I mean, why not take an interface like SimCity and map it to real business functions. Transportation and Logistics comes to mind. Even better would be a first-person shooter hooked into your accounting system. POs get processed in record time! Blam, blam, blam!

Alright, psychotic idea. I mean, who would want to have fun doing actual work…

Virtual Worlds Poised to Become Valuable Work Tools:

orrester has released a new report into the use of virtual worlds in the workplace. The report makes the big claim that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”. But before we get too carried away, the report also notes that right now virtual worlds are not user friendly to the enterprise crowd – “you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools”, Forrester notes.

The report, entitled ‘Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds’, states that Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and “more business-focused offerings” are on the verge of becoming valuable work tools.

[Via: ReadWriteWeb]

The 3 Levels of Programmers: Good, Lazy, and Bad:

most of us will never join the upper echelon of programmers who’ve built widely used and successful toolkits. I’m pretty sure I never will, as I am lazy by nature. I’m always reaching for open-source tools to accomplish my projects.

[Via: Guy Davis]

Reflections of an Interface Designer:

Web application design is surprisingly organic. I’ve never designed something so volatile and delicate. In college, web design always felt cold and distant. It was the least exciting medium for me. I preferred anything else to it: print, paint, sculpture, mixed media, video, performance. I was addicted to eliciting emotions and I couldn’t imagine anything farther from my audience than the Internet. But Wufoo has showed me that software can have personality and feel more alive than anything else I’ve ever created. Because thousands of users are using something I’ve created in realtime, it responds almost immediately to the slightest modifications. Moving a button, changing a color, rewriting copy. All of it matters and in different and surprising ways. This is so different from creating framed art work for a gallery where feedback and the possibility of response and interaction is difficult and mostly non-existent.

[Via: Particletree]

Unobtrusive Javascript:

Some topics covered in the video:

A bit of history and how we got here.
Semantic Markup
Obtrusive Examples <– big belly here
Benefits of coding unobtrusively
Examples, specifically to Rails
Guidelines and assumptions you should make when coding javascript
Graceful degredation
Namespacing

[Via: Rails Envy]

Of course, it doesn’t make me feel much better knowing that CE is under the hood.

Voting Machines – Elections – Ballots – Politics – New York Times:

IN THE LOBBY OF JANE PLATTEN’S OFFICE in Cleveland sits an AccuVote-TSX, made by Diebold. It is the machine that Cuyahoga County votes on, and it works like this: Inside each machine there is a computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are taken to the county’s election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine; election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in an emergency.

[Clued in by: Joel on Software]

Now, my question is Why? Why do we have these things in the first place? Not, why don’t electronic voting machines work. Not, why don’t we use open source instead of vendor controlled systems (as the article points out painfully).

Why have them at all? What problem to do they solve?

Sure, there is the question of punch cards and butterflies (ala 2000), but really couldn’t that system just be improved? We vote just a few times a year. Is it critical that we know the outcome right when the polls close? Couldn’t we vote over several days (as they do in other countries) and then tally the votes over a similar period of time?

Why all the rush?

It’s not like politics move at such a lightning-quick pace to begin with. What’s a few days in-between? Besides, just think of all the ad revenue to be generated by dragging it out, the endless flow of news articles wondering about the outcome, the watercooler chatter…

Wait, do we even have watercoolers anymore?

Hmmm. Maybe it is more productive to get those results in quicker after all.

Agile Absolves Developers:

A waterfall development team, in contrast, is avoiding responsibility. It may be that the team does not consciously realize that they are doing it, or even intend to do it. Intelligent people can agree to disagree about the reasons that an organization does or does not pursue agile – that’s another debate. A team may not be able to handle the additional responsibility. An organization may be unwilling to create an environment that makes this ownership possible.

[Via: Tyner Blain]

Scott, don’t worry about posting it early! You gave me something to read tonight, especially with the great links!!!

I’m always on the lookout for new web frameworks and tools. It’s part of my nature I guess (or maybe I need to look into that hobby thing again). That said, one thing that always seems to get me about frameworks is how interestingthings are supposed to be under the hood. You read the docs and check out the forums. You hear people rave about this feature (usually throwing about the world ‘elegant’). But it isn’t often I hear people talking about the primary reason for having a web framework: users!

Gregory over at redcorundum sums it up pretty well in the middle of a great post on web frameworks…

Do You Understand What Your Web Framework is Doing?:

Most people developing web sites/applications think in terms of the server software they are developing. Much as first-time GUI developers often find it baffling, the inversion of control involved in modern web programming confuses many developers. The server has full control when responding to a request but, once it has generated that response, control reverts to the client. For one thing, that means that data on the client does not get to the server unless the client decides to send it. It also means that data from the server does not get to the client unless the client decides to request it. One needs to work from the point of view of the user in front of the browser.

There’s actually a lot more to it (as you can see in the referenced Wikipedia article). In general, code coverage is a good thing. But like all god things, it is possible to go a wee bit overboard, just ask Kyle…

Monitoring code coverage, or “How to descend into madness”:

It started innocently enough. We added code coverage statistics a while back but only lately have we broken the build when it dropped below a certain level. We started at 60% and last week, our coverage sat at 67%. So I upped the threshold to 65% and after some good-natured goading among the team, I raised it to 66%. Y’know, just as a joke. No harm, no foul, eh?

A couple of days later and the coverage is starting to hover near 70%. “Very exciting,” says I, “soon we’ll be able to increase the threshold to 70%”. And the excitement I felt at that notion should have been a tipoff to seek some form of counselling.

[via: CodeBetter.Com]

I tend to think that 65%+ is probably reaching maximum efficiency in code coverage. I know some folks try to shoot for 100%, but this seems excessive. Of course, my figure is based more on gut than on a deep quantitative analysis. Scott Sehlhorst has a very compelling and quantitative argument for at least 90% code coverage (5/2006).

I dig what Scott is saying, but then I don’t want to end up like Kyle…

A tight interface is the first step to building a good application. For developers, the interface is your conduit to users. This is the part of the program they are most likely to understand (and hate/love). If you’ve done a poor job of building that interface together, the application will probably fail due to lack of use no matter how good the thing works under the hood.

In Software, The Interface Is The Product:

Too many online retailers lack agility in their IT, despite having great smart committed developers.

Why is that?

How much blame should be placed on their development methodology?

[via: rkgblog]

Pragmatic Programmer presentation posted:

I’ve posted the slides from a presentation I gave at work to our software development team on the Pragmatic Programmer book. This collection of common-sense practices has become kind of a manual for good programmers everywhere.

[Via: Guy Davis]

About the book

From the publisher:

Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process—taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible, easy to adapt, and reuse.