Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Writing usable software specifications. Brian R. Krause writes about creatives ways of producing usable software specifications, with an emphasis on communicating to stakeholders and developers alike, instead of just producing telephone-book-sized specs. To quote: An effective spec must be inviting and easy to understand... [Column Two] 9:43:23 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [X-log] Drivel:  I have been reading William Gibson's Idoru recently.  He paints a very interesting picture of how people perceive each other in the future.  In particular, how the amount and types of data they generate identify people. This has made me wonder what I look like when all of the data I generate in aggregated.  The only publicly accessible data I generate is this weblog and various postings to discussion groups I belong to.  There is a ton of other data that I generate that is available to me electronically, but no easy way to aggregate it. All of my financial transactions and holding with various institutions, medical history, education records, credit history, cell phone calls, telephone calls, household utilities, mortgage and rental history, emails, travel programs, and a complete history of purchases online and offline.  Obviously you wouldn't want to aggregate all of the raw data as a single individual could easily fill a couple of terabytes in the span of a few years.  You would want meta-data flowing to you. What would you do with this data once you have it?  First, you would want to monitor who else is accessing your data.  Second, you would want to find better ways to secure your data.  Next, you would want to find ways to begin restricting access to your data. The one assumption I am making here is that all of the data you generate belongs to you.  Right now, it doesn't.  Your financial history belongs to the institutions that represent you.  Your cell phone and telephone call records belong to the communications companies.  This is quite an interesting problem as it is not only technological in nature, but very much legal and political in nature as well. What do you think? 9:34:09 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: [News from the Forest] Random Software Architecture Thought. So ASP.NET works very well with ADO.NET. Most web developers I've talked to love ASP.NET and bind to ADO.NET constructs 90% of the time. So I started thinking about how I architect middle-tiers and tiers that the UI will use. I've decided (and this is not an original thought) that I want what I call a DataSet Tier. This tier will be constructed of all my domain objects. Depending on the method called it will load up Domain Objects and create a DataSet for them. The tier will accept DataRows containing updated data. Or it will simple accept primary keys. Then I load the object and do whatever is needed. Then everyone is happy. Web Tier gets to work with their DataSets. I get to work with my objects. Like I said. This is definitely not an original thought. Just my mission now to get the new apps being designed to follow this paradigm. Wondering about the benefits? Well...if the DataSet Tier is defined by interfaces, I can whip out some fake ones that allow the UI team to move along without worrying about the real objects being developed. That alone would make my life so much more pleasent. And if I following the pattern I laid out a couple of days ago, I can add a logging layer on development that logs out all the parameters. Now when they say "it don't work", I can just have them e-mail me the log and write a test case around it using the data they passed in. Ah...how wonderous that would be...   6:06:29 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. Ernest Becker     --The Denial of Death 11:54:38 AM    trackback []     Articulate []