Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code

Since I've spent quite a bit of time at JPL, some of it doing formal specification and verification, this article in the latest IEEE Computer caught my eye.

It's a short essay giving ten "rules" for safety critical software development. Some of it reminds me of cleanroom software engineering (with the exception of Rule 10 :)

UC bad news, whale good news

Two unrelated things:

The chancellor (many universities would call it "president") of the University of California, Santa Cruz jumped to her death. What do you think of the excerpt below from the local newspaper article?

But many have said Denton was unhappy at UCSC, reported John Wilkes, recently retired director of the Science Communication Program.

"No one could say quite why — it was just a bad fit," he said. "She might have been unused to dealing with people outside of science and engineering, because she never had to deal with them before."

How does a UC campus choose a chancellor? UC Merced is losing both their founding chancellor and provost. Here is a brief description of the chancellor-selection process. Also, UC Merced is losing their provost (to become president of UNLV!) 1 July.

I previously posted about UC woes.

Changing subjects completely, adding to my previous postings about whales, here is a video of a whale examining some underwater equipment. But where was the underwater equipment? That video says Perth, while a rival YouTube site says Galveston, Texas :)

Big Island coastline

I previously posted a link to images of the entire California coastline. Now someone has done the same thing for the Big Island of Hawaii. You can read an article from the Star Bulletin, or go directly to the photographer's page.

It's a little annoying since you need to click on either "Aerial Photographs" or "every square inch of coastline". But after you pick a spot to start, you can go forward and back just like the California coastline website.

I like this quote from the article:

Powers flew his single-engine Piper Cherokee 160 at 500 feet, holding his Nikon D100 camera out the window and firing off pictures of the nearly 300 miles of coastline.

"It took some practice. You have to do two things really well: You have to be able to take good photos and be a good pilot," Powers said. "You can't focus too much on either one."

If you are, say, going to attend a fascinating workshop on IT planning at HICSS in January, you might want to stay at the conference hotel. You can see it by clicking on "Waikoloa Resort" on the Big Island map.

Picturephones

The one-page FastCompany article about picturephones that I mentioned earlier is now available.

A soccer ball with curves

Baseball isn't the only game with curve balls (see my previous posts here and there). The new soccer ball is driving World Cup goalkeepers crazy.

Speaking of science, why does your favorite football (not soccer) coach make decisions unsupported by the data? Have the coach read this :) Speaking of stats, Malc recently blogged about NBA statistics and the "worth" of players.

My three-time alma mater, the University of California

The University of California is getting some unflattering press lately, first about compensation for executives, then the ethnicity of UCLA's entering class, and now disappointing news of UC Merced's enrollment. I've maintained that the regents made the wrong choice for the UCM site. This quote from the completelrdp.pdf document on http://www.ucmercedplanning.net is interesting:

The selection of the Lake Yosemite site came after a review of more than 85 sites in the San Joaquin Valley. Finalist sites were in Merced, Madera and Fresno Counties. Among the criteria leading to the final selection were available housing, commercial services and cultural amenities, as well as access to metropolitan areas, community support, availability of water, and an estimation of environmental effects associated with the site. The site proposed in Merced County also had the significant advantage of being owned by the Virginia Smith Trust, which funds higher education scholarships for local high school graduates.

Never underestimate free land!

In any case, an editorial in today's Fresno Bee about UC Merced's enrollment problems talks about how UCM needs to be more fun :)

Telecommuting cutback

Is HP swimming upstream by cutting back on telecommuting? An interesting quote from a San Jose Mercury News article:

But one of HP's former IT managers, who left the company in October, said a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements and could be heard washing dishes or admitted to driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates.

So far, Fresno State's almost 10 year old telecommuting policy continues.

Ambient interfaces

This article in today's Fresno Bee describes how PG&E is giving "energy orbs" to major users. The orbs change color color based on energy demand (i.e., shortages).

I talk about ambient interfaces like the energy orb when I teach HCI (CSci 291T at Fresno State and ICS 664 at the University of Hawaii). My favorite is the ambient pinwheel: the more unread email messages, the fast the pinwheel spins. If you are running OS X you can get a similar dashboard widget that represents your unread emails by the number of flowers in your virtual vase.

The first commercial ambient interfaces I remember seeing were from Ambient Devices. You can see a fuzzy picture and read a paragraph about the ambient pinwheel at this archived web page.

Telephone usability

I think an easy-to-use cellphone with big buttons would be a great. Check out this short article from CNN.com about cellphone usability and how Sprint Nextel does usabiltiy testing.

If you have hardcopy of the June 2006 FastCompany magazine, page 42 is about how picturephones introduced in 1964 never made it big (although iChat might change that :) Here's a quote from the director of customer research at AT&T Labs:

Around 1971, I surveyed 173 executives in the Chicago area ... The bottom line was, there were virtually no business situations for which the picturephone was best.

To read the article online, you can enter the access code found on page 10 of the June hardcopy issue, or wait until next month and read it in the free archives.

Malc watch update

Malcolm Gladwell was on CSPAN's Q&A show last weekend. You can watch it or eventually read the transcript. In the beginning of the interview he talks about his mixed-race family growing up in the Mennonite hotbed of Elmira, Ontario Canada.

Also, the New Yorker posted audio of a February 2007 talk Malc gave about "prodigies and late bloomers".

IT, stress, and training

A survey of IT professionals sponsored by Skillsoft is getting some press. Although most people are pointing out that IT support is the "most stressful occupation" (you can check out the top ten list), I noticed the following about training:

Kevin Young, managing director of SkillSoft says: “Our research was sparked by a recent Gartner report which claims that the untrained or under-trained desktop user will cost an organisation five times more to support than a well-trained worker. This led us to thinking about how much pressure this must also put on the IT professionals who have to provide such support.

Other things in the study remind me of what McConnell says in Rapid Development about what makes software developers nuts (see the middle of one of my previous posts): number one on the SlillSoft "Top Ten Colleague Irritations" at the end ot the article is "seeing others not pulling their weight" :)

videoconferencing & desktop sharing

We've been looking at systems for real-time videoconferencing, and even cross-platform desktop and app sharing. Here are some links:

• Marratech (commercial system).
  
• Elluminate (commercial system, cross-platform app sharing!)
  
• iVocalize (commercial, but inexpensive). It looks like a work-in-progress, but the TLT Group likes it and uses it.
  
• ePresence (open source, but I'm not sure if it works on Macs)
  
• and if you only have a few Mac people to talk with, iChat AV is amazing. Using Trillian I think you can even iChat with your PC colleagues.
  

In November, InternetWeek had a review of five web conferncing systems, and last month Network Computing had a good article "TechU: The World is Our Campus" where they graded nine web conferncing systems.

OK OK

The web page for the basketball video isn't very well organized, so here is the direct link to the video to watch:

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

I accept the challenge!

At a faculty end-of-semester reception today, a colleague from the philosophy department challened me to find a video he saw in a cognitive science talk.

Most people remember seeing the video featured on Dateline NBC.

Here's the easiest way to experience it:

• Go to http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dateline.html
  
• Scroll down to "view the basketball video" and do what it says.
  
• after watching the video and counting the number of times the team dressed in white passes the basketball, go back to the first page and click on "learn more about inattention blindness" :)
  

Does computer science need a Feynman or Sagan?

A few postings ago I gave links to data about CSci enrollments.

It's a hot topic: a recent article in Business Week, an interview of six CSci profs in Computer World, and Grady Booch's response on his blog.

It's deja vu all over again

The physics of baseball must be a hot topic right now -- it's not just me blogging about it.

So you still don't believe the whole airfoil thing

Here's a collection of interesting information -- including a reference to the Raskin article -- about how wings work or don't work. I never bought the whole "air flowing over the top has to go faster to meet up at the back of the wing" explanation, so it's nice to see alternative explanations.

For extra credit, find a little league baseball player, and without using math, describe why curve balls drop and fast balls rise.

Flying is probably stranger than you think

Everyone's heard about why airplane wings are flat-on-the-bottom-and-curved-on-top, but actually things are much weirder when it comes to generating lift.

Check out these ground effect airplanes that don't fly very high but can lift tons (literally).

And besides, the reason that you were probably told about why airfoils work was probably wrong. At least according to Jef Raskin.

In his article, Raskin mentions a famous book called The Physics of Baseball. You can see more information here.

A whale story where no one blows up or sprains an ankle

I am revisting one of my frequent topics: whales and more whales and, yes, more whales.

This time, an urban legend that is apparently true! And everyone survived!

The May/June 2006 issue of Sierra has an "interview with a whale" conducted in the channel between Lanai and Maui, but the online version doesn't have the pictures included in the hardcopy version.

Last day of CSEE&T

The last day of CSEE&T started with a keynote by Lynda Northrop from the SEI. One of her points was that we aren't educated and trained in software architecture as we should be. Too much code, too little architecture. Also, that maybe functionality shouldn't be the driving force when it comes to devising a software architecture (at least that is my interpretation of what she said). She noted that every system has an architecture, intentionally or not, and that in general you can't just refactor code (i.e. XP-style) into an architecture. Here's the SEI software architecture group.

I'm also in a workshop on "Intellectual property law for software engineers". The workshop leader recommnded some basic documents on software intellectual property that look pretty good. Also, here is a short article about the state of software patents at the USPO.

One more thing I learned from CSEE&T: a couple of people said that they are seeing companies move away from agile methods and back to traditional waterfall models of development (and associated documentation) because of the Sarbanes-Oxley act I wrote about in the last paragraph of this blog entry.