The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Berin Loritsch:

I’ve discovered why I’m lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It’s tedious. It isn’t the creative part of the effort. It’s boring!

The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they’re boring to write, they’re boring to read as well – so noone does.

In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it’s Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit’s good and bad points – complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

“The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive,” one of the boys’ parents told the paper.

If by any chance you happen to be trying to get a Ubuntu system (or probably any Linux system) to talk to an Apple Airport (in my case the original 802.11b UFO style), don’t try to use the plain ASCII password for the WEP key – Linux and Apple seem to have different algorithms for converting the password to the actual HEX key.

Instead, open the Airport Admin Utility, double click on the base station in the list to open its configuration interface and then choose “Network Equivalent Password…” from the “Base Station” menu. Enter the hex key it gives you into the Ubuntu networking dialog as a Hexadcimal key type.

Jensen Harris: Help Is For Experts

One of the most interesting epiphanies I’ve had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: “help” in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts.

How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Jonathan Boutelle talks about how he made a wiki work with his software developers:

• Start off maintaining existing documents
• Make it easy to login
• Insist on Wysiwyg

So, so true. The first two could be a little more generalized: Start with a reason to use the wiki and make it easy. Making it easy encompasses insisting on Wysiwyg but the editor is the most important touch-point of a wiki that it’s worth stating separately.

Interesting argument between Tim Bray and Robert Scoble about what benefit standardizing Office 12’s XML format will provide.  Tim Bray suggests that Microsoft should use the open document format as the basis for its XML format with custom extensions when required.  Scoble argues that documents are more complex than Tim believes and that it would be impossible to create a compatible version of Office around the open document format. Maybe Tim Bray has done a lot of work with Word documents and office documents in general that I’m not familiar with – I know he’s done a lot with XML but that’s not enough to comment on the needs of a office-style document format¹.

Though everyone should already know about this, there is a survey out on what features to add to Swing’s text packages for Java 7. While that’s still a fair time away, and a long, long time away before you can count on everyone having it, now is definitely the time to make yourself heard about what features are required if you want to get them in.

Most of what’s on the list is possible to do today but takes a heck of a lot of effort to achieve, as well as a lot of very specialist knowledge. Making it easier would be a pretty big plus.

Dear lazyweb,

Do you happen to know if the scripting engine stuff that will be part of Java 1.6 is available for previous versions anywhere? I know there’s things like bean scripting framework, rhino etc but would like to use the one standardized API to drive things if possible. I haven’t seen much information come through about the scripting APIs which is a bit surprising actually.

Thanks!

Too many companies make the mistake of promoting programmers to management despite the fact that they are awful managers. I’ve long thought Linux suffered from that problem and Torvalds threatening to laugh in the face of contributors who submit new features after the 2 week window at the start of each new version’s development.

Linus Torvalds has threatened that if developers add ’last-minute things’ to the next version of the Linux kernel he will ‘refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively’ Laughing in people’s faces is never acceptable behavior and threatening to do so is childish and demoralizing. It definitely doesn’t help to build community which is what opensource lives on. It might be a very good idea to limit new features to the first 2 weeks of development (though fixing known bugs before adding new features also has a lot of merit), and being very strict about it might be the best thing. Regardless, childish tantrums are not appropriate in software development.

It seems like noone has managed to invent a bug tracking system that can do search well.  Bugzilla’s famous for having a lousy search interface but its not just interface – I’m yet to find a bug tracking system that can search for a find bugs I’m looking for consistently.

This becomes particularly annoying when you are trying to avoid logging duplicate bugs as you have to spend ages crafting search queries to try and identify whether or not the bug has previously been reported.