Well, I ‘ve got news for you!!!

The backwards third world mentality is alive and well in a Brisbane software company.

Day-in-day out there is always a push to increase productivity, reduce defects and minimize software development costs.

The company does a frigging excellent job at minimizing software costs by pretty much expecting – in a demanding kind of way – that you give the company 24/7 all the time.

Some of this partly to blame on the culture where the average worker has given businesses in Australia over $18 billion in unpaid overtime.

Fine – average workers are just idiots!!!

Last week, a woman CEO demanded that all developers use physical paper folders for all projects that they’re working on.

Wow.

That meant that gone are the Word requirement documents, the Excel spreadsheets that we email amongst ourselves, test cases that get dumped on the shared drives etc.

All this because she likes to touch/see the physical documents.

What a bitch!!!

How can a CEO of a “world leading” fashion software organization be so backwards. What makes things rather scary is that she’s in her early 40’s – not even an old fart yet.

Maybe it is the environment. The Sydney siders often say that “Brisbane is a big country town“

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ADSL Broadband

Better value – lower costs – can definitely be obtained if you integrate the Internet plan with a mobile and/or land line.

Obviously it can be argued that if you have a good, reliable Internet connection, VOIP connection, you don’t need a “standard” land line phone connection. Just like Skype, there are a couple local providers in Australia that offer an Internet to standard phone line / fax service at an even lower cost.

Some of the wireless broadband deals are listed below:

Wireless Broadband

The last option with 3, whilst having the appearance of low cost becomes rather expensive as you exceed the 2GB quota. Each additional MB incurs a 10 cent penalty. There is also roaming surcharge of $1.65 per MB!!! The 3 deal is also a 24 month contract!

It is better to accept a provider plan that has integrated speed shaping than get a bill a horrific account at the end of month.

What do you think?

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Well, not anymore – “To survive, all you need is the Internet!”

Australia has become a virtual nation.

In Australia, everything imaginable can be ordered or arranged over the Internet. This includes all the basic goods and services to insurances, government and state paperwork, bank accounts, investments, rental properties, travel and entertainment.

If you live in Brisbane, you can even find out where the cheapest fuel prices are with the Triple M Bowser watcher! No need to be late for a date – get the latest from the live traffic webcams here. With a streaming audio connection, you can plan your route around the radars…

Overall, internet performance is quite reasonable – obviously some will disagree – and those that do, have never been to Africa!!!

Basically, your internet performance depends on the following factors:

• Firstly, your link speed (dial-up or broadband) to the ISP – Internet Service Provider. Forget standard dial-up unless you’re planning on cutting your wrists Accept nothing less than ADSL, preferably ADSL2+ Broadband. More than 15% of Australians have home broadband connections.
• Secondly, your ISP’s connection to the Internet. Avoid those ISPs that oversell their bandwidth – get an ISP performance benchmark (like for the UK) before committing to a broadband contract and package option.
• The download server’s connection to the Internet.

The last factor is completely out of your control. The only advice here is that if there is an option to download via FTP (file transfer protocol) – take it!

FTP carries at lot less baggage – protocol overhead to manage the download – and so downloads generally take less time. The FTP protocol also supports recovery, which helps if your connection is unreliable.

Ideally, starting another download should have little effect on the download performance.

Depending on where you are in the world, even if you have the best available ISP, Internet performance could still be poor. This is caused by the country itself having a poor Internet Backbone connection – 400Mbps for South Africa – Ag shame

Twenty million Australians struggle to share a couple 10…40 gigabit links growing to lousy 2-terabit PIPE Pacific 1 (PPC-1) USA link in late 2009 ;-(

If you can’t deal with the pain and own a bank, use a satellite link! Now that’s a really expensive option but available if you can afford it.

Internet performance is also affected by the local time relative to the target server time. In Australia, mid mornings during the week are generally reasonable when connecting to servers on the west coast of the USA – California et al.

Overall, weekends – in particular Saturday mornings are the best as shown in the figure below. The destination server in this case is lives in Berlin, Germany, Europe and so they’re asleep, so I get to use all their bandwidth

To find out where the destination server lives, use tracert or a tool like VisualRoute to perform a network trace.

Many Australians are currently unhappy with their ADSL, ADSL2+ broadband speed. For some it is a question of raw performance whilst others have issues with wireless broadband coverage. Wireless internet coverage is an issue! As a slave to this coverage, just changing the angle of the high gain antenna swings signal strength from 90% to 40% – that sucks! This change in signal strength drops transfer rate down to an unacceptable 40KB/Sec.

I hear the 3G network that Telstra has been promoting, supposedly giving cellphones broadband connectivity and performance also has issues with coverage.

Now in Australia it could all be jealousy at 1.7Mbps – some of our Asia Pacific cousins like Japan have an average internet connection speed to the home of 45.6Mbps ;-(

Later this week I’ll add some costing for the Broadband Internet Packages in Australia.

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What doesn’t help is how so called “software engineers“ and “software architects“ seem oblivious to this. The solution they say is to simplify the interface by wrapping these objects together with those or hell no – “We’ll switch to C# and all the memory allocation issues and strange runtime behavioral problems will be sorted on a managed platform.”

“C++ is complicated programming language and developers either don’t understand it or abuse it. We’ll wrap objects and have a simple interface.”

Who the hell are they trying to kid?

What happened to system requirements analysis and understanding?

What happened to a detail requirements document / specification?

Where’s the detailed design? All developers need to be on the same page!

Object modeling – interfaces – data flow – extensibility – security?

How does this design improve on the last?

How are we going to debug this complicated system of interfaces and data flows?

Performance, traceability, verification, validation, software lifetime.

Are you sure this is engineering? Somehow I’d say that current development practices are by far nothing more than hacking! Professionals who get paid a bucket load of money are designing the systems which control our everyday existence are screwing up!

But rest assured, you’ll be rewriting the system again a year or two later.

Somehow I don’t think a civil engineer would dream of telling his boss that they’ll need to rebuild the bridge in year or two even five for that matter.

So how can programmers call themselves engineers?

I’ve had some programmers openly admit that they ‘hack‘ the code because they’re not quite sure how it works but the fix / addition does the the job so what’s the problem?

Many years ago, experts in the community called this the “Software Crisis“.

Well I’d say this crisis is far from over! It still exists today and it is only going to get worse!

Software projects are getting larger because there are now hardware platforms which have the ability to process a couple million of lines of code (MLOC) in a fraction of a second. Next year there’ll be hardware that does a whole lot more!

Will the software development processes and techniques of today have improved sufficiently to enable the delivery of larger projects with a less bugs tomorrow?

I don’t think so! So loose the “engineer” – you don’t deserve it!

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With SQL 2005, Microsoft moved that functionality away from new Management Studio and pushed it into the Visual Studio 2005 environment – sweet. All you now need to do is start a “Database Project“.

Well, there’s a gotcha.

When debugging a C++ or .NET project with SQL debugging enabled, the SQL profiler reveals the numerous calls to a “sp_sdidebug” stored procedure.

Somehow these calls combined with the location of normal application breakpoints causes the some ATL - SQL interface to fail / misbehave.

The misbehavior is the SQL stored procedure call dropping from the application code down into the ATL code and freezing – stuck in a loop. No timeout whatsoever!

THE FIX: Loose or disable all application code breakpoints on or near the ATL based SQL interface calls.

The “sp_sdidebug” stored procedure is pretty much undocumented. The only thing that I do know is that it provides or has a debug COM interface for the SQL engine.

So the theory is that the ATL COM and “sp_sdidebug” COM have issues. It could even be the Visual Studio interface – who knows?

Drop a comment here if you can provide an explanation or some further insight into this behavior.

Checkout: KB817178, KB328151

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