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Campus Welcomes Chaplain Patrick Murphy
Top HeadlinesDate: August 24, 2005
Contact: firstname.lastname@example.com
Phone: 269-471-3322
Each school year brings new faces to the campus of Andrews University. Along with new freshmen and transfer students, this year Andrews is happy to welcome Chaplain Patrick Murphy.
However, to say that chaplain Murphy is new to the Andrews campus is not exactly accurate. Having received both his undergraduate degree and master of divinity from Andrews, Murphy has merely come back home.
Murphy graduated from Andrews with a degree in religion in 1997 before returning to his native Battle Creek to serve as a youth pastor at the Battle Creek Tabernacle Seventh-day Adventist Church. A few years later, he married his wife, Heidi, a graphic designer, and made a return to Andrews to study in the Seminary. Before coming back to Andrews as a chaplain, he and his wife have been pastoring in Michigan's Upper Peninsula since 2002.
In his role as chaplain, Murphy will be focusing on outreach, which includes ministries such as AU-Outreach, the Easter Passion Play, Impressions drama ministry, student missions, as well as weekly chapels.
Murphy is looking forward to the "opportunity to lock arms and be shoulder to shoulder with the movers and shakers of the church, the youth."
With a tangible passion for God and his ministry, it is Murphy's goal that upon graduation, students will leave "on fire for God, and that within their profession, no matter what that is, they will draw others to Christ."


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John Joseph Rademacher of Spokane, Wash., was born Nov. 1, 1940 in Grand Rapids, to John Lawrence and Beatrice Bessie Boynton Rademacher.
John Joseph Rademacher of Spokane, Wash., was born Nov. 1, 1940 in Grand Rapids, to John Lawrence and Beatrice Bessie Boynton Rademacher.
John graduated from Ionia High School in 1958 and from Albion College in 1962. In Detroit, he married Merrilie Jo Savery in 1965 and graduated from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1966.
Following an intern year at Los Angeles County Hospital, he served two years in the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War. John completed his residency training in radiology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Ore., eventually joining in practice for 20 years at Blue Mountain Diagnostic Imaging in Pendleton, Ore. In 1993 he was appointed department head at the Walla Walla VA Medical Center. John later joined Inland Imaging in Spokane, Wash., retiring in December 2010 after 44 years of practice.
John is loved and survived by his two sons, Joseph Allen Boynton (Jessica) Rademacher of Clackamas, Ore., and Brooks Lawrence Savery Rademacher of Rochester, N.Y.; two grandchildren, Jacen Patrick De Lair Rademacher and Jaina Grace Jaclyn Rademacher of Clackamas; his sister, Janet Rademacher Baker of Walla Walla, Wash.; and the mother of his children, Merrilie Savery Rademacher of Pendleton, Ore.
He was preceded in death by his parents, and infant grandson, Joseph Allen Boynton Rademacher, Jr.
During his time at Inland Imaging in Spokane, Wash., John enjoyed working closely with his colleagues, consistently stating that his practice benefited greatly from their readily available expertise. He often took advantage of opportunities to train Radiology residents and technicians, and was honored to speak at the technician graduation ceremony each year.
Beyond his family and friends, John grew to love music, having lived in and near Detroit during the popular Motown era. John's other hobbies included travel to Hawaii, Mexico, and the Oregon Coast, spending hours in search of the latest music in Portland, and being an avid Gonzaga Basketball fan.
After a fearless and determined fight against cancer, John passed peacefully at the Hospice of Spokane house on Oct. 26, surrounded by friends and family.
A Celebration of Life was held Nov. 3 in Spokane, Wash., at the home of one of John's dear friends. It was a time of sharing tears, laughs, music, and memories with his family and friends. Please send any donations in memory of John to Hospice of Spokane, P.O. Box 2215, Spokane, WA 99210.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Djekanovic happy to be home April 1, 200812:00AM PDT Previous Next Vancouver Whitecaps goalkeeper Srdjan Djekanovic is looking forward to his second spell with his hometown club. This time last year, the Serbian-born shot-stopper looked set to help the Whitecaps defend their 2006 United Soccer Leagues First Division title. That all changed in late April when Canadian rivals Toronto FC signed the 25-year-old for their inaugural season in Major League Soccer after agreeing an undisclosed fee with Vancouver for the keeper. Though he made eight appearances for TFC last season, Djekanovic was released by the MLS club in the autumn. After leading the University of British Columbia Thunderbirds to a second Canadian Interuniversity Sport national championship title in three years last November, Djekanovic has returned to what is a new-look Whitecaps squad under the guidance of head coach Teitur Thordarson. The Delta, BC, native is impressed with the spirit he has seen in the team so far. "It's a good group of guys and there are gelling really well," Djekanovic told whitecapsfc.com. "I think the coaching staff is helping with that. Teitur has the experience of being a player, so that helps, while his assistant Todd Wawrousek has been a positive influence as well." With goalkeeping being a specialized role, Djekanovic has been working closely with the club's new goalkeeping coach Mike Salmon. The Englishman brings a wealth of experience to the role, having played for several professional clubs in the UK and as a coach at English Premier League giants Arsenal. "Jay and I are doing things with him that I've never seen before," Djekanovic said of Salmon. "Mike is very organized and pays a lot of attention to detail. It shows his professionalism when you show up for training every morning and you see everything set up 15 to 20 minutes before practice." With only one starting position available in goal, Djekanovic will be contesting for the club's number one jersey with another former MLS keeper in Jay Nolly. Though he knows they are competing for the role, Djekanovic has enjoyed training with the former Real Salt Lake and DC United man. "Jay is a classy guy," he said. "I think we both have had the same career paths, having been around either Major League Soccer or the USL First Division, but not having played as much as we hoped. If either one of us were not here in Vancouver, it would have been easier for us to be a number one with any club in this league. We are both going to push for that number one spot, but at the same time, there is a lot of mutual respect between us and a good friendship off the field." Returning with Vancouver will allow Djekanovic an opportunity to face his old club Toronto FC in the new CONCACAF Champions League qualifying tournament this summer. Though he expects two tough games against TFC, the Whitecaps keeper feels USL-1 rivals Montreal Impact may be slight favourites to claim the honour of Canada's top professional club in 2008. "Montreal has put a lot of money into their preseason," noted Djekanovic. "They have a good team and will always be tough to play, so I would put them as pre-tournament favourites right now. Overall, I think it's going to be very tight, as I can see lots of drawn matches in the competition." The Impact are also widely touted as one of the favorites for the USL-1 title in 2008. For Djekanovic, the keeper also sees defending league champions Seattle Sounders be one of the teams to beat in the upcoming campaign. "From what I saw of Seattle in preseason, I think they are going to be a tough team to play," he admitted. "They're well organized and play nice soccer. Portland Timbers should also have a good side, and from what I've seen, I expect Charleston to be really well organized defensively with the additions of Marco Reda and Jack Stewart. With former Canadian international defender Mark Watson in their coaching staff, I would see them being a tough team to play and create scoring chances against." The Whitecaps open the 2008 regular season at Swangard Stadium with an all-Canadian tilt versus the Montreal Impact on April 12. Season tickets are on sale now and start at $199. All season tickets include a bonus ticket to this year's international friendly. For more information, CLICK HERE or call the Whitecaps office at 604.669.WAVE (9283). Previous Next


text:
HuntEx in Midrand, South Africa - MINOX presents its products
Since the successful launch of the exhibition in 2011, HuntEx has become the largest expo for hunters and sport shooters on the African continent and is also the largest small calibre weapons expo. HuntEx is primarily a consumer expo. From 18th to 21st April 2013, 250 manufacturers will show the latest trends in 27 different product categories on a floor area of 11,286 m². MINOX will demonstrate its sport optics programme comprising binoculars, riflescopes with illuminated reticle and game cameras, including expert advice on site.


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Craft and Software Engineering
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Glenn Vanderburg believes that software engineering and craftsmanship are not mutually exclusive, and there is synergy between them, explaining how to combine them in the software development process.
Glenn Vanderburg is a consultant at Relevance focused on cutting-edge software development technologies and techniques, including Ruby, JavaScript, Ajax, and state-of-the-art development practices.
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.
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Tell us what you think
Jerome St-Pierre
A software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with the designing instead of being used after the design.
I was astonished!
Wrong conclusions, only supporting own thoughts, user entirely missed
Adam Nemeth
Yet the conclusions drawn here are entirely off the ground sometimes.
It's a good idea to check what do other engineering disciplines do. Perhaps this should stop people claiming publicly that engineering documentation is mostly for workers. It'd be enough to just spend 8 work-hours at any architecture or civil engineering company to realize it's not the case.
(Also, saying that in traditional engineering, actual building is the highest price is entirely off the ground, especially as in some fields of architecture, the design and construction firms are separate, with one firm having 0 cost of construction as they don't move a single brick.)
So, in some ways, this presentation, I feel, is about supporting the presenter's view on that Agile is the holy way. It isn't, and it's not a preliminary form of something. This doesn't mean it doesn't have good parts of course.
Let's go back to that NATO discussion a bit. It's in 1968, and what's the driving force? Projects are getting late, they are unpredictable, and they don't bear the results their customers wanted.
And here's what we have missing in the entire one hour presentation: customer, end-user, and predictability. Nothing. Absolutely nothing is about them.
In order to have predictable results, they wanted people who have disciplines of how to build software. They wanted to have the ability to say, that 3 months from now, you'll have a working system which you just described and your problems will be solved.
I don't want to claim percentages, but a large part of engineering documentation is about making customers, 3rd party engineers (like, house registry officials) reassured that the system complies with their wishes. Some of this documentation is written in a format which is to provide a digestible model to uninformed people.
Anyone who thinks UML is about anything else should look at what Rational made a living from first. They were consultants. They made sure that the customer gets what she wants.
Also, saying that construction has 0 cost in software engineering - albeit I wouldn't call the 40-minute compile time of larger java projects w/o unit tests zero - misses a pretty important point: that if you put a not well-thought model into the production system, you can mess it up for the system's entire lifetime.
There's nothing wrong with prototyping; there's even nothing wrong with prototyping as close to the real system as it can be. It's just that making the system fully testable is costly, and that not having a clear distinction of when it was just "tried out" and when it is executed can and will bear disasterous results.
The IEEE definition of software engineering is as follows:
"The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development,
operation, and maintenance of software"
IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering
Terminology, IEEE Computer Society, 1990.
Craftsmen don't have such: however, craftsmen don't have any formal education, and craftsmen sometimes fail. If you fail to do a bag, or a necklace, you messed up a single person's life a bit, who lost a few bucks. But if you mess up a system, as an engineer, you messed up the life of a community, and a multi-thousand dollar product: as an engineer you're always responsible for the community of your end-users.
That point is entirely missing somehow, and if nothing is about the customer and the end-user, if it's not about reassuring them at every single point that we are going to solve their problems, and that we'll solve the right problem in the right way, then, I believe, excuse me, but this presentation doesn't solve the right problem in the right way, as this is why that NATO conference was held, and this is why I claim I'm an engineer.
I'm an Engineer and I "get It"
Paul Beckford
I'm an Engineer too (B. Eng, MIEE) and I haven't seen the presentation but I felt compelled to respond to your comment. I have also read the 1968 NATO Proceedings and the thing that struck mis is that Dykstra et al didn't know how to solve the crisis. They settled on Engineering as a metaphor, but they also spent half the report remonstrating over why the metaphor didn't quite fit the problem.
Software is software a new discipline with new challenges. The IEEE definition of Engineering suites problems where the reconfiguration costs are high. So if you build a multi million dollar bridge, you better get the design right before construction. Software just isn't like that. The reconfiguration costs are relatively low. You can change code/design at any time if you do it right.
We have learn't some since 1968 which has led people to alternative metaphors, craftsmanship is just one alternative. Back to the goals of an Engineer. I agree with you about making the customer central, but plently professions share this goal. For examples the goals of a Theatre company (one of my preferred metaphors for software) are just the same, produce a product that will please the customer.
The Engineered buildings with blue-prints and safety certificates that fall down killing their occupants during earth quakes, do they please their customers? The proof of the pudding is in the eating not the paper work.
For software we have learn't that the best way to give visibility to customers is not to show them plans or artefacts, but to show them working software, early and often. This is where the Agile movement starts.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I
Adam Nemeth
It'd be interesting to dwell into Dyjsktra's biography, but it would dwell us too far as certainly Dijsktra is way too pedantic to our age. For example, he claimed that doing a bugfix release is just plain nonsense, you should've learnt how to do it right at the first time (Discipline in Thought).
I stick to the engineer metaphor as there's something, which is
- a work of art (a catedhral is also a work of art in my view)
- and based on hard science (a fast-fourier transformation is pretty much science)
- is an infrastructure system (waterpipes, railroads, etc?)
- done by changing the environment (parafemized definition of architecture)
- to serve from hundreds to thousands of people who happen to be there (living structure)
- for a limited, but relatively long period of time (buildings don't last forever, softwares last years)
- for a crazy amount of money (10 programmers for a year is more than a million bucks)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't trust a group of craftsmen and bring them one and half million dollars, just to make your 3000 employees suffer as they can't deliver reliably something which is an integral part of their everyday experience 40 hours a week - which otherwise happens quite often today.
They do it because this group claims they're engineers, that they can deliver reliably.
An enterprise programmer costs 10 000 dollars per month or more, with social security, employer taxes, etc.
The reconfigurability prices are tremendously high: just try to move a 10 years old system from one SQL engine to the other and you'll realize that it'll be near to the price of a space shuttle launch, and much more expensive than building a house, or buying one, especially in the US.
I agree that sometimes showing working software early is the best thing, yet this can come with that price - I've seen it too often - that it gets binded to an SQL engine with pretty dirty code. Don't make me wrong: I'm not for Big Upfront Design, yet our current agile practices are really short-sighted.
And although the theory of Adaptive Programming is a good one, what I see at Fortune 500 companies is more about wasting millions of dollars per month on the simple fact that some developers were ... ehm... too agile.
Name calling!
Paul Beckford
There is plenty we can agree on :)
Delivery is key. IMHO it's not what you call yourself that counts, but what you can do. I am an Engineer and I am a computer programmer. Engineering has probably moved on since I was designing military radios (circa 1990), but sometimes as a programmer I feel like I'm Engineering and at other times I don't.
These are just metaphors. Programming has unique characteristics that the world hasn't encountered before. None of these metaphors IMHO is a precise fit. Which is why I'm happy calling myself a Programmer :) Metaphors are useful though, because they come with inferences that can be used to change mindsets. The Craftsmanship metaphor is a backlash and comes with the inference of learning a craft (or trade) through practice. A useful message, but not the whole story.
We get into trouble when we take any single metaphor too far. The map is not the territory.
Where we agree is that incremental delivery done poorly can be an even bigger disaster then batch development done poorly. One caveat though. The customer gets visibility that you don't know what you are doing a lot earlier. So if they choose to keep payng after that, then I suppose they deserve what they get :)
It is definitely worth reading the 1968 Nato Report. The level of uncertainty over what to do to solve the "software crisis" is staggering. They didn't have a clue. They didn't think that Programming was Engineering, but they had to come up with something :). They were having the same debates about what programming is and is not that we are still having today. How about we stop trying to put Programming in some other professions box and accept that Programming calls for a unique set of skills never needed before and that the vast majority of practitioners lack many of these skills (especially the people and listening skills) and hence aren't very good at it :)
Calling yourself a Craftsman an Engineer or a Wizard doesn't tell me whether you are any good at programming. May be if we found ways to make the quality of our work more visible, we'd worry less over what we choose to call ourselves.
Re: Name calling!
Adam Nemeth
I'm pretty fine with your agreement. It's just that I finished a SEEK-compliant course, and read the SEEK material ( sites.computer.org/ccse/SE2004Volume.pdf ) and in retrospective, after years of practicing, it makes sense to me. Note, that there's still some uncertainity in that writing, more than 30 years after the conference.
I pretty much agree that Software Engineering is not a polished study - yet. But every attempt to not define our profession as an engineering profession just weakens it - that's why I'm against it.
I've worked with clients in urban architecture; I have a lot of books in architecture, and somehow I could always explain myself in their terms: the similarities are sometimes staggering, yet they have nothing to do with what Glenn presented up there.
My university teachers also weren't software engineers: most of them came from the field of electrical engineering, but some of them were mechanical engineers, as in the old days, even electrical engineering didn't exist as a separate field.
The reasons I'm for software engineering are above: it's a pretty expensive field, with softwares costing a fortune, and affecting thousands of people's life; I wouldn't give this task to anyone not formally trained to bear this. A bug which a single developer hunts for a week is comparable to a price of a car.
I also understand that people got disillusioned of the waterfall model, and the more formal and pedantic interpretation of RUP: but this is not what software engineering is about! Honestly, I believe that people simply misinterpreted RUP/Waterfall in the 90s, and misunderstood the role of UML, that's why the fuss.
For example, software engineering has nothing to do with batch delivery. Why would it? RUP never ever said they should do batch delivery.. As for waterfall, it's a model of much smaller tasks than what we do today. Back then, an algorhythm with a few thousand lines was the full system; nowadays I write such manually in a single week.
(Please note, that I don't have to use punch cards, and compilation doesn't take a full day, which makes development a lot faster I guess...)
As for documentation: most of the documentation engineers write are for customers. Sometimes a customer has to get funding, either financial or political; sometimes you have to be able to draw a baseline, "this is all we know now",and you can't do it in code quick enough. Sometimes you have to prove to 3rd parties, without a full implementation. Sometimes a prototype would be too expensive for the task, but anything non-formal would be inferior. Sometimes you don't want to have a luxury of having a document hanging in the air, being completely independent and telling nothing of the actual product.
What frightens me, is the complete lack of understanding in design, and lack of motivation to zoom just a bit further on what people are doing right now: I know it's officially not Agile's fault, yet I blame on them as Agile tries to defy SE values, and you're either part of something or being a complete counterpart.
And with that comes the complete disrespect for education, for formal methods; with that comes the continous reinvention of the wheel, even for those advances which were made by the founders of Agile (like, Kent Beck or Ward Cunnigham) but somehow didn't make it into the Agile canon.
I'm an engineer. With this I mean not just that I feel that having formal knowledge on what you're doing is important, it seems I also have to claim that current agile practices - not theories! - are wrong; that customer satisfaction is more important than feeling yourself good at workplace; that a bit of future proofness is more important than doing requests as quick as possible; that understanding each situation separately is much more important than following the scrum/agile canon.
So yes, despite being one of the first people to do scrum in 2006 in my country, it seems that I have to be the person who says no to it; not because it's wrong; but because its average implementation makes harm to the society, delivering softwares which are way too buggy, and makes it hard for the user.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I
Luis Espinal
Software is software a new discipline with new challenges. The IEEE definition of Engineering suites problems where the reconfiguration costs are high. So if you build a multi million dollar bridge, you better get the design right before construction. Software just isn't like that.
Depends on the system. The cost of getting it wrong are very different between building software that goes into a medical device and software behind a shopping cart. Even in commercial systems, I've worked in such systems where glitches literally costs ten of thousands of dollars per hour at least. It might not compare to multi-million dollar costs on a bridge built bad, but I'd be hard press to see a company bleeding that much money like that and not see this as critical.
The reconfiguration costs are relatively low.
Relative to what? Also, relative does not imply trivial or nominal. Costs are costs, and even if they are relative low compared to other types of engineering work, that does not make them trivial or non-critical. Ergo, companies that rely on such software systems, and those who are in charge of building them, must do better. Engineering maturity is the only way to go.
You can change code/design at any time if you do it right.
As anyone who has build non-trivial software for a living will ask you, how do you get it right?. What approaches do you use (or should/must use) to get it right? If it was trivial, or at least self-evident, we wouldn't have these type of conversations and problems, would we?
Just because software is malleable, that does not remove the challenge to actually build it right. We have to learn how to do engineering with software. At least you guys in the physical engineering disciplines have tools and physical models with which to analyze and verify ideas that guide your building of things. We don't. Ergo, a greater need to identify how to do engineering.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I
Luis Espinal
Don't make me wrong: I'm not for Big Upfront Design, yet our current agile practices are really short-sighted.
Bingo. The greatest bane of our industry is that people swing to extremes. We need to do engineering, which entails a firm rooting in scientific principles as well as pragmatic, on-the-ground concessions and trade-offs.
Instead we have people that, without discipline or deep thought, jump from one quasi-religious silver-bullet fad of the day, without any thought, in a all-or-nothing manner.
As a result, on the one hand, we have people calling themselves engineers w/o understanding what exactly that means. And on the other hand, we have self-proclaimed agilistas calling themselves craftmen when in reality they are just undisciplined hacks with a very myopic view of the software building landscape.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I
Alexandre Poitras
Software is software a new discipline with new challenges. The IEEE definition of Engineering suites problems where the reconfiguration costs are high. So if you build a multi million dollar bridge, you better get the design right before construction. Software just isn't like that. The reconfiguration costs are relatively low. You can change code/design at any time if you do it right.
Programming is a design activity so compare it to the design phase of any engineering project not the actual construction of the project and you'll see a lot more similarities (a software project is build by a compiler, so the construction is free). Iterative design wasn't invented by software development. It is used in most engineering disciplines.
Actually, the main difference between traditional engineering and software engineering is in a tradional project you have to deal with the physical world, so in the end you have to respect mother nature laws. A software on the other hand is virtual so you don't have to deal with physical laws, but you need to focus on things like extensibility. The amount of features is also much greater on a software than on any physical machine so testing is big concern. The main problem as I see it is that we have no way yet to measure or just quantify extensibility and things like that and that testing techniques are still in their infancy.
Reconfiguration costs include Design
Paul Beckford
I agree, construction in software is free. This is my point. Iterative development when construction isn't free is VERY expensive. I was an Electronic Engineer and at most we built one or two prototypes. With software, I have a new version of the product every time I get a green bar.
It's not just the construction costs, it is any reconfiguration costs. Someone mentioned reconfiguring the SQL Engine. Well if the code is well maintained and clean, and there is a well defined I/O layer then swapping out one database implementation for another is relatively easy and quick. Try shifting from a MC68000 CPU to an Intel 20286, it means wripping up the mother board and starting again.
Design changes are expensive in most Engineering disciplines, which is why a lot of effort is spent planning and trying to get the design right upfront (BDUF). Engineers live and die by their plans. With software the design can emerge over time. What we call emergent design. This allows A LOT more experimentation and discovery as you go, and much less reliance on getting the plan right first.
I know of no Engineering discipline that has a similar reconfiguration cost. Software is different. Not to say that there aren't lessons that can be learned from Engineering, but we are lying if we say the two are the same. They knew as much in 1968, and the intervening 40 years have proven them right.
The software crisis is with us as much today as it was in 1968. All the talk about Engineering, and the efforts of the SEI didn't solve the crisis. In some ways the Engineering nomenclature set us back, only for us to reinvent some of what we lost with the Agile and Craftsmanship movements of today.
Software development is difficult. Calling it Engineering doesn't make it any easier. Calling it a Craft doesn't making it easier neither. It's neither and both plus much more at the same time.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I - the code writer
Vladimir Tsvetkov
Talking about software (let's leave aside software that needs formal approaches, such as medical, avionics, etc.) as to engineering activity leads to more problems then benefits - especially in the area of customer relations. If what we do is engineering then we can use some formula/model and just calculate to the customer the two main things they need to know - what's the release date and what's the budget? And that's the root of all evils. you can't imagine how much time and energy software firms are investing in explaining why something would take exactly that amount of time, or why there are deviations from the original estimate.
It is not even close to engineering. My observations are that university graduates majoring Computer Science or Software Engineering are just not ready to do production-quality work. That's what "formal" training can achieve for the current moment. Then these guys start working - most likely their first job is going to be an apprenticeship, where the more senior developers are tuning their theoretical knowledge into the practical stuff of getting things finished in time and within budget.
Craftsmen are just filling in the gap of how a graduate can get to the next level through disciplined practice and apprenticeship.
But there's one thing I can agree on. The sheer amount of average developers no matter what they call themselves engineers, agilistas or craftsmen are just plain mediocre at what they do. This leads me to the conclusion that maybe our profession is closer to writing - there aren't too many good writers, are there?
Re: Reconfiguration costs include Design
Adam Nemeth
It's not just the construction costs, it is any reconfiguration costs. Someone mentioned reconfiguring the SQL Engine. Well if the code is well maintained and clean, and there is a well defined I/O layer then swapping out one database implementation for another is relatively easy and quick.
in an ideal world, every chip has the same amount of legs, so it can be exchanged without too much ado.
In practice however, no code is clean enough that this would be an easy task, or you loose runtime stability (just like you can wire any chip in a logical analyzer leg-by-leg fashion, yet you don't want to do it for a production system).
Again, construction of software costs paid worktime. If people don't realize this, it just costs more and more time.
Most coders write 0 number of prototypes: they do the real system. It's like handing over the FPGA to the customer as the finished product. Please note: nowadays electronic engineering is also handing over the FPGA firmware. A cost for a new FPGA isn't zero, but the cost of having no formal approach can be a disaster.
What I claim here, is that the design activities aren't to be missed and that the craftmanship and most agile movement - despite every attempt of their inventors - are entirely dropping design and forward thinking on the base that construction is free anyway, if we did an error, we just go back and fix it.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I - the code writer
Adam Nemeth
While it's really nice to see the code catas, what it reminds me about is simply a cargo cult. While the question-answer system of design is a pretty good approach (see Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form as an example), it is also widely known that a higher level of self-consciusness is possible (see also there.)
As for your comments on engineer graduates, I'm sorry to tell you that architect graduates cannot be used as full-blown architects, and this is usually even restricted by regional laws. It's easy to go from the Architect's wikipedia definition to this article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_requirements...
It feels to me that most practiticioners of development who are arguing here have never ever looked after what do architects (or other engineers) really do, how are they educated and what do they deem important, but instead try to get it from a layman's perspective.
That formal training has a lot of good parts:for example, it tells you if a system is complete in certain senses. But it also tells you how to apply systematic approaches to requirement elaborating, testing, and any other elements of a software construction flow.
While I understand your frustration that these aren't "burned in" enough yet, the university has no intent to burn it in, exactly as to let people have some specialization by their first years of practice.
Its unfortunate, however, that those people "already out there" mostly don't know about these. My first question to junior developers about certain set of problems - like, typically, how to start elaborating requirements, or how to distill design from them - is the question: "What did you learnt in school for that?"
It turns out they got pretty good foundations, and can solve any problems systematically, once they really did understand how their knowledge should be applied. Without this however, the next generation will forget to use it too - to the level that now, much to my surprise, I'm standing nearly alone to defend certain values.
One last thought: Those things they teach in school didn't came while doing nasty things under an academic desk: they are stories and conclusions of real-life developments from the 60s to the 90s. Everything you see from UML diagram styles to development lifecycle styles were proven solutions for real-life problems before they got into the education realms.
I'm not into the logic that they were academic assholes who don't know how to solve today's problems. I feel such thinking is short-sighted, and its prevalence saddens me a lot.
Re: Reconfiguration costs include Design
Alexandre Poitras
What I claim here, is that the design activities aren't to be missed and that the craftmanship and most agile movement - despite every attempt of their inventors - are entirely dropping design and forward thinking on the base that construction is free anyway, if we did an error, we just go back and fix it.
Yep that's the main advantage and yet the main problem of software development. If a car has a design flaw, you need to recall it to fix it which cost a lot of money. As for a software you just send a patch which is almost free for the developers. But ask your customer how much a bug can cost him in lost time...
Re: I'm an Engineer and I - the code writer
Vladimir Tsvetkov
Don't get me wrong! I'm personally involved as a lecturer in the Sofia University. I do see value in education. I do see value in being theoretically prepared. I do see value in being well informed and went through at least some of the chapters of Ivor's Jackobson Software Engineering in Practice or something similar.
What you just told me is that academic curriculum is like that because it has to pass to the students only solid proven, research backed-up, real-life problems solving knowledge. This simply doesn't work! As an owner of a software company, I can tell you that 95% of my interviews are resulting in a rejection. And it doesn't matter whether the candidate is a fresh-out of the university, or with many years of experience, or with an impressive CV and experience that is far-more rich than mine for example. Why so many software guys are at that dire straights level of skill?
I'm sure that architecture or civic engineering graduates are in a pretty similar situation. It's just a speculation but I would bet that in the engineering field again 95% of the professionals are on the level of an intermediate beginner, while only 5% are truly capable of handling the messy process of Synthesis of Form.
It's logical to conclude that what they do is also a craft and not quite engineering. The only thing that makes it an engineering is the high level of standardization of the basic parts and the potential of vast multiplication of simple materials.
And the fact that they're just bit better at repeatably building successful arcs in a predictable fashion, right?
But when it comes to building something really, really unique, do we have enough data about how successful are architects and engineers? Or we're just assuming they're really good at that?
In software there aren't such really basic parts and materials - technologies and patterns are at a way more higher-level of organization than simple reusable parts. Another point to ponder is that it seems to me that all current software design principles and maxims are possible to be followed only by professionals with higher level of self-consciousness.
And how do you get to that level? Certainly not by academic training and certainly not by following software engineering books. And certainly not by imitating the way engineers from other fields are working.
Craftsmen practices are yet to be research backed-up and solid proven. But I see them working in the field and for me this empirical knowledge is a quite good approximation on which I can successfully rely.
The engineering analogy can be as short sighted as everything else.
So, why not trying out some other analogies?
Re: Reconfiguration costs include Design
Adam Nemeth
Yep that's the main advantage and yet the main problem of software development. If a car has a design flaw, you need to recall it to fix it which cost a lot of money. As for a software you just send a patch which is almost free for the developers. But ask your customer how much a bug can cost him in lost time...
Maybe some developers work for free, but the companies I've heard of employ their employees with the full cost of between 5000 to 10000 EURs a month. that means, a single bug hunted for a week by a single person costs 1200 to 2400 EURs, which is half of the price of a whole car
Software construction is multiple cars and houses away from free, start to deal with it.
Re: I'm an Engineer and I - the code writer
Adam Nemeth
Theoretically prepared
A craft is different from some kind of science (even engineering science) that it has some scientifical basis.
Software engineering has scientifical basis by nature: otherwise we wouldn't have operation systems or graphical representations.
However, most of the developers are just users of advances in fields of Computing Science and Software Engineering.
This is bad on one side. On the other side, a general practitioner doctor is also just a user of recent drugs, even if he is the one to answer on the field for unique needs; so is an architect selecting which kind of brick or window to use.
95% of my interviews are resulting in a rejection
I drop about 90% at a multinational development firm as an interviewer, due to time restraints ("We have to find guy who knows X by date Y").
standardization of the basic parts
The basic parts are standardized: they are language constructs and patterns. Also, you can employ a library for nearly anything.
You never had to think about wether you can use the "class" construct in a programming language, most of them has it built-in (with javascript as a well-known exception in some regards).
Our basic parts are concepts: the concept of a class, the concept of a drop-down select, the concept of a QR-Code reader. They are ready-made and available for a vast array of platforms.
they're just bit better at repeatably building successful arcs in a predictable fashion
The fact that they don't collapse usually makes them magnitudes better. However, in recent years there are also serious problems for sure.
Also, they do avoid collapses as it would cause physical damage to people and personal damage to themselves (architects literally go into prison after such, regardless of how much the customer insisted of a given feature).
something really, really unique
I don't think an accounting system is really-really unique I'm afraid. It is personalized to the customer's needs, of course, but so is an office building.
technologies and patterns are at a way more higher-level of organization than simple reusable parts
Since multiplication is easily done by using the 'new' operator in most languages, I guess a library is a pretty good candidate for a pre-made low-level reusable part.
all current software design principles and maxims are possible to be followed only by professionals with higher level of self-consciousness
Would you give 10 000 euros a month for anybody who isn't on a certain high level of self-consciousness?
And how do you get to that level?
By demanding academic knowledge and background check every single time a problem arises at the student's first workplace. It worked so far, all of my "students" as I called them became development team leads sooner or later. It also needed their talents of course.
Craftsmen practices are yet to be research backed-up and solid proven
While I have nothing against some practices - like, formal specification based development, which they call TDD - the term craft can be nothing more than cargo cult.
Once their practices get research back-up it should be a part of the standard software engineering curriculum, that's all.
So, it's not the practices, but the viewpoint which makes me worried.
So, why not trying out some other analogies?
Because a programmer costs a huge amount of money, and as long as we think of software construction as free, our employers and customers will loose multiple houses worth of cash every single month based solely on that assumption.
If something is based on science, even if it's closed into code libraries, and yet it has signs of an art, and has to be adopted for each environment, I call it as engineering.
Analogies are just as worth as the viewpoints we look it from.
I look the analogy of a craftsmen as the quality of things I see at a usual fair. I look at the analogy of engineering in terms of background and science.
I just freak out if I think of a future were formal education would be seen as non-essential, in case information technologies would be such important for our society as they are now.
I literally see the craftsmanship movement, that although their practices are well-intended, the pure analogy to compare software construction to craftmanship is defining darkness as standard, to quote the old Microsoft-joke. Their practices are welcome as a part of software engineering practices, though.
Re: Reconfiguration costs include Design
Paul Beckford
It's not just the construction costs, it is any reconfiguration costs. Someone mentioned reconfiguring the SQL Engine. Well if the code is well maintained and clean, and there is a well defined I/O layer then swapping out one database implementation for another is relatively easy and quick.
in an ideal world, every chip has the same amount of legs, so it can be exchanged without too much ado.
In practice however, no code is clean enough that this would be an easy task, or you loose runtime stability (just like you can wire any chip in a logical analyzer leg-by-leg fashion, yet you don't want to do it for a production system).
From this response it is clear to me that you haven't done any real Engineering. For Electronics you would have to reconfigure the whole assembly line. That means new templates for the PCB's and new tooling. This is *VERY* expensive and is why Engineers invest so much time getting their design right *before* production. I've watched the video now and Glenn is spot on.
Which begs the question why are you so stuck on this single metaphor? It seems to me that for you the title of Engineer bestows greater credibility and kudos then that of Craftsman. Well if your code is crap it doesn't matter what you want to call yourself in my book :)
Which brings me to my next point. If you produce code where you can't swap out the persistence layer relatively easily then I would say that is pretty poor. A design goal should be a clear separation of concerns. Persistence is an orthogonal concern and should be addressed as such.
Spaghetti code where everything is horribly coupled to everything else is expensive to re-configure I agree. I wasn't assuming spaghetti code though. I was assuming clean code written by skilled professionals.
I agree that over 40 years of Software Engineering has left us with unskilled practitioners that produce crap code that is expensive to maintain.
Emergence & Language
Vladimir Tsvetkov
Just one thing that you're totally missing. Building software is about creation, writing and it is rarely a construction. It's about emergence, shared conceptualization which happens not inside of a factory, but in a social setting. It's about language. You're leaving me with the impression that to you the emergence of human language had happened as a result of some sort of scientific research.
In Programming there's something more than engineering - there's some sort of spontaneity and a moment of illumination. A design activity strongly bond to language. I would never refer to language as to basic parts. Zeros and ones - these are the basic parts we can reuse.
Re: Emergence & Language
Adam Nemeth
I mostly deal with architecture theory nowadays through the works of Christopher Alexander (albeit I came from an architect/engineer family). He says the same things about architecture, and defines it as a language, and its conceptualization according to him should happen in a social setting. Basically everything you say about writing applies to architecture in his view.
If I'd claim anything about emergence is that builders of cathedrals had respect of their history, whereas in our current situation, the persistent notion is the "everything before was wrong" approach, which applies to Craftmanship as well as to Agile, and - funnily - applied to OOP vs Structured Programming before (its proponents seemingly didn't deal with the fact that the class construct appeared one of the first times in the Dijsktra-Dahl-Hoare book on Structured Programming).
I'd claim that roman architecture and gothic architecture are both architecture; I'd claim that there's much more to build something large then being a craftsman; I'd claim that if it was languages, the relation of software development to its state 20 years before should be the relationship of modern greek versus antic greek, rather than italian versus latin.
If I had to define a basic part, I'd rather concentrate on a CPU instruction set, or similar, as zeros and ones rarely occur to be actually defining anything, 0 and 1 weren't the ones where we began.
Re: Reconfiguration costs include Design
Adam Nemeth
Let me state something: in outsourcing, where I spent the largest part of my professional carreer, you get what you get. It's not me who produces crap code, it's already there I'm afraid. Most outsourcing projects were about maintenance / further development of existing codebases.
My job for that time was to stop people continuing the tradition of spaghetti code. My internal memos of code conventions are still required course material long since I've left. I was well-known for "maximalism" when it came to so-called internal quality.
Then I switched to in-house enterprise development, and seen where did those spaghetti codes came from.
It came from the very people who defied SE practices. It came from "The Scrum Company", which I don't want to name here, it came from people who defined themselves "agilists". I met also with one of the largest agile coaching companies. I was horrified by their ideas on how software should be developed.
Craftmanship doesn't define zoom-out. Layers are not part of craftmanship knowledge, it's code-focused.
Actually, persistence layer is a rarely changing stuff,which needs pretty good performance, it's a perfectly defendable approach if one of the architects - or even a sole developer - decides that his code would be persistence-engine dependent, just like it's a pretty good guess that the environment is Win32-compatible, or runs on x86, or DirectX is present. In case of applications where 70% of the code is about really complex queries, it may make sense to make it dependant on one of the SQL dialects or platforms.
This decision is enough to be made once over a 10 years lifetime: if they do it for just a month, it'll take at least a month for you to find that spot and fit it to the new platform, especially as there'll be no useable documentation available from 9 years ago (especially not in today's state, remember, working code over docs!)
And again: nearly any kind of reconfiguration is expensive! I use the example of a bug here, a single bug is usually not a big deal in terms of amount of code to be modified.
Even if you exactly know what to do, you have to type it in, test it, etc. A horrible amount of work when it comes to paychecks.
But in case you want to see it in real life, try to make Fitnesse, a creation of the leaders of the craftmanship movement, talk into anything not HTML. Hint: HTML is hardcoded into java strings through the whole project in every layer, or at least so it was in a version I checked out a year ago.
Engineering is about accepted risks and costs. There's no free lunch in software development either.
Re: Emergence & Language
Vladimir Tsvetkov
It is evolution of practice, not abandoning the old.
There is no such conflict such as OOP vs. Structured Programming - there's just Data/Object anti-Symmetry
There are point which we can agree on:
1. Building large and complex stuff is mainly about architecture.
2. Architecture & Design conceptualization happen in a social setting.
3. Architecture is emergent discovery of non-obvious synergies where simple parts and materials can be combined and multiplied in a very large scale.
The main difference between our opinions is in the following:
1. To me software construction is not quite like building - rarely parts fit in a fixed way, software "parts" are structures of a higher-order abstraction and complexity.
2. Building software can not be done by following simple instructions or whatever instructions, even when there's an already prepared architecture and designs.
3. Building clean software can happen only by following strict maxims and principles (not to be mistaken with instructions and recipes).
4. The effective application of maxims greatly depends on the maturity of the practices of the given programmer.
5. There's still not a predictable and repeatable way of growing a professional to the needed level of maturity and skill.
Re: Emergence & Language
Adam Nemeth
1. To me software construction is not quite like building - rarely parts fit in a fixed way, software "parts" are structures of a higher-order abstraction and complexity.
I think we use a different view on building; I'd like to recommend reading A Pattern Language from Christopher Alexander; it's a required reading in some architecture schools, therefore easy to get from libraries (or from other sources). It's also the source of the pattern languages ("design patterns") movement.
2. Building software can not be done by following simple instructions or whatever instructions, even when there's an already prepared architecture and designs.
The role of the build worker is for the computer, that's something I agree on with the presenter. Therefore the building itself is about following programming language instructions.
3. Building clean software can happen only by following strict maxims and principles (not to be mistaken with instructions and recipes).
So is any livable place, like a park or an office space. No disagreement here, albeit one: a general recipe can and should be followed (such recipes are the development methodologies), albeit never exactly. Such recipes also exist in most of the engineering fields (somewhere more regulated than at other fields).
4. The effective application of maxims greatly depends on the maturity of the practices of the given programmer.
No disagreement.
5. There's still not a predictable and repeatable way of growing a professional to the needed level of maturity and skill.
I also recommend reading the Software Engineering Educational Knowledge I linked above. This is exactly what IEEE wanted to achieve, and although it needs talent from the student's side of course, in the first years it's crucial to demand formal knowledge (like, SOLID principles or (lighthearted!) RUP processes, or MVC) from a junior developer after graduating. In my experience, it worked amazingly well.
Re: Emergence & Language
Vladimir Tsvetkov
If you think about that a bit more you'll notice that these are two different aspects:
1. The first 3 points define the theory behind thinks
Re: Emergence & Language
Vladimir Tsvetkov
If you think about that a bit more you'll notice that these are two different aspects:
1. The first 3 points define the theory behind software - call it Computer Science or Software Engineering. This includes the scientific basis, general purpose knowledge such as mathematics, algorithms, data structures and programming paradigms.... etc, etc, etc.
This first aspect I would agree to call an Engineering.
2. The second aspect (the second 5 points) is related to growing someone's practice and maturity to the level of an expert. Here, I'm almost convinced that even in matured engineering fields the way this is achieved is somewhat more closer to Craftsmanship. The seniors and the experts in the role of the mentors, while the juniors are in the role of the apprentice.
Re: Emergence & Language
Adam Nemeth
Because there's nothing wrong with apprenticeship: to the contrary! It's actually part of every engineering studies.
What I'm attacking here is this notion that the participants of the 1968 conference were wrong, and that our education is built on false premises. It's not perfect, of course, as long as a student thinks that waterfall is to be executed to modern sized software or that RUP requires you to write unneeded documentation and find a suitable participant for each of the 92 roles. Yet I believe they got some things right.
What I'm attacking here is that instead of trying to attack based on layman's notions of architecture, we should get close to other engineering / architecture studies and watch them actually working. I'd actually require everyone to spend a week at an architecture / civil engineering / urban architecture company, look at what they do for real, and talk about their work with them.
And lastly, what I'm attacking here is that maybe we should stop reinventing the wheel and trying to find an entirely new direction for software development. I'm perfectly fine with software engineering as a self-definition (which is bit more than a metaphor), just as I'm perfectly fine with the notion of Structural Programming and the problems it tries to solve (namely that the brain capacity of a sole person is way smaller than what a real life project could fit into, and we have to find methods to keep at least some parts under control).
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try out new approaches, it's just it would be the time to recognize values in our past as the situation that development is chaotic by definition gets embarassing, even if statistically, we fail less projects now.
Re: Emergence & Language
Vladimir Tsvetkov
Focus on the first sentence: "...we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft" That's the whole essence of this movement - a movement which grew out of the frustration of dealing with incompetent colleagues or with their crappy codemess. This is not a movement which abandons old practices or rejects past achievements. Even the manifesto is some sort of an upgrade to Agile.
As to the word engineering - I don't mind using it when I'm talking to my colleagues. The care and responsibility with which I work can be attributed to an engineer. But I would avoid that word when dealing with my customers. It's just setting wrong expectations. And there's quite a long way before it can be considered an engineering.
Re: Emergence & Language
Adam Nemeth
Actually, I believe SOLID will become core educational material in every single software engineering course on the world in a few years, albeit parts of it were always taught.
But I still have word against the naming and against the actual practice behind it.
Re: Emergence & Language
Adam Nemeth


text:
Glee's Heather Morris Steps Out with Large Baby Bump!
Heather Morris shows off her large baby bump while stopping by a local burger joint to get some breakfast on Thursday morning (September 19) in Los Angeles.
The 26-year-old pregnant actress, who is known for her fan favorite role as Brittany S. Pierce on Glee, gave her dog a sweet kiss through the window as she got back to her car.
Heather reportedly will not be making any appearances on Glee for the upcoming fifth season as she is focusing on her family. She is expecting her first child with her longtime boyfriend Taylor Hubbell.
Looks like Heather may be welcoming her new addition any day now!


text:
BALTIMORE — In the aftermath of another down-to-the-wire clash between bitter AFC North rivals, as players mingled on the field at M&T Bank Stadium — and the head coaches had their abrupt postgame handshake moment — Ed Reed got an earful from some of the Pittsburgh Steelers basking in the glory of the huge upset.
Reed, the Baltimore Ravens all-pro safety, maintained that he couldn't remember specifically which Steelers made the remarks. But the message stuck.
"Those guys said, 'See you soon,' " Reed recalled while leaving the locker room after the 23-20 Steelers upset. "They're confident, man. But it's all respect. They're the Steelers."
It would be fitting for another meeting to occur in January, after each team won a three-point grudge match on their rival's turf within a 14-day span. After all, they had a rubber match in the playoffs twice within the past four years. Both times the Ravens were eliminated by the Steelers.
That's the underlying theme with the see-you-soon promise.
"I don't know, but it would not surprise me to see them again," Reed said, "because they put themselves in a good spot by winning against us."
The Steelers (7-5), with No. 3 quarterback Charlie Batch subbing for injured Ben Roethlisberger, showed much grit in snapping a two-game losing streak to maintain their hold on the AFC's final playoff spot.
Yet the most revealing takeaway from Sunday's outcome was what the Ravens (9-3) didn't accomplish as they had their league-best 15-game home winning streak extinguished by the last team to beat them here. In addition to failing to clinch a playoff berth, they blew the chance to inflict a major blow to the Steelers' hopes.
Fumbled a 10-point lead, too.
"It sucks to let this one go," summed up safety Bernard Pollard.
Weeks from now, this could come back to haunt the Ravens — who would be hosting the Steelers in a first-round opener if the playoffs began today.
At the moment, though, the Ravens are troubled by themselves. A week after scratching out an overtime victory at San Diego that was stamped by Ray Rice's brilliance in converting a checkdown pass on fourth-and-29, Rice didn't have a single touch in the fourth quarter of Sunday's setback.
Shouldn't there be a Maryland law against that?
Sure, the Steelers controlled the clock in the final quarter and held onto the football for the last 6 minutes, 42 seconds to set up Shaun Suisham's 42-yard field goal as time expired. But on eight offensive snaps amid two full possessions and a portion of a third in the fourth quarter, Rice's number wasn't called once by offensive coordinator Cam Cameron.
"My touches go with the game flow," Rice said, diplomatically, afterward.
No, his touches can change the flow of a game.
In the third quarter, he started up the middle on a carry, then bounced outside left end and wasn't touched on a 34-yard touchdown.
"Obviously ... we could have run the ball a little more," Rice added. "But you know what? Situational football came into play."
You'd think there would be no situation bigger than winning a game that could make the difference between having a bye week and second-round home game in the playoffs or not. For this, however, the Ravens put it on the arm of Joe Flacco.
This was not a pretty sight.
Flacco had the type of outing that adds to the long-running debate about whether he is an elite quarterback — and when you have to ask, well, Peyton Manning,Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers are not subject to such debates.
On the final possession, it was a good thing that he overthrew Torrey Smith on a first-down pass, because the receiver was double-covered. On the series before that, he couldn't get rid of the ball fast enough as James Harrison barreled in for a strip-sack that led to Heath Miller's game-tying seven-yard touchdown catch-and-stretch.
In the second quarter, Flacco escaped a rush from Ziggy Hood but threw an ugly pass downfield for tight end Dennis Pitta that was intercepted by safety Ryan Clark.
On the day, Flacco completed just 16 of 34 passes for 188 yards, with a passer rating of 61.9. He had help with the struggles. Just before Rice's TD, the usually-reliable Smith dropped a pass in the end zone.
Afterward, Ravens coach John Harbaugh defended his quarterback like he's supposed to, while every once else in the room wondered.
"It's a group thing, a team thing," Harbaugh said. "It's not our job to stand up here and assign blame to any individual. It starts with me, putting guys in positions to make plays."
The Ravens are still positioned to win a second consecutive AFC North crown with a two-game lead on the Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals.
But then what?
This does not have the look of a team that can be trusted on an AFC playoff landscape that will feature strong contenders in the Denver Broncos, New England Patriots and Houston Texans. With an injury-stung 25th-ranked defense, Baltimore needs the frequently inconsistent offense to dictate flow.
Then consider that five of their victories were nail-biters that could have gone either way. That resilience gets a stiffer test in January.
Linebacker Ray Lewis could be back. Projected to be lost for the season when he suffered torn triceps in mid-October, the heart-and-soul leader could return to practices as early as Wednesday. But for all of the emotional lift and coach-on-the-field presence that Lewis provides, he's 37 and in his 17th season. Before the injury, he was not as dominant as he used to be.
So that's a wait-and-see development.
Now there's another injury to watch. Linebacker Terrell Suggs left Sunday's game in the fourth quarter with an apparent biceps injury. Suggs, the reigning defensive player of the year, made a remarkable comeback in October after tearing an Achilles' tendon in May. As he seeks to recapture his quarterback-crunching mojo, there's a setback.
In the locker room Sunday, Suggs downplayed his fresh injury. He told the reporters that gathered at his locker, "I'll be alright."
Maybe so. But that does not seem to be the prognosis for the Ravens' chances to win a championship.


text:
Year-endDecember 17, 2007
I feel like I'd better pop my head up and break the Web Directions-induced radio silence for the sake of getting at least one more post on here before the end of the year. So this will be a bit of a round-up of what's been on my radar in the past month, in amongst all the craziness.
Web Directions North
The most frequent question in casual conversation these days: how are registrations? This year it's going really well. I daresay WDN08 is going to quite a bit bigger than 2007. There's still a lot — an awful lot — to do before the end of January, but the four of us putting it on are starting to feel the pressure lifting a little which is a nice pre-holiday treat. If you missed it, Digital Web is running their snowboard contest once again, and you have a few more days to get entries in for a shot at free tickets to the conference.
24 Ways
Drew and crew are back for another year of holiday cheer. If you missed it, over the weekend my annual contribution was published: Get in Shape, where I spend some time looking at the role of consistency, balance, and completion in design. Given last year's colour analysis, you could be forgiven for plotting the next few years' worth according to fundamental design elements like, ohhhh, say line or texture.
You've likely heard by now that Opera has decided to engage in legal proceedings against Microsoft. The main points seem to resolve to 1) Microsoft is limiting choice, and 2) they're refusing to implement web standards.
I'll reserve judgment on point #2 until I see what's in store for IE8 as the steps forward made by IE7 give me some hope for what lies ahead. (It struck me IE7 was a quick fix to kill the biggest headaches, so I wonder what they've done with the year or so they've had since shipping.)
As for point #1, haven't we seen this movie? Keep in mind that Opera is a commercial company. I think their proposed remedy of including pre-installed browsers in Windows is somewhat telling.
Eric Meyer thinks this is a case of very Bad Timing and though I'm not quite as concerned about potential bad reactions, I find myself agreeing.
Stuff and CSS
And in the other corner, Andy Clarke kicked off a dialogue about disbanding the current CSS working group as a consequence of the Opera lawsuit, making the perceived connection more clear in a follow-up post.
Reactions have been swift and passionate both on-site and elsewhere. For my part, I questioned the financing of such a proposal, but that's far from my only concern. I think Maciej Stachowiak (Apple, WebKit) sums it up best: those of us in the trenches don't get feature requests from the general web design & development community, but the browser folks do. Far be it for me to claim what I want is the same as what everyone else wants; the community is too diverse. Removing the people who likely have the most insight and do much of the work seems like a less than ideal course of action.
It's a good discussion to have; there have to be better solutions.
an insightful late-entry essay to add to the heap, The future of web standards.
Zen Mini-update
Back in October I decided to change the submissions process of the css Zen Garden to either yes, you're in, or no, thanks for trying. The new way didn't sit well with me, I'd forgotten that I often don't/can't include great work for some reason or another. Rejecting them outright was a problem.
So, another quick change to the publishing process, and we're back to the old way. All designs are published, but the ones that don't make the cut are put on the Other Designs list (accessible from "All Designs" in the top paragraph of text). While I was at it I decided to use the metadata for the newer ones that have it, so there's now a country and date listed for each of these.
A big link list may not be as elegant as the previous categorized designs, but it's sustainable — I still make a yes or no decision, but at least these the ones that don't make it have a place to go.
Presents. Did I mention there were presents?
And to end on a positive tone, I'd like to share a few sites I've been enjoying lately.
I Love Typography popped up a few months ago as a well-designed new type blog. It was an automatic add, but it's managed to keep me engaged with great material like font creation case studies. Then little while later I noticed Nice Web Type, which hasn't been updated much yet, but hits all the right buttons in terms of subject matter. One to watch anyway.
Two personal blogs that stood out this year are Ongoing and rc3. Both are written by programmers, both frequently dive into coding minutae I can't hope to follow, but both also cover much broader subject matter more frequently in literate and well-considered fashion.
And a brand new find (as a result of a link to Web Directions, if I remember correctly) is FAIRspot. Part blog, part gallery, part directory, it's kind of like CSS Beauty without the CSS part. Lots of great stuff coming through their RSS feed.
That's likely it from me in 2007. It's been a fairly light year for writing on this site, but that's just cause I've been busy elsewhere. Good problem to have.
Thanks for the cool links, Dave. typography has limitless potential for opening eyes and minds.
Enjoy your Holidays
Thanks for sharing the FAIRspot and (in particular) I Love Typography links –awesome and inspirational…
Happy Holidays!
Opera's filing of a complaint with the European Commission, is not a lawsuit, and the timing is in step with similar complaints that has been successfully tested. Thus, both the timing and the actual complaint are near perfect. Sadly, it seems to have resulted in a lot of uninformed noise, which hopefully will die down shortly.
The process behind CSS and other standards - and especially the implementation part, will probably gain from being discussed in many fora - as long as nobody seriously suggest that same standards should, or can, be produced without full participation of those who are supposed to implement them.
Thanks for the posts you've taken time to post during the year that has past. Some very interesting links that I just have to check out even while swamped with deadlines just before the holidays.
Happy Holidays! :)
Interesting timing on this news:
Looks like IE8 is making some strides on the standards compliance…
Some great links. Keep up the good work with Web Directions–only wish I could make WBN08.
Have a great Christmas typographically exquisite New Year.


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For further information on Good Neighbor Community Services coverage and services, you may call them at (804) 520-8005 or by just visiting their website at http://www.goodneighborcommunityservices.com/.
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Named one of the best SEO companies by Jonas Marketing, Follow Media Consulting, Inc. is a rapidly growing worldwide firm of SEO, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing Professionals. Follow Media Consulting, Inc. headquarters is located in Richmond, VA. However, our professional team is networked across the world, with regional offices across the United States, in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, South Africa, the Philippines, and India.


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Disability and pram access
Churchill Island Heritage Farm offers family and disability friendly access, including:
- Disabled parking
- Disabled toilet facilities
- Smooth, hard packed gravel paths with moderate gradient .
Assistance animals
Phillip Island Nature Parks welcomes visitors who use assistance animals certified by a registered authority. Assistance animals must remain on designated paths.
Companion and Carer cards
Victorian Carers Card holders receive a 10% discount at all Phillip Island Nature Parks attractions.


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Ursuline College
Ursuline is one of the top 6 colleges in Ohio, according to @AdvisoryHQNews. bit.ly/2uYSIDH #ursulinecollege
about ursuline college
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student life
High School Students
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Ursuline announces winners of high school writing contest
Counseling and Art Therapy grad wins research award
November 20
Surprise, Shock, and Gospel: A Public Lecture on the Parables of Jesus
November 29
Not a Number Night
Privacy Policy
Ursuline College Online Privacy Statement
Ursuline College has developed this privacy statement in order to explain our privacy practices related to information we collect on our website. Ursuline College's website is developed in accordance with this privacy statement and adhere to the following sets of privacy principles. This statement applies to all information collected online through Ursuline College's website.
Information Collected Online
Navigation Information: Ursuline College gathers navigational information about where visitors go on our websites. This information allows us to see which areas of our websites are most visited and helps us improve the quality of your online experience by recognizing and delivering more of the most desired features and services. Additional non-personally identifiable information (for example, domain type, browser version, service provider, and IP address) may also be collected, which will provide information regarding the general use of our websites.
Personally Identifiable Information: Personally identifiable information is requested from you when you use the services offered on our websites, such as applying online, scheduling campus visits, requesting information, submitting IT Help and Maintenance requests, updating your alumnuae profile, donating online, and when you contact us.
Categories of information collected online generally include your name, phone number(s), physical address, shipping address (if different), email address, credit and debit card information, and bank account information.
If you apply to Ursuline College, we will collect name, address, phone number(s), email address, gender, ethnicity, social security number, date of birth, high school information, GPA, standardized test scores, employment information, parent(s)' name, address, email address, phone number(s), employment and education information.
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Your information will be used execute the immediate transaction and service(s) and for other business needs of Ursuline College related to the transaction or service. Ursuline College may use third party vendors to help us provide services to you, such as monitoring site activity, hosting the website, maintaining our database, administering and monitoring emails, processing credit card, debit card, and electronic check transactions, and processing employment and admissions applications. Otherwise, Ursuline College will not provide any of your personal information to third parties without your permission, and we will not sell any personal information to third parties for purposes of marketing, advertising or promotion.
Ursuline College may release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with law or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Ursuline College, our users, the website, or others.
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If you are visiting the Ursuline College websites from a location outside of the U.S., your connection will be through and to servers located in the U.S. All information you provide to the Ursuline College websites or information you provide in an Ursuline College application will be maintained in web servers and/or internal systems located within the U.S.
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Our website may contain links to other websites. Please be aware that Ursuline College is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. The user is encouraged to be aware when they leave our website and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects information about you. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by the Ursuline College website.
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DENVER Marijuana for all adults has long been the goal of legalization backers in Colorado. They got their way when they added taxes and regulation to the mix.
On Tuesday, voters in the state handily supported marijuana without a doctor's recommendation. Exit polls showed the measure was supported everywhere in the state not just big cities and by both genders.
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, who opposed the measure, quickly cautioned that marijuana use is still illegal under federal law. On Wednesday, he asked federal officials whether they plan to prosecute Coloradans who use marijuana.
John Walsh, the U.S. attorney for Colorado, issued a brief statement saying the Justice Department was reviewing the measure.
Suthers said he would help state officials implement the new measure but repeated his belief that legalizing marijuana on the state level is very bad public policy.
The vote came just six years after Coloradans rejected legalizing pot in a 2006 vote. The difference? A plan to regulate the drug and keep it away from children, said the lead proponent of both measures, Mason Tvert.
Even the 2012 measure's name the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol underscored that marijuana would be legal, but limited.
This was the time to bring up a well thought-out, viable system, Tvert said.
The voter-approved amendment directs state lawmakers to tax the drug up to 15 percent, with the first $40 million going to school construction. Ads promoting the measure showed teachers and schools. One used the tag line: Jobs for our people, money for schools. Who could ask for more?
At several debates about marijuana, backers of amendment stressed that the drug would be tightly controlled.
We will take it off the streets and (put it) behind the counter where responsible business owners will ask for IDs, argued Betty Aldworth in one televised debate.
That selling point persuaded some voters, like Stacie Packard, a 42-year-old mother of two from the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge. She preaches to her children to stay away from drugs, but ultimately supported it because the first $40 million raised in taxes on pot would go to public schools.
I guess it's kind of a shame that it's come to this, she said about the education funding.
Though lawmakers must still agree on a pot tax, along with extensive regulations for commercial sales, officials said those would get done.
It's incumbent on the Legislature to honor the will of the people on that issue, said Democratic state Rep. Mark Ferrandino, the presumptive incoming House speaker.
After approval by the Legislature, the pot tax would face final approval by voters.
Even if lawmakers and voters agree how to regulate and tax pot, however, significant questions remain about whether marijuana will truly be treated like alcohol. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and federal authorities have indicated no willingness to allow a state to experiment with pot outside of restricted medical uses.
Colorado's governor gave a folksy prediction of the measure's future.
Federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don't break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly, Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the measure, said in a statement.
Associated Press reporter Colleen Slevin contributed to this report.
Find Kristen Wyatt on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt


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DIY Tech Accessories: Tutorials On a Budget
By now, you've probably opened all your new gifts, perhaps some of them tech devices. We hope Santa was kind. If you have already started shopping for new phone cases, laptop sleeves, and charging stations, then think about saving yourself the cash and go for one of these DIY options instead.
• DIY Stitched Leather iPad Case
• How To Make a Book Cover Disguise For Your Wireless Router
• The DIY Glitter Charger: Over the Top Tech Accessory
• Belinda's DIY Office Corkboard
• DIY Spandex Movie Screen
• Customized Camera Straps for Every Style
• $1 Constellation iPad Case
• Make your own Bokeh Filters
• Deck out your TV Tray
• How to Make a $1 Neoprene Sleeve for Your Nexus 7 Tablet
Welcome to Apartment Therapy's Best of 2012 roundup! From December 19 through January 1 we are rounding up our favorite (and your favorite) posts from the past year.
(Photo credits: See linked posts)


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WOrg Researchers Win Outstanding Author Contribution Award
"Mindfulness at Work" honored in Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management
"Mindfulness at Work," by Work and Organizations (WOrg) Professors Theresa Glomb and Michelle Duffy, Associate Professor Joyce Bono, and PhD student Tao Yang has been selected as the winner for the 2012 Outstanding Author Contribution award from Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management (Vol 30, 2011).
The authors argue that state and trait mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices in the workplace should enhance employee outcomes. They outline a model of the mental and neurobiological processes by which mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices improve self-regulation of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, linking them to both performance and employee well-being in the workplace. They especially focus on the power of mindfulness, via improved self-regulation, to enhance social relationships in the workplace, make employees more resilient in the face of challenges, and increase task performance.


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Tourists' Dickerson ties Sally RBI mark
Rockies prospect drives in 10 runs, launches three homers
By Robert Emrich / Special to MLB.com | June 3, 2011 7:25 PM
Dickerson tied the 33-year-old South Atlantic League record with 10 RBIs, homering three times in the Tourists' 13-5 romp at McCormick Field.
The Rockies prospect got his record-setting night started inauspiciously, lifting a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the first. Two innings later, he slugged a three-run homer to put Asheville ahead for good, 5-3.
Dickerson continued his rampage with another sacrifice fly in the fourth and a two-run blast in the sixth. He launched another three-run shot in the seventh to tie the mark set by former Tourist James Barbe on April 22, 1978.
"Today I felt good in batting practice, I didn't take any extra swings," Dickerson said. "The first at-bat of the game, I was trying to help the team and I hit a sac fly. The rest of the time, they got behind in the count and I was looking for the fastball."
Already with two homers and seven RBIs before his final plate appearance, Dickerson wasn't expecting to get a shot to swing the bat, let alone get a chance to tie a decades-old record.
"I went up there patient because I didn't think they would give me good pitch to hit," he said. "They made a mistake and I just put a good swing on it."
The 22-year-old left fielder had never driven in more than four runs or hit more than one homer in a game since the Rockies selected him in the eighth round of the 2010 Draft.
"I've had multi-homer games in college but nothing like this, not 10 RBIs," Dickerson said. "I feel really good, I wish I was still out there. After I got in the dugout, everybody gave me a curtain call. I felt really blessed and in the moment. It was really awesome."
Dickerson's big game vaulted him toward the top of the league leaders. He's tied for third with 12 homers and ranks seventh with a .994 OPS. After a slow start to the season, he slugged .677 in May.
"I just [have to] focus on being patient and working hard every day," said Dickerson, who earned Pioneer League postseason All-Star honors last summer. "If you have a good approach, the hits will come to you. Just work hard and it will pay off. Don't change anything, don't go to the plate looking for home runs, just be patient and work hard."
Bryce Massanari reached base four times and scored three runs, while Chandler Laurent was 2-for-2 with three RBIs for the Tourists.
Robert Emrich is a contributor to MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues or its clubs.View More


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WikipediaRead full entry
Lycogala epidendrum
Lycogala epidendrum, commonly known as wolf's milk, groening's slime is a cosmopolitan species of plasmodial slime mould which is often mistaken for a fungus. The aethalia, or fruiting bodies, occur either scattered or in groups on damp rotten wood, especially on large logs, from June to November. These aethalia are small, pink to brown cushion-like globs. They may excrete a pink paste if the outer wall is broken before maturity. When mature, the colour tends to become more brownish. When not fruiting, single celled individuals move about as very small, red amoeba-like organisms called plasmodia, masses of protoplasm that engulf bacteria, fungal and plant spores, protozoa, and particles of non-living organic matter through phagocytosis (see slime mould for more information).
During the plasmodial stage, individuals are reddish in color, but these are almost never seen. When conditions change, the individuals aggregate by means of chemical signaling to form an aethalium, or fruiting body. These appear as small cushion-like blobs measuring about 3–15 millimetres (0.12–0.59 in) in diameter. Colour is quite variable, ranging from pinkish-grey to yellowish-brown or greenish-black, with mature individuals tending towards the darker end. They may be either round or somewhat compressed with a warted or rough texture. While immature they are filled with a pink, paste-like fluid. With maturity the fluid becomes a powdery mass of minute gray spores. The spores measure 6 to 7.5 µm and are round in shape with a netted texture and appearing ochre to lavender in colour. The pseudocapillitia, sterile elements in the spore mass, are long, flattened, branching tubes with transverse wrinkles and folds.[1]
This species is classified in the family Tubiferaceae, [2] although it is accepted in the Reticulariaceae family by the Integrated Taxonomic Information System. [3]
See also[edit]
- Enteridium lycoperdon, the false puffball slime mould
- Notes
- ^ Lincoff, Gary H. (1981). National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. New York: Random House. p. 848. ISBN 0-394-51992-2.
- ^ The Global Biodiversity Information Facility: GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, 2013-07-01. Accessed via http://www.gbif.org/species/3213352 on 2013-11-10
- ^ Integrated Taxonomic Information System [Internet] 2013. [updated 2013 April; cited 2013 Nov 10] Available from: http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=181336
- Sources
- Stephenson, Steven L & Stempen, Henry (2000). Myxcomcetes. A Handbook of Slime Molds. Portland : Timber Press. ISBN 0-88192-439-3.


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To the Sea
The original content of this post has been removed because the author was a #WhinyLittleBitch with all the maturity of a mayfly and all the depth of a shoe print on dry mud.
Honestly, would a polite email have really hurt you that badly?
This notice exists because Matt is too sarcastic for his own good and is not always so mature either.
This notice replaced the previous content automatically using a search and replace query directly in the SQL engine. If the mayfly in question has any further complaints he can stick them where the sun shines not.
Or he can try and sue me but he will lose.
Come at me bro.