Mars Mission Rehearsal

One of the problems with mounting a mission to Mars is knowing how a crew will handle the close to two year mission with only one another in close quarters and the only outside communication subject to a 20-minute lag.

The Russian space agency is starting a preliminary test today. The 105-day experiment will utilize a facility built in the 1970's:

The mock spacecraft consists of four hermetically sealed modules built in the 1970s for isolation experiments ahead of missions aboard Soviet space stations and later the International Space Station. A section was recently added in which participants in the 520-day experiment will simulate a Mars landing.

The facility’s wood-paneled interior maintains a particularly Soviet aesthetic, but it has been equipped with new life-support systems to be tested during the Mars-500 project. Volunteers will tend experimental greenhouses that scientists hope will provide fresh vegetables and sights and smells of home.

One interesting point of the article is that projects such as the Mars mission are being created and administrated by people who will never be able to participate in the mission themselves. They're just hoping to see their dreams realized within their lifetime.

The Internet Is Real

Popular Science has an interesting article on the physical structure of the Internet, including an interview with a man whose job is to repair undersea telecommunications cables. Cool stuff!

Powerpoint Presentation Perspiration

I'll be presenting at a local conference next week, so I'm putting together a Powerpoint deck to accompany my remarks. I'll tell you what, there's an art to effective slide decks, and I'm afraid I'm just not an artist. It'll get the job done, though. At this point I need to get something together so I can start practicing and getting feedback from my unfortunate guinea pigs.

Software Development and Religion

If anyone thinks they can eliminate religion just have them spend time around software developers. Even if you can get them past the "Great Windows Vs. Linux" debate you're bound to run into other topics of controversy and dogma. Which development methodology to use is one such topic.

I'm going to be a presenter at a local development conference this month, and I've been digging in to various methodologies to make sure my remarks are broad enough to apply to as many situations as possible. Today is "Agile Day".

To be honest, I'm going to have to plead agnostic. After spending several hours on the finer points of Agile, I can honestly say: It doesn't matter which methodology you choose. Any methodology, if you do it well, will deliver a quality project. No methodology, if you do it poorly, will save your bacon.

The main advantage of Agile is that it tosses out a lot of extraneous steps and processes. The main weakness of Agile is that it tosses out a lot of "extraneous" steps and processes that might not be extraneous. Unless I've missed something along the line, it relies on gut instinct more than other methodologies, and hence relies on experienced developers to get the job done. Unfortunately, that doesn't speak well for the methodology. Any methodology will work if you use only experienced developers.

I see Agile as being the preferred methodology for consulting teams and implementation teams. It has the potential for abuse by these groups, as well. With such minimal up-front planning, it would be very easy to put the project into continuous loop, thus prolonging the engagement and running up the bill.

On the other hand, if it's done right I can see it as being very effective. I just suspect that "getting it right" is more difficult than people appreciate. Inexperienced project teams just will not get it right, period. The only saving grace is that the methodology makes it easier to disguise that you're not getting it right.

What really amuses me are the various advocates who try to play "peacemaker" among the methodologies. These are the people who say "Well, you would use this methodology in these cases, and this methodology in these cases here." It sounds good in theory, and in theory it is correct. There are some methodologies that lend themselves better to certain types of projects.

The problem is that very few organizations possess the skills, size, and discipline to pull it off. Most organizations are struggling to execute one methodology well. Add another methodology two and you'll have the software equivalent of "I speak three languages, each one badly". More often than not everyone will just be confused. It is better, I think, to learn to execute one methodology well, even if it's not always a good match for the project, than to execute with mediocrity in several.

Anyway, it's been interesting research so far. Agile is especially hard on my particular area of expertise: documentation. In short, they're against it. Or at least that's how it comes across. If you dig deeper they're really just attempting to reduce the overhead that often creeps into documentation efforts in one-size-fits-all methodologies. They're not saying "don't document," they're saying "document only what makes sense". And I will admit that far too often some documentation doesn't make sense.

In any case, I'm glad I'm giving this presentation. It's helped me to look outside the rut I've been in with my current job and see what other things have been going on in the industry. My presentation will be much better for it. And it will help immensely in preparing for any religious fanatics in the audience.

Making Things Happen

Here's an interesting story about workers at a sign company who suddenly found themselves out of work when the company went under. They organized: first into a support group, then into an economic action committee. The result is that half of them have already found new jobs at the new businesses their actions helped bring into the area. Read the whole thing here.

Arches and Gates

Here's one of my favorite projects from last year. Our back yard had two exits. One was a barely-functional double gate the previous owners used to get their boat out from behind the fence. It was essentially two sections of the fence put on sagging hinges. You could get it open, but only with much grunting. The other was next to the garage on the other side of the house, and about as far away from any place you'd want to be in the front yard as it gets.

I could tell from examining the fence that there used to be a gate right next to the house. They had boarded it up when they'd put in some raised garden beds along that section. But I came along and removed the garden beds, which opened up that spot to become a gate again.

Of course we didn't just want a clunky old section-of-the-fence type gate. We wanted an archway. And so one day last fall we bought an arch kit from Home Depot and I got to work.

I removed the section of fence (former gate), which was wider than the arch by a couple feet. That meant I needed to put in a new post and restore a small section of fence. I decided to put in the two feet extending from the post right next to the house. Once that was done it was a simple matter to "plant" the arch in the gap. But next I needed a gate. No problem. I picked up some 1"x3" stakes, hinges, and latch, and pulled out some left-over 2"x3" from a shelving project.

A short time later I had a gate, and we now have an attractive and convenient passage between the front and back yards.

Of course that creates the necessity to put in a nice pathway from the arch to the front door--or at least do something with that former flower-bed you can see right in front of the arch.

But as any good do-it-yourselfer knows, you never complete your list of projects. You just uncover new ones with every project you do. We lived in our previous house for five years and spent much of that time taming the large back yard, tweaking the landscaping, and convincing the fruit trees to grow. We still weren't really finished when we moved.

Landscaping is never really complete. It is merely abandoned.

Hand-crafted Since 1998

I have to admit I've been a bit busy. My latest project will hopefully "go live" in a few days. I'm making a website in preparation for a conference presentation I'll be giving in a few weeks. With any luck it'll be my "coming out" party as a consultant.

Anyway, money being tight right now I'll be doing it all myself, without any fancy software help. I'll let you all know when it's up so you can rip-- I mean comment on my handiwork.

Confessional

I enjoy making things and doing things myself. But not everything. The other night I noticed I had a headlight out. Today after my doctor's appointment I stopped in at the autoparts store to get a new bulb. Last time I had a headlight go out I was able to replace the bulb (after a fair amount of struggle, mind you), so I figured I could do it again--and more quickly, having been through it once already.

Well, I bought the bulb and went out to my car in the parking lot, popped the hood, and...couldn't even get to the bulb I needed to replace. On that side of the car they'd mounted the battery right behind the headlight. The only way to change the headlight is to remove the battery (and who knows what else).

So I took it to my mechanic. While I enjoy working on some things, my car is not one of them. I know I should forfeit my "Man Card" for that, but tinkering with the car has never held the same thrill for me that it seems to hold for so many others. Besides, my car needed an oil change, too, and last time had filled my punch-card. This time would be a freebie.

Bottom line: $15.00, plus a free oil change. I can live with that. Plus I get to skip spending an hour in the garage tonight cursing my Corolla. (Hmmm.... that sounds like an R.E.M. song: "That's me in the corner...that's me in the spotlight...cursing my Corolla...")

I also got to pet "Rooster", the golden-retriever the garage is named for. There are people in Japan who would pay $15 just for that!

Solar Power Becoming Cheaper

According to Popular Mechanics, First Solar has dropped their production costs down to $1 per watt.

Unfortunately they'll have to do a fair bit better than that before I can afford to go solar. The last time I checked it would still take me over 30 years for the system to pay for itself. I think they'd have to get that down to 10 years or less before I'd be able to make the change.

I'd love to, though! As Instapundit often says, "Faster Please!"

At Least I've Never Burned the House Down

Msnbc.com has an article about Wu Yu Lu, a Chinese farmer who would rather build robots.

Wu remembered being fascinated by motion and the mechanics of motion when he was just 10 years old. “I didn’t like to study, didn’t like going to school,” said the farmer, whose formal education ended after third grade. But he loved playing with machines.

He first started building mechanical parts in the 1980s and has since completed 33 working robots, most of which are littered around his dusty courtyard house. They’re an eclectic-looking bunch, sort of Tim Burton meets Wallace and Gromit.

One of the earlier models is a simple-looking box that, when turned on, waves a hand fan back and forth. It turns out it was a love letter of sorts to Dong.

“We had known each other for six months, but she wasn’t that interested in me or my machines,” said Wu. “When I built that for her, to help keep her cool when she was resting, she seemed to reconsider her opinion of me.”

But it took Dong a long time to truly accept her husband’s eccentric habits. Particularly after their home burned down due to a faulty transformer he’d picked up somewhere.

“I was so angry, I took the two sons and left, saying to him, how can I live like this?” recalled his long-suffering wife, who now laughs when she tells the story. “After all these years all you have are these few poor houses, but then you burned them down!”

She did eventually relent and return to Wu. Meanwhile, he has gone on to acquire some fame in China after all these years.

Wu, whose robots earned him nationwide fame when he was voted China’s smartest inventor farmer in 2004 on a local television station in Hunan province, has begun making some money off his creations and appears to be juggling three or four projects at any given time. They include a top-secret health venture for a company and the odd commission by a well-off businessman looking for a quirky gadget (he recently sold another robot to a factory boss for $1,400).

But the erstwhile farmer said he wants to prosper one day with his robots. His hope is “to work with my second son to make intelligent robots,” he said. “Then maybe we can really make something that will take off.”

They say that if you pursue what you are passionate about the money will come. For some it takes longer than others, but I believe it's true.