Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets by Frank Partnoy is a fascinating book. Partnoy describes how the ever raising performance-related bonuses for brokerage bankers in the 1980s lead the brokers to create a succession of schemes to inflate bonuses. The early waves of this phenomenon was in the dervatives business. Derivatives are financial instruments the payoff of which is determined by other factors. The stated purpose of a derivative is to sell the risk related to something to someone who is better prepared to handle it.

Joel Spolsky, of Joel-on-software fame was in Oslo, and had an open invitation to dinner for readers of his website. I think around 30 people showed up, which totally blew my mind. It is always nice to meet people who care about software development beyond having a job to go to from 9 to 5. Maybe there is enough interest to have a regular network event for technical people who care about what they do?

Learning OO is such a disappointment. When you go from the models and into the code, you pretty much discover that it is all bunk, anyway. In your neat customer-order-product design, each entity explodes into circa 10 artifacts if you implement it in J2EE, or gets fragmented into mostly pure data management if you use .NET. You can hardly find the classes again anywhere in the implementation. What went wrong?!

On the Agile Management mailing list, David J. Andersen writes: It would get a little more involved than that but the you get the basic idea. Pay for the value delivered, not the effort expended. Incentivize the vendor to deliver high quality. Most agile methods use a variation of a backlog. In an ideal project, the payment would be only dependent upon the value of each feature requested. Most software projects are much more resilient to underdelivery than people realise (and less resilitent to late delivery), which makes this into an contract that keeps both parties interests in mind.

Ullman’s book describes the lives of two people related to a large software development project in the early 80s. Ethan Levin is the programmer who is judged responsible for the bug. As it proves to be impossible to reproduce reliably his life seems to spiral down into dispair, loneliness, and depression. Ullman is a master at describing the almost hypnotizing urge to “just fix this last problem before” when programming. The dysfunctional team and people in the novel are more dysfunctional than anyone I have ever met, but they are perfect carricatures (I hope!

Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes. Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?) Alan Turing (of course) Edger Dijkstra (pioneered software and computer science as a discipline) Grace Murray Hopper (championing accessible program writing) Kristen Nygaard (as far as I know, he was one of the first people to be concerned about the impact of computing upon society)

Bush ’not mad’ at France [via CNN] “I’m going to remind him, like I’m going to remind a lot of people, that we can do a heck of a lot more together than we can arguing with each other,” [Bush] said." ITYM, “I can do heck of a lot more on of what I want if you stop hasslin’ me”, Dubya. Dubya might be “not mad” at France, but I sure hope France is still mad at him.

Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent. [ - from MacCentral ]

free culture Creativity and innovation builds on the past The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it Free societies limit the future by limiting the past Ours is less and less a free society

welcome spammers Dear Spam Robot: I don’t have much time to read emails, and I especially don’t have much time to read unsolicited commercial emails. But I have decided to make an exception. If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that you promise to pay me $500, and subject to the additional conditions mentioned below. You can accept this offer by sending unsolicited commercial email to me at mailto:make-my-day-q2wxe4q1@pobox.