It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of disciplines. Sweaty, unkempt, unnerving, uncomfortable and disrespected. Test. Yuck. You hate it. Design, baby! That’s where it’s at! Creating! Developing! Building! Who needs test? It’s designed to work!

In actuality, as much as it pains me to admit “trust, but verify” is a good rule of thumb. Of course, every design is developed with an eye to excellence. Of course, all developers are very talented and unlikely to make mistakes of any sort. But it’s still a good idea to have a look-see at what they have done. It’s even better if they leave in the code or hardware that they used to verify their own implementations. The fact of the matter is that designers add in all manner of extras to help them debug and verify their designs and then – just before releasing it – they rip out all of this valuable apparatus. Big mistake. Leave it! It’s all good! If it’s code – enable it with a compile-time define or environment variable. If it’s hardware – connect it up to your boundary-scan infrastructure and enable it using instructions through your IEEE STD 1149.1 Test Access Port. These little gizmos that give you observability and diagnosability at run time will also provide an invaluable aid in the verification and test process. Please…share the love!

For no apparent reason, but moreso than ever before, I have come to believe that the World Wide Web can truly be the source of all knowledge and a savior for the lazy (or at least an inspiration to those who need examples to learn or get started).

I was writing a simple application in C the other day and needed to code up a dynamic array. It seemed to me that actually typing out the 20 or so lines of code to implement the allocation and management was just too much effort. And then it occurred to me – “Why reinvent the wheel?” People write dynamic arrays in C every day and I bet that at least one person posted their implementation to the WWW for all to see and admire. A quick search revealed that to be true and in minutes I was customizing code to suit my needs.

Now…did I really save time? In the end, did my customizations result in no net increase in productivity? In many ways, for me, it didn’t matter. I am the sort of person who needs some inspiration to overcome a blank sheet of paper – something concrete – a real starting point – even a bad one. Having that implementation in place gave me that starting point and even if I ended up deleting everything and rewriting it I feel like I benefited, at least psychologically, from having somewhere to start.

It is also valuable to see and learn from the experience of others. Why should I re-invent something so basic? Why not use what’s already extant and spend my energy and talent where I can really add value?

But it is also true that although the WWW may indeed be “the wheel” it sometimes provides a wheel made from wood or stone, that has a flat tire or is damaged beyond repair. For me, though, even that is beneficial since it helps me overcome that forbidding blank sheet of paper.

I have decided to use this blog to out-gas on things I am thinking about. Aren’t you happy about that?

I have spent some time looking around the popular virtual world platform Second Life. In a virtual world, you assign yourself an avatar (basically a cartoon character representing you) and walk around this large simulated space and interact with other avatars and objects. There is a fun and coolness factor to it all. There are museums to explore, historical location recreations, science fiction universes and dance floors. Lots of dance floors. But what really intrigues me is the very presence in Second Life of large Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Cisco. What are they up to there?

I spoke to some people experiencing and supporting those companies’ Second Life presence in impromptu discussions “in world” (as they say). The conversations often left me with more questions than answers.  While the Second Life experience promises a high degree of interaction, it comes at a significant cost.  A user needs to become conversant in the use of the proprietary viewer (a special-purpose browser to connect you with the virtual world), the methods for creation, manipulation and animation of  objects and the utilization of the on-line chat facility or its voice-based interaction mechanism.  The primary question is: given all of these costs and barriers to adoption, what is the benefit of this experience over say, WebEx (which Cisco actually owns) or Telepresence (which Cisco also heavily promotes) or even a standard teleconference?  The common answer was either that Second Life was “cool” or “fun” – just what I experienced.  But is that enough?  Does that constitute “the killer app” for virtual worlds? It’s “cool” and “fun”?

There are also, however, some intangibles. People hiding behind their personal (and anonymous) avatars tend to be a little bolder. They tend to speak more openly and honestly. That can allow for more compelling and fruitful interactions and in collaborative circumstances result in better outcomes and solutions developed. Some studies have even shown that this boldness is transferrable to real life. So maybe, these companies are engaging in a little social cognitive therapy for those legions of techies they employ expecting to elicit better human interaction as a result. And that makes it all worthwhile.