I've started a new project on CodePlex, called Reggie, and posted the initial working source code. Reggie's goal is to be a simple developer tool for writing and testing Regular Expressions. It is inspired by the venerable Regulator tool and will be created in WPF using the MVVM pattern.

In the chapter titled "Plan the System for Change," Dr. Brooks again lays out the foundations for Agile software development. His was an era of dumb-terminals and highly scheduled availability. And yet, here he is saying, "plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." When RAM wasn't cheap, and good programmers even more rare than today, how does a project manager or architect justify throwing out the first design on purpose? By recognizing that "[t]he only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers."

Overclocked, Stories of the Future Present, is worth buying. But you don't have to, thanks to the fact that Doctorow made it available under a Creative Commons license, and you can download it for free. These are incredible short stories, standing up with the best of Bradbury and Gaiman (my favorite short story authors). When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth was gut-wrenching, at least for this former sysadmin. I, Row Boat manages to beguile and frighten you at the same time. What's more frightening than an angry, conscious, coral reef? Pared up with a row boat working through existentialism? Print Crime is a beautiful call to the indomitability of the human spirit, and Anda's Game is all kinds of biting and insightful commentary wrapped up in the thrill of virtual victory. I, Robot and After the Seige round out the brilliant set of stories.

Many of the recommendations Dr. Brooks makes in this work can seem outdated at first glance; however, it does not take much to bring them into today's software development environments. Take the telephone log for example:

"One useful mechanism is a telephone log kept by the architect. In it he records every question and every answer. Each week the logs of the several architects are concatenated, reproduced, and distributed to the users and implementers. While this mechanism is quite informal, it is both quick and comprehensive." (p69)

Aside from being a fascinating inside-look at some of the challenges faced by the mainframe programmers of the sixties, The Mythical Man-Month presents many lessons-learned that are no less applicable today. This is the second article in a series exploring some of these lessons, in particular: conceptual integrity.

We ran out of regular coffee, hence drinking instant this morning (Pampa brand from Mexico). The smell of this brand takes me back to Haifa, where I went on Pilgrimage a year ago. The B&B we stayed in had an electric kettle and kept us well-stocked with packages of instant coffee. On mornings where we had to get moving before the cafe downstairs opened, that was my wake-up.

When last I worked with C++, it was while working on my master's thesis ten years ago, using a basic text editor in a Red Hat Linux 5.0 installation. A new task in front of me: replace a Reporting Services report, which was exporting to CSV, with a new solution that will allow me to create multiple files, with max 150,000 records each. The first challenge is speed: with that many records, only bulk copy will be reasonable. The second is splitting the file. I thought about calling BCP from a C# process, because unfortunately managed code only offers bulk loading into a SQL Server database, not from database to file. But C++ is another story, thanks to the Bulk Copy Driver Extensions made available by Microsoft. So, time for a C# developer to brush up on C++, and learn it the Visual Studio way!

Dr. Brooks is my new… well, I can't think of an appropriate noun. Certainly not a deity. One book does not make him a favorite tech author. Static text cannot make him a mentor. Maybe tech hero?

This is a strange sort of spring we're having. And a small part of me died a little death watching the new Lorax trailer this morning.

This year's drought (new link; SF 2025) has brought the stark reality of water availability front-and-center in Texas. The state has faced droughts before — but by all accounts, this is one of the most severe, and the population continues to expand rapidly. Water is not entirely taken for granted in this state, especially in central and west Texas, but this year's experience seems to have struck home for people in a profound way. Even as we have begun to get some sporadic rain, the talk of stage 4 water rationing continues. And yet there are also stories of people flouting the rules, watering away in their yards. I wish I could accompany those folks on a visit out to John Bunker Sands Wetlands Center.