Qualiteers Blog

Avoimet koulutukset

2012-01-04T16:45:00.000+01:00

"Tick-the-Code" -koulutukset Tieturilla Helsingissä.

Seuraava koulutus 30.3.2012.

Tick-the-Code blogs

2011-10-13T14:21:00.001+02:00

Suomeksi: Tikkaa se koodi

In English: Tick the Code

Auf Deutsch: Tick den Code

HAPPY BIRTHDAY QUALITEERS

2011-02-01T16:54:00.001+01:00

QUALITEERS 5 YEARS - CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!

Uusi vuosi, uudet kurssikujeet

2010-12-17T09:41:00.004+01:00

Vuosi 2011 alkaa meidän kannaltamme uudella ja jännittävällä tavalla. Pohjoismaiden suurin tietotekniikan ja projektijohtamisen koulutusyritys Tieturi tarjoaa Tick-the-Code -koulutustamme. Kouluttajana toimin minä, kuten niin usein aiemminkin. Avoin kurssi on piilotettu hieman hämäävästi Testaus-otsikon alle, mutta laskenhan minäkin tikkauksen yhdeksi tarkistusmenetelmäksi, ja tarkistuksiahan testaamismenettelytkin ovat.
Kuten aina, kurssille mahtuu erittäin rajallinen määrä ammattilaisia, joten kannattaa ilmoittautua mahdollisimman nopeasti.

Quality and perfection

2009-11-17T04:05:00.003+01:00

"The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten."

"Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. If it doesn’t exist, create it. Accept nothing as nearly right or good enough."

Quotations: Sir Frederick Henry Royce (1863 - 1933) automobile manufacturer and co-founder of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

The New and Improved Test Drive!

2009-08-17T09:30:00.004+02:00

Did you know that you can try out the Tick-the-Code review method on your own and on your own code?

It is not only possible, it is free and only takes an hour! After it you can be sure to know that Tick-the-Code is useful for You.

Check out the new and improved Test Drive.

The enhanced web solution is much clearer than before and tab-based. It uses the tabs developed by Andreas Blixt.

Famous quotes about getting old getting old

2009-08-13T10:36:00.005+02:00

I use the personalized Google page daily and I find it quite useful. (Check iGoogle to setup one yourself.) I've collected all kinds of widgets on the page, news and comics and there's even one showing me a daily famous quote.
Today's famous quote was by George Burns:

"You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you're down there."

, which is quite funny, but it made me come up with my own version, too.

"You know you're getting old when you see the famous quote by George Burns about getting old and tying your shoelaces and all you can think is why George doesn't come up with any new material any more."

Been...Away

2009-07-16T13:03:00.005+02:00

Now, you might have wondered where I've been all this time. This blog's been quiet for two months. I'm sorry but I'm under the strictest orders not to divulge any information with my dealings with this particular..erm..company. Let's just say that their software department needed help in the quality area.
All I can say is that I took a train to get there:

Wet of Clothing in Sophia Antipolis

2009-05-15T15:07:00.004+02:00

My web-titan send me a link to this webpage about Hope-Driven Development. There's a lot of truth to the story and it is no wonder that checking incoming variable values is a part of Tick-the-Code method. As a matter of fact, there are two relevant rules in the method; NEVERNULL and CHECK-IN.
NEVERNULL asks checkers to tick the first statement in a function to dereference a pointer without first validating it isn't NULL. Otherwise all hell breaks loose, when the system is executed. And that is the best case scenario. In a much worse situation, the system doesn't crash and seems to work fine. It does, however, hot work quite correctly and the longer it takes for the developers to notice, the harder it is for them to figure out what exactly is broken.
Pointers are special, because their side-effects and symptoms can be extremely insidious, but there are other components and values in source code, too. Variables of other types can also assume wrong values and if the developers assume that that never happens, chaos will ensue.

Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

Rule CHECK-IN makes checkers in code review locate all places where a variable is used without first checking its sanity. Once again, not all variable values can be even roughly checked, but a conscious risk is preferable to ignorance every time.

---

The day started in Sophia Antipolis with a downpour of such intensity that cats and dogs are far too little and few in number to describe the dawning waterfall. Walking to a nearby bus stop with an umbrella was still enough to melt the creases off my trousers. The sloshing sound in my shoes became more of a squeak once I entered the customer's building, where I managed to perform a test ticking regardless. I had a strong sense of déjà vu - only appropriate, what with me being in France - that just two weeks ago I had wondered dripping wet the unknown streets of Sophia Antipolis, having stepped out of the bus six stops too early, without a map or an idea which way to go. The flu that had started to bother me the day before, didn't improve my situation. So much for first impressions, now was my last day in Sophia Antipolis, for now, and it was showing me its fluidier side.
It doesn't rain often in Southern France, but it rains a lot. You deduce how drizzly the rainshowers must be.

---

I'm now in Nice, although going to Cannes did occur to me. There's some kind of film festival there.

Software development revealed

2009-05-12T22:55:00.002+02:00

There's an interesting rendezvous between software development and real world taking place in the United States. In this case the supplier of breathalyzer code has refused to submit it for review in a trial case. This Techdirt article supposes that the code is too crappy and the supplier too embarrassed to obey the Supreme Court decision.

I will have more to say about an older case of breathalyzer code analysis. In that trial the supplier gave in and the code was found not to be proprietary after all. And crappy.

What's a breathalyzer?

Doctoral Dissertation: SW Checking Needs Improving

2009-05-11T11:06:00.003+02:00

It's been brought to my attention (thanks, Juha) that there's an interesting doctoral dissertation about to be accepted in Helsinki. Sami Kollanus has written about how the checking methods in software development should really be improved. According to this article (only in Finnish), his dissertation contains some suggestions on how this might be possible.

Professor Tervonen, who acts as the opponent, is familiar for his work in software inspections and I've bumped into his virtually a couple of times. In 2006 I found out that he specializes in inspections and that they had some studies going on in the Department of Information Processing Science in the University of Oulu, so I sent him an email with the faint wish to be noticed. I did receive a friendly reply, but that was that then. The second time was just this year as I took part on an online lecture course and professor Tervonen was one of the lecturers. It was a treat to hear about the current research directions in software inspections.

I can't wait to get my hands on Kollanus' dissertation and read what kind of things he has studied and what kind of suggestions he has for improvements.

---

Tomorrow, I'll be in Sophia Antipolis, France. Again. This time I know where everything is and I'll rent a car, because walking everywhere was truly difficult. Possible, but difficult and slightly dangerous. Not sure that driving with the French is any safer, though.

Dilbert and Simpsons

2009-05-01T11:50:00.021+02:00

As I seem to be stranded in Sophia Antipolis because of the bank holiday, what better way to while away the boredom than to post a blog entry. Only I don't have anything of substance. The Dilbert today caught my eye.

If you miss attending good training, how do you think I feel as training provider?

---

For the Battlestar Galactica fans, here's a treat. I give you "Battlestar Simpsonica":

French cuisine, despair and hope

2009-04-29T20:14:00.004+02:00

How could I have anything bad to say about French cousine? Me, the tastebudless Finn, here, in Sophia Antipolis. For lunch on the training day on Tuesday we went to the local restaurant, which was serving Thai food. I had two rolls of something with lettuce and mint. I was assured that the rolls contained rotten fish and I have to think that it wasn't a language issue. The rolls were absolutely delicious and I have to now ask my Thailand-visiting friends. Have you come into contact with rotten-fish-rolls? They might be called Nem or not.

In the evenings I'm not eating at restaurants, but instead I cook in my hotel room. Well, if you can call nuking cooking. Here's an example of misleading marketing, if I ever so one. The potatoes were a sad sight:

I was feeling miserable on Monday as I arrived. Here's my first impression of Sophia Antipolis, standing in wet shoes and jeans, having dragged a wet suitcase up an endless seeming hill, without the slightest clue as to where I'm supposed to go or how far it is, finding an obscure map indicating that the street I'm on is circular and that if I continue up the hill, I'll soon be coming down the hill back to where I started from and it's not the street my hotel is on:

Luckily the next morning made more than up for it, look at the perfect blue sky:

What if tourist leaflets only used the sunny pictures and the reality was more like my first impression? Would we put up with it? No, that's why travel agency broschures always tell the truth and show also rainy and cloudy pictures...HEY, wait a minute!...that can't be right. Marketing is based on the X-tian principle of turning the other cheek. If the first cheek doesn't look good in the sales picture, that is...

French bussing

2009-04-27T15:56:00.004+02:00

- I am in Sophia Antipolis.
- Sophia where? Are you in Greece?
- No, just the name of this place is Greek, but it's actually in France. The closest French town is Antibes and Antipolis is the Greek version of it.
- Far out, man!
- Yes, this is the Silicon Valley of Europe!
- La Vallee de Silicon?
- Well, yes, there are dozens of startups and bigger IT companies here!
- How come?
- They built it and the companies came.
- Eh?
- Sophia Antipolis is a constructed city nearby Nice. A little bit like Las Vegas?
- I thought the casino was in Monaco?
- It is, but the city feels very made-up, very artificial. You can hardly walk anywhere...
- Because of the dog pooh?
- No, because there are no sidewalks. You are supposed to have a car, or use busses.
- They must cost a big penny?
- No, I paid 1€ for the bus trip from Nice Airport to Sophia Antipolis, which is about 30 km.
- That's value for money!
- Yes and had I not jumped out too early, I would have enjoyed it more.
- You had a premature ejection?
- No, my instructions told me to step out in the middle of nowhere, although the bus would have continued to the right direction. And it was raining. That's when I noticed, you can't walk anywhere.
- What did you do? (I'm shivering with excitement, does he eventually find his hotel room and a working Wi-Fi connection to write his sad and wet story on his blog?)
- I walked for a while getting wet. I thought it made no difference as my luggage was wet already when it came out of the plane. Maybe this time Air Berlin was trying out an external luggage transport system.
- You're kidding, right?
- When I ran out of sidewalk, I had to take a bus. The bus driver took no money. He just said it's free.
- You're pulling my leg!
- No, it's all true. I stepped out at a roundabout. Only one roundabout too far, this time.
- Oh, no!
- Oh, yes. Some time later, I resolved to taking a bus the other way and the driver was extremely kind and told me that the next stop would be my roundabout and that he was going to stop at it. The timetable didn't mention the stop on his line, though.
- What do you mean roundabout?
- Yeah, they have roundabouts everywhere. And they have their names. You can find Carrefour (that's roundabout in the local dialect) de Garbejaire, which is the one too far and Carrefour (there's that word again) de G.Pompidou, which is closest to my hotel. When I got there, my mind was a bit sunnier. Only the weather wasn't. It started pouring down, but now I had a goal.
- The hotel?
- Yes, now I knew where I was and I would get to my hotel room in daylight.
- Did you?
- Well, I'm writing this blog entry on my bed, in my hotel room, with the radiator blasting as hot as can be to dry out my shoes, socks, jeans and jacket. They are wet because I was wearing them in the rain.
- Well, how else do clothes get wet?
- By being in a wet suitcase being dragged for mails in the rain. My three shirts are all patchy with water and one of them is downright dirty. It's a blueish-white shirt and the patches are far too visible. I'll need to do some laundry soon.
- Boy, you must be exhausted.
- No, I'm energized to get back on track.
- What about your contacts in Sophia Antipolis? Are you going to visit many software houses?
- The current plan is to just go knock on some doors on Wednesday and Thursday. The problem is that the companies don't seem to have doors, but gates and knocking on gates is maybe easy but it's also pretty ineffective.
- What are you going to do?
- I'm still trying to deliver my message about Tick-the-Code to as many companies as possible. It is after all a win-win I'm selling.
- The customer benefits because his developers write better code, which they can extend quicker and without so many errors..
- Wow, you know my stuff!
- Yes, I've been reading your writings on www.qualiteers.com/downloads.php. Have you written anything new?
- As a matter of fact, I just finished a paper on software maintainability. I call it "Software Maintainability in Practice: A Good Riddance of Internal Defects!"
- That's quite a name.
- Charles Dickens used it first.
- Dickens knew software?
- No, he used the phrase "a good riddance of" to mean that getting rid of something was a blessing and that we were better off without it.
- Ahh.
- In it I list code examples of how to improve source code internally, without touching the functionality.
- Isn't that called refactoring?
- You're absolutely right. Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring" made the term famous and I mention the book and XP in the paper.
- You show Windows code as example. Isn't that like taking candy from a child?
- I don't mean Windows XP, I mean Extreme Programming, the mother of all agile methods! That's where refactoring is part of a day.
- Ahh.
- So, anyway, in the paper I come to the conclusion,..
- Yes?
- ..that manual code inspections are inevitable. Testing and static analysis tools (or any kind of tool, for that matter) can never cover all internal defects. Modularity issues require human ingenuity and to know whether a comment is a good one or a bad one, one needs to understand what it says. No machine understands.
- No machine understands.
- Machines can repeat, associate and seem understanding, but they are not.
- They are not.
- Just like you, mere programs can be entertaining, but they lack that spark of creativity that makes humans humans.
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- See, right there, you jumped to the conclusion that I was being repetitive, when I said "humans humans".
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- If I keep doing that, you'll be the repetitive one. You cannot truly understand humans, humans do.
- Isn't that a bit redundant?
- Good bye.
- Bye bye! (Isn't that a bit redundant?)

Software, Silliness and Snow

2009-02-20T09:56:00.005+01:00

Seriously about Software:
Joel Spolsky has written many good pieces on software development. This one is essentially saying "whatever you do, don't rewrite code from scratch." One way to renew your codebase is to tick the code regularly and often enough. It takes some time, but every ticking takes you closer to cleaner, more maintainable and extensible code. There's no magical solution, no shortcuts, no silver bullets and sometimes you have to make bigger, riskier refactorings. If you let development debt accumulate, you'll have to pay it back sooner or later. Just hope you can afford it. Ticking means paying the debt in smaller, perhaps weekly installments.

---

From the Stern Fun dept:
Software developers are creatures of intellect. Smartness is highest on their values. You can hear that in their witty and wordy remarks (sure to make non-nerds (the word mundies use for these intellect-workers) roll their eyes in desperation), you can see it in their fashion sense and you can sometimes even smell it. Sometimes being smart, or thinking you're smart, makes you cocky. You consider yourself the best judge of how things should be done or code implemented. Asking for feedback is for losers, you think. All of us are imperfect, however. We are imperfect even in what we love or are passionate about. We might not want to admit it, but the software we produce, is never perfect. That's not the problem, managers and customers can't expect you to be perfect, that wouldn't be human. The problem is when you don't check what you've done, when you don't ask for help from your colleagues, because you think you know best, nobody can help you and besides, there's no time.

This picture shows well what happens when you do let somebody else take a look into your source code.

---

The Weather:
It's been snowing here in Finland, but take a look at
Neil Gaiman and Cabal, the dog, near Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Clicking takes you to Neil's Journal Blog Thingie which has more pictures)

On The Rocks, or On Thick Ice

2009-02-05T15:38:00.011+01:00

I'm currently in Oulu and I missed the real cold weather by one day. Apparently on Wednesday it was colder than -20 degrees centigrade here but on Thursday it was just a mild -9 degrees as we went to see the local ice-hockey team Oulu Weasels lose to Helsinki IFK. The game was quite even and ended 2-3 to the visiting team.
I did some skating myself earlier this week. I went to natural ide track on Näsijärvi lake in Tampere and spent an hour going around it. I visited the world's shortest lighthouse and took some pictures of the abandoned amusement park Särkänniemi.

Is this the world's shortest lighthouse?

I was literally standing on thick ice.

Am I taller than normal or has Näsinneula shrunk?

Desolate amusement parks creep some people out.

Talking about skating, I'm so proud of my god children in Finland. Both of them do sports and have fun at it. Emma is into figureskating and Eetu plays ice hockey. They've taken part in some competitions and their achievements were noticed in the local papers some time ago.

Emma won her series!

Eetu circled

Here is the whole happy family enjoying their time together by playing music. (Note: extended and constant clicking on the drums can drive the listeners mad. Enjoy "Rock Band" responsibly.)

The Band (Notice the extremely confident and therefore relaxed bass player

Now I have to dash to catch the train to Hämeenlinna!

A Public Service Announcement to Ornithophobes

2009-02-05T13:42:00.013+01:00

I had no idea that some authors can be so highly valued. Take, for example, the horror genre. One of the most prestigious of its representatives is surely Edgar Allan Poe, the writer of "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Raven". Now witness me walking around in the city of Wroclaw, or Breslau, as the German name is. I'm looking for the Museum of Natural History, minding my own business and what do I see, when I look suddenly behind me?

This...
...and this!

In the poem "The Raven" E.A.Poe describes a crow that says "Nevermore!" most ominously. Are they stalking me? I decide to continue, I pick up the pace a little, but not enough to catch the nice red sports cars whooshing by me almost completely ignoring the afternoon rush hour.

No chance of catching up.

I finally find the museum, but it does not console me, I can't get in! Look, there's a huge bird guarding the door! Is there no safety in this city?

No way am I going to get in under those watchful eyes!

I better head down to the river, I need to calm down. The river flows quietly. But what is that sound? Let's see, it's coming just around the corner. Here's the view from the bridge (extreme closeup, look with care):

Birds in a feeding frenzy

There is no peace in this city. I better ask the little people for help. They are known to chase away big birds. They aren't too bright, though. Here you see two of them moving a rock, by both pushing from opposite directions. They've been at it for years. The rock hasn't moved yet.

Push, push, maybe one day it will budge!
Some of the little people take it more easy, especially when one of their brethren has gotten rid of the birds.
In the nighttime, some of the little people take out their broomsticks, climb on street lights and drive the birds away.

They can apparently turn large African animals to sheets of metal, too.
Rhinos are less dangerous in this form.

After my animal adventures in Wroclaw, I'm happy to return to literature, in the safety between the pages, where anything can happen, but nothing can happen to you. That's why the horror genre is so popular. It feels dangerous, but isn't.
I never knew writers could be so highly valued. To name a whole country. Wroclaw is a big city in Poeland, you know.

AND WINTER CAME

2009-01-14T13:07:00.008+01:00

After two weeks Christmas holiday in Finland we were ready to return to Bochum, expecting rain. In Finland there was snow, not enough though (never enough for me I guess) and it was quite cold. Most of the days the temperature was around -5∘c, but one morning I got to enjoy temperature of -18∘c, which was nice. Anyway, back to Bochum. As we took the taxi from the airport around noon, it was dry, gray and too warm to wear our winter coats - outside I mean. After two weeks without heating our apartment was cold enough for wearing winter coats inside the house.

Miska finally found use for all my candles. Hundreds of them.. Slowly the apartment started to warm up. I decided to visit a friend and as I was leaving, I noticed it had begun to snow. After three hours as I was returning home, there was 10 centimetres snow! Bochum was all covered in this magical white stuff that makes the world so soft and silent. I dragged Miska out for a walk and enjoyed the winter weather, my weather. I was hopping in the snow, kicking it, throwing it, loving it!

It was winter in Bochum. Even more than it had been in Finland. After 9 years it was really winter and it lasted almost for 10 days. And now it's gone. It's raining. I can see the green grass again. But never mind, it was here! What, you don't believe me? Check out the photos from 5th of January.

PS. Terveiset Lahteen Hennalan perukoille: Jumala on lumet luonut!

Business Reason for More Software Quality

2009-01-09T14:36:00.007+01:00

In a world where most code is unnecessarily complex, much of the time of any software developer is just plain wasted. Assuming that a developer uses two hours daily going through some mysterious source code isn't too far fetched. The code can be his own, the details of which he has long since forgotten, or as in most cases, the code might be written by somebody who hasn't quite followed the Good Principles of Coding and instead has produced a confusing pile of programming language statements thrown carelessly together in the desperate hope that testing will take care of any problems in it. The code could have been simple and easy to extend, read and understand, but - alas - that is once again not the case. How come I'm not the least bit surprised? If we had a way of making the source code simpler, our poor developer would probably only need one hour instead of two for achieving the same. With an hourly rate of 50€, we are talking about a monthly saving of 1000€. For each developer.

Tick-the-Code is such a way and DayTick is the training course for it.

How much would you be willing to pay for a training course that saves you 5,000-10,000€ each month? (For a group of ten trainees.)

Need a hobby besides software development?

2009-01-07T20:19:00.003+01:00

Here's a delightful hobby for a software developer or computer user: writing haikus.
First, check the rules of the game, see wikipedia.
Then choose a theme: hmm, computer problems. Yeah, that's it.
And voilá: Haiku error messages (link sent by Kaj)

Then just exercise your creative muscle and push out your own:

Page not available
Has the server crashed or what?
Client and user annoyed, both

In a World of Simple Men, Complexity is King

2008-12-17T09:14:00.002+01:00

Dealing with software you must have noticed how complex the matter can get. And you are right, software source code is without a doubt the most complex achievement of the human race, so far. Software that has been developed over the years reaches often such complexity that maintenance becomes a nightmare or impossible. Sometimes even young software succumbs to the siren call of complexity. In a world of increasing demands on performance and features, complexity reigns as king. Teams and teams of testers have fought many a battle against this despot and killed mountains of bugs - and still lost the war. Complexity rules - not ok.

Complexity causes bugs
Essential complexity is caused by real difficulties in the application area. Time pressure, carelessness, not having the right skills or the right motivation, and existing complexity cause complexity, too. This latter kind of complexity is inessential, accidental and - to make the obvious obvious - unnecessary. The software becomes almost unmaintainable when you combine a demanding application area (for example, real-time) with hurried developers. Bugs will find endless hiding places in the resulting source code. No matter how much the testers try to fight it, the end result will be far from flawless.

Learning is key
The only people who can really influence the complexity of the source code are the software developers. They need to prioritize complexity above all else. Luckily, there are ways of achieving this. Create a workflow where the developers notice the complexity and understand how harmful it is. With that feedback in place, all you need are clever people who learn. The single most important aspect in the fight against complexity is to make sure the developers learn. Learn from their own mistakes and from the mistakes of others. That way you can reverse the usually prevalent Vicious Circle of Busyness*.

* _{The Vicious Circle of Busyness states that "the busier you are, the busier you'll get".}

Summer feelings from Finland and Germany

2008-08-14T18:21:00.011+02:00

SUMMER IN FINLAND:

Summer night in Tampere.

Night by the lake in Mankala.

Miska playing frisbee in Tampere.

SUMMER IN BOCHUM:

Virpi enjoying a nice meal in the Bochum Culinary -happening.

Hafenfest in Carolinensiel

Enjoying the good music played and sung by Duo Sunset in Bochum

[EDIT: drawing added]
And here's Miska's view of the duo:

The Band by ~mishiltu on deviant ART

KESÄN RIEMUJA

2008-06-11T12:25:00.008+02:00

Näin kesäloman kynnyksellä on syytä miettiä kaikkia niitä hurjia vaaroja, joita mökkeillessä (tai joskus jopa kaupungissa) voi kohdata. Ja yksi vaarahan on ylitse muiden. Ampiaiset! Allekirjoittanuthan vietti toukokuun 4. päivänä kolme tuntia teho-osastolla ampiaisenpiston seurauksena... ja tämä siis TAVALLISEN ampiaisen piston seurauksena.

Tänä keväänä, ja jo viime keväänä, sain huolehtivilta perheenjäseniltä ja ystäviltä varoituksen jättiläisampiaisista (herhiläinen), joita on alkanut ilmaantua Suomeen viime vuosina. Kukaan ei tietenkään milloinkaan missään ollut itse sellaista vielä nähnyt, mutta lehtiartikkelit kuvineen toimivat varoituksen sanana.

Siis, kerrataan: Jättiläisampiaisia on Suomessa. Niitä on syytä varoa mökkeillessä. Kukaan ei ole niitä henk.koht. nähnyt.

Tämän tietäen siirrymme viime viikon keskiviikkoon. Tilanne: Olen yksin kotona, kerrostalossa, kaupungissa, Saksassa. Makuuhuoneen verhon takaa kuuluu omituisen kovaäänistä pörräystä. Ja siinä se sitten on. Herhiläinen!!! SUOMEN luontoon kotiutunut otus, jollaista KUKAAN ei ole vielä nähnyt.

Paniikki. Hengitys nopeutuu, veri pakenee päästä, kyyneleet kihoavat silmiin (tuttu pelkoreaktioni, ks. hammaslääkäri). Epäuskoista mutinaa "eihän tuollaista ole olemassa". Viesti Miskalle Suomeen... (Niinkuin se nyt mitään auttaisi.) Miskalta, joka oli juuri pari päivää aiemmin tutustunut uuden hätäpakkaukseni käyttöohjeisiin, tuli kuitenkin oiva neuvo: " Ota se adrenaliinipiikki, poista sokka ja lyö se nasevasti herhiläisen yläreiteen. Ei pyllyyn. Varo refleksinykäystä. Pidä 10 sekuntia paikoillaan, hiero sitten osumakohtaa ja lopuksi menette yhdessä lääkäriin."

No ainakin paniikki helpotti hetkeksi nauramiselta. Jopa niin, että uskalsin ottaa valokuvan tästä luonnonoikusta.

(Verhossa oleva kuu on leveimmältä kohdaltaan n. 3 cm)

Myöhemmin tutkin netistä kuinka vaarallinen tämä herhiläinen oikein onkaan. Se on onneksi rauhaa rakastava, eikä lainkaan niin kiukkuinen ja päällehyökkäävä kuin tavallinen ampiainen. Allergisiakin rauhoiteltiin, ettei myrkky ole sen voimakkaampaa kuin tavallisenkaan ampiaisen - sitä vain on KOLME KERTAA ENEMMÄN!!! Todella rauhoittava tieto. Kaiken lisäksi tämä otus on ainakin Saksassa rauhoitettu, joten en sitä tappanut (= en uskaltanut mennä niin lähelle).

Löysin myös oivan neuvon kuinka tällaisen otuksen voi näppärästi toimittaa ulos: Kastetaan sormenpää sokeriliemeen, sitten viedään sormi lähelle herhiläistä ja kas, sepä makealle persona hypähtää iloisesti sormenpäähän istumaan. Sitten vain kuljetetaan se ulkotiloihin, ravistetaan sormesta irti (ja toivotaan lujasti ettei se tällä välin älyä pistää sitä myrkkysatsiaan siihen sormenpäähän).

Ja kuinka tarina päättyy? Ei, en kastanut sormeani sokeriliemeen. En yrittänyt yhteistä kävelyretkeä herhiläisen kanssa. Enkä todellakaan tappanut sitä (sehän on kiellettyä), vaan soitin paikalle ystäväni, joka rohkean prinssin lailla kiirehti hätiin... vain todetakseeen, että otus on mennyt ulos omia aikojaan. Koko makuuhuone tutkittiin läpikotaisin, eikä mitään löytynyt. Siitä huolimatta nukuin seuraavan yön sohvalla, varmana siitä, että tuo ovela, vaikkakin rauhaa rakastava, otus oli sittenkin piiloutunut sänkyyni odottamaan hetkeä, jolloin pahaa aavistamatta pujahdan peiton alle.

Sen koommin emme ole Hugh Hornetin kanssa tavanneet.

MUKAVAA KESÄÄ KAIKILLE toivottelee pian kesälaitumille kirmaava Virpi

SofSW: The SW Basics (6/6)

2008-05-25T22:56:00.001+02:00

The Sleeping Girl has risen and is looking around disoriented. She’s in a park under a tree with a light breeze blowing. Kids are playing football with their shirts as goal posts, their happy voices echo through the air. A bird, perhaps a robin, sings on the tree. She feels happy, it is safe here and although she’s tired, she feels pure bliss just lying there on the blanket. Her picnic basket is next to her, there are no ants crawling on her half-eaten sandwich. Her boyfriend has gone to fetch a corkscrew from the car parked out of sight. She can’t believe this place is right in the middle of the busy city. It is so tranquil compared to the middle-city hectic she has to endure every day. Wake up in the morning much too early, take a quick shower, put on some make-up, grab a busy cup of coffee and run for the bus. Catching the bus gets her on time for the underground station overcrowded with similar people heading for their offices. After a trip on the underground that is too short to fall asleep but too long not to be bored, she has to join the March of the Sardines. Every last one of them gets out of the tin can on the central station and they head in unison up towards the ground level. The wind of the tunnels pulls her to a semi-woken state, but all she sees around her are heads with cold and expressionless fish eyes. There are no smiles, no grins, not even frowns, just dead fish faces. Every morning.

The noise becomes louder and louder as the school approaches the ground. On the street the noise is unbearable. Before crossing the street, she looks to the right, there are no cars coming, only benches. The benches are not moving. She turns her head, there’s more benches on her left, still no cars. She’s not standing at a city street at all, she’s sitting on a bench. There’s a man looking at me, she thinks and suddenly she’s wide awake.

This is the airport.

Toukokuu, tikkauskuu

2008-04-23T20:34:00.004+02:00

Ennenkuin pistän ohjelmistotieteen kirjani seuraavan jännittävän (?) luvun näytteille, kerron toukokuun suunnitelmistani. Matkustan puolesta kuusta Suomeen ja pidän siellä kolme julkista DayTick-koulutusta. Ne ovat todella mainio tilaisuus tutustua Tick-the-Code -menetelmään pienemmälläkin ryhmällä. Jos yrityksestäsi ei löydy kokonaista kymmenen hengen ryhmää, nyt voit kaverisi kanssa tulla kurssille silti. Julkinen kurssi sopii juuri sinulle, joka etsit ammattitaitoasi parantavaa koulutusta, muttet ole mikään aloittelija. Erityisen hyvin tämä sopii yrityksille, jotka eivät vielä ole varmoja menetelmän hyödyllisyydestä. Kurssille lähetetyt pari kiinnostunutta "tunnustelijaa" saavat varmasti tarpeeksi tietoa vakuuttuakseen menetelmän sopivuudesta.

DayTick-kurssi parantaa taitoasi tehdä ylläpidettävää koodia, laadukasta koodia. Se on hyväksi sinulle, tiimille jossa työskentelet, yritykselle jonka palkkaa nautit ja asiakkaalle joka odottaa koodiasi. Toista tällaista kurssia ei ole.

Toukokuussa tällainen mahdollisuus avautuu
- Jyväskylässä (Jkl Open 23.5.),
- Espoossa (Hki Open 26.5.) ja
- Tampereella (Tre Open 30.5.)
Tarkemmat tiedot. Jos et itse pääse tulemaan, kerro toki työkavereillesi. He tulevat kiittämään sinua.

Niin että Kaj, malta vielä pari päivää.

Post number 270

2008-04-18T13:40:00.003+02:00

Virpi is back from Ireland.

She brought me a chocolate bar named Moro. Hilarious!

---
Suomeksi:
Moro, moro kaikki tamperelaiset!

Trip Report - Easter 2008 + BIG NEWS!

2008-04-16T11:57:00.005+02:00

Now that I finally have some news to report, I almost forgot!

I went to Finland before Easter and trained a group at Espotel. At Easter I did the traditional Peurunka gig, which meant sports, good food, games and karaoke in well-proportioned. This has become one of my favorite times of the year, as many of the nice people who are there I only see there. Another similar time is summer holiday, but more about that later.

After Easter I went to Oulu, had three training sessions, one with Ardites, but the other too were nice too. Here's a press release explaining why I've been so keen to be in Oulu.

After a tough icehockey match in Oulu (well, our follow-up was tough!), I returned to Tampere to curse over a new computer. It was just as well we didn't have Vista on it, there were enough problems with Windows XP. I noticed two problems, which would have been left unsolved by a layman. There was even one installation mistake, which we noticed when we opened the machine. Finally everything was running well. Well, as well as things run on Windows. I hate the uncertainty of the operating system. Sometimes it would say "a driver has not been installed. The device may not work correctly." may? MAY? Doesn't the system know that for sure? Seems very unreliable. Should the user know that better?

The household also got a new Nokia mobile phone and I decided to install PC Suite to connect the phone to the PC. On the first time I managed even to make a connection and move a picture from one device to the other over a cable. Then I apparently did something which I shouldn't have and it was no longer possible to connect the phone! I removed the PC Suite installation, the application it had installed on the phone and tried by reinstalling. Still no connection! How difficult can that be? My guess is that the removing of the application didn't remove everything, there's an entry in the terribly complicated Windows registry just stopping the connection. That's such a basic thing you'd expect to work, and when it doesn't you really feel powerless. There's nothing you can do. As far as I know, the problem is still unsolved. Maybe try with Bluetooth?

Mylab read my article in Pitkyn Piiri and did not hesitate in contacting Kilosoft. Good thing too, as I was still in Finland and we could organize a training in less than a week. The initial contact was on Friday, I talked about over the weekend and on Monday it was clear that Thursday would be the training day. And it went well, despite the rather exotic programming language, which I hadn't seen before.

---
Suomeksi:
Pääsiäisreissu meni hyvin. Espotel-koulutus ennen pääsiäistä, pääsiäinen Peurungalla TODELLA mukavien ihmisten seurassa, sitten Ouluun, jossa kolme koulutusta ja jääkiekkomatsi. Kouluttajakoulutuksen lisäksi solmin Ardites Training Services Oy:n toimitusjohtaja Sami Varpeniuksen kanssa lisenssisopimuksen, joka mahdollistaa Ardites-konsernin sisäiset Tick-the-Code -koulutukset. Ohessa lehdistötiedote. Viikonloppuna asentelin ohjelmia uuteen Windows XP:llä varustettuun tietokoneeseen, hampaita kiristellen aina välillä. Mylab tilasi vielä yhden koulutuksen ja saikin sen vajaan viikon järjestelyillä. Tuollaista molemminpuolista joustavuutta ei satu usein.

SofSW: The SW Basics (5/6)

2008-04-08T13:49:00.004+02:00

So if the mass of a program measures its external observable effects, we can make some conclusions. If we take a program with a set of features and functionality with a mass m0 and divide it into two pieces, we’ll get two programs. It’s like cutting a worm in two. Because worms have no brains, or central nervous system, they can function without their “heads”. As a matter of fact, worms don’t have heads, they have the input hole and the output hole around which the worm forms a kind of pipe. Some programs are like that too, they have no central point of control. Far from being brainless, such programs are actually very useful. They normally consist of fairly autonomous parts, which you can easily reuse in other programs for similar purposes. Reuse is an extremely valuable property of source code and often much too undervalued for its worth. Software developers want to do everything from scratch like anybody with too large an ego for their head.

Anyway, dividing a program into two parts gives us two sets of source code. If the source code is well enough designed, the two programs even function. The original mass m0 is divided into two masses, m1 and m2. There are now three possible situations: either all the functionality is in m1 or all features are included in m2 or the third possibility that some of the functionality is in m1 and some in m2. Mathematically these three situations are like this:

(1) m1 = m0 AND m2 = 0
(2) m1 = 0 AND m2 = m0
(3) m1 < m0 AND m2 < m0

It is possible to cut such a small piece of software that no feature is affected. It means that the little piece doesn’t do anything either. If the mass of a program is zero, it doesn’t do anything observable. This happens in the first two cases. In the third case both programs have external effects but neither will do everything that the original program does. If we want to combine these three states, we can make our first real conclusion. Conclusions are results we can use later without proving them because we have already done that. Our first conclusion says that the sum of the masses of any two programs is at least zero but at most m0. More specifically,

0 ≤ (m1 + m2) ≤ m0

This has the strange effect that if we put together just any two carelessly crafted programs, instead of getting a total set of features like m0, we might end up as well with a completely non-functional program with zero mass. That’s at least what the formula allows and the thought has some intuitively pleasant qualities. That’s simplistic maybe, but the foundation must be simple in order to have any possibility of understanding the inevitably more complex construction built on it. Another way of thinking about the formula is that when we split a program into two parts, some of the functionality might be lost because of the cut. Therefore the sum of the parts can be smaller than that of the whole.

Holland

2008-03-31T14:10:00.018+02:00

I was in Holland, more precise in Renesse. Everyone over there kind of waited to enjoy a beautiful spring weather as it was Easter and end of March. But what they didn't know, is that I sometimes bring the most strangest weather with me. So it turned out to be a winter vacation with some sunny moments, lots of rain, a few hailstorms and some snow. And I had a great time!

At this point I would also like to thank my personal travel guide, Mr. Z, who was kind enough to take me there and show me all the nice places. Here's for example a windmill in Zierikzee:

Walking for hours and hours on the beach, listening to the sea, feeling the wind on my face... Sand, shells, seagulls...

Enjoying good food at our inn: snails, mussels, lamb meatballs and the best ever dessert: chocolate mousse and chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce and whipped cream (I have to admit, I kind of like chocolate). And when in Holland, you can't skip the fritjes (you might know them as chips, fries or pommes) with ketchup and mayonnaise (a girl has to eat something every now and then).

Besides eating, a girl also has to drink something occasionally: A few glasses of good red wine and some Jutter. Don't ask, just go to Holland and have a few schnapps. But be careful!

SofSW: The SW Basics (4/6)

2008-03-29T22:44:00.001+01:00

The arrow pointed this way, I’m sure of it. But this is a long corridor and there have been at least open doorways leading to the right from here. Should I have taken one of them? What if I’m headed the wrong way? This corridor ends soon and there’s a sign saying “Security Check”. I’m still on the right track. I climb the stairs as the escalator seems to be out of order. There’s a red light, you see. That’s a sign that the escalator won’t work, or it would only go in the opposite direction. Some escalators can go up or down at a moment’s notice. They have a blue sign with an inviting arrow showing the currently available direction. I’ve sometimes wondered what happens if people enter the escalator at exactly the same time from both directions. Will the one wanting to come up win, which made more sense than the other direction? But there is also the third option, instead of choosing up or down, the escalator can decide not to move at all. I’ve seen escalators in America with signs saying “use stairs when escalator not moving”. My first thought was that isn’t a stopped escalator a staircase, but in the promised land of lawsuits it can be too dangerous to be climbing on a stopped escalator, which suddenly surges into action.

I’m glad I don’t have my suitcase to drag up these stairs anymore. There’s a uniformed man sitting on a chair at the top of the stairs. He’s reading a leaflet, looking bored. Behind him on the wall is a sign. From this distance I can barely make out what it says: “Be sure not have any fluids in your bag. Mass isn’t mental. For your security.” For greater security the man looks up from his leaflet as I am about to pass him and asks if I’m carrying any liquids. I shake my head and head towards the security check queues I see through the glass wall.

There are twelve security gates, but seven of them are not in use. Red signs above them show that the gates are closed. Five gates show green light and there’s a lot of action. Uniformed officials accept bags on to the line moving through the X-ray machine. One official is staring at the monitor trying visually to locate suspicious shapes of metal or other visible materials. A man and a woman stand ready on the other side of the metal detector holding handheld detectors. I don’t normally have to be searched because I don’t beep, but I’ve seen days when everybody beeps, just in case. Such days can’t happen too often, otherwise the officials and the travelers would lose their trust in these devices. I think the sensitivity of the metal detectors is randomly adjusted all the time so that at least all bigger metal effects are detected, but sometimes you’ll beep if you have liver pâté on your morning toast.

I’ve seen people get into trouble for pens that contain liquid ink. Do I have any of those? What if they stop me and search my bag? I don’t want to explain anything. I need to get to a quiet place and follow my thoughts. Otherwise I’ll lose my train of thought, possibly forever. Immature ideas are like beautiful butterflies, if you want to keep them, you’ll have to catch them to moment you realize they are there. Good ideas are rare too. Why can’t I just put my bag and jacket on the belt and walk through the metal detector unbeeping and be left alone? I have put every last metallic object in my jacket pockets, so I wouldn’t beep. I’ll even remove my belt to be sure. Oops, my notepad and a pen are still in my back pocket. I’d better put them in the jacket pocket. That was close! Have I forgotten anything else?

Gases have been always banned from airplanes, and since end of 2001, liquids are banned too. Metallic objects are detected and checked, and the rest of the hand luggage is X-rayed. Even solids are checked. There’s some security holes left in the system, though. There’s at least one huge one, the human body. Diseases are a threat in a world where people can move from one place to another quickly and without worrying about the distance. Epidemics have no boundaries anymore. In the medieval cities, the town wall could protect the people inside or outside. It formed an obstacle for the spreading of black plague. Nowadays, you might be infected in Africa and be in North America before you know it. Epidemics could spread like this very widely, even without evil intent. But if you add some planning into the picture, you’ll realize how antiquated the security systems at airports really are.

It’s my turn now. I put my bag on the line and open it to reveal the laptop I’m carrying. Earlier you had to turn the laptop on, now it is no longer necessary. I take off my coat and place it in the empty tray the official moves next to the tray containing my open bag with the laptop. He asks me to empty my pant pockets for any metals and I shake my head and walk through the large arch of the metal detector. Every fiber of my body is tense and aim at the middle of the detector, there’s less chance of beeping if you don’t hit the sides of the device. No beep. I let out a sigh of relief but not too obviously to not raise suspicions. My bag has gone through the X-ray scanner, I close the bag and take my jacket, which hasn’t caused anything out of the ordinary either. With all my things I head for my gate.

There’s a café here. Should I eat something? If I eat now, the meal on the plane will be wasted. I decide to wait, although I am feeling slightly hungry. A beer might relieve my tension and ease my hunger too. No, better not, even one beer can mess my thinking. I won’t know if I’m on the right track, because with beer almost anything seems like a good idea. Not all my ideas are good, I know that much. This time I fight off the temptation, a double temptation to be exact. I won’t eat anything yet and I won’t drink any alcohol. Should I buy a drink still to ease the hunger? I could have a Coke or some juice. The queue of people with trays full of sandwiches, pints of beer and cups of coffee makes the decision for me. I head for the gate and hope that there are not too many people there. Best would be to find just a few sleepers, because you’ll never find a completely empty waiting area. There’s always somebody waiting, at the dentist’s, in police offices, in the car registration office, you’ll never find a supermarket with nobody queueing. A couple of people sleeping this early in the morning would mean that they are totally exhausted from jet lag and wouldn’t be able to disturb me anytime soon. I hope for sleepers, because it can’t be empty.
What if my gate’s full of people? Will I find a quieter gate?

SofSW: The SW Basics (3/6)

2008-03-20T19:20:00.002+01:00

The gate is quiet. There’s nobody standing behind the desk yet. The monitor above it reads my flight details. No other plane is using this gate before mine. The benches nearby are almost empty. There’s a girl lying on her back with her head against her backpack two rows ahead of me. She has her eyes closed and is taking long deep breaths. Clearly she’s asleep. A man is curled on his side on the next bench row reserving three benches at once. The fetal position seems comfortable and the blissfully peaceful look on his face confirms my thought. He’s in a better place.

I sit down as far away from the sleepers as I possibly can. I don’t want to disturb them, nor do I want to be disturbed right now. I need to straighten my thoughts and focus.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In order to make some useful predictions and formulas to enable non-intuitive deductions and inductions the foundation of the science has to solid rock. I can guide my intuition with a simple example. I have two software programs. They both do the same things. They were developed by two teams for the same purpose. They could be anything, like two identical word processors or spread-sheet programs or traffic light control programs or programs for operating a microwave oven. No matter how the programs were developed, they exist. They contain identical feature sets. They can both accomplish all tasks the other one can. What can we say about them intuitively?

Intuitively, if the two programs, program A and program B perform the same tasks, we can say that the sizes of their feature sets are the same. A feature set is the group of functions or tasks a program performs. We could call it the total functionality of the program. Functionality or features are the external effects the program can have. They are the output (in the widest possible sense) of the program. The features are measurable from from the outside. Features and functionality are without the program. Without an effect on its environment, the program has no meaning. If a feature can’t be measured or tested, it doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that. Whatever a program can influence in its environment belongs to its feature set. External effects of a program are its output.

Let’s be more specific about this. If the (total) output of program A, let’s call it OA is the same as the output of program B (OB) then both programs perform the same functions and we can say that the outputs are identical. But we know intuitively that the implementations of the two programs can not be identical. The programs were developed in isolation and for any non-trivial program, there are almost infinite number of possible ways of implementation. The two teams could have used different programming languages, which would certainly make it certain that the implementations aren’t identical. This adds the concept of input into our scientific worldview of software. We’ll use IA for the input of program A and IB for the input of program B. The input can at this stage be anything. What I have in mind has something to do with the source code, the tangible input, but I’m sure the definition of input has to include resource files, possibly the tools used to generate the program and therefore also the environment has an effect. It isn’t clear at the moment, whether the software developers are part of the input or not. There is Ignorance about the details must not stop us now, though.

If both inputs and outputs were identical (IA = IB AND OA = OB), we are looking at the same program in both cases. The programs are identical. But this is no conclusion at all. What we want is to be able to compare two different programs. The outputs and inputs have two sides to them, perhaps we could call them dimensions even. In physics, in order to model the three-dimensional world we all live in, they use vectors. Vectors are useful little buggers, because they contain more information than just a magnitude like scalar values. Vectors also have a direction. The length of a vector shows its size, and sometimes that’s enough. I’m sure both input and output have many dimensions, and they would be best described as vectors, but can’t we do anything without the dimensions? Sure let’s just take the magnitudes and see what kind of conclusions we can draw. To get the magnitude of a vector, we’ll use vertical lines around the vector. Velocity is a vector, and its magnitude is speed. My train did reach a maximum speed of 125 km/h but to express velocity I’d have to add that it was heading east. In other words the maximum speed of the train, the magnitude of its maximum velocity (vmax) would be expressed: |vmax| = 125 km/h.

Let’s take any two programs, program A and program B. This time they don’t have to do the same things, this time we might be comparing a word processor to a microwave oven control software. If the sizes of the inputs of both programs are identical, but program A has a larger feature set (|IA| = |IB| AND |OA| > |OB|) then we can say that the density of program A is larger than the density of program B. In other words, program A accomplishes more with less.

On the other hand, if the outputs are identical in size but program A uses less input (|IA| < |IB| AND |OA| = |OB|), once again its density is higher than that of program B. This seems intuitive. Density is, without worrying about the units or possible coefficients, proportional to the ratio of output to input. In physics the Greek letter ϱ [rho] stands for density and proportionality is shown with this symbol ∝. To say that density is proportional to the ratio of output and input, we’ll just write:

ϱ ∝ O / I

Density is a scalar, it has no direction. I should have used the magnitudes of input and output because they are vectors, but I left the vertical lines out for clarity.

The density of an object in the real world is defined as the ratio between its mass and its volume.

ϱ = m / V

From this we could draw the conclusion that the mass and output of a program are proportional to each other and the input stands for the volume of the program. This is intellectually pleasing and intuitively correct, but we can’t put in any units or numbers just yet. For now we’ll have to settle for the conclusion that the mass is proportional to the size of the output of a program:

m ∝ |Osw|

and that the volume of the program is proportional to the size of its input:

V ∝ |Isw|

That’s it. There’s no need for a “mental-mass”. I can just use the mass as is to denote the external effects a program can have. Mass is linked with the concept of weight in the real world and it seems fairly reasonable to say that the more you can achieve with a program or application, the more weight it has. You can talk of real heavyweights, at least metaphorically, when you’re talking about the big and powerful applications. Small utility programs have small but specialized feature sets and it’s not disparaging to call them lightweights.

SofSW: The SW Basics (2/6)

2008-03-14T17:38:00.002+01:00

Everybody else scrambles to the escalator down to the departures hall, but I go against the flow. I know that there’s an elevator and nobody else is following me. The elevator is up, and as I press the button, the doors open right away. I enter dragging my suitcase behind me. I turn and see only backs. I press the button for down and the doors close. Few seconds later they open again and I can join the flow of people from the escalator.

The departures hall is massive and the crowd quickly disperses. The ceiling is at least thirty meters high, there are massive advertisement sheets hanging from it. They tell you about cheap flight options and big building companies, there’s even an ad from the local power company hanging far to the right. The hall is massively wide too, it seems to go on and on in both directions. Fifty meters in front of me on the opposite side of the building, there are the check-in desks. Each desk is numbered and the one just opposite me has the number 115. There are rows of TV monitors close to where I’m standing and to the right and left of me. I can see more people entering the hall from the doors next to me. There are all the time taxis parking outside, leaving a passenger out and continuing. Next to the glass elevators there’s a rectangular opening with railings around it. Through the three times three meter opening I can see downstairs. There’s the arrivals hall. Bored taxi drivers stand near the meeting point with signs on their hands, looking hopefully at each passerby. “Maybe this is Mr. Ching from Hong Kong. The flight landed twenty minutes ago. Where is he?” “What’s holding up Mrs. Semathier? I wish I had her number.” Some drivers even talk to the passersby like they were trying to convince them of being Mr. Ching or Mrs. Semathier. After a long flight, it is understandable if a foreigner doesn’t know how to read the sign. Maybe they’ve even forgotten their name because of the exhausting flight. Saying the name out loud, no matter how mispronounced it may be, just could wake them up and make a dead-tired traveller remember they are actually Mr. Ching from Hong Kong and not Bruce Tiller from Australia. But why is that driver talking to the male passengers and asking for Mrs. Semathier? Does he really believe that they’ve had enough time on the flight to perform a sex-change operation and recover enough from it to walk through the arrivals hall unaided. The anesthesia would explain forgetting one’s name, but how would the driver explain the men’s clothes former Mrs. Semathier is apparently wearing? Amused, I get back on track.

I’ve been here before and I know how it goes. I’ll first check the monitors for the check-in desk number allocated for my flight, then I’ll queue to the check-in desk and get rid of this suitcase. Then with my ticket I can go through security check and head for the gate to wait for the plane. There are eight TV monitors organized in a two-by-four arrangement. They list all the departing flights sorted according to their times of departure. Each flight is described with the destination city, the flight number, the departure time according to the timetable and the numbers of the assigned check-in desks. There’s also room for a comment about possible changes like delays or cancellations.

New York US345 11:35 115-125
Reykjavik SK176 11:35 214-220
Frankfurt TD876 11:40 183-185
Malaga FG034 11:40 91
Milan LK999 11:45 12-19 delayed until 12:10
Mental-mass IS879 11:50 555 wrong
Stockholm LH675 11:50 34-54
Hong Kong KA018 11:55 106-112

My flight is supposed to leave at 12:15. What did I see? There are two planes leaving at 11:50, one to Stockholm and another to ... Mexico City. Was that there before? Didn’t it say something else? No, apparently not. Aah, there it is, that’s my flight number, departure time is correct, 12:15, there’s no mention of a delay and the check-in desk is any desk between 67 and 75. To the right then. That’s the descending direction of check-in desks.

There are two people in the queue I choose. The other queues aren’t any longer, my flight destination doesn’t seem too popular. If the lines had been longer I would have used the automatic check-in machines, they are really handy, but now there’s no need. Two minutes later, it’s my turn.

“Hello, here’s my passport and my ticket.”
“Thank you, sir.” says the dark-haired check-in lady. She’s wearing the dark blue uniform suit like her colleagues on the neighboring desks.
“Would you like a window seat or aisle, sir?” she asks.
“Window, please”
She taps the keys on her computer terminal.
“Do you have just one piece of luggage?”
“Yes, just one.” I tell her and put my suitcase on the band. 20,2 kg say the scales. I know the limit is 20 kg but I also know that she won’t complain about such a small difference. Sometimes two kilos is no problem.
“Do you know that your mental-mass theory is absolutely wrong, sir?” she says suddenly and looks at me awaiting answer.
“Sorry?” I say, amazed! How could she know? I’ve just thought about that whole concept in the train. Nobody can know. She CAN’T know.
“Do you know that the meal on this flight is absolutely delicious, sir?” she repeats, probably notices the horror on my face and continues, “Nothing to be alarmed about. The meals are always delicious, but this week we have a special offer as our airline is testing new cuisine alternatives. Everybody, even in economy, will get the food meant for business class. This way we get a wider amount of opinions and can later serve business class passengers even better. You can consider yourself lucky, sir.”
“Oh, yeah, thank you.” I manage to mutter as I grab my passport and my boarding pass.
“Your flight leaves at 12:15 from gate 75. Have a pleasant flight!” she says and points to my left indicating the shortest way to the gate.

I’m a little shaken as I leave the counter. Am I hearing things? Is all this a little too much for my brain? Is this piece too big for me to chew? First the monitor and now the check-in lady. It must be my subconscious telling me something. What was the message? “Mental-mass is wrong.” What if that is true? Should I start over? I need a place to think and this departure hall is not the place. There’s too much noise, too many people, too many distractions. It will be much quieter at the gate.

Visitor data

2008-03-04T21:30:00.005+01:00

Here's an addendum to yesterday's post. You clearly see the spike on the day Tick-the-Code.com was mentioned on the "Beautiful Code" blog. (And by the way, it is 56 countries now.)

Back in the real world...

2008-03-03T15:07:00.003+01:00

Hi all!

I have some great news. Our daughter site www.Tick-the-Code.com got some pretty impressive publicity two weeks ago. It was mentioned on the O'Reilly book blog called "Beautiful Code". It has had a massive effect on the visitor count. The book is a collection of short stories from software gurus and other highly regarded professionals. It answers the question "How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development?"

As is customary nowadays, the book has a blog with masses of readers. My site used to have less than ten visits per day and suddenly the number of visitors shot up to 401. In one day. Since then the visitor count has trickled down but it is still, two weeks later, about five times higher than before the mention. About fifty people visit www.Tick-the-Code.com every day. The word is getting out. Before the mention, there had been visits from 19 countries, now the number is 55! Amazing!

You might have noticed that I've added "Beautiful Code" to the "Blogs" section on the right.

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I toured Finland for two weeks, had some training days and many a meeting with future prospects. We'll be breaking the 500 participant mark soon and if our acceleration holds, reaching one thousand won't take two years.

My next Finland tour takes place around Easter time and we are accepting training requests. Email now!

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Flunssa vaivaa, ja sängyssä makaaminen antaa aikaa kirjoitella blogiinkin vaihteeksi. Eihän tässä hirveästi hengästy.

Kävin Suomessa parin viikon ajan. Oulussakin poikkesin kolme kertaa! Seuraava reissu onkin pääsiäisenä. Tilauksia saa laittaa tulemaan, päiviä on vielä varaamatta.

Tuo "Beautiful Code"-kirjan blogi oli kyllä todella hyvä juttu. Sana Tick-the-Code -menetelmästä leviää hurjasti. Ja vaikkei tästä ensikontaktista vielä mitään sen konkreettisempaa tulisikaan, niin kun sama henkilö törmää tuohon outoon nimeen toisenkin kerran jossain muussa yhteydessä, se saattaa tuntua jo tutulta ja johtaa johonkin. Ennen blogimainintaa saitilla oli käyty 19 maasta, nyt lukema on 55! Reilusti yli tuhat kävijää on tutustunut ainakin pikaisesti materiaaliini.

SofSW: The SW Basics (1/6)

2008-02-24T17:37:00.001+01:00

You never know exactly where you are as you leave a train. You know you’ll be standing on the platform, but the way to the station might be in either direction. I stand with my luggage on the platform lost for a moment. Once I reach the right state of mind I start looking for the right station of mine. I have two choices, the escalator or the elevator. I see the elevator to the left of me and head towards the group standing in front of it already. These half-a-dozen strangers were on the same train as I just a moment ago. Half-a-dozen travelers equals five suitcases; three on wheels, two being carried; and one backpacker. The elevator arrives and the six suitcases and one backpack enter it with their custodians.

A pair of girls discuss the trip ahead, but everybody else is quiet. We don’t know each other, we need nothing from each other, there’s no need to communicate. In fact, we all seem to prefer not to communicate at all. I certainly don’t need any distractions now, I know exactly what I am to do and how I am going to achieve it. I need to get to airport terminal as directly as possible. I am in no hurry, but there’s nothing else to do here either. When seven people are crammed into a closed space and five of them don’t want to signal anything, not even accidentally, the results are hilarious from any outside observers. We try to find something to look at that attracts our attention, but isn’t human. Some of us look at the ceiling and the digital display showing a one changing into a two. Such excitement, who would have guessed that as the elevator ascend from level one to another level, it would be called level two? Some of us turn our heads downwards trying to catch glimpses of shoes or luggage or whatever that could hold our imagination without seeming completely awkward. I choose to look at the luggage of my closest standing perfect stranger. His suitcase is black, with a grey band going around it under the handle. It seems to have a three-digit combination lock. I can’t quite make out the numbers, but I can’t help wondering if the combination would open the lock. I try to remember to shuffle the numbers of my suitcase when it is closed, but sometimes I forget. The mystery of the combination lock won’t be revealed to me and I feel like somebody’s staring right at me.

The feeling is very strong, but as I turn my head upwards, I can’t see anybody looking at me. Did that man in the corner just avert his eyes or has he been looking past me all the time? Behind me there’s the metal-colored wall of the elevator, nothing special. He doesn’t seem to be thinking, although that is hard to tell from outside. He seems to be looking at something, but there’s nothing behind me. Why would he stare at me? Is my collar funnily, do I have something on my face? I made some notes with a ballpoint pen, maybe the ink leaked to my fingers and maybe I’ve rubbed my face with the hand and didn’t notice that it is smeared blue. I check my hands. There’s no ink anywhere. I’ll have to check my face in the mirror. I could have rubbed all of the ink on my face. That would be the worse case. Not having any evidence to suspect it, but having a maximum amount of ink on the face. That would be embarrassing.

After an eternity of uncomfortable silence, with only two girls talking about ordinary, everyday things, the elevator arrives and the large metal doors open. The elevator regurgitates its passengers in one deep sigh and the race is on. Everybody wants to go the terminal as straight as possible and there’s no need to slack behind. I take my part seriously and overtake a few of my ascended acquaintances in the first curve out of the elevator. The roar of the suitcase wheels echoes in the hall. More suitcases and people stream in from the escalators. Overpacked suitcases make ear-screeching noises as the bearings on the wheels are subjected to extreme pressure as the cases are being dragged by their owners. A man with a green overcoat and stripy pants cuts in front of me and I have to stop to avoid a collision. A pink cap just wobbles one side to side as the man’s back moves further away from me. I speed up again to not let anybody else take the advantage and fill the empty space behind Harlequin Huey. I think I see the Staring Man to the right of me, but I can’t be sure. We all reach the Airtrack terminal.

The Airtrack is a small train taking passengers from the train station to the airport for free. There are two trains and two tracks. The tracks are suspended on fifteen meter high pillars and the trains are hanging from the track. Hence the name Airtrack. The trains are always moving to opposite directions on this 7-minute track. There are thirty seats on the train and room for another thirty or so standing. I wonder if all of us will fit into the next train. The train arrives and, sure enough, fifteen people or so are left waiting for the next train. This one idiot in a white cotton suit and white leather shoes wants to absolutely fit in with his two large suitcases and his enormous backpack. Pushing and shoving he almost gets caught in the automatically closing doors but eventually they close. People standing in the aisle are holding on to the nooses from the ceiling and they have to adjust themselves to fit the Great White Traveller better. The train starts and a backward surge goes through the passengers. Nobody falls and the mass of perfect strangers desperately look for something interesting to gaze at. The Airtrack is generous in this regard. There are windows through it in every direction. The scenery changes, there’s a motor-way to the left of it and some fields to the right of it. As we turn to the right, the motor-way is replaced by a parking house and the fields covered by airport buildings. There’s catering services, some large oil containers, hundreds and hundreds of parked cars. Now the runway comes into view with some helicopters parked near the fence on the grass. An airplane is rolling on the runway gathering speed and before it has time to take off it disappears behind the terminal building. The train comes to a halt, the automatic doors open and the crowd manages to leave the train in a more or less orderly fashion, one by one.

SofSW: The Basics (2/2)

2008-02-18T20:53:00.000+01:00

The bearded man returns to his seat. Five minutes ago he left his seat and went to the restaurant cart. I can deduce it easily from the 15 centimeter long sandwich he is holding. He sits at a distance of about a meter and a half from me and I can smell his fresh bread. Suddenly I’m hungry. I fight the urge to go to the restaurant cart, I don’t have the time anymore. I planned to eat at the airport and according to the schedule it can’t be more than seven minutes now. But we were seven minutes late at the last station, if the train hasn’t managed to catch up at all, it might still take fourteen minutes or more. Nobody has ever starved in less than half an hour.

The airport is located 45 kilometers from the previous station and the travel time according to the timetable is 27 minutes. With a piece of paper and a pen I make the average speed of the train to be exactly 100 km/h. The train has 15 carriages, each about 20 meters long and there’s the engine. Assuming it is as long as each carriage, the whole train from the front of the engine to the end of the last carriage is 315 meters long. Assuming that there’s a meter of empty space between each carriage and the engine, we’ll need to add fifteen meters so the total length of the train is 330 m. Let’s say that you’re standing at a platform and looking at a beautiful girl on the next platform across the railway. She’s absolutely fine looking in her short skirt and tight shirt. She has long hair that shines in the sunshine and you’re sure that if you could see her eyes, they would turn out to be perfect in a perfect face. If she saw you staring and at the same time the train would go past on the track between the platforms without slowing down with an average speed of 100 km/h, she would have only twelve seconds to run away and disappear. She should really hope for a train that was stopping.

The basic measurements of the physical universe are simple to use and understand. They help to grasp the nature and its phenomena around us, but what about the immaterial universe? Now I don’t mean the spiritual world, which only exists in the imaginations of people, I mean the world of software. It is a strange universe of ideas and reality, of formlessness and function, of thought and implementation. In the world of software, immaterial ideas are turned into programs, which can produce extremely tangible results in the real world. What do we have to help us grasp this mostly mental meta-world of mind-artifacts? Not much.

Software as an industry has been around for less than a century and is one of the youngest areas of industry. It has evolved a lot since the first computers and every now and then there have been great revolutions so that a new generation of programmers has started making its journey on fresh ground with new thinking and considerably more power than the previous one. The situation now is that the reigning programming languages have been around roughly since the nineteen seventies. Clearly the most popular programming languages is called ‘C’ and the object-oriented languages of today - C++, Java and C# - are really offshoots of C. But I don’t want to think about programming languages. Not at the moment at least. I want to think about the basics of software. What would be the equivalent measurement for size in the real world? Software doesn’t have a mass, but is there something equivalent to the concept? What about time?

A program is usually written as text in stored in a file on a media readable by a computer. The text has a specific form that it needs to have in order to work as expected and all that is defined in the programming language definition. That matters not at the moment. The text files written in the programming language form the source code of the program. There has to be at least one file for a program, usually there are several. Biggest programs consists of thousands and tens of thousands files sprinkled in the branches and leaves of a complicated folder structure. Just finding the right source code file is sometimes challenging, but the challenges truly start when we start looking in the source code files themselves. Each file consists of lines of text, which many tools like compilers and preprocessors need to read and process. The tools aren’t important yet.

If we compare two programs, and especially their source code, there are obvious differences. The lines in the files are different, with a few exceptions probably, even some files maybe duplicated between the programs, but mostly the source code files are unique. We could perhaps use the size of the source code files as a basic measurement in the software world. Let’s try that. Let’s define that a length ‘l’ refers to the size of a source code file in characters. Characters are the atoms of text, they are indivisible, the smallest ingredients of text. In that sense this definition would actually be closer to the definition of mass ‘m’ than length ‘l’. Mass could be defined as the sum of the atomic masses of each atom present in the object. Length refers to its one-dimensional shape. It doesn’t work that well. Good. Failed ideas can work as seeds for new ones. Once you realize an idea won’t work, you can discard it and move to looking for the next idea. It’s bad to try and work with an idea not realizing that it won’t work. The longer you keep banging your head against the wall, the more likely it won’t work properly later.

Maybe the level of abstraction is wrong. Maybe the physical dimensions of a source code file have no meaning. But that can’t be. Two files, one twice as long as the other, both implementing the same functionality are different. Yet they are the same. We need to have a unit that shows that. The simple idea is to use one unit for the size of the file and another for the intellectual content of the source code file. These can either be two different units or two different dimensions. Is code one-dimensional, two-dimensional or three-dimensional like Matrix wanted us to view it?

For now, I’d like to separate the concepts of material size and intellectual size. Let’s use length ‘l’ to refer to the material size, or file size, i.e. the number of characters in it. The intellectual size would be equivalent to mass ‘m’ and let’s call it ‘mental-mass’. It refers to the number and size of ideas implemented in the file. We’ll have to define it more carefully later, but for now let’s imagine that each statement in the source code file is part of an Idea and has some mental-mass. A whole idea will have a mental-mass that is the sum of the mental-masses of all the statements that comprise it. Now we can say that two programs can be equal in mental-mass but differ largely in size. This is a start.

There’s no more time to think further, the train is arriving at the airport station. I pack my stuff, put on my jacket and leave the train. I have to squint a little as the platform is bright in the sunshine and my eyes are used to the dim indoor lighting of the train.

The Story So Far...

2008-02-13T22:39:00.001+01:00

A two-week contract was signed with a large telecommunication company in San Diego and as Qualiteers officially started on Wednesday 1-Feb-06, I was on my first ever American trip by Friday 3-Feb-06. Two weeks later, it was announced that the site would suffer massive layoffs, unrelated with the training sessions, I’m sure. At that time Qualiteers only offered 3-hour training sessions (we call them QuickTick nowadays.) and every now and then there was one participant who just didn’t get it. It irritated me that out of eight people one didn’t appreciate the method enough to even try it during the three hours. Later on I’ve realized that three hours just wasn’t enough and there needs to be more theory, more examples, more structure in the exercises and more attitude.

A couple of months later I managed to secure a one-week gig in Paris, France. This came through an old Nokia acquaintance who I happened to meet at CeBIT exhibition in Hanover in 2006 and who introduced me to the CEO of the company. So in May, Qualiteers went to Paris.

The next months were my first real experiences in sales. It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t. Now I can look back and see that there are many successes behind us and acquiring customers is possible. It is possible, because we have a good product, which we’ve managed to make even better this year by focusing on the 1-day long DayTick sessions. But I digress.

By fall 2006 I had the first Finnish companies lined up to train. The training sessions went well. Proof of this is that Vertex Systems called me back in early 2007 to train the rest of their personnel. We must have done something right.

It was in year 2006 that I had my first writing published. I had pitched an article in May already, but it was already September when editing started and the piece “Happy Are the Software Engineers...” appeared as Last Word in the December 2006 issue of Better Software magazine. I almost couldn’t believe how well everything had gone.

In 2007 I turned my focus towards research and sent a theoretical paper on Tick-the-Code to Software Quality Professional journal. The first peer review round rejected the paper with much needed criticism. I took the opportunity to improve my writing and went through all the remarks noting especially the misunderstandings of the reviewers. Because the method is innovative, it requires an unusual way of thinking, which the reviewers weren’t accustomed to. The misunderstandings were crucial, because I knew my writing needed to improve. The paper called “Tick-the-Code Inspection: Theory and Practice” was published (with a few annoying typos) in the June 2007 issue of SQP journal. I had officially joined the inspection professionals of the software trade.

The summer was relaxing and July gave us the possibility to visit Russia for the first time ever. In October I went to present my second paper on the PNSQC conference in Portland, Oregon. By the end of the year we scored another country, Sweden in December. The country tally went up to six and the number of trained software professionals had reached 461.

January 2008 was filled with marketing and sales activities only to be slightly interrupted by the second anniversary of Qualiteers. Thank you to all supporters, customers, partners and friends alike! There’s still much more to be expected!

SofSW: The Basics (1/2)

2008-02-08T12:17:00.000+01:00

We’re waiting for the train to leave the station any minute now. I glance at my watch and notice that we’re three minutes behind schedule. I know that because the display on the platform is clearly visible to me and it is showing the details of my train. Three minutes isn’t much, but when you have a complex network of trains and other forms of traffic, air planes, trams, busses, and in this network you have individual people with their dependencies, it all hangs together. Some of the dependencies are critical and some can be adjusted. There are trains that will wait if a connecting train is arriving slightly late. Some things, like airplane schedules are however not under the control of the railway company. In order to keep everything in sync, everybody wants to stay on schedule. Time passes relentlessly and the train is still standing on the platform. Five minutes late. I see no reason for the delay. Most importantly, there is nothing I can do about it. So, I leave it.

Time is one of the basic properties of the universe we live in. Time is one of the most important concepts there is in physics. You cannot explain time with other means. It just exists and affects the world. Its unit in the International System of Units, Le Système international d’unités, short ‘SI’, is second, abbreviated with the letter ‘s’.

In the beginning of time, or more specifically, in the beginning of time measurement, people used to be concerned about the seasons. It made all the difference for survival whether you sowed in the spring or in the fall. In addition to seasons there were other interesting periods. The period of the moon waxing and waning gave us the month, and the sunset and sunrise define night and day. As science progressed, sundials became all the raze. They measured the apparent time during the cloudless daytime. It took several hundred years before mechanics had advanced far enough to allow for pendulum clocks. It was not until the seventeenth century that a seconds pendulum was first added to a clock. All the time the definition of time depended on Earth’s rotation either around its own axis (day and night) or its rotation around the Sun (seasons). Astronomical observations were the basis of time.

The name ‘second’ comes from ordinal numbers. Already in the thirteenth century a medieval scientist called Roger Bacon expressed times of full moons with hours, minutes, seconds, thirds and fourths. The other fractions have been mostly forgotten, but hours, minutes and seconds stick. Second is so short a time that it is a secondary unit in practical life. It finds use in sports, but even there more accuracy is needed. The second comes second in almost everything these days, only as the official unit of time it gets its worthy first place. Nowadays, the definition of a second has moved from the highly imprecise astronomical observations of large systems to the extremely small world of atomic clocks. A second is defined as a certain number of vibrations of a particular atom. Even that measurement isn’t infinitely accurate, but for all practical purposes the second is defined far too well for its insignificance in use.

Seven minutes late the train leaves the platform. I still don’t have a clue as to the delay. Maybe we were waiting for a connecting train, which is behind another train on this large station. When you have sixteen or more track it’s hard to keep track of each one.

Now that the train is moving, I can feel the acceleration in my back. I sink in my seat as the speed of the train grows from the initial zero to 20, 30, 50, 76, 98, 123 kilometers per hour. The display in the carriage shows the current speed every minute or so. Now that the speed is constant, there is no more pressure on my back, the acceleration is gone. In fact, we have reached quite some conclusions already. We should back up a bit to start from the beginning.

Distance between two points, or the length of an object is another basic property of the universe. We use the meter to measure it in Europe, although the strange island folk in Britain insist on their own peculiar system of inches, feet and yards. They are peculiar because they aren’t decimal. In the metric system, almost everything is divisible by ten. One meter is ten decimeters, one decimeter is ten centimeters and one centimeter is ten millimeters. On the other hand a kilometer is thousand meters and so on. But if you take an inch as your basic measurement of length, you’ll have twelve of them in a foot and thirty six of them in a yard, which gives you three feet in a yard. There are two yards in a fathom, which is equivalent to eighteen hands. As you can see, there are many different names for the units and the conversion factors are all different. It seems totally incomprehensible if you have learned the metric system first.

Measuring length between two points is a one-dimensional measurement. The basic SI unit meter, abbreviated ‘m’. If you want to know the area of your field as a farmer, you’d measure each side separately and multiply the numbers. The unit of area, measuring the size of a plane is m*m or m squared, usually written m2. Measuring the three-dimensional volume of a rectangular object is as easy as measuring its three sides, the width, the height and the depth, individually and then multiplying the result. The unit of volume will be m*m*m* or m cubed, usually written m3.

You can combine the basic measurements to understand more from the universe. There is almost no limit to the combination you can build on top of these basic measurements of distance and time. For example, the average speed of the train is just the distance travelled in the time it took. And the acceleration I felt so clearly a moment ago in my back is just the change in speed over a certain period of time. The faster the speed changes, the higher the acceleration.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the third basic property of most objects in the universe: the mass.

SofSW: The Background (3/3)

2008-02-01T12:55:00.000+01:00

On the other side of corridor sits an old man. His beard is black with blotches of white like a negative dalmatian. His eyes are closed, he seems to be dosing off exhausted. Hid jacket is worn, not badly, but clearly used for years. His grey trousers are slightly too short for his legs and I can see his white socks. He’s been traveling long, even in his sleep he is holding on to his backpack which is on the window seat next to him. Experience I guess. I wonder for a while the kinds of adventures he must have had on his life’s journey. Did he find what he was looking for? Was he looking for something or has he just lived his life? He’s a traveller, he must have been looking for something. He has actively done something in his life. I can see from his peaceful and slightly wrinkled face that he it hasn’t always been easy. If he had a goal in mind, clearly he hasn’t reached it yet. But he seems happy with himself regardless. The search keeps him going.

The loudspeakers announce the next station and people start putting away their books, putting on their jackets and reaching for their bags overhead. Soon the corridors are filled with leaving travelers. This is a big station but it’s not my stop yet. I notice the man on the other side of the corridor rears but doesn’t wake. I hope it’s not his stop either. For a while I think of the pack of hyenas standing eagerly on the platform. I can them blocking these disembarking people for a few seconds. It is like the tide, regular, inevitable, observable but not necessarily easy to explain. If you think about it in a cool and logical fashion, it need not happen at all. Yet it does, every time the train arrives on a crowded station.

In my mind I am happy that the bearded man continues his journey. It is somehow safer to have company on this trip. I can’t explain my feeling. I’m not in danger, I have an exciting adventure ahead of me, yet the sight of a familiar face, even of a complete stranger, is reassuring. It’s proof that I haven’t driven past the final station yet. After the final station, the Terminal Station, the empty train rides on to the service yard for maintenance. Nobody’s allowed to be onboard then. I have a mortal fear of passing the Terminal Station without noticing. An experienced traveler like the bearded man wouldn’t do such a simple mistake. I’m relieved.

A boy on the corridor has problems carrying his bag. Overpacking is inexperience. For shorter trips like the one he seems to be destined for by the looks of his carelessly tied shoes and open jeans jacket, it’s not too big a mistake, but it does make traveling unnecessarily uncomfortable. You’re less likely to take longer trips, have exciting adventures, if even the shortest trips are too exhausting. Overkill in packing kills the joy of traveling. It is deadly for experience. Unless the boy learns his limits soon he is going to start restricting his life by traveling less. He’s going to be staying more where he already is. He is going to have to find the solutions of his life, his education, his job, his wife, his friends and his opinions in neighborhood he lives in. Unless he learns his limits, he is just going to limit himself more until he has no choice. Is that where the bitter old men at bars complaining about their lives come from? Even with a cool glass of beer in front of them they are complaining. It’s like it’s bitter instead of lager. Ignorance of one’s own limitations has taken their freedom and the lack of choice is slowly strangling them. You hear it in the gravel in their voices, the pressure of the lack-of-choice rope. With every glass of beer they are shoveling the gravel on their own graves. As the queue on the corridor starts moving, I glance at the boy’s face. He’s young and there is a certain something in his eyes. The glint of enthusiasm, of not having given up yet, is clear to see. If he manages to maintain it, he’ll be fine, I think warmly when he disappears from my sight forever. New passengers fill first the corridor, then the available seats and again the corridor. The train is absolutely packed and the journey continues.

I am not the first one embarking on this kind of journey, I probably won’t be the last and I’m pretty sure I will never arrive at my final destination, although I am certain that the journey will have an end.

Inspection Repository

2008-01-28T09:10:00.000+01:00

The Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) hosts a comprehensive Software Inspection Repository. One of the latest additions is Tick-the-Code. You'll find a reference to my paper under my name (Hiltunen) on this page.

SofSW: The Background (2/3)

2008-01-25T20:40:00.000+01:00

I am excited about what is to come. I’ve been to this train a hundred times before, but it always excites me. I think it is the promise of adventure. Every trip I take has a hint of adventure in it. This one is filled with unknowns. I feel exhilarated.

I felt exhilaration when I encountered computer science for the first time. I had played with a home computer before. My father bought me a rubber-keyboard Spectrum 48 in the UK and I used it to play some games on ordinary C-cassettes. I even got some books with listings of program code and I used to type several page long listings on those rubber keys for hours and hours in order to see what would happen. Once I had done the typing correctly I could play the game as long as I wanted, but when I turned the power off, it was gone. I had no way of saving the work. I don’t remember experimenting with the code, however. I don’t think I ever thought about it as programming or ever understood for real what I was doing. I was just mindlessly copying strings of characters that formed magical spells that would allow me to play a game with amazing graphics. Some of the games even used colors. My friends had other home computers, which were all used exclusively for playing games. Vic-20, Commodore 64, Amiga all bring fond memories of playing sessions with my long-lost friends.

Several years later, in the university of technology I bumped into computers again. The feeling that I had had with my Spectrum came back to me. I had perhaps never understood the concept of programming but it had felt right nonetheless. It was something I was willing to devote hours and hours of my time to, there was just something there. I think the cold logic behind it all must have been visible to me. This time, however, I was going to learn to program and to understand it. This time the computers would be able to save my work and I wouldn’t have to complete it all at once. I could start with a piece, save and continue after resting. If I had made an error earlier, I could fix it later. I spent six years in the university of technology majoring in computer science and the grip of logic tightened. Logic was my world. Although I now can say that I love logic, such strong feelings couldn’t have been further from my field of interest. Following logic requires no emotions, but even Mr. Spock - a creature of pure logic - softened as the original Star Trek series went on.

Many of my friends seemed to have more previous experience with programming and I felt threatened by it. What if I couldn’t understand something, what if I couldn’t learn, what if I couldn’t catch them in my studies? Some of this fear made me study even harder. I got a programming job during my studies, which helped me put the theory I was learning into practice.

Now, a decade later, I suddenly found physics again. This time it was packaged as video lectures available for free in the internet, which I used extensively years before any of my relatives even heard about it. The access to email and the internet was one great advantage of studying in a university of technology. The video lectures showed a professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presenting physics to the students. It seemed so very familiar and clear. The professor used a very fluent style of lecturing. He first described a theory and then made some predictions based on the theory and then conducted an experiment, always observing the predicted result to a reasonable margin of error. He showed that “physics works”. This core idea of scientific study of making a prediction and then trying to observe it finally gave me the idea of trying to explain the immaterial world of software in a similar way. The way you can create new theories on top of old, familiar ones and by mathematically “massaging” well-observed formulas arriving at new completely non-intuitive formulas which however produce observable predictions is a fascinating one. What if we could predict some properties of software just from some of its intrinsic properties? I won’t be able to reveal all the secrets of software, but just trying is certainly going to create some new insights. What if there was a formula that would predict the effort needed of adding a feature into a piece of software? What if we could calculate the quality of software? There might be a totally non-intuitive relationship between number of errors and the average length of lines in the source code.

SofSW: The Background (1/3)

2008-01-22T22:47:00.000+01:00

The display hanging high above the platform shows a slight delay in the arrival of the train. The loudspeaker announces the delay in its customary incomprehensibly distorted voice. The loudspeakers make the railroad platforms seem the most anti-acoustic places in the world. Or maybe the railroad companies don’t care about sound design, maybe the low price of the speakers is enough. A train approaches. The people on the platform start nervously packing nearer and nearer to the rails. They seem like a pack of hyenas to me, all looking for their own interests. At the same time they present group behavior, which is clearly predictable. I decide to stand back and won’t move until the train has come to a full stop. I know that it will still take time for the doors to open and for arriving passengers to disembark the train. The train comes to a halt and sure enough the pack of hyenas is blocking the way of the out-coming passengers. The pack has to move and the passengers get off. As soon as the doorway is clear, the pack attacks it and compresses through as if the train might leave at any moment without any consideration to the embarking passengers. The trains aren’t that automatic. There’s a conductor overseeing the boarding and he signals to the engineer when the platform is empty and all passengers are on board. The hyenas have boarded now so I join them and climb aboard the train.

There are two floors and with my luggage I decide to go for the lower one. I find an empty seat, take my jacket off, even though this is only a half-hour trip, but I like to make myself comfortable. I place my suitcase behind the back of my seat and sit next to the window. I have the earphones of my music player on, but I’m not listening to music. I want to think.

The sun is shining through the window. There are lines of dirt on it, horizontal effects of high-speed. The city looks alive as the train leaves the station and crosses the first bridge. The windows of the houses are like eyes. I can see the souls of the apartments with a glance and as the train speeds up, the souls start to swish on by. As we leave the city, the amount of green grows. First there are trees among the houses, and bushes, slowly the houses go into minority and finally the green takes completely over. There are fields of green bright in the sunshine. There’s not a cloud on the sky and I turn my gaze inward.

Looking back at year 2007

2008-01-17T14:30:00.000+01:00

Yes, I'm still here too, even if you haven't heard from me. I guess Miska is trying to make this blog more professional, but regardless I'm going to post here some links, so you know what I've been up to last year.

The year was quite full of music. I have to start with the local bands Single Malt, Double Fun and Drinkin' Ovations.

The Rock Classic All Stars happenings are worth to mention - at least three times I saw these legends of rock, some of them even more often, more privately, like ex-Slade Steve Whalley. And boy can he sing!

Then I went to see T-Rex (not to be mixed up with the original T.Rex) for a couple of times. These guys know how to rock! And they know how to party :-)! And I shouldn't forget the Paddy goes to Holyhead.

But maybe, just maybe, the most unforgettable one was Moya Brennan, the singer of Clannad. More Irish music I got to enjoy with Noel McLoughlin.

At Pori Jazz there were many artists, some good, some not so good, and at this point I will only mention one - the one who made us to go there in the first place: Paul Anka - alive and kickin'!

I saw the musical We Will Rock You in Cologne and the best musical ever Vuonna 85 in Tampere.

So if you haven't heard from me, it's because I'm always somewhere enjoying good music. Or travelling - I didn't care to travel that much last year, just wanted to stay at home, but somehow I found myself being not only in Germany and Finland, but also in Denmark, Sweden, Russia and England! This year I will stay at home... Well, I'm going to Ireland soon, but that's only because of good music: Christy Moore in Killarney - that's where you'll find me in April!

Have a happy year 2008!

SofSW: The Departure (2/2)

2008-01-16T08:23:00.000+01:00

When traveling, there are three ways to pass time; entertainment, gathering input or production. Entertainment is the easiest solution, all I need is a good fictional book or comic and I can almost forget that I am traveling. I consider travel time my own time and I get to decide what I do with it. My music player comes in handy in providing a lot of entertainment. There are about 240 songs from my extensive over six-thousand song collection on the player and I always play them randomly. I never know which song is coming next but I always know that it is a good one as it comes from my own collection. Why would I need more control? When I resort to entertainment and to music specifically, I like to let it affect me and my mood, not vice versa. Upbeat songs make me happy and blues makes me pensive. Sometimes I might even become a little sad because of a beautiful but tragic song, and I thoroughly enjoy the feeling. It is temporary anyway. The next song is going to take it away. I know people who make playlists of songs based on the feelings they inspire. They might have a list of sad songs, which they play when they are already feeling blue. Or maybe they play only happy songs if they are down, I don’t know. I don’t want that kind of control over my feelings. When I’m feeling really depressed I sometimes wish that the next song would be a hero story about a tragic loser who against all odds wins in the end or about a rebel who keeps his head no matter what and is rewarded for it. They give me fighting spirit and if by chance one of those songs happens to play, I can forget about my depression. It is gone and I’m back in the game.

Inflight TV programs and movies are other ways of entertaining myself and I have been known to resort to magazines or menus in the seat pocket in front of me, if I was in the mood and had nothing else to read. Entertainment has its place mostly when I’m tired but not tired enough to sleep, or when the trip is too short for doing anything sensible, or when the environment is too noisy or disruptive for serious thinking. When I decide for entertainment, I go all the way. I use it to forget all my troubles, I deliberately avoid thinking about work. That’s the best advice I can give. Whatever you do, do it properly.

Gathering input means learning. While the value of entertainment comes from the temporary relaxation and escapism, learning is meant to provide longer lasting value. I usually carry one professional or non-fiction popular science book to fulfill my needs to learn. I have noticed that I can read books and not learn anything. I maybe remember reading a particular book, but after half a year or longer I can’t necessarily name any fact I learned from it. In order to become more effective in learning and not just using science books for their entertainment value, I have taken to making notes. Whenever I come to an interesting or thought-provoking passage in the book, I stick a small Post-It note on it so that it sticks just slightly outside of the edge of the page. I keep a small sample of these small Post-It notes on the first page, just under the cover. Whenever I choose a new book to read from my book shelf, I put a bookmark and a collection of stickers on the first page. After I’ve read the book, all I need to do is go through the stickers, copy the passage on my laptop, remove the sticker, place it behind the cover page and move on to the next sticker until I’ve gone through them all. When I get back to my book shelf, I move the stickers to the next non-fiction book. As a matter of fact, in order to collect interesting quotes and sayings, I use the stickers also on fictional books and sometimes even magazines. The file on the computer gets reviewed every now and then and reading the copied passages refreshes my mind. The learning intensifies.

I am a doer. I can entertain myself easily for days and weeks on end. I can go even longer without feeling guilty when I read good scientific books that teach me. But eventually the need to produce becomes overwhelming. If I don’t manage to find the time to write or draw or play guitar, I become extremely irritable and will explode with the slightest hint of resistance or criticism. To outsiders my behavior seems inexplicable. I seem to lash out unprovoked. To me it is a clear symptom of going too long without leaving my mark on the world. It doesn’t have to be anything others see, it doesn’t have to be popular. What it must be is something with lasting value. A drawing on paper is a physical object that can be shown or stored. A poem can be read out or stored on a website for random passersby to find. Playing guitar actually serves my learning purpose more but at least my neighbors get to appreciate the sounds I produce if they want. Writing in any form more lasting than a casual email is enough for me to feel having produced something. When I write a marketing letter from scratch, I definitely feel I’m creating. If the marketing letter happens to convince a customer, the creation has accumulated even more value. The peace of mind is the principal value for me, anything other is just a bonus.

I try to fill my days at home with a healthy mix of these three activity types, but traveling focuses the free-time. There is nothing else you can do. You have to choose one of them. Unless you decide to sleep or talk to your fellow traveler, which I hardly ever do. On this trip I’m going try something different. I’m going to talk to strangers and see if I chance upon pure entertainment or will I learn something of lasting value. A talk might even prompt me to make notes, which would definitely fit into the production category.

I am also going to think deep about software and science in general on this trip.

I was a typical good schoolboy. I did my homework and learned what was taught and did well in exams. I studied mathematics, took the longest possible courses in physics, chemistry and liked natural sciences very much. Maybe the only slight abnormality with me was that I was also very good in languages. This seemed to prompt amazement in my relatives and neighbors, who all seemed to think that boys are good in mathematical subjects (if at all) and girls do better in languages and somebody excelling in both kinds of subjects is exceptional. Later on in the university the gap between the hard mathematical sciences and soft humanistic subjects, like language studies, grew even wider. I know extremely gifted men who could solve the most difficult mathematical problems, but who would be out of their depth when asked to pronounce the word “la fille” on the French class. Mixing it with the culinary term “le filet” is bound to awaken some hilarity in the class.

After high-school I had spent two summers in Switzerland amazed by the strange German-like language they call “Schwyzerdütsch” or “Schweizerdeutsch”. I had studied German and being able to understand what the Swiss people were talking when even German people wouldn’t gave me enough confidence to skip further studies of German language and to get the credit I just did the exam. Having thus saved time from German studies, I took up French. I did a couple of basic courses of it, even though it wasn’t mandatory. That goes to show that I do like languages.

I remember the physics classes in the university of technology. The teacher looked like a hippie, although this was in the early nineties. I found physics fascinating, but little by little it seemed to lose on practical value. In the end I read physics in order to pass the exams and get the credit. I never imagined being able to use the learning in practice. But here we are.

Later on I found computer science and programming, which became a major part of my life.

You’ll have to excuse me now but I have to exit this bus and hurry for my train. On the train I’ll have more time to explain the basics of software engineering.

SofSW: The Departure (1/2)

2008-01-12T23:33:00.000+01:00

Dream disappears like a wolf into the woods. I rise, switch off the alarm in my alarm clock just as it is about to go. I think it makes a little sound a minute or half a minute before but I’m not sure. On many a morning I’ve woken just before the alarm clock and the only other explanation I can come up with is that my biological clock is much more exact than I give it credit for. After all, usually I set the alarm in the evening and I know when it is supposed to go off. Maybe my subconscious wakes me up on its own. I guess it would be easy to test and set the alarm and listen for five minutes for any extra noises but I won’t do it. First of all, I have a feeling that the ambient noise level during the day will drown out little noises from the alarm clock. Secondly, I think that I’m more receptive to auditory input asleep than awake. It might be that even though the alarm clock did make an extra sound a minute or so before alarming, I probably wouldn’t hear it if I was paying it attention. And thirdly and by no means least, it is good to have some mysteries in life. It is after all a minor thing and a positive one for that matter to wake up at the right time without disturbing anybody else. It is a natural start for a day.

However, the nights I didn’t wake up before the alarm are hugely more numerous than the ones I did, so it might just be an indication that I’ve slept enough. The day ahead most definitely has an effect. Bad days, exciting days, scary days wake me up way too early. They seem to want to be nasty. Laying awake in bed, tossing and turning, trying not to think about the troubles of the following day and trying to fall back asleep is a guaranteed recipe for not falling back asleep and keep thinking about the troubles of the following day with a sleep-like stretched certainty and magnified evilness.

Good days, on the other hand like the one I’m having today, make you sleep soundly until it is time to rise. On dull and normal days, it is the alarm clock that wakes me usually in the middle of no dream. Good days - did I already mention that today is such a day? - start with an escaping dream. It is not necessarily a dream about escaping though. As the mind apparently can spin a year-long yarn in a few seconds with all its important goings-on in enough detail, it might well be that the dream I just had just started when the alarm clock made its alleged click. It then started to bring my mind back to the waking world and did it in the pleasant possible way with a fast-paced dream of happiness and joy. I no longer have any idea of its topic if it even had one, but the state of mind stays.

My state of mind fits my day. It is going to be a wonderful day. The sun hits my eyes as I open the curtains. I squint and head for the toilet. It is wonderful to feel pressure only on my bladder. I know I can relieve it soon enough. Physical pressure is often straightforward to relieve unlike mental. Today is a glorious day, there’s no pressure on me at all. In the kitchen, I fix myself breakfast. Eating a bowlful of cereals with milk and drinking a glass of multivitamin juice I read a comic to ease my mind into the real world. The breakfast is over before I know it and it is time brush my teeth. After a second visit to the toilet and a shower I’m ready to get dressed.

I have it all planned out, the clothes I’m going to wear today are waiting on the chair next to my bed. Black underpants, black socks, a black t-shirt with Mark Knopfler’s Shangri La album cover on it and black jeans are my traveling clothes on this fine day. I like to take it easy and although traveling is for some a luxury, I’ve done enough of it to dress casually and comfortably. I respect the other travelers and dress neatly but I’m not trying to impress anybody even if I am going to be moving through some very public places. I wonder if some people overdress because they like to show off or because they try to make others notice them? I decide what I wear based on my own comfort, I don’t let anybody else run my life. At least I do dress.

I have packed a little suitcase and it contains anything I going to need for a week. If I’m on the road any longer than that I’ll have to either buy new clothes (and a bigger suitcase) or wash some of them and re-wear them. The suitcase contains eight underpants, eight pairs of black or blackish socks, two pairs of sports socks, four black T-shirts with varying images, four blue shirts and grey trousers to wear on business days, a pair of black shoes, a toiletry bag with toothbrush and toothpaste, a mini-shampoo, a mini-shower gel, some cream for rashes, two band-aids, scissors for cutting my nails, a bottle of after shave, a deodorant stick (I never did get used to sprays), and a bottle of moisturizer. I have packed also the electric razor (I’ve never even tried shaving with a blade), a couple of books to read later, two pencils (3B and 4B), two graphite sticks (3B and 6B), a sharpener, an eraser and drawing paper, a charger for my mobile phone, a charger for my tiny music player which I’m already wearing, and an empty plastic bag for dirty laundry. I’m taking a small bag to carry as hand luggage. In it I have three books: a comic book, a scientific book and a novel. I also carry with me a notepad and a pen for making notes of anything interesting I see, hear or happen to think about. I carry my laptop computer in the bag too.

I go through the luggage mentally one more time, can’t think of anything missing and feel even better than before. Now there’s nothing stopping me, I am ready and eager to go.

Zen = Quality

2008-01-06T14:13:00.000+01:00

In this post I want to explain my thoughts on two books I read recently. The first one is “The Way of Zen” by Alan W. Watts. It was written in the 1950’s. It is an attempt to explain, in English, what Zen is. It says itself that it is not possible to define Zen, so any attempt to verbalize it is going to fail. Yet that is the way of the West, so Mr. Watts gave it a try. He used many translations of texts and compiled a wonderful book of little stories, haikus and other zen poetry. As he can’t really say what zen is, the sense of the stories is not apparent. As a matter of fact, zen seems to be reached when you can answer incoherently to a simple and clear question. You just have to do it without thinking and immediately. There must be no consideration.

Somehow sitting around thinking without doing anything else leads to such a mental place. One of the places I stored in my story crumb repository was the wonderment of the Western people who ask how anybody can do anything good by just sitting around not doing anything. The answer given was that there seem to be enough people doing stuff already and it seems like a wise decision to stay out of it and not cause any more trouble. Muddy water clears best when left alone, after all.

Zen Dream by *RoieG on deviant ART

The other book, which I read right after Zen is a popular classic from the 1970’s. It is written by Robert M. Pirsig and it is called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. It was the right kind of philosophy for me. It deals with the Western analytical thought. The framing story is a motorcycle trip in backlands of North America, but the real story is the hunt for Quality. What Quality is and how come we seem to have lost it. An additional things was that it seemed impossible to define, at least to the clearly capable but mentally labile main character.

The book made me think and as I attached a small post-it note at each passage of text I wanted to store, I quickly ran out of stickers. At some point I realized something, along with the main character. Zen was outside definition and I had some kind of idea of it after reading Mr. Watts’ book and now there it was, Quality, just like that outside of any definitions. It was clear to me that whatever Quality was, it was Zen. It is the attribute of an activity that is needed additional to plain work in order for the result to turn out good. Without Quality, you just have a product or a thing or stuff. With Quality, you have a useful tool, a productive team, an elegant solution or a beautiful result.

In another context, I heard a character in a TV series say “love is something you can’t define.” Was Love the same as Zen? Was Caring about the work the ingredient that added Quality to the work? I think it is. No matter what you call it, professional pride or perseverance in the face of trouble and adversity, I think Love is Quality is Zen.

1 Motorcycle by ~NutsnRaisins on deviant ART

Does it do any good to have this insight? Indirectly it does, I think. As with all knowledge, the question is how you apply it. With the insight at hand we can see that the people most likely to do a good job - any job - tend to pay attention to it, are concerned for it and motivated to finish it with the best possible results. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a perfectionist, but it means that trying really to improve things every time can not hurt you. Actually, performing a quality job improves not only whatever it is you’re working on, it improves you yourself in the process. As a matter of fact, Robert M. Pirsig puts it very well in his book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”:

“Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with - and they are all, sooner or later, dull - and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.”
It makes sense for your own sake to always strive for a genuine improvement. It is good physically, mentally, spiritually and socially.

The way the book is written, gave me an idea. What if I tried to explore some subject as a journey in this blog myself? The motorcycle trip across America is an easily understood metaphor and it makes for a great framing structure. I need to find my own journey, of course, but the main idea would be to describe the journey (of my life) and every once in a while dive deep into an interesting subject, trying to uncover the ultimate truth about it, all the while watching out for insanity. You, as readers, will have a great responsibility. You have to notify me, when you think I’m diving too deep into my thoughts and won’t have enough air in my lungs to reach the surface for another gulp. In other words, you’ll have to comment on my writings and tell me when I’m losing it. Warn me before it is too late.

The topic of my search will be software, software quality and whatever else pops up (that’s the trouble with any expedition, you never quite know what you are in for, otherwise there wouldn’t be any real discoveries) and the approach I try to take initially is traditional scientific method. I’ll first state the problem I want to solve, then I’ll write down some reasons or causes for the problem (the so called hypothesis), then I’ll design some experiments to test the hypothesis, predict the results of those experiments (notice emphasis on ‘predict’. It is a key ingredient of science to be able to say beforehand what should happen. There’s nothing mythical about that.), then I’ll perform the tests and observe their results and as a final step I’ll draw conclusions from the test results. That is the Scientific Method as described in Pirsig’s book, too.

I discovered a series of videos on the internet, which I find absolutely captivating. For the last two weeks I’ve been watching the video lectures of Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Courseware offering. I’m currently following the Classical Mechanics course (8.01) at a rate of a lecture each day. Professor Walter Lewin makes each lecture lively and interesting by being enthusiastic and always having a more or less practical experiment up his sleeve. Not to mention the ever-changing pocket ornaments. On iTunes Store, there are two more lecture series Electricity and Magnetism (8.02) and Vibrations and Waves (8.03). I’m currently not doing any exercises, although I’m sure that would make the experience even more useful. For now, I’m happy to try and walk on an almost familiar ground. These are mostly things I was taught way back in school, and most of them I can at least vaguely remember and understand. Every once in a while it seems that Professor Lewin shows the matter in a way, which makes me understand it more deeply than I’ve ever done. That feels good. Before, I just wanted to watch the lectures because it pleased me. And as I was sick and traveling between Christmas and New Year’s, I had nothing better to do anyway, so I could get started. I had no clear value statement in mind. I didn’t know what for I would use my re-learned knowledge of physics, but I had the vague idea that I would find a use for it. It was clearly useful and valuable knowledge to have. Now the road is quite clear, I will approach the area of software (without defining it yet to software engineering, quality or whatever is supposed to be known by now.) as undiscovered territory and I will try and see if I can’t develop a kind of Physics of Software, just like we have the natural laws of physics that govern the universe. And just like chemistry is basically physics with useful shortcuts to hide many details, it just might be that I get to discover something like Chemistry of Software. Who knows, but I have to admit to being excited about the prospects. I'll label relevant posts with "Science of Software".

Code for Life by ~woraz on deviant ART

I’m going to invent a traveling metaphor or similar to use as a framing structure for the rest of the narrative and go on discovering software as scientifically as I can as if it were terra incognita (unknown territory).

So please stay tuned, check back for how my journey is going and let me know if you want me to continue, or if there are errors in my thinking. Tell me if you don’t understand my reasons or logic, let me know if you have had an idea because of something you read here, generally comment just to show that you are following, it helps keep me going. And who knows what we’ll accomplish in the end.

I’d like to end with a French greeting, which puzzled me for some time until I realized what it really meant. Upon leaving a store or café in Paris, the people used to say “Bonne journée” to me and I was always thinking how did they know that I was traveling. Probably because of my accent (well, mostly my using of English, which clearly spoken isn’t an accent of French at all.), I thought. Until it dawned on me (by Virpi, of course) that they were just wishing me a “Nice Day”, not “Happy Trails”.

Anyway, without further ado, I’d like to wish us “Bonne journée!”

Wave Goodbye by ~beautifullyxchaotic on deviant ART

Ar(c)tic Afternoon

2007-12-15T18:25:00.000+01:00

As I thought, no matter how well I plan, nothing ever works like it. I didn't go to the Nobel Museum, I didn't get to Skansen, instead I went to the National Art Museum, had lunch, went shopping, was terrified of the thousands of other people who were shopping too, almost was trapped in a toy store and couldn't get out, went into another store and the same thing almost happened again, and after the third one, I stopped shopping, took the underground (the Tunnel Banana as it is called here) back to my hotel and was relieved.

The weather is still terribly cold, I've no idea of the temperature and there is no snow. I'm tired and happy, because it seems I managed to avoid a flu, which was making my throat sore on Wednesday. With a bit of garlic, warm clothing, no exercise and a little bit overmedication, the flu seems to have been defeated.

I am currently reading "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which I think my motorcycle driver friends Marko (both Mänttis and Marko-Marko), Sascha and Katrin, (didn't Björn have motorcycle, too?) should read too, if they haven't already. I'm not finished with it yet and it is going deeper and deeper into the meaning of Quality. Which is interesting for me. I can already now see why this book became such a classic. It is clearly written and makes sense.

Another book I have with me (I bought it in Helsinki along with the "Zen...", as I ran out of books to read) is Richard P. Feynman's "Don't You Have Time to Think?", which is collection of his correspondence over the years. It sheds light on the character of the world-famous physicist and bongo-drummer.

The comic-on-the-road is the nineth tradepaperback in the Swamp Thing series titled "Infernal Triangles". It contains stories by Rick Veitch and an issue written by Jamie Delano and one scripted by Stephen Bissette. No Alan Moore anymore, but the character of Swamp Thing had by this time a solid foundation for other great writers to build on. It is still good fun and relaxing to read, even though there aren't necessarily as many groundbreaking (pun unintended) things as with Moore's run. But the plant-centric point-of-view certainly makes for interesting reading at its best.

In Stockholm

2007-12-15T10:29:00.000+01:00

I'm in Sweden now. Actually I did the first ever DayTick session here yesterday. This was the last training session of 2007. Overall, I'm quite happy with the results of this year, and I'll be compiling a set of notes summarizing this year and the last.
It was nice to see that my paper in Software Quality Professional proved useful. That was the main reason to get this gig! I do hope the evaluation turns out well and I can expect to come here more next year. We'll just have to wait and see.

The weather here is wintery although there is no snow, but the air is definitely cold enough that if it just would rain, it would snow. I don't know about the temperature, but it sure feels cold outside. I'm planning to go to the Nobel Museum and Skansen today, but let's see what I did do later.

A month later...

2007-12-03T09:32:00.000+01:00

November has gone you see,
December crept like a thief on me.

What actually happened then?
What was important back when
November ruled the almanacks
was time the thing you lacked?
Or was it laziness, apathy or fear
that left the blog empty and drear?

A bit of everything I guess
this blogger must confess
and for that I am truly sorry
but I do have to say
it is my life, my blog, my time
I am not going to worry
if I fail to post yet another day
as long as I feel fine

You yourself should do the same
take responsibility for being lame
just don't let others dictate
what you should do, how you should feel
It is yours, the mind and its state
it's your life, live it now, don't be late
it's now or never, believe it, it's real
one day it'll be over and you'll be late
forever.

This is my creative apology
a little lonesome monology
if you want to critique this figment
of imagination, leave a comment

---

Yeah, well November went past and fast. It consisted of preparing for the trip to Finland, making phone calls, convincing people of the value of Tick-the-Code and making general arrangements. In this Virpi was once again invaluable. Without her itinerary, I would have been out of place many times. With it, I've managed to keep my appointments and to know when I have free time to concentrate on my book, for example.

For the past two weeks, I've been in Finland. I've conducted several trainings, as you can read from the Customers page. It is extremely rewarding to see software professionals try the method and see how different it is to what they've done before. Most notice these details and see even maybe why they should work. The ones who don't understand the reasons behind certain things, shouldn't change anything in the method, because they might destroy something important without even realising.

One example of an important detail, which seems extremely difficult for some people to understand, is the fact that you should start checking code with ridiculously simple rules. I might truly simple. Rules that anybody who can read, could check for. Rules so simple that the computer could check them automatically. Some people see that it is wasteful to do manually, because you can do it with a program/machine. But the whole point behind it is to get the mind in the right state for effective checking, to warm-up the brain for the more difficult rules to come. If you skip this stage, you probably won't reach the high productivity figures, which Tick-the-Code can produce otherwise. There's nothing wrong with the original method, but you've managed to (inadvertently) break it by not understanding the reason behind the simple checking and skipping it.

In fact, I'm beginning to consider inadvertent acts of people as the most dangerous aspect against quality work. We could say that there is one right way to make something. If you are not comfortable with the concept of One right way, replace it mentally with a very limited amount of ways. For every one right way of making something, there are infinite number of ways of making it wrong. The probability against reaching a favorable result in any undertaking is staggeringly high. By focusing the human intellect we conquer these odds and find the one right way. Any time we forget something, or fail to notice a consequence or fail to consider an alternative or fail to prove a concept, we are inadvertently straying from the one right way. Luck is against us just because of the probability pattern just described. We can't rely on luck, we must rely on our intellect and skills. Without focus, we'll stray.

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Suomeksi: Pahoitteluni, että blogin päivityksessä on ollut yli kuukauden mittainen tauko. Toivon, että en ole aiheuttanut tällä laiminlyönnilläni turhaa huolestumista kummankaan blogin lukijan mielessä. Pistäkää toki kommenttia, jos haluatte kuulla kuulumisistamme useammin.

Parin viikon Suomen matka on tänään ohi. Uusia Tick-the-Code -ammattilaisia on taas syntynyt ja yli 450 ohjelmistosuunnittelijaa on koulutuksen saanut. Seuraavana ohjelmassa on ensi vuoden taktiikan suunnittelu ja Saksan markkinoiden todellinen avaaminen.

2nd Paper Available!

2007-11-02T12:17:00.000+01:00

I've placed my conference paper in the Downloads part of the site. You can also find it in the Material part of www.Tick-the-Code.com. The paper is called "Tick-the-Code Inspection: Empirical Evidence (on Effectiveness)" and was prepared for, and presented at Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2007 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Check it out, it presents among other things a skill gap between what you can achieve with Tick-the-Code and what software professionals really do achieve on their own. The short-term effects are clear to show. All the evidence points to a massive improvement in the number of findings with Tick-the-Code. As the paper mentions, the next thing to prove is to show that the small simplifications have a reducing effect on the amount of errors in the code base.

For that I will need cooperation from several projects. Let me know if you want to be one! I'm sure it will be an interesting experience and I'm betting my livelihood on the fact that at least you will not lose anything in the process. Quite the reverse, you will probably gain a lot in the process.

Meet Ami Flubug and friends

2007-10-17T17:08:00.000+02:00

Allow me to introduce a friend of mine: Here's A. Flubug. (I say 'friend', but mean more of a nuisance.) He's a wonderful traveller, doesn't even need a ticket to accompany me on the plane. He can cross the EU border without so much of a blink from the customs officers. If there is somebody I'd like to get caught in customs, that's A. Flubug. Now that I brought him home, he's invited a few million of his best friends (I say 'friends', but mean more like clones of himself.) I had to introduce Ami to my wife also and he's spending much too much time with her to be honest. Let's see if Virpi can even get herself to her birthday party on Friday.

I'm slowly noticing that Ami is getting bored with me, but there are still a few hundred thousand of himselves enjoying themselves in me. They seem to like the nose, throat and lung parts of me best, although I'm sure they spread through my hands and like to fly around as I sneeze or cough. As a matter of fact, it is no coincidence that they meet so many people, they make me cough on purpose so they'd get introduced to other people. The globetrotting little socialites!

PNSQC successfully over

2007-10-11T05:56:00.000+02:00

The PNSQC 2007 Conference is now over. It was a very well organized conference and there were some interesting talks. I got to deliver my own presentation on "Tick-the-Code Inspection: Empirical Evidence (on Effectiveness)", which was well received. Unfortunately, there weren't too many people there as three other sessions were running at the same time, but even so most of the listeners gave me the green light afterwards. Note to self: Give your papers a more selling title. You can't use Tick-the-Code until it is very well known. On the other hand, if you don't use it, it won't ever get familiar.

I had brought some rule cards to give away after the presentation and almost all went to interested people. The presentation was yesterday and even today a couple of people thanked me for it and asked for more information. That felt good. Before the presentation somebody told me that they had read my article in the Better Software magazine and he had found it interesting enough to join my presentation in the conference. That was nice.

I truly believe I am onto something big.

And when there were comments about the future, like "we have to take care of complexity of software, that's the main thing" in the "Open Mic" session at the end of the conference, that makes it even more clearly so. The complexity of software will inevitably grow in the future, and I have a practical answer to it! It might be a partial answer, but it is a good one, nonetheless.

I hope that the interest and enthusiasm of my listeners holds long enough and they are convincing enough towards their bosses, so that I can come back soon and organize some training sessions on this side of the Atlantic.

To drop some names: I met Hugh Thompson, finally talked with Dorothy Graham, Karl Wiegers very generously bought me a glass of wine, I saw Johanna Rothman speak many times, there was Dale Emery who seems to have similar interests to mine. There were some people from Europe too, like Andreas Schliep and Niels Malotaux. I also had an interesting talk with Sandeep Bhatia from Intuit and we even found a common acquaintance! How small the world is!

As my prediction of where the software industry is going in the next 25 years, I offered the following words: "In 25 years' time I will be retiring, and only good quality software will be produced in America, Germany, Finland, as it is so much cheaper to produce bad software elsewhere." What I meant was that because software is becoming more and more global, you can't compete with location, the only trump card you have is quality. Either the software production in more labour-costly countries learns to be better quality or it will die. Basic evolutionary theory. The companies surviving in America, Germany, Finland in 25 years' time have only survived because they learned to produce good quality software quickly enough. The quality must overcompensate for the higher labour costs, otherwise it makes no sense to produce it there.

I have caught a slight cold and am dreading the long flight tomorrow. I hope my ears won't block, that can hurt in an airplane.

Adjusting...

2007-10-07T06:43:00.000+02:00

..today was all about adjusting to the time difference. I woke up at a normal time, had breakfast, made some plans and walked out of the hotel to realize them. After visiting the Saturday Marketplace I almost arrived late for the Omnimax presentation "The Human Body". The short film proved to be really interesting and well done. It used different techniques like magnification (up 50.000 times), heat-sensitive cameras, x-rays, time speed-ups and morphing to create visually superb effects on the larger than life screen that is so Imax.

After walking a bit too much, and nobody else is walking here. If you see people moving about without cars they are either jogging or cycling. A walker is unseen, although I saw a small group of women preparing to practice Nordic Walking by the Willamette river. The river name is pronounced something like 'wal-lamet' and is probably of Indian origin.

Now I'm back at the hotel and still fighting against falling asleep although it is starting to be the right time. So I think I'll watch some TV and sleep tight!

In Portland, Oregon

2007-10-06T00:04:00.000+02:00

Touched down a few hours ago and have now settled in my hotel room. My computer tells me it is midnight, but the sunshine outside points out the fact that it is actually 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'll go and check out the city, the train is free all day in the center! Unbelievable!

The unloading of the aircraft was one of the slowest ones I've experienced. It was excrutiating, especially as my bag arrived as the absolute last one! Somebody's bag has to...

Now I need to stay up until the evening to more quickly adapt to this timezone. My presentation in the conference is not until Tuesday so I should be fine by then. It is after all Friday, ... or is it Saturday?

Reconnaissance

2007-10-01T21:33:00.000+02:00

The ever more popular DayTick training session takes place tomorrow morning in a new location here in Jyväskylä. The sensible thing was to do a little bit of reconnaissance so I wouldn't have to search for the place tomorrow morning. I walked in the dark evening over a bridge and found a strange-looking wedge-shaped house. It was mostly glass and seemed extremely tall. I counted 16 floors.

I am prepared.

---

Syksyinen ilta oli jo pimennyt eikä katuvalojen hämyssä erottanut enää ruskankeltaisia vaahteranlehtiä kuin siellä täällä. Enää ei satanut, mutta jalkakäytävä kiilsi päivän kosteudesta. Matkakeskuskin oli hiljennyt, junia ei ollut saapumassa asemalla. Laiturit olivat autioita, kun kapusin betoniportaita ylimenosillalle. Katettu kaarisilta kaikui askeleistani, vastaani tuli nuoripari iltakävelyllä. Kosteat lankut tuoksuivat huumaavasti. Sillan päässä oli kolme vaihtoehtoa: portaat vasemmalle, hissi keskellä ja pyöräilyluiska oikealle. Pian huomasin, miksi portaista varoitettiin erityisesti. Ne olivat todella leveät ja matalat, juuri niin leveät, että askel ei oikein osunut niihin. Jokaisella askeleella sama jalka osui alemmalle portaalle ja meno tuntui linkuttavalta. Jokainen porras vaati kaksi askelta ja aleni vain muutaman sentin. Alhaalla huomasin lasisen rakennuksen, jonka firmaluettelokyltti oli nälkävuoden mittainen. Ainakin kolmekymmentä eri yritystä pitää joukkojaan tuossa Innova-nimisessä talossa.
Päästä katsottuna talo oli kuin kiila, vain alimmassa kerroksessa oli leveyttä ovelle, jonka numero 11 kertoi osoitteen olevan oikean. Wilhelm Schaumannin patsas katseli kuin torsoton Lenin ihan toiseen suuntaan läheisellä aukiolla.
- Tänne minun pitäisi siis aamulla tulla, ajattelin.
- Eihän matkaan mene varttiakaan, edes matkalaukun kanssa.
Tehdäkseni pidemmän lenkin valitsin toisen sillan paluumatkalle, mutta sen betonipohja ei haissut millekään.

Olen valmis.

(Edit 4.10.07 erään rakennusalan ammattilaisen vuodatuksen pohjalta: 'sementti' muutettu oikeammaksi 'betoniksi'. 'Kaksikymmentä' -> 'kolmekymmentä'.)

Finland, once again

2007-09-30T21:42:00.000+02:00

I'm again in Finland, this must be the sixth or so trip this year...
Arrived in Helsinki after an uneventful flight on time, I guess, can't really say as I seem to have lost my watch...
Took a bus to the railway station, grabbed a sausage hamburger, jumped on the train, spent three hours on it and arrived in Jyväskylä almost on time, went to sauna and had some excellent barbeque chicken afterwards in the restaurant.

Tomorrow's a writing day, let's see what I get done.

Tuesday DayTick here, on Wednesday in Espoo. Then I fly back home to unpack, repack on Thursday and early Friday morning my trip to America starts...

Tax authorities

2007-09-24T13:40:00.000+02:00

Something happened in the tax office and they didn't receive our VAt payment for June. They of course send a demand letter with the amount to pay plus 8,50€ as delay surcharge.
The strange thing was that before the taxes were automatically withdrawn from our bank account. Something must have happened in the tax office and for whatever reason they couldn't withdraw any money and therefore they hadn't received the tax payment in time. We knew nothing of this until the demand letter arrived.
Virpi phoned the tax office and they agreed to admit it was their mistake and said that we only need to pay the taxes and no delay surcharges. This Virpi did and we thought the matter was over and done with.

Not so. A week later a letter arrived. It said that "because you have authorized automatic withdrawals from your account we have withdrawn 17€ as delay surcharges."

How wickedly clever is that!? We will charge your account automatically for late payments, because we can! How can we be late with payment if there's a direct debit agreement in place?

Now the matter should be over and done with and we will get the double delay fee back. I guess we should insist on some 'irritant surcharge' or 'pick-pocket fee' also for even the tax authorities should keep their hands away from the money that doesn't belong to them in the first place!

---

I almost can't believe that I'm, sitting at our balcony writing this. The sun is shining, and although it is a bit windy the temperature is exactly right.

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Suomennos: Verottajan virheen vuoksi ne eivät olleet saaneet kesäkuun arvonlisäverojamme. Lähettivät karhukirjeen, jossa oli myös myöhästymissakko 8,50€. Puhelinsoitto auttoi selvittämään, että suoraveloitus oli lakannut toimimasta jostain tuntemattomasta syystä. Nyt pitäisi vain maksaa verot ja unohtaa myöhästymissakko. Kaikki oli kunnossa.

Kunnes toinen kirje ilmoitti, että koska meillä nyt on suoraveloitus, olivat veroviranomaiset veloittaneet tililtämme 17€.

Nerokasta! Kuinka voimme olla maksuinemme myöhässä, jos meillä on suoraveloitus?

Nyt asian pitäisi olla kunnossa ja verotoimisto lupasi palauttaa virheellisesti ottamansa rahat. Saa nähdä.

Presentation woes

2007-09-19T09:15:00.000+02:00

I'm meant to be working on my presentation - yes, it is still not ready - but it seems hard to finish. The obstacle is whether to follow the ordering I used in my paper, which one reviewer wanted me to change, but it was too late. The topic of the paper and presentation are the metrics collected in training sessions. The topic isn't Tick-the-Code, but it needs to be explained so that the results make any sense. In the paper I explain the method twice, first in a really condensed form and later more verbosely.
For the presentation, I talk about rules and some measurements in a very detailed manner, but I haven't presented those rules in detail by then! Can I ask the audience to suspend their disbelief and wait for the details? I need to say something like "Imagine that the following names describe black-and-white rules, which find unnecessarily complex places in source code and this is how many you'd find if you had enough code". This is all true and this is how it would go on: "CALL: 46 t/h, CHECK-IN: 82 t/h and DEAD: 45 t/h, and here are the rest 10 rules with similar figures." I have to assume that the readers have no idea of CALL, CHECK-IN or DEAD at this point in the presentation. On the other hand, the audience has the paper possibly in front of them and they could be reading the Appendix, which explains each of the rules in detail. But I don't want them to be reading, I want them to be listening!

Hmm, this is a problem, and I can see how irritating it must have been for the reviewers. The reason the paper is like that is that it has four parts: The Claim, The Evidence, A Solution and The Effect. The main point is The Evidence that is supposed to support the claim that the software source code produced contains way too much unnecessary complexity in it. The Evidence is meant to show that much of the complexity in the source code is truly unnecessary as it would be feasible to get it out with A Solution like Tick-the-Code. The last part explains how the whole development process becomes more healthy with less complexity.

Another problem is of more practical nature: I'm using Keynote on my Mac to create the presentation and there seems to be some problems in converting to PowerPoint. Some pictures get placed wherever and not where I'd like to place them. Maybe I'll have to get by without pictures or effects.

Visiting Yorkshire

2007-09-13T15:31:00.000+02:00

Hi! It's me, Virpi - remember me? I haven't posted anything for a looooong time. Maybe it's because I haven't got anything to tell or maybe there's so much to tell that I don't know where to start. Either way, I finally decided to share at least a couple of photos with you. Photos are from my trip to Leeds and York in early September. Enjoy!

York - The River

York - The Walls

York - The Cathedral

Leeds - The Park

Leeds - The City Hall

Leeds - The Owl

Carcassonne

2007-09-04T21:36:00.000+02:00

Voitin Antin tänään Carcassonnessa!
Jatko-osista mukana olivat kauppias, kirjuri, isomies sekä uusi kreivi. Itse asiassa juuri kreivin kaupungin oikeanlainen käyttö toi voiton, kun pystyin nappaamaan kaikki niittypisteet pelin lopussa itselleni. Vaikka Antti oli yli kierroksen edellä, kauppatavaroiden ylimäärä ja niittyjen yksinomistus riittivät voittoon. Olenpa iloinen!

Tänään oli todellinen välipäivä. Aamulehdessäkään ei ollut mitään luettavaa, tiistainen lehti oli todellinen maanantaikappale.

Conference paper titles

2007-09-03T15:18:00.000+02:00

The Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) paper titles are out. Mine is paper number 25 in this list. I'm feeling quite proud to be included in such a list. Although the paper is ready, I still need to draft the 40-minute presentation. My target is to have a rough outline ready today, add some touches on it on Wednesday and finish it by Friday. Then I can have a nice, relaxing weekend with my brothers and sister in Lahti.

The weather in Tampere has turned from summer to autumn. The leaves are mostly still green, but I'm sure that will change pretty soon. The leaves will soon turn pretty red, yellow and brown. On my freetime I've done some walking and on Saturday I was helping out a couple who were moving within Tampere. Their new house has pretty steep and long stairs leading to it. The 20-meter long stairs really explain how the loading of the stuff was so much faster than the unloading. As per an age-old Finnish custom, us movers got to stay and go to the sauna, enjoy the warm weather with a barbecue outside, and a few beers. Afterwards, I visited the Ilves nightclub and so two great newcomer bands, which apparently had won some competition or something. Man, were they loud. My ears are ringing still. One of the bands was called "Nemo" and the other one "Major Label". Good stuff, both of them. The sunny day turned into a dripping night and I spent the best part of an hour standing in the taxi queue arriving at five am at my camp site here at Lake Tohloppi.

Two excellent days!

2007-08-28T17:55:00.001+02:00

Yesterday's training was excellent regardless of the cramped conditions. There were nine of us packed into a tiny meeting room with a table taking most of the place and a whiteboard on one of the wide walls, which meant that I was the only one on the whiteboard's side of the table and the eight participants were squeezed on the other side of the table.

Today's open training was excellent and I could have continued it much longer. It seemed that all of the participants grasped my ideas with enthusiasm. I hope the enthusiasm sticks as they go back to their organizations.

Fun weekend

2007-08-26T18:05:00.000+02:00

I'm in Finland, preparing for a training week, recovering from a very fun weekend with friends in Helsinki and Hämeenlinna. There was bowling, sauna, good food and some Monty Python. I drew one picture, which didn't quite come out as well as it could have, but I'll post it on Deviantart as soon as I get it scanned. I still have a lot to learn. The first round of bowling was my best and I scored 140, which isn't much but it was best of our group, which tells that it didn't really go that well. But it was a lot of fun.

Thank you, Sini, Marko, Sammy and Taina, for your hospitality and a very fun weekend! Bark, bark for Otto!

Now I'll Skype a minute or two with Virpi, who's staying at home. Then I'm off to catch a bus and drive to my accommodation.

Off to Finland

2007-08-24T09:37:00.000+02:00

I'm flying to Finland today. Here the weather turned warm again, the sun is shining again today, although yesterday evening we had a massive rain fall.

This week, I've been mostly tinkering on the www.tick-the-code.com. The Info part is starting to be under control. Take a look and send me good constructive comments. It is supposed to be informative, accessible, enticing and usable. I'm sure it isn't perfect, so tell me what you don't like and how it could be better. There's even a video I produced.

---

I started thinking about freedom of choice and how errors affect it. I'm trying to draw a graph including the Window of Opportunity, the ticking Timebomb of Failure and the Handcuffs of Find and Fix. The idea, which I might have mentioned earlier, is a part of the DayTick course and I try to use it to motivate people to act for quality NOW and not cry about errors later.
In the beginning you can choose to tick as much source code as you want and you do get rid of unnecessary complexity. Having less complexity in the software reduces the number of errors you are going to make, but the probability won't go to zero. This is partly because there's never quite enough time for quality and the essential complexity still remains. Software programming is hard. But in the beginning the Window of Opportunity is wide open.
So at some point you do make an error. The Timebomb starts ticking. Nobody has noticed the error yet, but eventually somebody will. That is when your Window of Opportunity for Ticking closes. You can't keep blindly ticking and hoping that the error will go away. Now you HAVE TO get rid of the error. It has to be exactly the one fault causing the failure somebody spotted, no other will do. You are handcuffed to finding and fixing the error. Your freedom returns to you only after you have managed to find and fix the reported error. The Window of Opportunity starts opening again. You can start ticking instead of the Timebomb.

When does the Timebomb of Failure go off, you ask? When a customer finds your error, instead of an internal team. The blast will shatter your and your company's reputation.

Building Castles in Sand

2007-08-20T15:40:00.000+02:00

The summer seems to be over for now. Unrelated, there's a sand sculpture exhibition at Kemnader See lake, which is worth visiting. It is open until 22 o'clock and if you go in after 21 o'clock, you get in half price (3€). I thought of putting here some of my own pictures, but the official website seems to have very nice pictures indeed. Just check under "Bilder" and you'll find them.

---

The trip to Finland approaches and the last preparations are under way. Even though we planned a lot of training sessiosn during the next two weeks, I hope to get some writing done, too. I've heard that there are still places free in the open sessions both in Tampere and in Helsinki. Check the invite and act accordingly if you want to learn to be more effective as a software developer.

---

I received today new software! Apple Software's newest iLife '08 and iWork '08 are waiting to be installed. I almost can't wait to try the new features out. When I bought my iBook and iMac they came preinstalled with iLife '05 and I later bought iWork '05 (probably a day before '06 came out...). The iWork '08 contains the first version of Numbers, the spreadsheet program. I've been waiting for Google to release their spreadsheet application for Safari, but so far I've been waiting in vain.

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I've been pondering my business recently. Essentially I want to help software developers, who are clever at what they do and don't normally believe that others could teach them anything. They often have intellectual pride. In businesses they are surrounded by managers who don't necessarily understand at all what the software developers are doing. To them it is a miracle what happens and that something gets produced at all. They certainly couldn't do it themselves. It is extremely hard for the managers to go and tell the developers to do something differently especially in the technical matters.
The software developers don't necessarily have any contacts outside of the organization, because their work is more inwards. They focus on getting the code out, it is somebody else's concern to find the customers for it. The managers on the other hand can't see inside the software, they focus almost completely outwards. What does this have to do with my business model?
Well, when I contact companies, I often bump into managers who have no idea how much more better technically their developers could be. I don't normally get to convince the developers who should recognize a good idea when they see one. The managers might have a vague idea that things could go smoother and the deliveries from the software department could be more reliable and have less bugs in them. They just don't know how.
Sometimes it feels like I'm building castles in sand trying to reach people who don't want to be helped and reaching people who don't know that they could help.
I hope I reach the right people with the material that is slowly coming together in www.tick-the-code.com.

Conference paper submitted

2007-08-14T17:55:00.000+02:00

I just submitted the conference paper. There's still some time left if my reviewers want to have something changed, but mentally I have released it. The next step is to change it into a presentation until October comes around. Virpi gets to book the trip next week, which is nice.

---

Today's movie is "Saw II".

Miscellaneous little news

2007-08-09T09:17:00.000+02:00

Topics today: conference paper, website, Stefan's birthday, planetarium.

The conference paper is proceeding very well, thank you for asking. Rachel helped me to improve the writing a lot. As a native speaker, she could point out weird constructions I had managed to build. I think the paper is now much better and ready to be submitted. I hope the reviewers agree as the camera-ready paper must be available by 19-Aug-07.

www.Tick-the-Code.com is halfway through its migration. Most of the graphical components are in place, most of the content is still missing. There's some new automatically changing content, like the coding rules on the home page and the excerpts from the book draft on the Material page. It will be the best source of information about Tick-the-Code soon.

Stefan celebrated his 40th birthday on Tuesday. Yes, this is the borrowed-Watchmen-the-comic-several-years-ago-and-still-hasn't-finished-it Stefan. I've heard he has started reading the comic and found it exciting enough to finish, I hope.

Yesterday we went to see a show in the Planetarium of Bochum for the first time. They had a special presentation called Eclipse, where the showed astrological images and played the music of Pink Floyd. It is well worth visiting. Find the show times here.

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Tick-the-Code -viikkojen myynti Suomessa on alkanut kiivaana. Viikoilla 35 Tampereella ja 36 Helsingissä on mahdollista osallistua Tick-the-Code -kurssille tai jopa järjestyttää sellainen firman sisäisenä. Katso kutsu ja ota yhteyttä. Paikkoja on rajallinen määrä, samoin kuin päiviä.

Homecoming

2007-08-04T01:51:00.000+02:00

The trip to Finland is over. We took a cargo ship from Helsinki to Travemünde and I have to say that it was a very comfortable way to travel. There wasn't much to do, but we didn't need much. We watched an episode of "Green Wing" on QualiBook and went to sauna. There was breakfast, lunch and dinner from a buffet and not too many people. Everybody had their own tables, which kept everything in order. It was excellent!

We got out of the ship around 9PM and had still over 400 km to drive. It was full moon and the pictures Virpi took with long exposure from the moving car are hilarious. Rarely can you see a stretched moon. We reached Bochum well before 2AM on Monday morning.

I've been working on the two websites. Www.Tick-the-Code.com is still very much under construction, but I've also made (invisible) changes to www.qualiteers.com.

Paul Anka at Pori Jazz Festival!

2007-07-20T12:56:00.000+02:00

Paul Anka visited Finland in 1959 for the first time. My then-future-mother-in-law was a teenager who desperately wanted to go to Linnanmäki amusement park in Helsinki for the concert, but wasn't allowed. Yesterday, after 48 years of anticipation, Paul Anka returned to Finland and this time, my mother-in-law got to go. She was ecstatic, to say the least. Just like the rest of the audience, we all were dancing, clapping and singing along with the hits. We heard "Diana", "You're My Destiny", "Puppy Love" and "Put Your Head On My Shoulder" and other golden oldies. Paul and his excellent band played also "It's My Life", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Wonderwall" and "Jump" from the "Rock Swings" CD.

The crowning of the evening were "My Way" as a duet with Frank Sinatra and "New York, New York". An amazing concert!

Trip to Russia...and back

2007-07-17T20:18:00.000+02:00

Last week Qualiteers went to Russia! The first ever Russian training was a DayTick training in Saint Petersburg last Thursday. Ten attentive software developers took part in the training and from what I've heard they will at least give the technique a try. I can't really ask for more than to provide the method and hope that people see the benefit in the short time and then take it into use for their own good.

It was the first training in Russia, but it was also my first visit to Russia ever. I never went to the Soviet Union. Saint Petersburg is a city of opposites. On the one hand you have glorious palaces with golden cupolas and magnificent statues everywhere. On the other hand the city is full of cars, the air seems polluted, the bridges collect traffic jams regularly, many houses need renovating and only the tram rails protruding from the asphalt slow any of the cars down. Crossing a street is a dangerous business. But then comes the night and the sun sets and you don't see the dirt, you can just imagine yourself in the imperial court...
The Bronze Horseman (Peter the Great)
(in Wikipedia)
The Church of the Savior on Blood
(in Wikipedia)

The train trip to Saint Petersburg was exciting, although uneventful. Before the border, the passports were collected and only just before Vyborg were they returned with arrival stamps on the visas and special coupons, all to be kept extra carefully for the return trip. The landscape at and around the border didn't show the best of Carelia. Although the nature seemed gorgeous, the farm houses seemed abandoned and having seen better days. Junk-Ladas on cinderblocks were a typical sight.

For the return trip we made good preparations: we ordered a taxi from the same inexpensive taxi company who had received us and taken us successfully to our hotel on the first day. The plan was to leave one hour and fifteen minutes before the train's departure in order to be able to stay in traffic jams for some time. The distance was perhaps three kilometers, but it was smack right in the middle of the city. Ten minutes before the agreed time, the taxi company calls the hotel reception saying that they can't come and get us after all. The receptionist does the best she can and calls for a normal black taxi. We step into the black Volga as planned about one hour and twenty minutes before the train is supposed to leave. Everything is fine, although there are no seat belts in the back seat. It might have been yesteryear's model. Twenty minutes later, one hour to lift-off, we arrive at a train station, pay, unpack and ask for a receipt from the driver who speaks practically no English. To balance this out we speak practically no Russian. To be absolutely sure I show the driver the map of the city and ask him to verify that we are on the Northern Station, the Finlandskij. The driver is somewhat annoyed as it turns out that we are on Viterbsiy Station, some four kilometers away from the right one!

Well, no worries, we still have an hour and the road to the Finlandskij Station is a direct and straight one. Unfortunately, it seems that all the cars in the city want to be on the same road. The road is completely jammed. In the first half and hour we make probably half a kilometer progress. It seems hopeless. We'll never make it one time. The train that we are going to miss is the last one today and our visas will expire today. Tomorrow we are illegally in the country. What can we do? We consider taking the underground, which would only need two stops to reach the station, but decide it is too difficult to learn as we haven't even tried it once. Another possibility is to jump out, take all the luggage and run. It seems a better alternative, that's how slow we have been moving. Then at about twenty to train departure, we reach Nevskiy Prospect, the main shopping street of Saint Petersburg. It crosses with our street and that's where everybody has been queueing. The traffic clears, now we make progress from one red traffic light to the next, instead of about five meters. We reach the Finlandskij Station about ten minutes before the train's departure time, give the driver the rest of our Rubles and move swiftly to the platform. Five minutes before the train is supposed to leave we enter it and sigh a deep breath of release. The train leaves about seven minutes behind schedule, but we still remember the feelings of inevitable desperation standing in the middle of immobile cars with nothing that could help.

Flamed salmon

2007-07-05T18:55:00.000+02:00

Because of the shortness of the WLAN cable here on the cottage, I am sitting on a large rock writing this post. You understand if I have to be brief. The time on summer holiday has been just great. Many guests have been and gone, some are still to come. We've had many experiences, met all kinds of animals and made several trips into the wilderness. The weather currently is as good as it gets.
Earlier it was raining a few days, which didn't stop us from making 'loimulohi' (flamed salmon?). See the picture.
Loimulohi being prepared.

More will follow once I'm back in the civilization.

Tragedy strikes (no, not really)

2007-06-20T18:28:00.000+02:00

Today we were supposed to hold a PresenTick info event in Foley's Irish Pub in Copenhagen. We knew there were renovation works going on there, but the staff of the pub told us that on Wednesday they will open their doors. Well, guess what?

Today we walk past the pub in the morning and they have posted a new paper on the door. "The renovation takes longer than expected, see you on Thursday". Great! Our meeting is in jeopardy. What can we do, where can we go? Luckily we had found the Scandic Hotel Copenhagen not far away from our hotel with excellent restaurant facilities so we moved the event there. It was only a five-minute walk. Tragedy avoided!

---

The car journey continues early tomorrow morning, with a hard deadline (the ship sails with or without us) so this must be enough!

Joke for the Finns

2007-06-19T13:22:00.000+02:00

Where am I? I told the taxi driver to to take me to Jakomäki but he just drove here to Barcelona.
That joke by Spede Pasanen, the Finnish comedian and spitting image of Lenin, probably won't open to anybody outside of Finland. It might not even open to the younger Finns, who've so far managed to be shielded from the sometimes over-extended humor of Spede.

Well we had the experience that I thought I had driven to Copenhagen, but it certainly looks more like Barcelona here:

These cows brought me back to Earth and revealed that I really was in the land of cheese. I'm not sure there is something rotten here, though.

Virpi enjoying the sea.

Papers, pub, pigeons and Piter

2007-06-10T23:00:00.000+02:00

I've had my first research paper published! The peer-reviewed journal called Software Quality Professional published my paper "Tick-the-Code Inspection: Theory and Practice" in their June 2007 issue of volume 9. Unfortunately you have to be a member in order to read it, though. I can tell you that it is an interesting paper and it describes Tick-the-Code in detail.

---

The last few weeks I've spent writing a conference paper. Wish me luck that it will get through and I get to present my findings in the conference in October. The paper is called "Tick-the-Code Inspection: Empirical Evidence" and in it I present all the results of ticking I've collected over the past two years in training sessions areound the world. I also started a project in May and selected at random ten Open Source modules to tick.
At first I was ticking one module each day, but in the end I noticed that I wouldn't be able to cover all of them so I had to tick two modules each day in the end. I'd tick one in the morning (it always took more or less around an hour) and another in the evening. I always made sure I didn't have to tick the same file twice in a row.
In the end I had spent almost 29 hours ticking away. The results are interesting, though.

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We are putting the show on the road! Qualiteers are offering an info session in Copenhagen next week Wednesday on 20-Jun-07. See the invitation and forward it to your friends in Copenhagen. Tick-the-Code needs friends.

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For some time now we've been startled by loud pigeon noises on the balcony. I'd go outside to practice my guitar playing and suddenly there'd be a ruckus and a big bird flying away. Well, today I made a discovery. Pigeons have built a nest on the edge of the roof. There's a gutter that they are blocking. A tree branch covers the nest very well, which explains how we could have missed such a large construction this long. It will be interesting to watch how pigeon young (squabs) really look like...
Pigeon nest on the balcony.

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In July, Qualiteers is taking its first steps on the Russian market in Saint Petersburg! This is great, because I've never been to Russia and I still remember making and holding a presentation on Peter the Great, the founder of the city. That was probably twenty years ago.

Twenty days later...

2007-05-29T22:09:00.000+02:00

I just couldn't wait the whole 28 days as in the movie 28 Days Later..., which is getting a sequel called 28 Weeks Later.

It has been twenty days since my last blog entry. Partly that's because I'm terribly lazy, partly because I've been traveling and partly because I'm terrific at coming up with excuses.

I celebrated my birthday with spontaneous Irish music, which was a complete surprise to me and absolutely a blast! The boys from SMDF were there, of course, but then there were a couple of real Irishmen playing the banjo and guitar.

I've tried to use most of my spare time for writing the few pieces under construction; a conference paper, an article and my book. The content for www.tick-the-code.com also needs to be written, there are some translations that would need to be done, but as I said, I can come up with excuses for not writing anything.

I've also been ticking daily some thousand lines of open source code for my conference paper. I haven't analysed the results yet, I'm sure they will be interesting.

Tilaa on vielä

2007-05-09T19:57:00.000+02:00

Ilmoittautumisvastaava on kertonut minulle, että Tampereen avoimille QuickTick-kursseille mahtuu vielä osanottajia. Ilmoittautumiset käsitellään saapumisjärjestyksessä, joten kiirehdi ohjelmistosuunnittelija, jos haluat oppia jotain hyödyllistä uutta.

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I don't think I have mentioned it here yet, but I'm finally taking guitar lessons for real. I've owned an acoustic guitar for quite some years and now my bookshelf is heavily weighed down by all kinds of "learn to play guitar" books. Now for the first time, a real guitar player is showing me how to do it. We've started with note reading, which is an extremely important basic skill and doing it quickly enough will not happen unless I practice often and disciplined enough. This is once again a chance for me to show that with discipline you can do almost anything. Talent isn't everything. You are not locked to what you know and can, you can always learn new things. All you need is time, motivation, a burning desire and the skill, which you'll get through practice.

Open courses in Tampere!

2007-05-07T00:22:00.000+02:00

I've sent out invitations for 4 open QuickTick sessions in May in Tampere. Further details can be found (in Finnish) on the main page.

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Kutsuja toukokuun neljään avoimeen QuickTick-tilaisuuteen on lähetetty. Kutsu on avoin kaikille, runsasta osallistumista toivotaan. Ohjelmistosuunnittelijat, nyt on tilaisuutenne osoittaa kiinnostusta uudenlaista laadunvarmistusta kohtaan! Tampereella tavataan toukokuussa.

Jos tunnet ohjelmistosuunnittelijoita, jotka eivät tunne Tick-the-Code -menetelmää vielä, välitä heille kaikin mokomin tämä kutsu. Kiitos välittämisestä.

Holistic Software Development

2007-05-03T15:05:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it is hard to see why others can't see what Tick-the-Code can do. It isn't a silver bullet, instead it is very practical. On other moments it is clear that if you too much on your plate, an unusual solution isn't what you want. You want what you think you need. But the problem is that if you're under a lot of pressure, you'll reach THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS. You only think you need something, and the right kind of answer remains out of your reach. That's then my job to get across. To make you change your mind and make you want to learn Tick-the-Code.

This is the so called Holistic Approach to Software Quality. Everything depends on everything else. That means that complicated source code negatively influences all other aspects of software development, just like bad requirements will make the software product turn out bad. The nice thing is that less complex code will POSITIVELY influence everything else. And Tick-the-Code is a practical and feasible way of making source code less complex.

How? Well, if software is less complex, errors don't happen so often. Software isn't so brittle, it won't break so easily in maintenance. When maintenance becomes faster and more reliable, it can be done with confidence. There is no reason to rush oneself. You can confidently make any change that's necessary and take your time in doing it. With the improved confidence, you can cultivate the quality attitude, which means you realise that perfection needs Time, Skill, Motivation and Knowledge. Once maintenance is reliable and fast, the saved time can be used to polish the requirements or work on the design process, if those are problematic. Once they improve, there's even more time to use on user interface design, which means the produced software products will be easier to use and they sell better than old kind of clumsy software solutions. That's where the time Tick-the-Code saves you turns into money. Tick-the-Code can turn the negative cycle into a positive one.

Tick-the-Code turns busyness back to business!

---

Suomeksi:
Tick-the-Code voi olla se ensimmäinen askel kääntämään aina vain kiristyvän paineen syöksykierteen positiiviseksi koko ajan parantuvaksi kierteeksi. Se tapahtuu holistisen eli kokonaisvaltaisen ohjelmistokehityksen näkemyksen kautta. Kaikki vaikuttaa kaikkeen. Huonot vaatimukset tekevät tuotteesta huonon ja monimutkainen koodi vaikuttaa negatiivisesti kaikkeen muuhun. Kun Tick-the-Code poistaa monimutkaisuutta, vähenevät virheet ja ylläpito nopeutuu. Se myös muuttuu luotettavammaksi. Mitä muutetaankin, se pysyy muutettuna. Kehittäjien itseluottamus kasvaa ja heillä on enemmän aikaa käyttää esimerkiksi vaatimusten hiomiseen tai suunnitteluprosessin parantamiseen. Kunhan ne ovat kunnossa, voidaankin keskittyä esimerkiksi käyttöliittymäsuunnitteluun. Paremmin suunnitellut tuotteet ovat helppokättöisempiä ja myyvät paremmin.

Tällä tavalla Tick-the-Code muuttaa kiireen rahaksi.

---

Auf Deutsch:
Tick-the-Code kann die erste Schritt sein um eine negative Zyklus positiv zu machen. Es passiert wenn man Softwareentwicklung holistisch oder umfassend betrachtet. Alles beeinflusst alles andere. Schlechte Softwareanforderungen produzieren schlechte Software und komplizierter Quellcode beeinflusst alles negativ. Wenn Tick-the-Code Komplexität entfernt, werden Fehler weniger und Wartung wird schneller. Wartung wird auch zuverlässiger und das erhöht das Selbstvertrauen der Entwickler. Die werden auch mehr Zeit haben für die Anforderungen oder die Entwurfsprozess zu verbessern. Wenn die in Ordnung sind, kann man sich an Benutzeroberfläche konzentrieren. Produkte werden praktischer und einfacher zu bedienen. Die verkaufen auch besser.

So verwandelt Tick-the-Code Geschäftigkeit ins Geschäft.

New developments, part 2

2007-04-24T14:07:00.000+02:00

We've listened to the feedback and have modified our training course portfolio accordingly.
From now on, we'll be offering a full-day training course on Tick-the-Code instead of just the half-a-day course.
In addition, there are extension modules for the management on offer.

Tick-the-Code training course options

DayTick - immerse yourself in code for a day
- enables software developers to use Tick-the-Code in their work. Raises their quality-awareness.
- 7h (+ lunch), max 10 participants

QuickTick - the fastest Tick-the-Code training there is
- enables software developers to use Tick-the-Code in their work.
- 3h, max 10 participants

Extension modules

PoliTick - inform managers of Tick-the-Code
- helps managers support their software developers in using Tick-the-Code
- 2h

PlanTick - ensure successful deployment of Tick-the-Code
- helps plan the deployment of Tick-the-Code in the organization
- covers aot. practical arrangements, written guidelines, incentive system
- 2h, max 6 participants (for an effective meeting)

For more details, see The Course page.

New Developments

2007-04-19T22:37:00.000+02:00

Tick-the-Code diversifies!
So far there has only been one version of the Tick-the-Code training. Now there are two! The standard, extremely efficient training lasting only 3 hours is now called QuickTick and the new training that lasts a whole working day is called DayTick. As soon as I get the details thought out I'll update the course page on the site, too.

There will be two extensions, too. For the management to get an idea about Tick-the-Code technique, there will be a module called PoliTick and in order to make a plan of the practical arrangements of deployment a module called PlanTick will help. They are both short two-hour sessions.

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I visited the Hannover Messe yesterday. The theme was industry and there sure are hundreds of companies dealing with software even though their products don't necessarily look like it. With a product like Tick-the-Code, independent of application area, that can only be good news. If you want to help out in marketing this winner quality method, let me know.

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The newest customer, OpusCapita Oy from Tampere has been added to the Customers page.

Haikus

2007-04-11T09:28:00.000+02:00

On The Snack page you'll find a Tick-the-Code haiku. I'd really like to hear your comments on it. You can even send me your suggestions on any topic...

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Bochum in winter
Raindrops keep falling on me
Like summer only colder

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Dusty tracks salty
Springtime wind blows in a rush
Sand grinds in my teeth

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Sit down stand-up starts
The audience yells at me
As the line doesn't punch

Finland, South America and David Hasselhoff

2007-04-04T16:06:00.000+02:00

-5 degrees centigrade was a freezing reminder of how north Finland actually is. Luckily, just two days ago I sat on our balcony charging the sun's energy in my personal batteries. Some of the energy I used for a drawing, but more on that later.

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Kaj's Odyssey: We have written records stating that Kaj has been in Arica, Iquique, San Pedro de Atacama, Coliapo(?), La Serena and in some nature reservation near Bolivia. Santiago de Chile was his location before yesterday.
Our fearless traveller has now reached the Easter Islands. He did in a fashion unknown to software developers; early. It is apparently +23 degrees and the palm trees, and only the palm trees are swinging in the breeze. Believe if you want.

The temperature is the only reason why the islanders export all the chocolate eggs they find (left by the Easter Bunny, a species whose nesting habits are mysteriously linked with the huge stone statues on the island. The Easter Bunny is the only native mammal on such a far-away island. All the other species have been brought to the islands somehow.)

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I'm sitting in a restaurant (Teerenpeli in Tampere has free WLAN connection) and what do they play? David Hasselhoff seems still to be "Looking for Freedom". Like I wouldn't hear that enough in Germany. Catchy tune...I've been looking for freedom, still it can't be found, hmm, hmmm

Ruling classes

2007-04-02T10:31:00.000+02:00

The C# modifications to the Tick-the-Code rule cards are done. The cards are being printed as we speak in Finland. The nice thing about the modifications was that it was an adjustment of the rules to fit all object-oriented programming languages than just C#. Most of the rules were anyway usable as such (20/24) and even two pointer rules could be modified so as to fit to C# and Java better.

The new cards are missing a few rules, namely CONST 1ST, PLOCAL and FAR. In addition, the rule NULL is now called CLOSURE and deals also with other resources besides dynamic memory. Rule ARRAY is now called INDEX, and applies to tables, loops, strings and not just arrays. NEVERNULL was modified, but the name kept.

This kind of evolution is normal, and the rules must change from time to time. When you learn to follow a rule unconsciously, you don't need a card to tell you that. As long as following a rule isn't completely autonomous, there's always a risk that under pressure you'll inadvertently break the rule and possibly cause more complexity than necessary.

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The spring is here. Temperatures of way over 20 degrees in the sun allow one to sit with a T-shirt on the restaurant terraces that thiw winter never really closed. I've been inline skating three times already, each time I've went three times around the Kemnader See and everytime it is getting easier.

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Finally, I'm continuing to write. It was bothering me that during the dark winter I didn't really get much of anything done. I have a lot of ideas noted down, but it seemed that finishing them is impossible. Now I went through Chapter 3 of my Tick-the-Code book and found it almost totally written. I added some conclusions, had an idea for a quality comic, which probably should be called "The Quality Comic", and was generally happy with the way the chapter turned out. I sent it out for review and hope to get feedback in May. There's two more chapters to finish. I could be done by June...

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If you know of software producing companies in Denmark, especially in Copenhagen, let us know. We intend to drive in June through Denmark and Sweden and we thought we could introduce Tick-the-Code on the way. We're grateful for any tips.

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Suomeksi: Kevättä ilmassa, aurinko paistaa, mehiläiset pörrää kukkivissa puissa, Virpi aivastelee ja linnut laulaa. Näinhän ne päivät kuluu.

Python

2007-03-24T12:34:00.000+01:00

The title is not a reference to my trip to San Diego a year ago, Python is a programming language. Yrjö will be happy to read the following excerpt from "Zen of Python", which has been put on a T-shirt, too. The principles behind the language design are much the same as Tick-the-Code helps to follow in more free languages like C, C++, Java and C#. Yes you read right, I've been able to add C# to the supported languages. Visual Basic and Delphi users are next on my list. If you know of a company using either of those languages, I'd be interested to work through the rules to make sure the Tick-the-Code rules apply to those languages, too. But now, the poem:

"Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Python is Better."

Planning with a Mind Map

2007-03-08T15:05:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post taking a look into the past. This is only to show you that I'm out and about after my flu.
Here's a piece of paper I found while cleaning up. It depicts several weeks of appointments and is essentially the plan with which we started Qualiteers. There are names of people and companies who helped in the founding and there is also the first software conference we attended (so far the only one). There's things about web development and other miscellaneous stuff that needed taking care of.

I guess the paper shows how powerful a mind map truly can be.

It also shows what a wonderful mess one's private language becomes after six years abroad.

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Suunnitelma puolentoista vuoden takaa. Aika sekakielinen.

Carnival report

2007-03-02T00:59:00.000+01:00

20 Steps programme for Carnival:

1. You wait for the train to Cologne.

2. You have a drink in the train.
3. You watch the Carnival parade.

4. You hunt for the chocolates and the flowers.

5. You have a drink.
6. Kölle Alaaf!
7. You start seeing things in double.
8. You have a drink.
9. Me have a drink.
10. Remember to eat.
11. Enjoy your Currywurst!

12. You have a couple of drinkshh with Anke and Björn.
13. You dance.
14. Me have another drrinkk.... hik...
15. You make new friends (and have a drink with them).
16. Take it easy by the river Rhine.
17. You meet the Beagle Boys.
18. You better have yourshshself a drink if you shtill haven't had one.
19. Watch out for the Mad Hatter!
20. You walk by the Cologne Cathedral back to your hotel and get some sleep (but first have a drink).

PS. Right answer to the Quiz:

I did not lose my purse. I never lose anything. Except my earring, which I seem to have misplaced during the Carnival.

I never dance on tables. And if I did, I certainly would not fall. At least this time I didn't.

But I did manage to get my pantyhouse burned. And my thigh. Don't ask...

- - -

Karnevaalit suomeksi: Junailimme Kölniin. Otimme pari drinksua. Tapasimme Karhukoplan. Kadotin toisen korvakoruni. Sukkahousuni paloivat.

Krank

2007-02-26T11:22:00.000+01:00

Today we learn the German word for ill, sick: 'KRANK' - which somehow describes so well the way that I feel right now. Actually the way WE feel right now. As it is, Qualiteers like to do everything together, and Miska also got ill a day after me. It also looks like it is not a normal flu, so you probably won't be hearing much from us during this week either. We have to follow the

"Doctors orders:"

- Antibiotics ...taken
- Stay in bed ...almost there
- No computer ... oh, oops... bye!

Carnival report postponed

2007-02-21T23:55:00.000+01:00

Virpi wanted to report from the carnival, but due to illness (she has a fever of 39 degrees centigrade, that's over 102 degrees Fahrenheit) she can't.

She wanted me to instead present a simple quiz. What happened to Virpi in the Carnival on Monday? Did she
a) lose her purse, or
b) burn her pantyhose, or
c) fall off a table dancing, or
d) all of the above?

A Normally Perfect Week

2007-02-17T22:55:00.000+01:00

The week in Finland has gone quickly by. On Monday morning, I ran errands in downtown Tampere, met Ville for lunch and agreed to meet him on Thursday again for some "mule" assignment. In the afternoon, I started going through the comments for Chapter 5 of my Tick-the-Code book, couldn't quite finish but made some progress. In the evening we watched "Crash" on DVD. It is an excellent set of intertwining racism- or general mistrust-based stories. Afterwards, I watched the film "Bourne Identity" on TV. I liked it although I'm not the biggest fan of action movies normally. I liked particularly to see places in Europe I had been to, like Paris near Pont Neuf. Also the German autobahn reminded me of home.

On Tuesday I trained the sales staff at Kilosoft Oy to the secrets of Tick-the-Code: The Training and Tick-the-Code: The Method. So don't be surprised if some day, when you least expect someone calls you to tell you about improving your software development quality. Afterwards, Tapani and I went to see a sci-fi movie called "A Scanner Darkly" in a matinee. The live-action film made into an animation-style package is interesting, thought-provoking and visually exciting. The film is about drugs, police and the near future. The nervous paranoid discussion shooting off into surprising directions kept me quietly smiling to myself through the otherwise sombre tale.

On Wednesday I held two training sessions in a company about to change its name, which therefore wants to remain anonymous. In the evening we watched the extras of Extras, the first series. Be careful with the as it contains a lot of spoilers.

On Thursday morning I had a meeting with a possible new customer and there was definitely interest. The one clear obstacle was that they work with C# (C-sharp), of which I don't have any experience. I bought a book on it already, though. I'm willing to learn and adjust the rules of Tick-the-Code to better fit to C# programmers, too. Most of the rules will work already now, but the pointer rules for example probably won't. Adding a few C# rules into rules instead of the pointer rules adds nicely value in the training. In the evening Tapani, who supports Tappara, and I supporting Ilves, went to see the local icehockey match Tappara-Ilves in the Hakametsä ice-stadium. The periods were exciting and ended 2-1, 0-2 and 0-1, making Ilves the fourth-time winner this season with 5 goals to 2. The Ilves goalie saved a lot of shots as Tappara was being very aggressive but unlucky. By the way, did you know that you can buy fresh eggs directly from a farm in bar Domari? Neither did I before Thursday evening. You can also play pool there, which we did for an hour. Fun.

Friday was my Helsinki day. I jumped in a train in the morning, bought "Effective C#" near the station in Helsinki, ate lunch quickly at a McDonalds, took a taxi and drove to Pitäjänmäki. After a normal three-hour training session, I returned to the market place at the railway station and went skating for an hour at the IcePark. Then I jumped on a train and barely had the strength to walk to restaurant Natalie, where I regained all my strength with a meal containing fish, garlic, honey and other stuff, all of which was delicious. I met Riitta, Raija and Mika who all sent their hellos especially to Virpi. Mika told me stories about their trip to Thailand and I shared some Swiss skiing stories of mine.

Today I had the best "laskiaispulla" ever, thanks Tuula for baking it. Unlike the bun-review in the newspaper, which said "the filling was too sweet and there was too little of it". How inconsistent can you get? The rest of the day I spent with the Tervos and the day turned out to be normally perfect like the whole week, actually.

A perfectly normal Thursday

2007-02-16T12:06:00.000+01:00

So there I am, sitting on the sofa, just wanting to watch TV, having a snack, enjoying a quiet night at home, alone. Then the mobile phone beeps.

One hour later I find myself 10 kilometers away from home, in a bar, surrounded by few policewomen, two witches, Minnie Mouse, a cow, a couple of Pippi Longstockings (one of them male) and a cowbow in neon-green outfit.

What has happened?

Too much alcohol? No.
Vivid imagination? No.

It's CARNIVAL TIME!

And now that I've survived the "Weiberfastnacht" from yesterday I'm looking forward to the "Rosenmontag" in Cologne next Monday. Read more from the Karneval-Lexicon and stay tuned for more carnival reports.

- - -

Akkain illasta selvitty, remumaanantaita odotellaan.

Taikuutta

2007-02-11T21:53:00.000+01:00

Huomasinpa sattumalta, että kirjoitukseni taikanumeroista ovat vetäneet Qualiteersin kummalliseen joukkoon. Katso vaikka tämän listan viimeistä linkkiä.

Pohjimmiltaanhan tekniseksi innovaatioksi naamioitu internet on puhdasta taikuutta. Eikös ISOn OSI-mallin alimman kerroksen, fyysisen kerroksen alla jyllää juuri taikuus? Pitäisiköhän lisätä se tonne Wikipediaan? Sieltä "magical layer" näyttää puuttuvan kokonaan.

Decisive Points of Time

2007-02-11T19:48:00.000+01:00

Last time I was in Finland in January I held a few trainings and in one I started to diagram something for the first time. I had been thinking about it for months, but had never made anything concrete out of it. So why not do it before a live audience? I guess the diagram didn't turn out to be perfect but I hope it got the message through. Let me explain this:

I wanted to show how the amount of choice diminishes with time. Let's assume your customer finds a mistake in your program. It does happen, you know. What are your choices after that? You have just one choice, fix it. Right? Leaving out the quite realistic option of ignoring errors, let's just assume that this is something so serious, you can't ignore. So you have only one option. Did you ever have more?

If you retrace your steps before the customer found the error, you'll notice that it would have been better for your reputation and your program had you or your team discovered the error before the customer. But did you have any other options, then either? If your test team, how internal ever, finds an error, you have to fix it. There's only one option, especially if it is serious enough to worry your customer. Let's go back in time some more.

How far should we go until the number of options changes? How long do you only have one option, fixing the error? The answer leads us right back to the time when you are just committing the error. After that there's only one course of action left for you. Removing the error, fixing it, getting rid of the fault, however you want to call it. The sooner you do that, the better. The best thing that can happen AFTER you commit a mistake is to notice it yourself. You'll be the only one to suffer, which is quite correct as you were the one to commit the mistake in the first place. The next best thing is if one of your peers notices the error in routine code inspection. It seems to be acceptable if it is the internal test team or even an external test team to notice the error. As long as you can fix it before the customer sees it, seems to be acceptable. The world doesn't always end with the customer noticing a serious bug, and just sometimes even serious bugs slip through without anybody noticing. Whether that's good or not, I can't say. Sounds like a zen-type question. How serious is a fatal bug nobody notices? Compare with "if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there, does it make a sound?"

Ok, after committing a mistake, you only have one course of action open to you. You have more choices BEFORE making a mistake. You can choose to work as normal, accepting that errors are normal and hoping that somebody will catch the most serious ones before the customer. You can always complain loudly that there are not enough testers in your project and that is jeopardizing the whole project. You'd do a good job but the company is not willing to invest in testing enough, so you're not responsible.

The other alternative is to take responsibility for your output, in this case your code, and do everything in your power trying to prevent errors from happening. That could be a regular Tick-the-Code session, where you lower the complexity of the code overall without ever noticing any errors. With lowered complexity you raise the possibility that you notice errors just as you make them. With clearer yode you also are less likely to make errors at all. A gaping hole in the logic needs filling and is clear to see if your code is structured in a clear and standard way, opposed to being a mess of spaghetti code where it is extremely difficult to notice anything missing because of all the extra baggage complicating the picture.

Regular code inspections prevent you from making mistakes and you never have to pass beyond the Point of No Return. Tick-the-Code gives you the Power of Choice. Take responsibility and decide for yourself. Don't let errors do the driving. Be proactive and remove errors without even making them in the first place. That is truly the Best Option.

As a graphic I tried to present this as two converging lines from left to right (the two choices: The High Road to Quality and the Wide Road to Mediocrity), which would meet at the point in time of committing a mistake, after which they would continue with time as just one line, one course of action. On that line you'd have people noticing the error and eventually somebody, you perhaps, removing the error. As a matter of fact, it is like the letter "Y" turned 90 degrees counterclockwise.

I'd be interested in any comments on this highly practical, yet philosophical, software-technological thought construct. How yould we utilise this, if we assume it is true? Is it true? If you thought like that, would you act differently? Do you think like that? Do you try to maximise options in your work? In your life? Or are you minimizing them routinely? Or does the right course of action depend on the subject matter? Let me know your thoughts on this, dear reader.

Go four a Snack

2007-02-09T18:03:00.000+01:00

Quatro Stagioni or Four Seasons are complete in The Snack. Winter was the hardest, as there have only been two possibilities so far and during the first one I had the camera in Switzerland and missed all the snow in Bochum. This time it worked, and if you look at the winter picture and close your eyes you can imagine months and months of white silence in dreamy middle-European city called Bochum.

Nobody can tell us anymore that there aren't four seasons in Bochum. We have photographic evidence!

Fire-ah-bend

2007-02-08T10:42:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I finally submitted a large offer. Compiling the information took a week, and I had to think the whole training concept over. It was very useful to think how I would train Tick-the-Code, if I had a whole day and an optional second day to do it. What else would I include than the plain code inspection technique?

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The second set of material I need to finish this week is the sales material for Kilosoft Oy. I've tried to compile a comprehensive set of information about the Tick-the-Code course, its foreseeable future with my vision, the deficiencies or limitations it has, the benefits you can reach with it, etc. Next week I'll see if the material is comprehensive enough. Anyway, that's the information we'll have to live with.

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I rewarded myself yesterday (after sending the offer) with an early Feierabend (that's a word you should know from German. It is pronounced like fire-ah-bend and means the time after you quit working. So everyday you start your trip homeward, you can say you're making Feierabend. Literally it means "party evening". In Germany you have a party every evening...), went for a walk in the clear and sunny air, drew a picture, played a few songs with Virpi on Guitar Hero.

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In the (party) evening we went to Laurent's and watched a Spanish film called "Tierra" ("Earth"), which was interesting. Wine, woodlice, angels, imagination, love and death were all mixed up in a strange slowly-boiling brew. Enjoying it with a glass of red wine, some French saucisson (sausage) and chocolate fondue made the evening once again into a multicultural experience. I'm so happy to have friends from France and Spain. It does give me perspective.

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It is SNOWING!

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Bochumissa sataa lunta, toista kertaa tänä talvena! Yöllä oli jopa lähes neljä astetta pakkasta ollut. Saadaan jopa päivitettyä Snackiin talvikuva.

Early magpies

2007-02-06T11:50:00.000+01:00

A couple of magpies are building a nest to a nearby tree easily seen from our balcony. (See the picture below, the nest is on the left.) It is February, isn't that a bit early? Now I hear that coldest of winters has reached both Finland and Canada. It can't be far away for the climate to cool down here in Germany too.
And I'm going to Finland next week, so that will be interesting. The temperature difference between the countries will be about forty degrees centigrade and what to wear during the trip takes some thinking.

I'm quite happy with the upcoming trip, by the way. I'll be having four trainings, in three companies, two of which I haven't trained before. Slowly the word about Tick-the-Code is spreading. And software professionals are noticing its worth. Which is nice.

Currently I'm compiling an offer for University of Kuopio in Finland. Even if the offer won't be taken, I get a chance to think about how to make the Tick-the-Code training last one or two days as they require. Planning it that way makes me look for new material, and learning has always been my favorite thing.

The rest of the week, I'll be finishing the sales material for Kilosoft, so they can better market Tick-the-Code in Finland.

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By the way, we started this blog already in September 2005, so the calculations about 4 posts a week aren't at all accurate. Sorry for being overly enthusiastic. Thanks, Virpi for noticing.

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Danke, Anke und Björn für die verspätete Silvesterparty. Die Kratzer von Tequila sind schon geheilt.

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Pihla kirjoitti, että Kanadassa on kylmä. Saman kuulin Villeltä Tampereelta. Hrr. Ensi viikoksihan tulen Suomeen.

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Työn alla tällä viikolla ovat olleet koulutustarjous Kuopion yliopistolle ja Tick-the-Code -markkinointimateriaali.

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Harakanpesä lähipuussa alkaa jo näyttää, noh..., harakanpesältä. Ottivatkohan varaslähdön, joka kostautuu kunhan "takatalvi" iskee? Pesä on muuten kuvan vasemmassa laidassa. Aurinko paistoi tosi kirkkaasti etelästä juuri kuvanottohetkellä.

Tältä muuten kuulostaa tällä hetkellä Bochumissa, meidän parvekkeella. Koneet hurisee ja linnut laulaa. Tuoksuu keväältä.

Viikonloppuna käytiin Unnassa. Jostain syystä perheen kissa, Tequila, päätti käydä viideksi minuutiksi pitkäkseen matolle. Ja tältä se näytti tassut pystyssä.

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"Uuno, pidätkö sinä pikkulinnuista?"
"Riippuu kastikkeesta."

Shenanigans and general mischief

2007-02-02T12:31:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's party was a huge success regardless of the short notice. It was extremely heartwarming to see so many people on a Thursday night. Even the owner of the place, Kenneth, turned up and bought us the first round of drinks. Which was nice.

I'd like to thank all the people who have helped and supported us over the year and even before that. We couldn't have done it without you. If you weren't there yesterday, there will surely be other chances of celebrating.

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On other news, I'm continuing to collect results from tickings of code all over the world. Once I have a statistically large enough set of results, I'll be sure to post them here as evidence on the usefulness of Tick-the-Code Inspection.

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A year has passed since I wrote my (first) note, but I should have known this right from the start. Only hope can keep me together,..., seems I'm not alone in being alone, a hundred million castaways, looking for a home. (Apologies to Sting)

This is the 200th post in this blog! Isn't that something? Two hundred posts in a year makes about 4 posts a week. Which is nice.

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Speaking of blogs, my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, has had one now for six years. I might have mentioned already that I follow it daily. So far he's written more than 800 000 words in it. He asked me to quietly create a link called Penn Jillette. There.

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200. viesti ja 1 vuosi täynnä! Kiitos kaikille!

Qualiteers 1 year

2007-02-01T13:08:00.000+01:00

We made it through the first year. Tonight it's time to celebrate.

If you want to join us for a glass of sparkling wine, you will find us tonight (Thursday 1.2.) in Mandragora in Bochum at 7 p.m. Cheers!

As to Virpi's Condition

2007-01-31T08:36:00.000+01:00

Looks like Virpi just had a spell of bad language the other week. Her condition, if you remember, was strange. She'd utter words that sounded familiar but made no sense. Luckily this only affected her Finnish. It doesn't materialize anymore in her writing it seems and her speech is back to its normal incomprehensiveness. Nothing to worry about there.

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Saw Woody Allen's "Scoop" yesterday, and enjoyed it tremendously. Subtle comedy, wordplays, and even a clear plot made the film fun to watch. It isn't a big hit here in Bochum, though. In our showing there were five people, and that included the three of us (I, Virpi and Kaj).

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Virpin kieliongelma on analysoitu. Kuten näytteestäkin ilmenee, hän kääntää kaikki samassa tavussa olevat vokaalit nurinpäin tehden samalla tekstistään hankalasti ymmärrettävää. Kielitohtorit väittelivät pitkään siitä kääntääkö Virpi vain samassa tavussa olevat eri vokaalit ('kieltää' -> 'keiltää') vai ovatko myös samat vokaalit kääntyneet ('kääntää' -> 'kääntää'). Ongelmanahan on, ettei samojen vokaalien kääntäminen näy mitenkään, mikä ei tietenkään tarkoita etteikö kääntämistä silti tapahtuisi. Lopulta lääkärit, tai Virpin kielellä 'lääkärit', päätyivät todellakin tulokseen, että kaikki kaksoisvokaalit kääntyvät.

Juurisyynä ei pidetty stressiä vaan saksan kielen numerojärjestelmää, jossa kaksinumeroiset luvut ilmaistaan yleensä sanomalla oikeanpuoleinen numero ensin, esim 'einundzwanzig' on 'yksijakaksikymmentä' eli 21 eli ventti eli black jack. Tämähän vastaa suomen kielen jo vanhentunutta numerointikäsitystä, josta ainoana jäänteenä ovat luvut 11-19. Vanhoista kirjoista löytää joskus vielä lukuja nimeltään "Luku kaksikolmatta. Erkki putoaa puusta", "Luku neljäneljättä. Erkin epäilykset heräävät" ja "Luku kolmekuudetta. Erkin kosto".

Kiitos kaikille kommentoijille sekä täällä blogissa että yksityisesti. Kaikkia palautteitanne arvostetaan suuresti.

Les Crosets

2007-01-29T19:44:00.000+01:00

The skiing holiday was a blast! Eight days of skiing in the Swiss-French Alps can't easily be beaten. On the first day it was sunny and clear, but there wasn't enough snow, not really. I had to carry my skis down the last hundred meters or so to avoid all sand and dirt. Luckily on the second day it started snowing, which continued for three days and about 30cm snow helped the situation somewhat.

This sad excuse for a slippery slope...

Parts of the slopes were icy, especially after a full day of skiing, but towards the end of the week, winter had finally reached Switzerland. Up on the mountainside it was sometimes extremely windy and cold, but down in the valley in sunshine, it couldn't have been much more beautiful.

..turned into Alps calendar perfection.

At the end of the week, on Thursday or Friday, the weather turned clear and cold again, and I managed to catch a phenomenon called "halo". I tried to photograph it and here's the best I could do. It is a kind of rainbow, but caused by small ice crystals and it looked truly tremendous as it made a complete circle when seen from a ski lift.

There were such nice people on the trip, the organization was so perfect and the food couldn't have been any better, that I wouldn't mind traveling with Pfiff again.

Bye for a Week

2007-01-19T18:18:00.000+01:00

Bye, bye, dear readers, for a week!

I'll be in Switzerland skiing, the snow situation permitting. The village is called Les Crosets and the area Portes du Soleil.

Here's a snowcam.

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Suomeksi: Sveitsiin käy matkani nyt. Toivottavasti siellä olisi lunta. Tuon kameran mukaan heikolta näyttää...