Wisconsin Training
I spent this past holiday weekend “Up North” at our cabin near Hazelhurst, Wisconsin. Although we got drenched by storms on Saturday, both Sunday and Monday were gorgeous days to be outside. My memories of past memorial days in Wisconsin generally include a lot of rain and cool, if not down right cold, temps. Needless to say I tried to take full advantage of the summer weather.
Sunday, my parents helped me explore some back roads near our cabin for putting in some miles on my road bike. With only five weeks to go until the David Browne 2006 ride, I need to whip myself into serious shape. I logged about 28 miles in 1:35 which is an average of just under 18 mph. The ride felt pretty good and some of the recent shorter rides I’ve done in the twin cities definitely helped. My route was enjoyable enough that I extended it a bit for a Monday morning ride. My ride this time was an out-and-back route of just over 35 miles in 2 hours. My average was a little slower for Monday, probably because it was more humid and it felt a lot hotter, probably due to more sunshine.
Overall I felt pretty good, although I did bonk near the end of Monday’s ride. I think the heat really got to me, but that is part of the training process. Going forward with my training, I am going to try to focus more on extending my ride distance and not be as concerned with the pace. I’ve already learned this lesson in my marathon training, but it’s difficult to remember since I have fun trying to go fast on the bike! It’s been my experience that a workout either needs to push the limits of endurance (duration or distance) or push the pace (speed), but trying to do both isn’t effective.
For Your Heart
This summer I will join a small group of friends to raise awareness and money with the goal of reducing the impact of heart disease. The David Browne ride was founded in 2003 as a living memorial to an energetic young man who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 24 of congenital heart disease. Undoubtedly, every one of us has been affected by heart disease or stroke in some shape or form. It may have impacted someone close to you, or possibly it has even affected you directly. I sincerely believe that with your help, our journey can make a difference and help diagnose more cases like David’s.
For the 2006 ride, the group, known as Team242, will bicycle 900 miles through Wisconsin in nine days. This July, I have pledged to ride for the first half of the adventure. My four day route will cover about 360 miles, and I hope to share our message with many people along the way!
This year we want to raise at least $20,000 in funds for the American Heart Association. This is a sizable goal, but with your contribution I know we can do it. Please join Team242’s mission by completing and mailing in the attached pledge form with your tax deductible donation. All funds raised go directly to the American Heart Association and we, as riders, pay for all the event’s expenses.
I also invite you to visit our website for more information on the ride. You can find it at www.team242.com. You’ll find photos, a map of our route, rider information, and a message board where we will post updates during our adventure.
Please print and mail me the pledge form along with your contribution and make help me make a difference today. Thanks for your support!
Summit Brewery
Saturday we toured the Summit brewery in Saint Paul. Although our tour guide “didn’t bring his A game”, we still got a sense of what the brewery is all about. And what is it all about? Beer of course! I sampled the Great Northern Porter, India Pale Ale, and limited edition Scandia. Their beer does taste better at the brewery as people many claim. It’s a lot more flavorful probably because it is so fresh. But then again maybe it’s because free beer always seems to taste better.
Support your local brewery!
Technology Conference
Last week I attended the 2006 Systems & Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, UT. The conference is oriented around the defense industry and co-sponsored by the US Navy, US Army, US Air Force, US Marine Corps, and the Defense Information Systems Agency. I spend four days in Salt Lake City, listening to presentations from everything between the overall vision for what improvements need to be made to enhance our national security to detailed software coding techniques. The keynote speakers included Grady Booch and Barry Boehm among others.
Here’s a little bit about the sessions I found the most enlightening:
Java for Large Distributed Real-Time Systems
This session was the most relevant to my current job. At BAE Systems in Minneapolis, I work software for DD(X) which is the next generation destroyer for the US Navy. The DD(X) has recently been named DDG 1000, which is a positive sign that the ship will actually be built. Anyway, information was presented about the use of Java on one of the DDG 1000 weapon systems by En-Kuang Lung from Raytheon. Historically there have been many skeptics about the feasibility of this. Traditional Java with unpredictable garbage collection among other things makes it impossible for use in a system with requirements for real-time responsiveness. The weapon system software we write is all in C++ so it was interesting to hear that a truly real-time system can be produced using Java.
Conflict and Communication
The session by Dr. Randall Jensen and Kasey Thompson from the STSC really hit the nail on the head with regards to identifying some of the most significant problems in the typical software development environment. The point I found most relevant is that communication between people is mostly visual. What this means is that communicating in person is twice as effective as talking over the phone and four or more times effective than using e-mail. These facts in itself are probably not that surprising, but the sad truth is that many organizations spend very little time making sure communication is fluid on development teams. I walked away from this presentation with the feeling that this should be the sole job of management. Management shouldn’t be involved in the technical details of a project and should have an attitude of working for employees to resolve communication problems as quickly as possible. The classic example give is the cubicle farm environment. This environment is horrible for development and tearing down the walls can lead to a much more productive team. This is all easy to say but much harder to do. Hopefully when I find myself in a position to make these changes I remember how I feel sitting in the developer’s chair and become aware of the research communities’ finds on communication of teams.
Measuring Team Effectiveness
Judy Bamberger talked about ways to measure the “touchy feely” aspects of working in a team. She presented a case study were a team measured personal well-being, team growth, authenticity and project alignment. I believe these subjective metrics are very difficult to measure, and probably not the most important ones, however Judy pointed out that “what gets measured gets produced.” So if you want your team to grow, you should attempt to measure team growth. The team becomes more aware of their problems and they have a means of communicating issues which limit the metric from being better. I’ve seen the simple act of taking measurement impact a team’s output and this can be both good and bad, so I found Judy’s case study believable. Do you think “what gets measured gets produced” is true?
Programming UIs using Windows Presentation Foundation
Marc Schweigert from Microsoft presented their next generation user interface programming framework called Windows Presentation Foundation. Despite the fact that WPS is Microsoft-only, I think it does some things very well that other GUI programming options just don’t offer. To me, the two coolest features are:
- Separates UI design from programming logic via XAML
- Vector graphics based – the entire UI is scalable and not based on pixels
Microsoft is also working on WPF/Everywhere which will be a subset of WPF and will run on “any browser and any platform”. I’m not going to hold my breath…but it might be a technology that is worth keeping an eye on.