notes from 29,000 feet
(Written Wednesday.)
On the ground Atlanta was dark and dreary, but as we emerged above the cloud layer the view was (and still is) breath-taking. The sun is nearly at the horizon (that is, the cloud-horizon), and the yellow-orange light plays beautifully across the "ripples" in the clouds. Baruch ma'aseh b'reishit (blessed is the source of creation), or words to that effect. (There actually is an appropriate blessing for situations like this, but I don't know what it is and my siddur is in the overhead compartment.)
If there was any doubt before now, I now know that the travel agent who booked my flights isn't touching my future travel. I'm too big for middle seats on airplanes. Sheesh. Fortunately, that was only for the Memphis-Atlanta leg. The flight from Atlanta to Pittsburgh is sparse enough that I wonder about choice of plane. How far in advance do they have to commit to the plane, I wonder? Do they even take purchased tickets into account, or do they just have heuristics about the source, destination, time of day, and day of week?
The conference was quite good, though not always what I expected. The theme was "engineering quality" (for documentation), so I hoped to come away with some QA-related metrics and methodologies that I can apply to our documentation. I was particularly looking for hints for long-term maintenance of doc quality, as opposed to the initial check of a new document; I recognize that this is hard, because you can't exactly write regression test suites for docs the way you can for code. I didn't come away with a lot of ideas for that, but I did get some ideas for the up-front QA, and there are some interesting ideas out there that, over time, should make "doing it right the first time" easier.
Surprisingly, there is a lot of interest in collaborative techniques, and we saw a demo of a tool that allows multiple people to work on a document simultaneously with all the right things happening. The document text is stored in a database, and the set of meta-data is rich -- so you always know who did what to which parts, and you can annotate the document in various ways. It immediately made me think of CoMotion (our company's product), of course, because while this tool was specifically about text, the idea of collaboratively developing work products is much bigger than that. I talked to a few folks about CoMotion and there seemed to be broad interest in knowing more about it. I think some of my coworkers should work up a paper submission for next year. (They aren't really all that interested in the implementation, so we could talk about usage without ruining any trade secrets.)
I also got some ideas that we can use in CoMotion. In particular, when we do get to the point of doing our online context-sensitive help (which I think we need to do, though I don't think there's budget for it), we should be using our own tool to manage it, not something like HtmlHelp. If we write our own integrated tool, users can augment the help, suggest re-organizations, create links, and otherwise adapt it to suit their needs. The "source" needs to live externally (in XML in my opinion), but that doesn't preclude a living project-specific copy in each application built on CoMotion. I need to think about this more.
On this trip I got some insight into some historical halacha. On top of "basic kashrut", there is a body of halacha (law) and minhag (community custom) around food and gentiles. Some of this was, as I understand it, specifically developed as a block to fraternization -- the rabbis felt that if we couldn't eat with them then we wouldn't let them lead us astray, including into intermarriage.
Now we, in the 21st century, like to think we're smarter than that. And I think we mostly are, but seeing some of the food problems on this trip, I have new appreciation for the problem.
Some background first: The last time I went to a conference, I requested a kosher or vegetarian meal for the banquet. I was betting on vegetarian, but the conference organizers axtually went the extra distance and ordered a kosher meal, which I appreciate. Based on the price of the banquet, I assumed it would be a sit-down meal. In fact, not only was it a buffet, but it was one of those events where everyone mills around and no one actually sits much. So there I was, with a large box of food, unable to really mill much. It hindered my ability to socialize, and I felt awkward. People were staring at me (maybe not as many as I perceived), and I wasn't able to do the things these banquets are created for -- networking. A more extroverted person than I (and that's a large portion of the planet) would have been able to make it work, but I had trouble.
So this time I figured I'd just fend for myself. There had to be some vegetarian food (or fish), right?
According to the locals, the south doesn't really do vegetarian very well. And they interpret "fish" as catfish and shrimp, based on what I saw on dinner menus on other nights. While I found things to eat, it was a challenge. At the banquet I ate raw cheese (which a more strict person wouldn't have eaten; I don't have issues with rennet), potatoes, pickles, and bread (and dessert). The entrees were pork ribs and some sort of chicken-ham-cheese combo, and the vegetable was baked beans with pork. No salad, no actual vegetables, no fish. One other night I ate a salad for dinner (no entrees on the menu were kosher); another night I was lucky enough to find a black-bean tamale (which was really really good, by the way).
I have new appreciation for Jews trying to live in this environment. I was only there for four days; that's easy, relatively speaking.
Short takes:
Either the wireless card or its configuration for this laptop is broken. (So maybe the Pittsburgh airport does have wireless access after all.) Fortunately, the wired access worked fine, so I could access the net from my hotel room if not from the conference center.
FedEx sponsored a building ("FedEx Institute of Technology") at University of Memphis. (This is where the lab we toured on Monday is.) It was a little odd to hear people talking about "running over to FedEx" when they weren't talking about shipping packages. :-)
I didn't know that the idea of design patterns existed in (physical) architecture long before it existed in computer science. The relevant name here is Christopher Alexander.
Michael Priestley (from IBM in Toronto) looks really really familiar, and he thought the same about me. We were both at SIGDOC in 2000, but I don't think my memory is that good, and I don't think I did anyhthing to draw attention to myself there. (It was a larger conference, so it was easier to be invisible.) I wonder if I know him from somewhere else and, if so, where. I'll have to see what Google says about him. (I wonder if he'll be doing the same thing. :-) )
The attendance seemed to be about evenly divided between academics and industry folks. You could sometimes tell that they live in different worlds.
On the ground Atlanta was dark and dreary, but as we emerged above the cloud layer the view was (and still is) breath-taking. The sun is nearly at the horizon (that is, the cloud-horizon), and the yellow-orange light plays beautifully across the "ripples" in the clouds. Baruch ma'aseh b'reishit (blessed is the source of creation), or words to that effect. (There actually is an appropriate blessing for situations like this, but I don't know what it is and my siddur is in the overhead compartment.)
If there was any doubt before now, I now know that the travel agent who booked my flights isn't touching my future travel. I'm too big for middle seats on airplanes. Sheesh. Fortunately, that was only for the Memphis-Atlanta leg. The flight from Atlanta to Pittsburgh is sparse enough that I wonder about choice of plane. How far in advance do they have to commit to the plane, I wonder? Do they even take purchased tickets into account, or do they just have heuristics about the source, destination, time of day, and day of week?
The conference was quite good, though not always what I expected. The theme was "engineering quality" (for documentation), so I hoped to come away with some QA-related metrics and methodologies that I can apply to our documentation. I was particularly looking for hints for long-term maintenance of doc quality, as opposed to the initial check of a new document; I recognize that this is hard, because you can't exactly write regression test suites for docs the way you can for code. I didn't come away with a lot of ideas for that, but I did get some ideas for the up-front QA, and there are some interesting ideas out there that, over time, should make "doing it right the first time" easier.
Surprisingly, there is a lot of interest in collaborative techniques, and we saw a demo of a tool that allows multiple people to work on a document simultaneously with all the right things happening. The document text is stored in a database, and the set of meta-data is rich -- so you always know who did what to which parts, and you can annotate the document in various ways. It immediately made me think of CoMotion (our company's product), of course, because while this tool was specifically about text, the idea of collaboratively developing work products is much bigger than that. I talked to a few folks about CoMotion and there seemed to be broad interest in knowing more about it. I think some of my coworkers should work up a paper submission for next year. (They aren't really all that interested in the implementation, so we could talk about usage without ruining any trade secrets.)
I also got some ideas that we can use in CoMotion. In particular, when we do get to the point of doing our online context-sensitive help (which I think we need to do, though I don't think there's budget for it), we should be using our own tool to manage it, not something like HtmlHelp. If we write our own integrated tool, users can augment the help, suggest re-organizations, create links, and otherwise adapt it to suit their needs. The "source" needs to live externally (in XML in my opinion), but that doesn't preclude a living project-specific copy in each application built on CoMotion. I need to think about this more.
On this trip I got some insight into some historical halacha. On top of "basic kashrut", there is a body of halacha (law) and minhag (community custom) around food and gentiles. Some of this was, as I understand it, specifically developed as a block to fraternization -- the rabbis felt that if we couldn't eat with them then we wouldn't let them lead us astray, including into intermarriage.
Now we, in the 21st century, like to think we're smarter than that. And I think we mostly are, but seeing some of the food problems on this trip, I have new appreciation for the problem.
Some background first: The last time I went to a conference, I requested a kosher or vegetarian meal for the banquet. I was betting on vegetarian, but the conference organizers axtually went the extra distance and ordered a kosher meal, which I appreciate. Based on the price of the banquet, I assumed it would be a sit-down meal. In fact, not only was it a buffet, but it was one of those events where everyone mills around and no one actually sits much. So there I was, with a large box of food, unable to really mill much. It hindered my ability to socialize, and I felt awkward. People were staring at me (maybe not as many as I perceived), and I wasn't able to do the things these banquets are created for -- networking. A more extroverted person than I (and that's a large portion of the planet) would have been able to make it work, but I had trouble.
So this time I figured I'd just fend for myself. There had to be some vegetarian food (or fish), right?
According to the locals, the south doesn't really do vegetarian very well. And they interpret "fish" as catfish and shrimp, based on what I saw on dinner menus on other nights. While I found things to eat, it was a challenge. At the banquet I ate raw cheese (which a more strict person wouldn't have eaten; I don't have issues with rennet), potatoes, pickles, and bread (and dessert). The entrees were pork ribs and some sort of chicken-ham-cheese combo, and the vegetable was baked beans with pork. No salad, no actual vegetables, no fish. One other night I ate a salad for dinner (no entrees on the menu were kosher); another night I was lucky enough to find a black-bean tamale (which was really really good, by the way).
I have new appreciation for Jews trying to live in this environment. I was only there for four days; that's easy, relatively speaking.
Short takes:
Either the wireless card or its configuration for this laptop is broken. (So maybe the Pittsburgh airport does have wireless access after all.) Fortunately, the wired access worked fine, so I could access the net from my hotel room if not from the conference center.
FedEx sponsored a building ("FedEx Institute of Technology") at University of Memphis. (This is where the lab we toured on Monday is.) It was a little odd to hear people talking about "running over to FedEx" when they weren't talking about shipping packages. :-)
I didn't know that the idea of design patterns existed in (physical) architecture long before it existed in computer science. The relevant name here is Christopher Alexander.
Michael Priestley (from IBM in Toronto) looks really really familiar, and he thought the same about me. We were both at SIGDOC in 2000, but I don't think my memory is that good, and I don't think I did anyhthing to draw attention to myself there. (It was a larger conference, so it was easier to be invisible.) I wonder if I know him from somewhere else and, if so, where. I'll have to see what Google says about him. (I wonder if he'll be doing the same thing. :-) )
The attendance seemed to be about evenly divided between academics and industry folks. You could sometimes tell that they live in different worlds.