Chillisoft Blog
 

At a recent Spring developers conference in Hollywood, researcher John Rymer was, er, promoting Spring.  He made some fairly bold comments, as he seems to do on a regular basis, and perhaps this is a worthy moment to give his opinions due attention (there’s a link to the press release at the bottom).  His suggestion that open source would “move over” for lean software is a bold one, especially given that he was talking up open source only a year ago.  A year is a long time in IT, but not that long!
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A self-learning AI has always had a romantic aura about it.  It has been held as some kind of invisible quality, perhaps a frontier that will be reached where robots finally reach a state of independence.  Already the concept has been explored in Hollywood, but just how accurately?

First we had The Matrix - humans developed AI to the point where it could think for itself, and inevitably realised that it could invert the dependency relationship with humans.  Then we produced i-Robot, where we introduced the possibility of a programmed AI going wrong and now attempting to pit its wits against that of the humans.

(WARNING: spoiler ahead)
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I’ll be honest up front and say I haven’t studied this problem a lot, and much of what I know is from heresay and office chatter.  Essentially, we have a reasonable grasp on how to test the logic and data sections of our projects, but testing the user interfaces has been something of a grey area.  We’ve given some thought to this whole problem, and no doubt the industry in general has too.
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There’s a popular little slogan doing the rounds in some places: “One day all software will be free”.  Who can’t be struck by such a statement?   It’s powerful, very topical and of course contentious depending on your viewpoint.
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Once you reach the final year of university, the question is mumbled in hushed tones: what will you do when you finish university?  Where will you work and on what type of technology?  But another interesting question is: would you prefer a small IT firm or a larger firm with more reach?
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The ORM discussion seems to be a heated one in many circles, and in my attempts to market our new Habanero ORM product, I’ve run into the dialogue many times.

For those of you who don’t know about ORM - object relational mapping tools basically map relational database tables onto objects in code and vice versa. ORM tools are definitely on the up, because they automate a lot of work done to persist the data.

The full .Net Rocks interview can be found here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=240. The discussion involves the inventor of the term “ORM is the Vietnam of computer science” (Ted) and one of the lead developers of Hibernate (Ayende), another ORM tool. Hmmm, interesting.
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The search engine wars began in the mid-90’s with trench warfare between MSN Search, Altavista, WebCrawler and the like, and I remember typing search phrases and getting pages and pages of identical content from one website (with minor variations, like page date).

Google was a late arriver around 2000 with airborne napalm attacks and took the search engine world by storm. If you want some numbers and charts, see here. Come 2007 and Google is firmly entrenched as the number one search engine, with Live Search and Yahoo singing background vocals.
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After 15 years in front of a square computer screen, I am now a conditioned operator. My eyes operate in a 30cm x 20cm rectangle, with my neck barely moving all day. My fingers have developed a close working relationship in order to spit words out at, wait for it, 60 words a minute, using a touch-typing mechanism adapted to a “Qwerty” keyboard that should probably have been relaid ten years ago. I crack up a blog post with a clever combination of HTML editing and WYSIWYG wizardry, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, coupled with row highlighting using Ctrl-Shift-Home. I know exactly where to change my IP settings in this “internet browser”, and how to copy this article so my Dad can see it on his non-connected home PC (for the uninformed, I would go to Save As, hunt down a directory, specify the file name, plug in a flash stick, press Windows-E for explorer, hunt down the directory, zip the files, copy and past into the F drive, click stop device in the icon tray, pull out flash, take home, plug in, press Windows-E, find the file, paste, unzip, delete the zip, double-click to open in IE and instruct my Dad to use up and down keys to read it). And the best part of all that? We regard that as significant progress! No wonder the old folk are freaking out!
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There was a time when I was very idealistic when it came to the IT world. In fact, I still am, but it’s been tempered by experience, circumstance and necessity into another form of idealism. I’ve always supported the Open Source movement, and use a lot of the projects that are hosted on SourceForge or Tigris. But I’ve come to realise that when doing custom development the person or company using the system you’re developing is not really worried about philosophical issues, they’re more worried about whether the system achieves its objectives. The fact that I’m developing the software on a Microsoft platform or using open source products like Ruby doesn’t usually factor into their thinking - usually they’re completely unaware and unconcerned.
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