Complex systems
The Many-Headed Beast on the Three-Legged Stool
Within a given organization — corporate or governmental — three separate groups exist that can determine the success or failure of your IT project. This is true whether you’re a senior IT project manager within that organization, a consulting firm developing or re-engineering a system for that organization or an external vendor trying to sell […]
Weighing in on Project Orca
[Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and ‘net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s […]
A possible game-changer in industrial robots
Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find […]
“Ground-truth documents”
A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its […]
WHS 2003 issues — looking for suggestions
This is actually a problem I’ve been dealing with — or, more accurately, ignoring and working around — for a few months, at least, so I thought I’d put a post up here to see if anyone has come up with an actual fix. Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home […]