I finally figured out what is so bad about folks who need to "control the message."

Architecture is as much politics as technology. And some folks think that political spin and message control is required. I think it's a mistake because the urge to control the message points up a …

There's a Special Report in the January 15 SDTimes with a headline that bothers me -- a lot. In the print edition, it's called "Can ALM tame the agile beast?". Online it's ALM Tools Evolve in the Face of Agile Processes.

The online title makes a lot more sense than the …

See Paul Glen's opinion piece on Projects and the Ungrounded Middle.

There's a subtle issue here that bothers me. It's the phony narrative arc imposed on a project.

Glen says that "managers talk about beginnings and endings". This is a -- potentially -- phony narrative arc we're told to wrap around a …

It can be a fatal mistake to impose a story arc on a project.

Aristotle's Poetics is a commentary on drama, in which he identified two story arcs that are sure-fire hits: Big Man Brought Down, and Small Man Lifted Up. These are the standard "Change in Fortune" story lines …

A year and change back, I wrote this on "Exploratory Programming".

It turns out that it was a mistake. While the subclass-expansion technique is a cool way to bang out a program incrementally, in the long run, the subclassing is ill-advised.

The more I look at Python generator functions and …

Interesting comments to Splitting Meta-Hairs.

Terms like Scripting, Interpreted and Dynamic are not "marketing terms". New, Improved, All Natural, Visual, Groovy, Lucid, etc., are marketing terms. I regret giving the impression that one should "not to spend time trying to get definitions that are exacting". One absolutely must get definitions …

Recently, I've been involved in some hair-splitting over the nature of Python.

I've described it as "interpreted", "scripting" and "dynamic", all of which seem to be true, but yet each seems to lead to a standard -- and pointless -- dispute.

Recently, I had two very weird "meta" questions on the subject of OO design.

They bother me because they imply that some Brother or Sister Architect has let slip the presence of the Secret Technologies that we Architects are hiding from the Hoi Polloi developers.

These are the real questions …

Eight Things Business Hates About IT. Plus eight things IT hates about business.

I suppose.

While there are 8 things identified, they seem to boil down to 2 things to fix: Replace bureaucratic with Agile; replace Keep The Lights On Management with any other way of budgeting.

While Agility is …

From time-to-time I hear a few mentions of MapReduce; up until recently, I avoided looking into it.

This month's CACM, however, is chock-full of MapReduce goodness.

After reading some of the articles, I decided to look a little more closely at that approach to handling large datasets.