Research

"What began as a basic research question points to a potential practical application of great value. For if solar cells can be made with this alloy, they promise to be rugged, relatively inexpensive -- and the most efficient ever created."

Via Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

Sony hires people to make fake graffiti advertising the PSP. Actual people alter the fakes.

I'll teabag a mime... Too good.

POTD

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Ducati Red.

Zed

ZEDstandards and LEED for neighborhood. Two standards for green, sustainable neighborhood development.

Will we do something forward-looking in New Orleans, or will the endemic corruption breed a wasteful rebuilding of the old low-density suburbs?

Yikes

"...in a series of speeches extending over a period of years, President Bush has articulated his policy vision more consistently and more eloquently than any President since Lincoln." [via Power Line blog]

The amount of denial present in the United States has reached terrifying proportions.

Complexity

The more I do this software stuff, the more I think that managing project complexity is one of the keys to consistent success.

• Maintaining documentation at appropriate levels of specificity and organized logically. Good docs help you functionally understand the system at multiple levels. It should be obvious that, if you don't understand the system, you'll write some bad software.
• Using use cases, XP stories, or some other result-focused documentation to drive work. Describing software is inherently complex. Getting Earth people to understand software requirements is near impossible. Use cases or XP stories structure the requirements in terms of visible, useful features, making them far easier to understand and discuss.
• Creating well factored classes. This should be obvious, but well designed classes factor behavior and related data to one entity, making them easier to understand and change.
• Creating both dynamic and static UML describing the systems at appropriate levels of abstraction. Good UML gives you a roadmap for understanding the structure and relationships in the system. UML is succinct and has semantic meaning; it is the best thing we have for describing the basic structure of software.
• Establishing roles for project members to make responsibility clear. Clear roles let team members focus on a set of related tasks, rather than having to context-shift from hour to hour.
• Organizing meetings with as few people as possible. You have a meeting to get something done; each extra person in the meeting adds an additional line of communication, making consensus more difficult. Worst case, the extra people can't even contribute to the topics being discussed. Even worse case, the idiot who can't contribute to the meeting also can't shut up.
• Planning work in order of risk and dependency. Finishing high-risk tasks first means that more simple tasks will be left as integration draws near. Keeping dependencies straight means less re-work on already completed code.

Complexity and risk are closely related. Managing one often mitigates the other. Less-complex systems are easier to understand, easier to modify, and are less likely break in the process.

Taking the reverse, if you see a project that isn't managing its complexity, assume they will bite it at some point.

POTD

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University District, Bologna.

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Piazza Maggiore, Bologna.

I have an all-day meeting today on Long Island.

Long Island

This is not right.

POTD

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Charles de Gaulle 2.

KDE: 3.5: A Visual Guide to New Features

KDE: 3.5: A Visual Guide to New Features

Best part:

"Konqueror has now become the second browser to pass the arduous 'Acid2' css compliance test. Apple's Safari browser was the first, which makes use of Konqueror's advanced rendering engine KHTML. Thanks to some fixes that were integrated back into Konqueror from Safari improvements, and the hard work of the KHTML programmers, Konqueror can now boast a high level of CSS compliance."

Go Apple!

KDE: 3.5: A Visual Guide to New Features

POTD

click for high-res

Also, while in Italy, visited the Ducati factory. Good stuff.

POTD

POTD

click for high-res

Also, while in Italy, visited the Ducati factory. Good stuff.

I just make JDK 1.5 my default VM. I'm really living on the edge.

John Vlissides

Sad note: Design Patterns guru John Vlissides passed away last week.

Photo Books

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd talk about some of the photo books I've recently bought that I liked.

• James Nachtwey's Inferno. A physically large book (about 11x17 inches), bound in black cloth, Nachtwey's Inferno is a 470-page history of his war coverage. Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya, Kosovo; Nachtwey has seen the worst of humanity. Inferno bears witness to war's inhumanity with beautiful, heart wrenching black and white images, many of which U.S. magazines and newspapers would not run. Inferno is a difficult, important book.
• Paul Strand circa 1916. I'm a big Paul Strand fan; I purchased this one to round out my collection of classics. Covering his time in New York City, the book consists of 170 pages of very well reproduced (duotone and tritone) prints, along with a lengthy introduction. This book is notable because most of the prints are reproductions of original, vintage prints.
• To round out my Strand books, I also picked up Paul Strand Southwest. Recently printed by Aperture, this book covers his time in New Mexico (1926, 1930-32). During this time, Strand split from his mentor Alfred Steiglitz and developed astounding prints of the southwest as well as some wonderful portraits.
• Recently reissued, in a large, beautifully printed edition, Richard Avedon's In The American West collects my favorite of his portraits. 120 11x14" reproductions of his American West photos, taken over five years in the early 1980s, lay bare the nature of every day western life.
• Because I like Avedon so much, I picked up an Aperture monograph of Martin Munkasci. Though Avedon is often credited with breaking fashion photography open, popularizing photos of powerful, dynamic women, he could not have done so without the groundwork lain by Munkasci. Working from the early 1920s, Munkasci's unconventional poses (running, jumping) clearly influenced Avedon's work.
• Though he is constantly mentioned, I had no books with any Marc Riboud photos. That was, until I picked up a copy of Marc Riboud: 50 Years of Photography. Very interesting photography. Surprising. He has traveled the world making beautiful, intimate photographs. I found myself frustrated looking through the photos in this book; they were the photos I would like to make, only better than I could possibly do.
• I've saved the most interesting book for last. I had seen this collection of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photos before, but passed if over, not knowing who he was. But, wow. What a surprise. Meatyard lived in Lexington, Kentucky, working as an optician. he bought a camera to make family snapshots, but soon grew more serious, making photos of people and places around Lexington. Astounding photos. Landscapes, abstracts, portraits, and a number of surreal scenes involving masks and people in motion. An excellent, surprising book.

Photo Books

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd talk about some of the photo books I've recently bought that I liked.

• James Nachtwey's Inferno. A physically large book (about 11x17 inches), bound in black cloth, Nachtwey's Inferno is a 470-page history of his war coverage. Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Chechnya, Kosovo; Nachtwey has seen the worst of humanity. Inferno bears witness to war's inhumanity with beautiful, heart wrenching black and white images, many of which U.S. magazines and newspapers would not run. Inferno is a difficult, important book.
• Paul Strand circa 1916. I'm a big Paul Strand fan; I purchased this one to round out my collection of classics. Covering his time in New York City, the book consists of 170 pages of very well reproduced (duotone and tritone) prints, along with a lengthy introduction. This book is notable because most of the prints are reproductions of original, vintage prints.
• To round out my Strand books, I also picked up Paul Strand Southwest. Recently printed by Aperture, this book covers his time in New Mexico (1926, 1930-32). During this time, Strand split from his mentor Alfred Steiglitz and developed astounding prints of the southwest as well as some wonderful portraits.
• Recently reissued, in a large, beautifully printed edition, Richard Avedon's In The American West collects my favorite of his portraits. 120 11x14" reproductions of his American West photos, taken over five years in the early 1980s, lay bare the nature of every day western life.
• Because I like Avedon so much, I picked up an Aperture monograph of Martin Munkasci. Though Avedon is often credited with breaking fashion photography open, popularizing photos of powerful, dynamic women, he could not have done so without the groundwork lain by Munkasci. Working from the early 1920s, Munkasci's unconventional poses (running, jumping) clearly influenced Avedon's work.
• Though he is constantly mentioned, I had no books with any Marc Riboud photos. That was, until I picked up a copy of Marc Riboud: 50 Years of Photography. Very interesting photography. Surprising. He has traveled the world making beautiful, intimate photographs. I found myself frustrated looking through the photos in this book; they were the photos I would like to make, only better than I could possibly do.
• I've saved the most interesting book for last. I had seen this collection of Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photos before, but passed if over, not knowing who he was. But, wow. What a surprise. Meatyard lived in Lexington, Kentucky, working as an optician. he bought a camera to make family snapshots, but soon grew more serious, making photos of people and places around Lexington. Astounding photos. Landscapes, abstracts, portraits, and a number of surreal scenes involving masks and people in motion. An excellent, surprising book.