By bfwebster on Nov 10, 2012 in Architecture, Art of 'Ware, Complex systems, Development, Product development, Project Failure, Quality assurance, Risk management, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 2 Comments
[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 [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 12, 2012 in Articles, Complex systems, Development, Main, Product development, Professionalism, Risk management | 2 Comments
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 [...]
By bfwebster on Feb 21, 2011 in Maintenance, Quality assurance, Risk management | 3 Comments
Well, first, apologies to all you who have been waiting for me to resume posting here. Your wait is over; I will be a bit more frequent in the future. Second, I have chronicled here my problems with two HP systems — a desktop and a laptop — that I each purchased new, with Windows [...]
By bfwebster on Jul 21, 2010 in Maintenance, Risk management | 1 Comment
[UPDATE: Read this post, which seems to be having trouble actually appearing here on the blog.] Since last November, I have bought three new, out-of-the-box systems preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (and upgraded to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit at the end of May): an HP Pavilion e9237c desktop (quad-core 64-bit processor, 8 GB [...]
By bfwebster on Mar 7, 2010 in Main, Maintenance, Quality assurance, Risk management | 1 Comment
I’ve actually been having this problem for some time, but I thought it might be some kind of hardware problem with the system. Now I think it’s Microsoft and/or ATI. As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium [...]