Take into account yesterday. I wandered through Chapters here in town and immediately saw 4 books I wanted to buy. I had to restrain myself, but in the end bought 2 anyway. Sigh.

The problem I have is one of space. At the moment I still have some room for books, but that will end. And I doubt I can convince my wife to allow me to have yet another room filled with bookcases. So, I have to come up with a solution and the Kindle is a major part of that solution.

Instead of always buying physical books I have decided to separate my reading into three types of books: pleasure, work, and interest. The first can be purchased via the Kindle and read at leisure. The second can also be purchased via the Kindle, but at times I may want a physical copy but it will stay at the office should I do so. The third are those books I figure I will re-read in future, and primarily are history, cultural, biographical, economic, etc. style books. For a taste of the types of books I mean for that third category I include such tomes as God’s War, Guns, Germs and Steel, Hitler 1889 to 1936: Hubris and its companion Hitler 1937 to 1945: Nemesis, Fire in the Valley, Rise of the West, Augustine, God’s Battalions, The Victory of Reason, Fumbling the Future, Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson, The Black Swan, Lost to the West, etc. All of which I strongly recommend as fantastic reads.

But for the myriad other books, like mysteries, SF novels, general interest, etc. I find the Kindle will save me a lot of space. How much? I don’t know since I’m stuck with my current collection unless I opt to repurchase them, something I loathe to do.

In fact, I’d love to be able to replace a slew of the books I currently own with digital copies. Perhaps selling them used and then buying a digital copy might be in order. Some people with similar problems have opted for drastic measures. I don’t know if I can bring myself to go to such extremes. It just rings too much of Books on Fire, the thoughts of which sicken me even if I do know there’s no comparison to what transpired in the past by nearsighted and stupid people.

I am a bit irritated that there’s no easy way to swap a book for a digital version. CDs were wonderful in that you could rip them onto your hard disk, but books are an altogether other matter. I’m sure I could scour the Internet for PDFs but I just don’t have the time nor inclination. I want convenience, and spending hours looking isn’t in my current makeup.

So I’ll do this going forward and I’ll see what happens. Part of my decision has resulted in my giving away to libraries, hospitals and friends hundreds of books already. And in that way they find a good home. And should I desire to read one of those books again, I can always borrow it from the library or get a digital version via the Kindle or iBook stores.

It all boils down to the difference of putting the onus on the developer to make the software as easy and intuitive as possible versus making the poor end-user jump through hoops to get anything accomplished. It’s the notion that whatever is done should be as easy as possible for the programmer to code as opposed to making sure the end-product is something that doesn’t aggravate, confuse, or otherwise enrage the end-user.

Cooper further states that software should just be “good enough”. This is a common refrain today, but a few years ago was rather heady stuff. I’ve long believed “good enough” would solve a lot of our troubles but most people in high-tech are perfectionists who spend an infinite amount of time honing their craft and their software to such an extent that it either never gets out or when it does get out is rather useless.

In this way Cooper is also proclaiming that Agile and similar RAD-like development methodologies are the way to go. Build something that accomplishes something useful and then get it out there. Then refine the solution incrementally, meeting the needs of users as they voice them. This is also the message you get from folks at 37signals, which they document in their book Rework. I’m planning on reviewing that book soon.

The point of this review is to actually comment on the fact that software is unnecessarily complex. That everything about software is unnecessarily complex. It’s as if all the lessons learned in the 60s and 70s, especially with Unix, have been forgotten. The attempt to make software simper to use, APIs simpler to call, etc. seems to have been lost in some kind of odd frenzy to make software complex for the sake of complexity — or to prove to the world that it’s hard. It’s all rather stupid. Software in and of itself is hard and complex. We don’t need to add complexity to it ourselves. That just makes it harder to get anything done. I look at languages like Java and wonder what in the world were the designers thinking? You can read an excellent lament about the state of programming by Rob Pike who has gone on to develop Go. Now, I’m not that fond of Go because I think it’s a throwback style language, but at least he’s voiced the lament. It’s all gotten to complex, too cumbersome, too slow, etc. It’s all stupidly complex. To the point that writing even the simplest of programmers in some of the “modern” languages takes so long it just frustrates old guys like me to the point I’d rather never program computers again!

And there’s no justifiable reason for any of this. Every aspect of development should focus on making things easier. And, no, I’m not talking about IDEs which I think just spawn complexity and obfuscate how things are done. They provide what appears to be an easier environment within which to code but I’ve come to think they actually only make lazy programmers who know more about cutting and pasting and less about true programming.

Thus Cooper talks about how bad things are and highlights this by showing programmers who go to extreme lengths to make something when a perfectly good enough solution is or was available.

I would argue this inability to comprehend “good enough” is what makes the early reviewers of the iPod condemn it because it only had a couple of buttons. There is this love of complexity that permeates many geeks/nerds/techies, so much so that they believe everyone is similar to themselves, interested in complexity and in love with the computer. Instead, Cooper aptly points out, most use computers as a tool. Making the use of that tool unnecessarily complex or over complicating development of extensions for a given tool or environment is simply silly.

Now, Cooper doesn’t always say do whatever makes the user do the least steps. He’s also aware that sometimes it’s just easier to have the user do something again, and provides an excellent example of a scanner he worked on. The “cool” solution would have been to write a lot of software to adjust for a misaligned page. The easy solution was to just have the user put it through the scanner again. I look over at my Fujitsu ScanSnap and realize that whoever designed that was thinking about the end user. It’s fast and if something screws up, well, it’s fast and it’s not a big deal to send it through again. I’ve been able to use the ScanSnap to rid myself of a lot of paper and I continue to use it to rid myself of paper and that’s a very good thing.

I do know that some of the reviews comment on Cooper’s ego or arrogant attitude. I didn’t find it that way at all. I found it to be a frustrated commentary. When he wonders why a program shows you menu items that you cannot use he states it because it makes no sense to show features that aren’t available. Or when he comments on providing users with more choice than they’re currently comfortable with, you quickly realize that a better way might well be to have levels of capability wherein the user slowly adds functionality as he or she gains confidence. This is similar to how many games operate. The games are simpler at the beginner levels, even supplying hand holding, but as the user ups the complexity the games become more complex and the user has to rely on their wits. Same should hold with software. When you’re just learning it, providing the ability to do something useful and therefore quickly see the value of the software is beneficial to both the vendor and the end-user. And as the user becomes more adept more features should become available.

I recommend anyone who works in software in any capacity to read this book. I’ve also recommended this book to end-users and executives so they better understand what they should be asking for, instead of defining requirements which read more like implementation details they can instead focus on what their true problem is and therefore are more likely to get a solution that resolves that problem.

The basic question behind the book is simple: What’s causing the so-called “Obesity Epidemic”. Whether you believe in the epidemic or not is immaterial. We all know that way too many people are struggling with huge weight issues. And the usual methods of staying slim don’t seem to work — more on that when I finish Good Calories, Bad Calories.

In the book Dr. Kessler examines what we’d consider “normal” food — i.e., the stuff nature produces — vs. the food we often consume from restaurants, processed food sections of supermarkets, etc. He determines that it isn’t fat that makes us fat. And that’s something that’s been pretty obvious to researchers for years — who can actually eat a sufficient quantity of fat? I mean, really? It’s impossible, our system simple gets disgusted once it’s been sated. But carbs are another matter, you can eat a lot of carbs. But even just carbs won’t sufficiently fatten a person up, not normally. To really get people huge seems to require a double or triple barreled approach of either fat and sugar or fat and sugar and salt. He describes this approach as creating hyper-palatable foods.

Dr. Kessler describes how the food industry, in whatever guise, has discovered that you can create awesome calorie carriers by combining fat and sugar  and occasionally salt. He points at the grilled cheese sandwich as such a simple, common delivery system for fat and carbs and salt. But the food industry has gone way beyond that. He points out processed foods that were built up over years from things that are extremely palatable — fat makes things taste better — to food that is, to put it most bluntly as Dr. Kessler does in his book, effectively predigested.

Now, some may start to gag at the thought that some of the food they’re eating is effectively predigested, but that is indeed the goal of some in the food industry. And it makes sense. How fast can someone deliver the calories in an effective package that won’t keep folks hanging around chewing. Thus, finely chopping the pieces and providing it in an easily consumable format can result in a “food” that requires next to no chewing, is highly flavourful because of the carbs, salt and fat and is calorie dense. In one instance Dr. Kessler points out a concoction that is a deep-fried burrito with a filling that has been highly processed so as to effectively require no chewing. The deep fried outer layer, he points out, is to keep the thing together in a solid piece until it’s consumed. And I’ve seen this exact food at O’Hare. To my Canadian eyes it looked disgusting and so I went for something more normal, a burger, but when I read that that “burrito” might have up to 5000 calories I nearly fell off my chair! That’s twice the daily amount of calories most people need! No wonder some people are fattening up so much. Eat a few of those a week and you’ll gain weight no matter who your are.

It also got me thinking about other things I noticed in the US on a recent trip. The portions were huge, which is something Dr. Kessler discusses in his book, too. I’ve always lamented the size of the portions because it seems like such a waste of food. But then, I’ve seen some people actually inhale those large portions. I recall my recent trip to Hawaii when I went to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. I ordered a seafood gumbo and it was massive. I ended up eating it across three days! I was very glad I didn’t order an appetizer and having a dessert was out of the question. My daughter’s meal was similarly huge, and it took her 4 days to fully consume. But at the table next to us was a massive family. They each ordered an appetizer, which was about the size of a main course here in Canada. They then consumed their main courses followed by dessert. I heard the father pronounce that he has no idea why he’s getting so fat. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he probably ate the necessary caloric intake for his whole family by himself that night, probably more.

And it doesn’t help that plates are so huge. Nor does it help that we were taught by our parents to finish everything on our plates as kids. I remember us Boomers being told to finish everything off as there are starving kids in Africa. Dr. Kessler similarly points out that this hasn’t helped, especially as portion sizes have increased.

Overall, a fascinating book. It gets a bit slow in spots but the main focus, that high calorie delivery systems that are hyper palatable are being created and disseminated within restaurants and grocery stores means it requires diligence. To further show how much diligence, a colleague of mine at work pointed out that on his recent trip to Florida he was shocked by the sugar content in yogurt. To me, the only true yogurts are the “high fat” ones — i.e., the way yogurt is supposed to be made. In Florida, a lot of the yogurt he found was high in sugar, up to 25g in a small serving. It was incredible. I pointed out that at that size it had more sugar than a soft drink. For this lunacy I blame the “low fat” crowd who think that it’s fat that’s making us fat when it’s the unnecessary infusion of sugar into way too many foods. Sugar in yogurt? Just so it’s more palatable? If you need to sweeten it then you’re making the food worse, not better. Ugh.

What the book did to me personally is accelerate my push within my family to only eat stuff we make ourselves. We have next to no processed food in the house. I’ve been following the rule that if my grandmother couldn’t figure out what it was it shouldn’t go into our bodies. And I’ve tried to ensure we don’t use carbs as calorie delivery systems. It’s convenient but, in the long run, deadly. And I’ve already started losing weight and feeling better.

The bottom line is pick up a copy if you want to figure out what the hell is going on with your waistline, or that of a loved one. Some of the descriptions of the various processed foods will disgust you, but maybe that will help you avoid ingesting those in future. I do hope that this book is the start of a movement to eat more naturally. As I noticed after my Viennoiserie course, you can make foods that look like high calorie delivery systems that don’t actually make you ingest huge amounts of extra calories. In the case of those pastries, I found I ate less during the day, was more sated, and actually lost weight. It was just fully satisfying. And it might explain the dilemma that some claim exists between the French diet and their weight, namely a lot of supposedly highly caloric foods but many French remain lean. After that pastry course I can tell you you simply cannot eat multiple croissants or puff pastries. It’s not because they’re not good,  it’s because they’re satisfying and your body says: you’re full. Besides, those pastries required chewing but each chew was rewarding in flavours. To have just inhaled those pastries would amount to a crime!

It makes me appreciate people like Bill Gates all the more. Originally a talented geek he was also a savvy businessman, which, I’ve found out, is all too rare. He quickly (and I mean quickly — by the age of 20) grasped the notion of “good enough” in terms of deliverable requirements while demanding top performance from this team. The goal is to create a great company that will drive great results. Bill Gates did that and more at Microsoft — no one in their right mind can argue that. Some may argue about the quality of Microsoft’s software but I will simply state: What stopped anyone else from building better software and selling it?

For an interesting take on how a leader can lose out by their own misreading of the market read Almost Perfect by Pete Peterson of WordPerfect (a PDF can be found at his site here). One can’t help but shake one’s head realizing how much WordPerfect gave up by ignoring Windows, even though it seems customers were telling WordPerfect they were going to buy Windows 3 and that they wanted a version of WordPerfect. Instead, WordPerfect focused on OS/2. They ended up 6 months behind Microsoft’s release of Word, which may well have been the turning point in the word processor wars.

Back to Good to Great. The book is an eye opener. There is one study that compares 11 great companies to some comparison companies. The 11 great companies flourished almost to the one under a CEO that was from within (there was one exception). The comparison companies almost to the one brought in an outsider. The outsiders usually didn’t get what the company was about and were more concerned with the here and now, their ego, and how much money they’d make. The CEO’s that came from within had more loyalty to the company and the employees, wanting them to succeed. Collins provides an interesting litmus test for CEO types called the Window Pane and the Mirror. The test is rather simple, but telling:

• If the company is successful on a given project, who does the CEO believe is responsible? Is it him/herself and senior management or is it the employees? If him/herself, then that CEO is looking at the mirror.
• Similarly, if there’s a failure or loss at a company that impacts corporate earnings, etc. does the CEO look out the window pane at the employees claiming it’s their fault, they didn’t work hard enough? Or, does s/he look into the mirror to attribute blame.

This is similar to the old Harry S Truman adage: The Buck Stops Here. If you’re a manager you have to take the good with the bad, but especially the bad. If things aren’t going well you have to take the heat. All too often we hear that the company or employees failed some visionary leader. I don’t think so. I think the leader may have been more blinded by his vision than willing to stare reality in the eye and determine the proper course of action.

Collins book is a great read on management and how they manage corporations, or anything. Although I’d like to believe I tend to manage and have managed correctly I’ll leave the judgment to others. However, if I ever start another company I can tell you that I don’t intend to ever have any managers that don’t fit Collins’ Level 5 manager definition. I highly recommend everyone interested in their careers read the book. It is well worth it for you and your staff.

The irony of much of the book is that the answer to how to motivate is simply “Get out of the way.” Throw in some trust and you’ll have folks truly motivated. Of course, it presumes that the folks you’re hiring are capable. But if you’re in any type of company that requires intellectual effort, motivated people are not that hard to find. Keeping them motivated is the trick. And most firms fail by simply failing to realize that so-called “incentives” are anything but.

The book is filled with tidbits, such as:

• “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation … When institutions … focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behaviour they do considerable long-term damage.” (pg. 39)
• “For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation … is essential for high levels of creativity.” (pg. 46)
  
• “… researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.” (pg. 91)
• “… satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals …” (pg. 143)
• “Performance reviews … are about as enjoyable as a toothache and as productive as a train wreck.” (pg. 157)
• “Real challenges are far more invigorating than controlled [ed: read artificial, enforced] leisure.” (pg. 169)

The gist of it all is that creative people crave autonomy. They might need “direction” but it should come in terms of mentoring, not fixed, hard goals that don’t truly motivate. Enforced leisure, goals, deadlines, etc. imply that someone higher up in the hierarchy knows better, that they have a better grasp of the intricacies of the work being performed or what will make a given individual happiness. It’s rarely the case.

I recommend anyone starting a company read this book. I also recommend anyone at a large firm who’s trying to figure out why their publicly traded firm seems “stuck” to read it, too. The portion of the book that discusses how companies that are constantly providing guidance doing worse — much worse — than those who provide occasional guidance is eye-opening. And once you read it it makes perfect sense. I know from my own experience, the constant jumping to quarterly requirements simply resulted in a staccato performance as we tried to get into step with some random goals as opposed to striving to be the best, to focus on the customer, to provide joy to employees and clients so that strong relationships are built where those clients will repeatedly come back because they know they’re getting more than just a bum in a seat. They’re getting a creative person who cares about their problem as much as they do.

You can see entrepreneurs making the right decisions and still losing. You feel the pain of the various entrepreneurs who were forced out of their companies or saw their life work collapse around them. Even some of those that were financially rewarded suffered as they were wrenched from their companies only to watch as the companies became something other than what they had intended. I found it comforting to realize that the emotional roller coaster for start-ups was pretty much universal.

This is one of those books that I wish were written back in 1997.

One thing I noticed courtesy of John Cook’s blog is what amounts to two new additions to Brooks’ Law.

Brooks’ Law is the famous “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” We can now add:

• “Many hands make light work” — Often.
• Corollary: “Many hands make more work” — Always.

And what I’d call Brooks’ Law of Design:

• Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

Obviously, I highly recommend anything written by Fred Brooks. His Mythical Man Month is a classic that everyone should read, especially project managers. His new book is the same, a must read.

I’ve always loved the fact that Brooks has little use for the Waterfall Model. I loathe it, and it seems he does too. I like being in good company .

I found it a great read, though there are a number of typos, format errors, and grammatical mistakes. I do also find he should have cleaned up the format a bit. It’s in an interview format, which is fine, but there are places where it could have flowed better. Sometimes there’s a single interjection by either the author or the coder being interviewed. I didn’t quite see the point as those small interjections didn’t offer much, if anything.

However, overall, I really enjoyed the book. There are some nice tidbits, including the overall dislike of C++ — with which I can sympathize.

While reading the book I decided to tag passages I thought were insightful or interesting. Here’s a summary.

• Jamie Zawinski   (7)
• Brad Fitzpatrick  (7)
• Douglas Crockford  (12)
• Brendan Eich  (7)
• Joshua Bloch   (7)
• Joe Armstrong   (9)
• Simon Peyton Jones    (4)
• Peter Norvig   (4)
• Guy Steele   (14)
• Dan Ingalls   (7)
• L Peter Deutsch  (13)
• Ken Thompson   (9)
• Fran Allen   (4)
• Bernie Cosell   (6)
• Donald Knuth  (14)

Obviously I found Douglas Crockford, Guy Steele, L Peter Deutsch, and Donald Knuth the most interesting.

The above stats are rather meaningless since they apply to my particular read of the book and reflect my interests or where the interviewee is actually stating something that makes me take notice. Others may not be so enamoured with what a given interviewee stated at a given point, but no matter.

Ultimately, the book was a satisfying read. I like reading up on computer history from a personal perspective. I think the lack of computer historians is rather troubling as we’ll lose these first person reflections as folks retire and then pass on. Knowing why things are the way they are is important to understanding how we can fix them, improve upon them, or when it’s time to throw something out.

In fact, I think that last is a big problem. We seem unwilling to walk away from something and simply say that it’s past its best before date. That it’s time to rework a system or solution or redo it entirely. Instead, we patch and patch and fix and extend until we end up with totally unmanageable messes on our hands. It’s totally aggravating. And having been in the computer industry for 30 years now I bemoan how bad its gotten. Seibel is right in asking many of his interviewees whether or not they could be a programmer today. That one question resonated most with me. Today I find computer science rather infuriating, frustrating, and depressing. Instead of getting smaller, better, more efficient, more expressive I see bigger, more cumbersome solutions and languages. I thought by now systems would be much much better. But it just isn’t so.

Thus, I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s a great read. You get historical perspective from a variety of people. You can read some fairly blunt assessments of where we are and what some are trying to do about it. And yet you can’t but help hear an underlying lament over what’s become of the field. That somehow we’ve seriously lost our way. That it just isn’t what we all thought it would be 30 years ago and that that is highly depressing for all involved.

For the nerd or geek in your life, this would be a great present. I’d actually recommend it along with Founders at Work.

Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels.

Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise.

A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy.

Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote:

My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates [1986], played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Software development is and always will be somewhat experimental. The actual software construction isn’t necessarily experimental, but its conception is. And this is where our focus ought to be. It’s where our focus always ought to have been.

As Knuth has repeatedly stated, software development is an art. It’s a craft. It’s not a science. And I, as many of my friends know, have long stated that anything that has to put “science” in its name isn’t a science. And the sooner we realize and behave according to the reality that computer science is more artistic but with a rigorous requirement pertaining to mathematics and that might be why it attracts the eccentric individuals that I spend my days with. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

The tome is beautiful and well worth it for anyone who enjoys Dilbert and wants to reread some of the older strips or just wants to see what they may have missed — or forgotten — from years gone by.

Of course you can just head over to the Dilbert.com site and see the strips there, now in colour.

My favourite strip remains this one:

which, I’m proud to say, is the day I made Dilbert. I submitted that to Scott Adams years ago and then in 2003 it appeared. I was tickled pink to see a part of my life immortalized.