blog.zgraggen.name  All-day insanity or I have a blog too!

A while a go George Fairbanks asked me to write a quote for his book: “Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach”.
I already read a statement paper about the idea for the book and reviewed a chapter of the book. I really liked the concept he had and was glad that he asked me. Which I believe is important when you write a quote. I wouldn’t want to write a recommendation for something I can’t support.

George then sent me the draft of the book. Since, I knew I had to write a quote I made notes about what I liked and what I could include in the quote. I hoped this would make it easier to write the recommendation. But when I started with the writing I had so many comments at the beginning that I didn’t know where to start. I then looked at many other quotes for technical book to get an idea what to write. But I was honestly disappointed most quotes are not book specific and could just be copy pasted to most tech book. so I decided to write something more specific which should help the reader in the buy decision.
Here is the end result:

“In many companies risk management is only a list of how projects could fail. Instead, this book shows you how to drive your architecture design based on risks. The book gives you a risk driven approach, and discusses good architectural practices, models, styles and techniques to create the architecture.”

You can see other quotes for this book here. Compared to some other quotes my quote doesn’t sound as exiciting as others. I know, that this would be the time to make a strong statement and maybe even exaggerate a little as this is common in the US culture. But, I also feel that I have to be true to myself. Another thing which I realized is that my recommendation is rather short compared to others and therefore doesn’t include much content. Maybe, reading some other book quotes gave me the wrong impression of the length. These might have been some of the reason, why my quote didn’t make it on the cover. Even though it would have been nice to make it on the cover, I am aware that the decision who will get on there is purely from a sales perspective. I am still grateful for this opportunity. I certainly learned a few things for my next book quote. If I ever get an opportunity again

The book has been published and can be purchased on Amazon.

I really enjoyed the book and would definitely recommend it to all software engineers who have to deal with project risk and design.

Please feel free to tell me what you think of my quote. I’m open for input!

It’s almost a tradition that I clean up my blog at the beginning of the year and publish all the posts which I never finished during the past year. This time I will focus on all the things I did during my last semester at CMU. Passing all my classes with an acceptable grade and finding a job kept me quite busy… But I did a few fun things!

Family Road Trip

Before the last semester started my parents came to visit me in Pittsburgh. After two days in Pittsburgh we started a road trip to see the Niagara Fall, NYC, Amish People, and Washington DC. Besides all the typical tourist stuff which can be seen on all those locations we also saw something special.

A waitress at the Niagara Falls told us that it is possible to operate the lights for the Niagara Falls at night. We followed her directions and knocked on a particular door which was then opened by an elderly nice guy. He told us stories of the old days and how everything used to be and also technical details about today’s lighting system. And finally we were allowed to play around with the light system. I thought this was funny since 100 of people were standing on the edge of the water fall taking pictures of all the random combination my family experimented with

A more detailed description of our road trip can be found on my brother’s blog. (in German)

Oopsla 2009 in Orlando, Florida

I and a friend from school went to the Oopsla 2009 convention as student volunteers. Special about this Oopsla is that it was held in the Disney World Convention center which was in the middle of Disney World Orlando. What a great location. The conference itself was really interesting and it would have been even better if our professor would have relieved us from our homework assignments

But I have to say one negative thing about Disney World Orlando, all the water you can drink from the fountains taste horrible after sulfur. Maybe that is because of the fireworks they light every night.
Before we left Orlando, my friend and I had to visit the Universal Studios and go swimming at the beach, which felt like a mid-semester break

Philly Marathon and Rocky stairs

Amy, I and two of our friends drove together to Philadelphia to run there a half marathon which ends in front of the famous “Rocky Stairs”. It is a nice and almost flat course. The special thing to do after you finished the half marathon is to run up the stairs like Rocky Balboa did in his movie.

There would be many more detail I could tell about each specific thing, but I finally want to publish this post. Besides for most of my readers this is supposed to be a short update on what I have been up to.

Ocassionaly, I check who visits my blog with Google Analytics. Recently, I realized an interesting spike from Korea.
Apperently someone found my blog useful and refered to it. Here is the post which refers to my blog.

Even tough I wasn’t blogging that actively lately, the traffic on my site was still there thanks to all the Korean visitors.

The first time I saw a Google Server Error. I was amazed that this message is translated in 18 different languages. I guess, it must be important that everyone understands that google has a problem.

Most of us have heard of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA and many also know what it is. But how many know the developer/inventor of it: Luis von Ahn. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at CMU and has already won several awards and fellowships even though he is only 30 years old. A few days ago a received a message that Luis von Ahn was on the show on NOVA scienceNOW. This short clip gives some insight who he is and what he does or better said what he did so far.

About four months ago I was attending a lecture of Luise von Ahn which was called Teaching Shenanigans. He gave this lecture because he won the “Herbert A. Simon Award for Excellence in Teaching” in 2008. In this lecture he gives some insights on his tricks he uses to teach the class “Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science”.

Download - Teaching Shenanigans

Do you think you would like this class as a student?

Thanks to cocaman, I’ll follow his advice and share it with all my blog readers.

A programmers comptency matrix in the big O style.
Read this and find out where you are lacking competency…

A good question cocaman raises: Does a person who scores for everything log(n) have a social life?

Ps: sorry for the HSR-Planet readers… for receiving this again

I had a weird problem with the update mechanism of Thunderbird. When you restart Thunderbird for an update an error message shows up and says that it cannot do the update and closes the problem. But then it starts the program again, because you said you wanted to restart it. When starting the program it tries to perform the update and fails again. This goes on and on…

After a while Mr. Google told me the answer:
When the webcam software from Logitech is running the update fails. Don’t ask me why, or what the connection is…

When you stop the “Logitech QuickCam Software” the update goes smoothly without problem.

My recommendation for all Thunderbird lovers which own a Logitech Webcam:
- Stop the Logitech software before you update Thunderbird.

If anyone has an idea why… please let me know!

While preparing for a midterm, I found a cheat sheet for the GOF Patterns on this blog.
Two Pages with all the 23 GOF Patterns.
This is the direct link to the pdf file.

It’s time to party!

This came to my attention, and I like to share this information

http://www.1234567890day.com/

Cheers,
Guido