enjoying your hotel stay

over at signal 15, we hear:

So, I’m in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it’s been suckin’ all night, like I couldn’t even do anything on it. I suspected someone running a p2p program and taking up all of the bandwidth, so I fired up ntop to analyze the type of traffic on the network, and just who it was generating it. Lo and behold, someone was running a p2p app, and taking up 1.6Mbit worth of bandwidth.
…
I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into a name. His windows machine was spewing Netbios packets with his computer name in it. For the sake of his privacy, I’ve changed the name, but let’s say it was “smith-laptop”. So I pick up my cellphone and call the front desk at the hotel and as for Mr. Smith’s room. The lady at the front desk says “Eric Smith?” And I tell her yes. The phone rings, someone picks up, the conversation goes like this:

Marquette U doesn’t believe in free speech

A dental student at Marquette University got in a bit of trouble over a blog posting.

I’ll let the Marquette Warrior sum it up:

But this is the first case we know of (there probably have been many we don’t know of) when a precipitous and emotional reaction from University administrators led to a punishment that, if it stands, will ruin a student’s career.

Offended at blog statements that were ill-considered, but did not clearly (and probably did not at all) violate any ethical or professional norms, they imposed a tough sentence.

When the student had the temerity to ask for the hearing he had every right to, they ignored the expert testimony of their own ethicist, refused to hear the testimony of a faculty member who could discuss the prevailing norms of student blogging, and came down on the student like a ton of bricks.

The entire process did not look like the adjudication of a case of student misconduct. It looked like a vendetta.

moneyball for college football

Michael Lewis, chaser-down of those who make good use of limited resources, found Mike Leach at Texas Tech:

Four years ago, Hodges was a high-school senior with just one other offer to be a college quarterback, from the University of Wyoming. Now, two-thirds of the way through the 2005 N.C.A.A. football season, and with a throwing arm so dead that he required a cortisone shot to move it, Hodges was the nation’s leader in yards passed, total offense and touchdowns. Three weeks earlier, against a competent Kansas State defense, he threw for 643 yards and, had Coach Leach not pulled him in the fourth quarter, might well have broken the N.C.A.A. record for passing yards in a single game (716).

A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A.&M. right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool. Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A.&M. – for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn’t be a single player – to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet – look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team’s tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in Texas Tech’s league, the formidable Big 12.

best software talk ever?

At last month’s BayCHI meeting, Alan Cooper of Cooper gave the best talk I’ve seen on software development, Ending the Death March. Unlike the rest of the BayCHI talks, this one wasn’t recorded or podcast. (Aside: please email BayCHI and Alan and ask them to make this available.)

However, Allison at BayCHI did take good notes.

Key point number one: bad software is a business problem, not a technology problem:

Death marches happen, according to Alan Cooper, for three reasons related to managers, who are still (1) using intuition instead of methods to run businesses, (2) letting programmers intimidate them with techno-babble, and (3) assessing the economics according to industrial era logic.

Key point number two: engineering organizations are badly structured:

The Triad of Entirely Separate Roles in Software Construction:
Programmer – Interaction Designer – Design Engineer

Programmer: Construction for shipment
Interaction designer: design for humans
Design engineer: Design for CPUs
Product managers are not Interaction Designers. If they are professional interaction designers, they aren’t doing the work of product managers. Keep those roles clear, Cooper said emphatically.

These three software construction roles are separate roles and have separate career paths. Cooper reiterated that the roles are fundamentally different: “You don’t graduate from one to the other, and one is not more advanced than another.”