Yearly Archives: 2008

Ceremony

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A comment I’ve left in David’s last article:

The ceremony? A revolting demonstration of how “One World, One Dream” means the destruction of all diversity for the sake of some governing power that be, forcing a single idea on everyone. A vomiting sequence of thousands of ants and bees moving at the compass of the negation of self. That’s what that ceremony is all about: a demonstration of power: “we have 1500 million nameless people under our power, ready to move as we tell them to”. It makes me think of the “Borg” in the Star Trek movies: “All resistance is futile”. You know what? This ceremony & in general these games makes me think about the 1978 Argentina Soccer World Cup. There were merely 200 meters between the largest stadium (River Plate, in the neighborhood of Núñez) and one of the biggest concentration and torture camps of the dictatorship (The “Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada”). This ceremony is as revolting as the declaration of Muñoz, a radio and TV speaker, saying “We Argentines are Human and Righteous”. Because right there they were drowning and burning pregnant women and stealing their babies. And 500 meters away from the river, where they were throwing corpses (and living people too) into oblivion, with their feet in concrete to ensure their eternal silence. For me this ceremony is like watching Argentina winning 6-0 against Peru in the semifinal. The same bad joke, and the people in the country defending themselves against the “bad foreign press”, who are “jealous” of how good their country is doing. I want to vomit. This is a big circus and everyone is watching it. Geez. I’m not happy.

Adding Manpower

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Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field. The book author, Frederick P. Brooks Jr., used his experience as the project manager of the IBM System/360 and its software, the Operating System/360, to explain a common set of problem patterns, applicable to other software projects as well.

One of the most famous citations in the book is the one regarding the consequences of adding human resources to a late project; this article will provide a couple of thoughts about this assertion, and highlight some contrariwise opinions. Continue reading →

Certification

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While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.

When in some situations it is not legally possible to use the title “software engineer” without an engineering degree of some kind (for example, in some states of the USA or some institutions like the IEEE – http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/titleengineer.html), the term “software developer” is usually applied to people in charge of designing, writing and / or maintaining software-based systems. I will use the terms developer and engineer interchangeably in this discussion, which some people might think is not correct. Continue reading →

Challenges for Software Engineers

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Software Engineering is the youngest of all the professions, being born around 50 years ago, but since then it has been continually improved. Practicers have fiercely debated upon it through the years, given the extremely fast pace of the innovations in the field, and the extremely difficult and inherently dynamic nature of software. Many trends have appeared and vanished, and many others will come.

In this article I will provide a short overview of two kinds of challenges that I consider that software engineers will have to confront in the next 20 years: the human and the technical. Continue reading →

A Watch – from an OOP perspective

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A watch might be one of the most common types of objects, but it remains also one of the earliest pieces of human craftmanship to show an extreme level of complexity, all contained in a small amount of space. Since the late 1700s, artisan watchmakers in Switzerland and elsewhere have shown their pride and skills creating watches called “Grande Complications”, containing thousands of individual parts and performing incredible functions:

The most complicated watch ever made, known in watch enthusiasts’ circles as “The Ultimate Watch,” is Patek Philippe’s “Calibre 89. The incredibly precise operation of 1728 parts in this really ultimate masterpiece of watchmaking allows to perform no less than 33 (thirty-three!) complicated functions, among them a correction for the 400-year-rule, an Easter date indication, a star chart, a tourbillon, a perpetual calendar, a sidereal time indication, and, and, and … This watch was sold in 1989 for the nice round sum of about four million Swiss francs.”

(Ozdoba, 2005)

(Source: CNN.com, 2005)

More information about the “Calibre 89″ can be found here and in the Patek Philippe Museum website.

However, the same watchmakers that made these fine pieces were also aware of the basic information that their creations were to provide: time. As such, their watches remained extremely easy to use, and they set up the basic standard for analog watches, in such timeless designs that the latest Swatch models show the same basic layout and functionality.

The underlying concept is the very same used in today’s object-oriented abstraction and encapsulation. Even Apple uses the idea of the watch to show this characteristic:

All programming languages provide devices that help express abstractions. In essence, these devices are ways of grouping implementation details, hiding them, and giving them, at least to some extent, a common interface—much as a mechanical object separates its interface from its implementation, as illustrated in Figure 2-1.

(Source: Apple Developer Connection, 2006)

In this article I will provide my view about how different OOP concepts apply to a real-life object such as a watch, in all its forms. Continue reading →

The beauty of Cocoa

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(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)

I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:

[source:c]

import

// The interface of a person @interface Person : NSObject { NSString* firstName; NSString* lastName; int age; } @end

// The implementation of the Person @implementation Person -(id)init { if (self = [super init]) { firstName = @”"; lastName = @”"; age = 0; } return self; }

-(void)dealloc { [firstName release]; [lastName release]; [super dealloc]; }

-(NSString*)description { return [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@”Name: %@ %@, %d years old”, firstName, lastName, age]; } @end

// Some code using the Person class int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

NSMutableDictionary* dict = [[[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init] autorelease];
[dict setObject:@"Teto" forKey:@"firstName"];
[dict setObject:@"Rodriguez" forKey:@"lastName"];
[dict setObject:[[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:34] forKey:@"age"];
Person* person = [[[Person alloc] init] autorelease];
// The beauty of Cocoa can be resumed to this very line:
[person setValuesForKeysWithDictionary:dict];
// Now sit back and relax:
NSLog([person description]);
[pool drain];
return 0;

} [/source]