical story, and I really like the way it shows the whole picture at one time: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/World_War_II_alliances_animated_map.gif.

• Theatre of Cruelty
• A Collegiate Casting Out Of Devilish Devices
• Death and What Comes Next

On behalf of the Apache Commons Lang contributors, I would like to
announce that we have released a 3.0-beta of Commons Lang.

Lang is now Java 5 based.  We’ve generified the API, moved certain
APIs to support varargs and thrown out any features that are now
supported by Java itself.  We’ve removed the deprecated parts of the
API and have also removed some features that were deemed weak or
unnecessary.

All of this means that Lang 3.0 is not backwards compatible with the
2.x versions.  To that end we have changed the package name, allowing
Lang 3.0 to sit side-by-side with your previous version of Lang
without any bad side effects.  The new package name is the exciting
and original ‘org.apache.commons.lang3′.  In general migrating should
be a simple search and replace.

There are also, as you’d expect, many new features, enhancements and bugfixes.

You can find out more on the Commons Lang website, where you can
download the beta or browse the Javadoc:

# http://commons.apache.org/lang/upgradeto3_0.html
# http://commons.apache.org/lang/download_lang.cgi
# http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-3.0-beta/index.html

We encourage you to give the new version a try and send us your
feedback, ideas or suggestions.  Feel free to subscribe to either the
user or developer mailing lists, or to create issues in the issue
tracker:

# http://commons.apache.org/lang/mail-lists.html
# http://commons.apache.org/lang/issue-tracking.html

Lastly – a hearty thank you to the many Java developers who have
contributed to Commons Lang over the last 8 years.  It is very much a
community built project.