An interesting metaphor for doing process for process sake, Ned Batchelder writes about a couple of cases of cargo cult software engineering. Instead of using a process as a means to a higher goal, you think that the process is the higher goal. This has been the gripe about Big Methodologies as long as they've been griped about, but this analogy is an interesting one.

Continuing to build off the appeal of a "pragmatic" approach to software development that emphasises the craft of software rather than the academic or theoretic approaches, the pragmatic duo have a new collection of books out that they call The Pragmatic Starter Kit. Their ideas are refreshing reminders of why we do this silly thing of developing software - because we love it, and when done right it can be a grand thing. The bureaucracy that can arise around any group-oriented process, though, has tended to shift most discussion towards management aspects of the process rather than the individual skills. These guys have a gift of showing us things which are sometimes too obvious for us to see, and reminding us to truly care about what we do.

Besides reading Al Franken's new book for laughs, getting to some of the deep issues of media ownership from a more staid perspective is usually heavier reading. I don't know if there's a way around it, but just having access to arguments is an important part of having a debate. Helping that out, Lawrence Lessig mentions a free version of the book "Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age", by Mark Cooper. You can get it at a normal bookstore too but may want to check it out online first. This is one that I'd like to say I'll read Real Soon Now, but instead it will likely go on to my stack for the moment.

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So what if Microsoft has 98% of the desktop OS market, and they aren't slowing down? Robert Cringely ponders where their .NET juggernaut will end, and as a side note has a link to a ZDNet artice on the convergence of Java and .NET.

Is the single language (C#), single vendor (MS), single platform (.NET) world as inevitable as all that? Well, I'm one of many who chafe at monoculture and herd mentality, and while IT managers may be more herd-like than others, I can't believe that corporate management will not look around and see the danger they're getting into.

I'm sure that I've got too parochial a life to make valid predictions on the long view of Microsoft's dominance and its effects, but something tells me that somethings got to give pretty soon - the same trajectory that Microsoft has been on can't go on forever, and as it finds the inevitable resistance, things are going to get volatile.

I find the predictions interesting and amusing to read, and worth thinking about, but this feels like an itchy age right now, in many ways, and what the world is going to be like a year or two from now is open to just too many possibilities to swallow any view too seriously.

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Part of me knows that I always have to use critical filters when reading news stories to look for exaggerations, falsehoods or conjectures. I sometimes forget to be on the lookout for omissions, partly because, by their nature, they're hard to spot - how do you know something is missing if you don't know much about the topic?

However, when I do know something about a topic, the omissions can be startling, frustrating, or just plain sad. Take the stories about the recent presedential elections in Guatemala. For the little coverage in the local (or national) news that this country gets, I'm usually excited to find someone taking an interest in the goings on there. Unfortunately, I'm usually disappointed in the coverage, not because they have their facts wrong, but because of the small set of common facts that seem to get reported in every story about Guatemala that appears: it's a small country, 30 year civil war, poverty, violence.

When I read the newswire stories of the runup to the election last week, it seemed that the stories focused on (a) the common, repeated facts, and (b) the possibility of a former dictator getting elected. Never mind the fact that the former dictator was running a distant third the entire time, he was the one making the headlines, not the leading candidates, and seldom were their issues - there just wasn't much space left in a 20-inch story once you've included all of the foundational elements needed for any story on Guatemela.

The heartache I feel is that there is so much about to tell about the country and its people that is beautiful instead of violent. What would happen if a reporter used this quote from Martin Prechtel's Secrets of the Talking Jaguar as their lead in instead of the standard copy:

Delicious, melancholy, lovely, full of flowers, mystery, laughter, and an extraordinary amount of suffering; if Guatemala were a woman, not a man alive wouldn't be lovesick for her. At once the wealthiest and the poorest nation in Central America, she is culturally the richest.

Of course, this argument could be made for any country whose condition only comes under the lens of the media when something bad happens.

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I enjoy the times when insights found in a book show examples of themselves in the world of the moment. I'm reading Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, where Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective finds himself using his convalescence time in a hospital to uncover the truer story of Richard III - he has gone done in history as a villain, but Grant sees a picture of him that suggests otherwise. All popular historical accounts are in agreement, but he and a cohort dig deeper and discover items strangely missed by earlier historians. When he confides this alarming discovery to his cousin in a letter, she responds that a story like that is nothing new.

"It's an odd thing, but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale, they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed."

Cut to the news stories about Jessica Lynch, the US Army person held briefly as a POW by Iraqis. There is a biography due out, and made-for-TV movie about to air that trumpet the heroism of those who freed her, and the demonic acts of those who held her. The only problem is that Jessica is saying that the press and US military are making much of the story up.

"Bill Moyers for president!" This became one of the cheers at the National Conference on Media Reform last weekend here in Madison. As Studs Terkel, the surprise guest said by way of introducting Moyers, if someone asked me who the ideal president would be, the choice of someone with integrity, honesty, passion and compassion is easy.

Bill Moyers' keynote speech that night was a labor of love and passion, for life and democracy and, above all, people. I had read some of Moyers' writings before, and knew something of his stature in the journalist's world, but hearing him speak was a tremendous experience. His clean-cut handsome looks belie the activist passion that burns in him.

What didn't get transcribed from his speech, unfortunately, was some of the ad-lib riffs he did off of Studs' introduction: "if I were elected president, it would be with Studs as my vice-president. And the first thing I'd do after taking the oath of office would be to resign. Then I would sit back and watch the show!"

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