Author: Administrator

What does a software program manager do anyway?

Asking what a program manager (PM) does in the software industry is a bit of a trick question because so many different and only tangentially related positions are called PM. So I can't provide a universal answer but I can explain what the PM groups I have worked with over the years have done/do. The short answer is that we are the conduit between the core Development team (e.g. Development/Test/PM) and the rest of the known universe. Our job is to bring data from the outside world in, bring the core Development team's ideas out to the world, negotiate a "contract" between the two as to who is to do what/when and then be held personally responsible for making sure everyone honors the "contract".

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What to buy in our 529 Plan

After looking at the various options available in 529 plans from stock mutual funds to bond mutual funds to age appropriate funds and so on the choice for us came down to TIPS mutual funds or CollegeSure CDs. We have decided to use CollegeSure CDs to save for our daughter's education. Yes, they have a horrible return and are quite possibly not FDIC insured (read the fine print) but of all the options this is the one that seems most reasonable.

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11/6/2007 – General Election – Redmond, King County, Washington

So far the most important issue on the ballot is Initiative 25. If you want any possible hope of having a meaningful vote in King County please vote yes for I-25.

This isn't an election, it's a denial of service attack! The whole point of representative democracy is that citizens have neither the time nor the background to make detailed choices about how the day to day activities of government are to be run. But in this election we am being drowned in no less than 9 different measures in addition to 14 different elected offices of which only 3 appeared on the primary. This is just nuts! The only consequence of dumping this many issues and elected offices on the citizenry is to so overload the citizenry that they either don't bother to vote or vote blindly.

  • Initiative 960 – Yes

  • Referendum Measure 67 – Approved

  • Senate Joint Resolution 8206 – Rejected

  • Senate Joint Resolution 8212 – Rejected

  • House Joint Resolution 4204 – Rejected

  • House Joint Resolution 4215 – Rejected

  • King County Prosecuting Attorney – Bill Sherman

  • King County Assessor – Scott Noble

  • Port of Seattle – Commissioner – Position No. 2 – Bob Edwards

  • Port of Seattle – Commissioner – Position No. 5 – Alec Fisken

  • City of Redmond – Mayor – John Marchione

  • City of Redmond – Council Position 1 – Hank Myers

  • City of Redmond – Council Position 3 – Dayle (Hank) Margeson

  • City of Redmond – Council Position 5 – Richard Cole

  • City of Redmond – Council Position 7 – David Carson

  • Lake Washington School District No. 414 – Director District 1 – Jackie Pendergrass

  • Lake Washington School District No. 414 – Director District 2 – Chris Carlson

  • Lake Washington School District No. 414 – Director District 5 – Ravi Shahani

  • Public Hospital District No. 4 – Commissioner – Rebecca Hirt

  • Public Hospital District No. 5 – Commissioner – Jeanette Greenfield

  • King County Initiative 25 – Yes

  • King County Proposition No. 1 – Medic One – Approved

  • Sound Transit Proposition No. 1 – No

Continue reading 11/6/2007 – General Election – Redmond, King County,
Washington

Interoperability Wars – Episode 6 – Part 1 – Revenge of Babble

Nothing said in this post (or on this blog for that matter) reflects the views of the blog owner's employer of the moment.

Dedication: To George Lucas for as Harrison Ford once said to Mr. Lucas, "You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."

Announcer: Join us for the exciting first part of episode 6 of the Interoperability Wars – Revenge of Babble!

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Babble

8/21/2007 – Primary Election – Redmond, King County, Washington

Since I do not associate with either the Democratic nor the Republican parties I don't vote in either of their primaries. So I will only be giving my opinion on non-partisan positions and various measures. I went to the King County Voter Guide which generates a custom on-line guide just including positions/issues I'm eligible to vote for. I then checked the voter guide candidate text, check the candidate's web site, check the PI, the Seattle Times, the Stranger, the Municipal League of King County and searched the net.

  • Port of Seattle – Commissioner – Position No. 2 – Thom McCann

  • Port of Seattle – Commissioner – Position No. 5 – Alec Fisken

  • City of Redmond – Mayor – John Marchione

  • King County – Proposition No. 1 – Yes

  • King County – Proposition No. 2 – Yes

  • City of Redmond – Proposition No. 1 – Yes

  • City of Redmond – Proposition No. 2 – Yes

Continue reading 8/21/2007 – Primary Election – Redmond, King County,
Washington

Apple Machine Support Sucks

The minimum system requirements for iLife '08 requires either a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0Ghz or iMac G5 1.9 Ghz. My machine is a Power Mac G5 dual 1.8Ghz and my wife's iMac is a G5 1.8 Ghz. I bought my machine in 4/2004 so after just 3 years and 4 months the machine is, in so far as Apple is concerned, obsolete. We bought my wife her iMac in 6/2005 so in her case it only took 2 years and 2 months for her machine to be declared obsolete by Apple. I think that is insane. Apple takes thousands of dollars and gives us just over 2 years before declaring our machines obsolete? I am not a happy Apple customer.

And yes, I know, it is possible to run iLife '08 on these machines but we wouldn't have any official support and if there is a problem we can't even return the software since, it is my understanding, that Apple won't take back open software boxes. So we're screwed. I typically upgrade my computers every four years or so, so I was planning on upgrading my box in 2008 but even then I can't move to iLive '08 because we won't be upgrading my wife's machine until 2009 and we share iPhoto by file synching (as in, my wife's machine is the 'master' and I synch off her drive). And no, terminal serving in to my machine from her machine won't work. The whole reason we got my wife a Mac is to make her life simpler, not more complex. Besides, she downloads the pictures to her machine, not mine.

Normally Apple makes me really happy but I feel seriously screwed by iLive '08. Obsoleting a main line machine in under 3 years is just wrong.

Making LY X Produce Decent Hyperlinked HTML & PDF Files

As someone who writes for a living I have used a whole slew of word processors and generally haven't been all that happy with any of them. When I write I want to focus on the content, not the presentation. So the whole WYSIWYG generation of word processors left me cold. In fact, I spend most of my time in outline mode in Word. LyX takes a different approach. It focuses on What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM). In other words, it doesn't worry about formating, just content.

When I first reviewed LY X a year ago I decided it was good enough to use (and have done so regularly since) but still painful. With the 1.5.1 release I can revise that review to say that it's only minorly irritating to use LY X but it's good points are so numerous that it's more than worth the pain if you need to deal with large documents, with math formulas or with large bibliographies. And thanks to the efforts of folks like Dr. Richard G. Heck (who has my undying gratitude for fixing HTML generation in LY X) LY X is substantially better at generating HTML.

LY X does have a learning curve and one is well advised to at least read the tutorial (Help->Tutorial). But I believe that the modern versions of LY X have vastly improved over their predecessors and the learning curve is well worth the effort.

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HTML & PDF Files

APP and Dare, the sitting duck

So poor Dare made the apparently unforgivable mistake of questioning anything about APP. First he suggested that maybe APP doesn't solve all the world's problems. Then he clarified that GData isn't APP. And then after a particularly appalling article by Mr. Bray that was so rude that I refuse to contribute to its popularity by linking to it, Date finally tried to explain that Microsoft isn't trying to destroy APP. I'm going to ignore all the heat because I suspect my handful of readers have already read Dare's articles and the various responses. Instead I'll try to explain what's actually going on at Live. I know what's going on because my job for little over the last year has been to work with Live groups designing our platform strategy. So I know where the bodies are buried and in many cases helped to bury them.

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Portable Reputations – Reputations Want to Be Free!

Imagine if you could find a random store on the Internet and get reputation data about it regardless of where it had previously sold goods. Maybe it has a great reputation on Yahoo Shopping but a lousy reputation on EBay? Maybe it has an outstanding reputation on MySimon but hasn't really established itself yet on MSN Shopping where you happened to find it? Shouldn't we be able to find all the reputation data without having to be held hostage to some reputation intermediary? The same applies to reputations about people. Imagine if a website with a comment section could collect reputation data about a user from every site they have posted at and use that to figure out how much moderation, if any, they should apply to that person's posts? Why should someone have to start building their reputation from scratch on every website they go to? It's out reputation data, it's about us or its generated by us and it's bloody time we set it free!

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Buying Home, Car and (maybe) Umbrella Insurance

Buying a house brings many joys, amongst them is insurance. This is an update to my last article on buying insurance and covers auto, home and umbrella insurance. I explain how I evaluated companies to buy insurance from and how I choose the limits for our insurance policies. In our case we bought everything from Amica. Our total cost savings by going with Amica over staying with Allstate was 17%.

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Insurance