It always happens with a new release...

Whenever I publish a new product release, I get bug reports that point out problems that have existed for a long time. I suppose this is partly due to the closer scrutiny that a new release gets as users test it to evaluate whether it's worth their time or not. In any case, there are 2 problems that the new 2.1.10 release of QVCS-Enterprise has brought to light:

• In the 'checked in before' and 'checked in after' file filters, things work fine immediately after defining a filter collection that uses either of these two filter types; but fails with a null pointer exception if you try to use that filter collection after restarting the client application.
• In the built-in visual compare tool, the 'ignore case' flag was always ignored... i.e. while you could request that the visual compare ignore case in the compare, it would never ignore case.

Both of these bugs are now fixed in the code base, and the fixes will appear in the next build.

Googling Jim Voris

Occasionally, I'll 'Google' my own name to see what turns up. Lately, when I do this... yikes. (I won't supply the link, but you can try it yourself).

I don't live in Indiana , and as far as I know, I have absolutely no relation to the 'Jim D. Voris' listed as the first hit on Google's search.

The results point out some of the biases built in to the way Google sorts its search results: apparently government sources have a higher ranking that other sources, though it may just be that the page rank of that government site is higher than any of the other lower ranked sites that return hits for 'Jim Voris'.

In any case, for anyone who cares, my middle initial is not 'D'.

Web site refresh

We just refreshed the web site again; the biggest change this time is that the QVCS/QVCS-Pro manual is now online, in .html. You can get to the online documentation from the documentation page.

The plan going forward is to maintain the online documentation, and the product help file. We won't bother to maintain the .pdf file.

Web site refresh

We just refreshed the web site. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

We still have some tweeks, but to my eye, this is a big step in the right direction. A big thanks to my daughter who did most of the work.

Web site refresh coming soon

We're working to create a new look for the web site. I don't have any screen shots that I'd like to share, but I'm guessing the new look will ready sometime this weekend, or next weekend. I'll announce it here of course, and look forward to your comments.

Upgrading to FiOS

I upgraded to Verizon FiOS today. The speed is a bit better than Comcast cable -- one rough test showed a download speed of 7.4 mbs with FiOS versus 2.4 mbs for cable... and FiOS is $10 cheaper per month to boot. A friend has had FiOS for over a year, and heartily recommended it as reliable and fast. The fast part seems to be there -- though it doesn't honestly seem to be that much faster than cable. We'll have to see about the reliability. The guy doing the in-home install noted that there's no power on the stuff outside -- it's just glass, so there's nothing to short out, etc. It comes with a wireless router which was easy to set up... overall a positive experience. Imagine that.

Ignoring Sycophants

Suppose you're some rich/powerful person. How do you prevent being surrounded by sycophants. Communication between two people is difficult and often leads to misunderstanding. Effective communication between different levels of a hierarchy is even more difficult. How does a Bill Gates or a George Bush get an accurate picture of what is really going on?

Almost by definition, they can only talk to people who are already in their orbit... people who may be just as much out of touch with reality. I suppose they must come to rely on gathering information from more impersonal sources -- e.g. reading articles, books, etc. where the author isn't affected by the inclusion of a Bill Gates in the audience. If they rely on advisors instead of impersonal sources, they're likely to be told what they want to hear instead of the truth.

For impersonal sources to offer meaningful criticism, the target of their commentary must be transparent -- i.e. only if they have access to the same general body of data as insiders can they offer informed observations. Whether in government or large corporations, secrets serve to arm insiders with knowledge hidden from general view. Insiders have a vested interest in preserving the shroud of secrecy, since this gives them power to control the debate. A leader surrounded by secrets can rely only on advice from people in on the secret -- a population with a viewpoint guaranteed to be warped by the sycophants it contains.

Effective leaders have figured out this dynamic; less effective leaders have not.

UPDATES: Fix punctuation; fix spelling.

Back from Austin

We're back from a spring trip to Austin, Texas. Spring is a good time to visit Austin -- though I could have done without the tornado watches we endured on our final night in town. We stayed at the Brava House Bed and Breakfast. It's a superb location in a quiet neighborhood just minutes from downtown. The 6th street music scene is a long, but pleasant (1.5 miles) walk. The new marquee Whole Foods market is just a few blocks away, and other eateries are just as convenient. We had a great time exploring Austin, and the surrounding 'Hill Country' area of Texas. Summers there are brutal (all the local admit this to be the case), but this time of year, the weather was perfect.

Austin has Verizon broadband wireless coverage, so it was easy to keep up with e-mail and tech-support issues...

Now it's back to work on the QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 release. I've made the transition internally to using the new 2.1.4 release. I won't be making it public as it is still missing some key features (file delete, directory delete, directory rename, and directory move); but it does have the skeleton of views implemented, and I want to get some mileage on that before the public beta. I want to get file delete implemented before making anything public -- and for that, my current thinking is I'll have a 'technology preview' before the beta. The 'technology preview' will not be feature complete, but it will have the view stuff in place. I'd like to get some user feedback on 'views' sooner rather than later. Will users see it as confusing, or intuitive?

Stricter QVCS forum access

If you want posting access the QVCS support forums (http://qumasoft.ipbhost.com/ ), you'll need to jump through more hoops than in the past (Users who are already forum members won't see any change). For reasons that defy my understanding, QVCS support forums have undergone a sustained spam attack from folks who either want to waste my time (which may be their intent), or have some wild misunderstanding of what kind of message traffic I will allow to appear on a Quma support forum.

If you want to become a forum member, please drop me an e-mail (jimv at qumasoft dot com) as forewarning so I can let your membership application go through. If you are a registered user of any QVCS product, you'll just need to provide your registration ID. If you are not a registered user (why not?), then I'll be happy to let you on the forum if you can persuade me that you are not a bleep bleep spammer.

QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.18, and new box shots

QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.18 is available. You can find more details here. It's been out for a while, but I've only now gotten around to annoucing here on the blog... sorry for the delay, but I've been preoccupied with work on QVCS-Enterprise 2.1, and a short-term consulting gig that I've taken on.

Along the way, to the 2.1 release, I want to dress up the web site a bit, and to that end, a first step is to create some cooler graphics that I can use to represent the 3 QVCS products. I've always liked web sites that show their software products in 'box shots', even though the product is sold electronically... so I began to play around with a tool that would help generate nicely shaded box-shot pictures for the QVCS product line.

In a web search, I found an affordable, and simple to use product called (appropriately enough) Box Shot 3D. The only problem with using this product is that you have to have some artistic talent to create the images that it uses for the front and side of the box.... so I asked my daughter to put together something, and was major league pleased with the results:

How cool is that?

Hopefully, customers will understand that they'll never actually receive a box containing software...

These new box shots will be part of the new look to the web site -- and though it will be a while before the web site update actually happens, I couldn't resist showing these off.

Back from Florida

We're back home from a nice visit with my wife's family. This is the time of year to go to south Florida -- the weather was pleasant, and for whatever reason, the roads were not as crowded as they sometimes are at this time of year.

While there, we goofed off -- enjoyed Charlotte's Web and Dreamgirls.Charlotte's Web was a quiet/good kind of movie. We have the books-on-tape version of the story as read by the author E.B. White -- which is very good. The movie is faithful to the book, and does a good job of capturing the same tone as the book.

Dreamgirls was excellent. The only complaint is that the story would have been even more powerful had it been the true story of the Supremes instead of a fictionalized account. The music was good, but including some of the original tunes would have been real icing on the cake. My suspicion is that the authors/producers of the Broadway version couldn't afford, or couldn't acquire rights to the original story, or to the original tunes. In spite of that, the movie is superb.

I also took the time to read several paperbacks: Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, and The Eternity Artifact... all decent enough, but they don't stand out as books that I will remember.

More American history

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed and recommended a new World War II historical novel by Jeff Shaara. Our local library bought lots of copies, but they're all checked out... so I opted to try out his 2 volume historical novel about the American revolution. I've finished the first volume (Rise to Rebellion) and have mostly finished the 2nd volume (The Glorious Cause). Both have been well worth my time. I'm not an expert on the facts, but reviews and other books I've read confirm the historical accuracy of the events portrayed in the books. What makes them different from most histories is the novelization of the main characters. This is where historians might have issue with the books' contents: an historian doesn't really know what Washington was thinking when trying to figure out what Howe's next move might be... but Shaara invents those thoughts and weaves them into the events that we do know. The result is something that is much more readable than a standard history book.

My current progress has taken me up through the beginning of 1780. As with other histories of the revolution that I've read, this one confirms the almost miraculous confluence of (now famous) men and events. Would the revolution have succeeded had we not had a Washington, Franklin, Sam Adams, or John Adams? Or on the other side, the mistakes made by Howe, Clinton, King George, et. al.? We'll never know, but the course of human affairs at the time was balanced on a very fine point, and all these actors had a huge impact on the way things turned out.

Technorati tags: Jeff Shaara, Rise to Revolution, The Glorious Cause

California Vacation

Here are a few pictures from our California trip. Click on the thumbnail here to get a bigger version of the picture.

This is from outside Sonoma. There are a lot of grapes in the area, and many wineries. Wine tours and wine tasting is a fun and relaxing diversion. We visited two different wineries in the area, and bought some wine. Because of Maryland's bizarre alcohol laws, we were not able to ask the wineries to ship any wine back home... so we carted a couple of bottles (all we could really manage for transport on the plane back home) with us for the rest of the trip.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of these signs, which welcomes visitors arriving on the ferry from San Francisco. I'm not real sure what a Cholesterol Free Zone is, but now I've been to one. We had a nice lunch in Sausalito overlooking the San Francisco bay. Lunch included good bread with butter (last I checked butter is a good source of cholesterol).... apparently the requirements of a Cholesterol Free Zone don't extend to restaurant menus.

This is the obligatory picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.We took the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, and then walked across the bridge from Sausalito to San Francisco. The day was clear and pleasantly cool.

From San Francisco, we headed over to Yosemite. This is me in front of some other folks who are standing on the precipice of a cliff that has a sheer drop of some 1,000 feet or so. When we first approached this vantage point, I crawled on hands and knees to the edge to look over -- and didn't do that again. These are the most impressive cliffs I've ever visited, and quite demanding of respect.... one slip, and you're dead. You can just make out a much needed railing on the edge of the cliff in the distance. You do not want to bring small children or unleashed pets here.

On the trail to Cathedral Lakes (in Yosemite). It had snowed maybe 1/4 inch the evening before. Yosemite is a beautiful park, but their trails are poorly marked compared to other parks I've been in... and their trailheads are not always easy to find. I'm not an outdoors expert, so maybe they make this stuff more difficult to discourage trail use by novices. Seems kinda counter productive. On one evening, when I was checking e-mail in the lodge lobby (where I had 802.11 access), I overheard the increasingly frantic efforts of one member of a group who was trying to determine whether other members of his group had made it off the trail yet. It was already dark, and his friends had apparently taken a wrong trail branch on their way down....easy enough to do since the trails are poorly marked. You've got to have a lot of respect for the wilds when out hiking, and I would not want to be caught unprepared to spend a night outside...

Here I'm pacing off the circumference of this giant sequoia. It was some 60 paces, which translates to 120 - 150 feet, or roughly 40 - 50 feet in diameter. That's a big tree. The giant sequoia's are a natural wonder. If you've never seen one, then put it on your list of things to see before you die. They stand as silent sentinals. The really big ones are old and gnarled and look eternal. After seeing them, it's still really hard to get my head around how big they are. Most impressive.

From King's Canyon and Sequoia National Park, we headed to Death Valley. Here I am at the bottom of Death Valley -- the lowest point in North America. Death Valley is aptly named. It's hard to imagine how anyone during the push west could have survived traversing this place -- yet they did. Thank God for air conditioning. In the summer, the average daytime high temperature is something like 116 degrees (Fahrenheit). The soil temperature gets over 200 degrees. It was actually pretty pleasant for this picture -- in the 70's.

This is looking down on the bottom of Death Valley from a place called Dante's View. From this spot, you can see both the bottom of Death Valley (at some 280 feet below sea level) and Mt. Whitney -- the highest point in the contiguous 48 states (at 14,494 feet). Dante's View is over 5,000 feet so the view you see here is like one you get from an airplane flying 1 mile above the valley floor.... that's a road down there.

From Death Valley, we headed to Las Vegas. I have pictures of Vegas, but won't bother posting them -- Vegas is a well known destination. We stayed in a hotel room on the 35th floor. The room had a balcony, with a decent view of the strip. Our hotel was connected with the MGM Grand casino -- so we could walk from our room into that casino without having to go outside. I'm not into gambling at all -- I just don't see the point, though I can understand how some other folks might find it entertaining. On our last night, we went to see a Cirque de Soleil circus show. I enjoyed it -- there was one act that had these two muscle bound white guys doing slow motion power lifts of each other. My wife and I were impressed -- we could both imagine how much strength was required -- a LOT... and they were smooth, no muscle tremors at all.

California is a big place -- and we just scratched the surface. We'll probably go back again sometime.

Back from California vacation

Back from a 16-day vacation to California.

We flew from Baltimore (BWI) to Oakland, picked up our rental (a red Jeep Liberty), and then drove up to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. Stayed there a couple of nights, then drove down to San Francisco for four nights. From there, we headed to Yosemite for four nights, and then on to King's Canyon (home of the giant Sequioia's) for 2 nights. From King's Canyon, we headed south, spent one night in Camp Nelson, and then one night in Death Valley. From Death Valley, we drove east to Las Vegas for our final two nights.

In all of this, we had Internet access (in some form or other) everywhere except Death Valley. Pretty cool. I wasn't able to get any development work done (it was a vacation, after all), but I was able to handle e-mail support questions, and keep up with issues on the forums (thanks Dirk for handling the PowerBuilder issues!). Over all, Internet access was more available than reliable cell phone coverage.

We're still digging out from all our junk snail-mail. The post office had to put it all in one of their large plastic tote boxes. I didn't bother to count the number of 'vote for me' pieces of junk mail we received... there is an election coming up soon, yet we were able to remain blissfully unaware of the numerous streams of hot air that elections seem to cause.

The measure of success for our vacations is whether we would change anything in our itinerary -- and on this vacation, things worked real well. Some of the places are ones we don't need to see again (e.g. Death Valley), but all the places we went were worth seeing at least the one time.

I'll try to post some pictures and cover more of the highlights over the weekend.

Outcomes vs. Process

Some years ago, I worked at a couple of companies (EMC Controls, Digitrol/ITP Systems) that were in the process control and factory automation business. They have both since gone out of business, or been absorbed into other corporate entities. I bring this up as a way to segue into the topic of this post -- process vs. outcomes.

These companies were in the business of supplying process control to industrial customers. What we controlled was process, and by controlling the process, we affected the outcome. There is no such thing as 'outcome' control. That's not to say that there are not outcomes -- it's just to point out that in order to achieve some outcome, you choose the outcome as your goal, and then control the process used to achieve the outcome. The more effectively you control the process, the more likely you are to hit the desired outcome.... presuming, of course that the chosen process itself is capable of producing the desired outcome.

Choosing outcomes is relatively easy. Choosing effective process is much more difficult. Controlling a process (usually via measurement of some process metrics), once defined, is generally easier than choosing and defining the process.

Jeff Phillips wrote on a related topic back in July. To generalize the problem: how to choose an effective process so you are most likely to achieve the desired outcome?

In software design, one of the more useful concepts to come out in recent years has been design patterns. Can the idea of design patterns be generalized to help choose or design a process? Doing a "web search" (because Google doesn't want googling to become a verb), turns up a link or two. 

You get what you measure

You get what you measure.

This is an old and faithful management commandment that in my experience is sound advice. As in most things, the devil is in the details.

When I was at UPS  (developing software for their Package Systems division), they had an alphabet soup of different activities that they imposed upon management with the purpose of improving communication between manager and employee. One was called 'Talk-Listen-Act', or TLA. Management was required to schedule 'TLA' meetings with their direct reports. A manager's performance appraisal included measurement of the percentage of their TLA's that they had completed within the review period. Because their TLA 'effectiveness' was closely measured, all the managers within the unit where I worked dutifully scheduled and performed TLA's with their staff.

There may have been some value in having TLA's with some problem members of the staff, but for most, it represented a waste of time for both the manager and the staff member. The best thing that would come of it was perhaps a 'free' (i.e. expensed) lunch for both manager and staff member.

The TLA originated within UPS's operations divisions where the management is white collar and the 'staff' consists of blue collar truck drivers. In that environment, special steps had to be taken in order for management to have any one-on-one face time with their drivers, since the drivers were always out of the office, delivering or picking up packages. In that environment, having some more formal mechanism to encourage communication between management and their direct reports makes sense.

In the environment of software development, where management and staff interact face to face on a daily basis, having the formalism of a TLA was (is?) not a good use of time.... yet, because 'you get what you measure', a lot of cycles were burned to satisfy the metric that its measurement demanded.

In small companies, where the distance between the work you perform and the company's bottom line is short, it's easy to know what you should measure. In large companies, where employees are far removed from the company's bottom line, company management must invent the metrics against which performance can be measured. The choice of metrics is often driven by internal politics, the 'need' to build empires in order to climb the corporate ladder, and/or other motivations that serve their manager advocates more than they serve the business. Because the choices don't obviously flow to the bottom line, it's often difficult to evaluate the utility of the chosen metrics.

In politics, things are similar to the problems faced in large bureaucratic corporations. Instead of playing to the internal audience of corporate players, politicians play to a larger audience. For policy wonks, because their success is measured by the ability to advocate policies that will get adopted vs. the ability to advocate policies that actually work, we witness politicians advocating feel-good programs that have little chance of producing the desired outcome. Because we measure good intentions, good intentions are what we get. It's a wonder that anything works.

You get what you measure -- So it's hugely important (and often very difficult) to measure the right thing.

Swarming behavior

Did you ever notice that cars on the highway seem to travel in packs? This observation hit me when I was southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike. I was a singleton car -- not in a pack, and then was passed by a pack of cars. After the pack passed, I was a singleton again. It was tempting to speed up and join the pack, which is a simple explanation of how car packs form.

I was attentive to this behavior at the time because I had recently read a couple of books on complexity. Complexity theory offers insights into a wide variety of problem domains, the formation of car packs being one of them....

But I spend a lot more time developing software than driving a car. Is there 'pack' behavior in the software development domain? The simple answer is an obvious 'yes'. Whether it's the methodology (e.g. Extreme Programming), the language (e.g. Ruby), the OS (e.g. Vista), etc. we all take shortcuts that put us in one pack or another.

From a business perspective, it's interesting to speculate on what rules must be followed by the pack members in order to create the pack and have it grow. In the flock of birds examples common in the complexity literature, the number of rules that each bird must follow in order to create a flock of birds is quite small.

What rules must prevail when creating a community (a.k.a. pack) to surround a particular methodology, or a particular programming language, or a particular product? Clearly, the one minimal rule is that community membership must confer some perceived benefit to the individual members that compose the community. In nature, we can see the survival value of a pack of wolves, or a herd of elephants. The value of swarming in lemmings is more difficult to understand.

What value is there in swarming/pack/community behavior within the software development domain?

History lesson

In my spare time, I've been working my way through a 4 volume history on the American colonial period and the American revolution. As I write, I'm into the 4th volume, and the revolution is under way.

I know it's cliche, but it's amazing how the patterns of political intrigue have remained constant over these many years. Sure, the names we attach to the good guys' and bads guys' philosophies have changed -- Whig, Tory, Liberal, Conservative, etc., but the patterns in politics are virtually invariant. Politics is a game of power, whether it's played in the boardroom, or in the public square.

QVCS-Enterprise pricing

QVCS-Enterprise prices will be going up with the 2.0 release on August 31. The new price will be $49 per concurrent client. The old price was $99/4 users -- or around $25/user. The other change in pricing is that beginning with 2.0, you'll be able to buy single user licenses -- so prices start at $49 instead of $99. A standard discount schedule will apply for volume purchases.

(A concurrent client is any user who must login to the server. This means that a single user who uses both IDE integration and the client application at the same time consumes 2 concurrent clients -- 1 for the IDE integration, and 1 for the client application, since each require a separate login to the server).

The justification for the price increase is increased and improved functionality (e.g. IDE integration). With IDE integration, QVCS-Enterprise offers close to the same functionality as QVCS-Pro, while providing better performance, much better support for remote users, and multi-platform support. The original $25/user pricing was meant to be an introductory price for a 1.x product. With 2.0, that introductory period is over -- With 2.0, the product is more mature, and still an incredible value at $49/concurrent client.

Of course, if you like the old pricing, you can still buy QVCS-Enterprise at those old prices through August 30. You'll get to upgrade to 2.0 'for free', since 2.0 will appear within 1 year of your original purchase.

Feature creep

Since I like writing code more than I like writing documentation (who would have guessed!), I added yet-another-feature to 2.0: the ability to choose an alternate location for reference files on the server.

In QVCS-Enterprise, if you enable the creation of reference files, by default, those reference files will be created in the qvcsProjectsReferenceCopies directory tree (beneath the server install directory). This new feature allows you to specify some alternate location for the reference files.

The feature is simple minded -- since the admin tool can run anywhere, it cannot verify that the string you enter for the directory name is valid (think running the admin tool from a Windows box, talking to a Linux server, or vice versa) -- that validation occurs on the server... If you enter a useful string, i.e. one that is valid, then things work like a charm. If you enter an invalid string, the server will reject it, and the requested change to the project's properties will be discarded.

Reference files (a.k.a shadow files), are just copies of the most recent default revision for the associated workfile. They're handy to have if you want to share your work product with folks who are not users of QVCS-Enterprise.