Tablet UML News

With a little help for my friends

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-07-11T17:07+00:00

Since I know some people who maybe could use it, I thought I would share some info from my leads folder. I can't promise which of these have openings, but some of them will.

Kalamazoo Area Tech Job Resources

TEK Systems - I'm finding them to be one of the best contracting firms around.

Michigan Job Network - Job search by area.

Information Technology (and related) jobs within 50 miles of Kalamazoo (from the MEDC Business Directory)

Williamson Employment Services - A local contracting firm.

Paragon Recruiting - A local recruiting firm.

Advantage Communication Enterprises - IT solutions.

appStrategy - .NET/Web-based CRM solutions.

Blue Granite - .NET solutions.

Configuration Solutions - Java development.

Data Pro - Reporting software.

Digital Systems Group Incorporated - Web design.

I/NET - Digital imaging, voice recognition, multimedia, and natural language.

ITS Communications - Voice and data integration.

Lueck Data Systems - IT solutions.

Manatron - Property software.

Medical Data Processing - Medical billing software.

SalesPage Technologies - CRM.

TCB Networks - IT solutions.

Battle Creek Area Tech Job Resources

Douglas Associates - Software for non-profits.

SH Systems - Desktop and Web software.

I have other leads for other areas. Let me know if you need them.

Stev-O must be lonely

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-06-16T17:06+00:00

I have no idea who Stev-O is; but in the past day, my spam filter has caught over 50 messages with the subject line "Party with Stev-O!" It's pretty sad when you have to resort to junk mail to find friends.

Cheops' Law

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-06-08T15:06+00:00

Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

But if you're patient and hard working -- and maybe a little insane -- it gets built.

For the team at my current contract, today was that day. And a very good day it is.

6 miles from my current contract?

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-06-04T19:06+00:00

I am so there!

"I've Got a Golden Ticket!" Update: "Because you were a member and supporter of the Michigan Space & Science Center in Jackson, I would like to extend an invitation for you to join us for the member's 'pre-opening' event at the new Michigan Space Science Center at the Air Zoo. This will be taking place 11:00 am to 7:00 pm on Firday, June 8th in the Air Zoo's East Campus building."

A punch in the gut

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-05-21T09:05+00:00

That's what this felt like to me:

I've never seen the Cutty Sark. Perhaps now I never will. But I've loved that ship for over 30 years. In middle school, I took a modeling class. I built a model of the Cutty Sark. Mom did the rigging. We did it together, and that makes it special.

If I look closely, I can see how crude my modeling and painting work was (and I doubt I'd do any better now). But if I look from across the room, I see the Sark, full sail, riding the waves. I hear the gulls, and the Captain shouting out orders. I smell the salt spray.

That's our ship, Mom's and mine. I've taken it with me wherever I've lived in all the years since. And I always wanted to see the real thing, but business never took me to London. Now, despite their optimism, I suspect it's gone for good.

But our Cutty Sark still sails.

Project metrics they never taught you in Project Manager training

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-05-04T11:05+00:00

Project management involves lots of metrics: data you gather, measure, and analyze to assess and predict the state of your project. But I find some of the most useful project metrics are often overlooked. Here are a few to add to your toolbox.

WSR (Work-to-Sleep Ratio)

This is a measure of how likely your team members are to make mistakes at crucial moments. If their WSR for the week is 1 or less, they're probably bored. 1.25 or even 1.5 are signs of a team moving at a good pace. Higher than that, though, can be a problem. 2 is about the limit for a typical team member, and they probably can't keep that up. Rare individuals can maintain a WSR of 3 for a time.

At one point this week, my WSR was 7.5. That's just not good.

DODO (Days On per Day Off)

Often correlates with the WSR, and serves as another measure for the likelihood of mistakes. 2.5 is a normal work week; but honestly, how many of you work normal work weeks? 6 is a common work week for projects in a crunch. A monthly average of 13 or more is a sign that your team members may soon be tied up in family counseling or divorce court.

HBT (Handbasket Temperature)

"It's getting kinda warm in this handbasket. I wonder where we're going in it?" Although this can be hard to measure, your team members probably have opinions on what the HBT is. If they all think it's getting hot, maybe you need to ask where your project's going.

GALB (Going-Away-Lunch Budget)

Every team has transitions. That's normal. But watch your budget for going-away lunches. If it starts to grow, that's because ~~the rats are deserting the sinking ship~~the team members find other opportunities more appealing.

Related to this is GAAB: the Going-Away-Alcohol Budget. If your team has some drinks at the going-away lunch, that could simply be because it gives them an excuse to drink during the day. But if the bar bill starts to exceed the food bill, it's probably because the ones who haven't found ~~escape hatches~~new opportunities yet are ~~drowning their sorrows~~celebrating the good fortune of their former coworkers.

Dilbert Barometer

Credit for this one goes to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. (Well, OK, he'll take cash or check, too.)

As Mr. Adams explained in an email I lost sometime last century, the Dilbert Barometer is a rather non-linear scale, where both extremes are bad.

If the programmers are papering their cubicles with old Dilbert strips, that's a sign that they're troubled. Even worse is when they don't just put up any old strips, only selected strips that happen to reflect what's going on in your organization. That means they're making judgments and a statement about the pointy-haired bosses at your company. (At one time, three walls of my cubicle at one job were Dilbert strips from top to bottom.)

But if there are no Dilbert strips anywhere, that means your organization is a rigid, humorless police state. All the people with talent and ambition (and humor) will leave. All that will be left will be those who have Abandoned All Hope. And since hope is the primary energy source for many projects, that's not a good thing.

A healthy Dilbert Barometer measures somewhere from one to ten Dilbert strips per team member. (Mr. Adams would be glad to sell them to you.) It's also healthy if the team members have scratched out the names in the strips and written in the names of their coworkers. That shows your team knows how to laugh. And that leads us to...

The Laugh Meter

Productive, successful teams are happy. They form a bond of shared experiences. They take time out to share ideas. They laugh.

Worried, stressed teams are unhappy. Their humor ranges from grim to none. They only talk about work, and mostly about problems. If you don't hear a few good laughs in a typical work day, your people have lost the energy they'll need to get through the project.

On the other hand, if your people giggle uncontrollably with little or no provocation, check their WSR. When it gets up to 3 or so, uncontrollable fits of laughter are a common symptom.

Dee Jay, Part 5: Homophones and Alternates

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-04-17T07:04+00:00

So in Part 4, I said that recognizing the music key would be tricky.

But why? Didn't I spend most of Part 3 explaining how cleverly I used M-SAPI so that users only had to say partial names to be recognized?

Well, yes; but I've long said that programming has a Conservation of Complexity law: the less complex for the users, the more complex for the programmers. (Be glad: that's the short version. My long discussion on Conservation of Complexity would take up the rest of this post.)

The reason why this flexibility leads to complexity is because one short phrase can match multiple long phrases. For instance, one album in my collection is Forever Gold by B.B. King. It includes these songs:

2. How Blue Can You Get?
3. Every Day I Have the Blues
10. Catfish Blues
14. Other Night Blues

I also have some sample music provided with Windows Vista, including one track from Aaron Goldberg's Worlds: OAM's Blues. From Sports by Huey Lewis and the News, I have Honkytonk Blues. From Jonathan Richman's self-titled album, I have Blue Moon. From Celebrating the Best of Jazz by Louis Armstrong, there's St. Louis Blues and Black and Blue. From Am I Cool or What? (yes, that's a Garfield CD — go ahead, laugh, but it has The Temptations, Patti LaBelle, Carl Anderson, Natalie Cole, The Pointer Sisters, Lou Rawls, Diane Schuur, Valerie Pinkston, Desiree Goyette, and B.B. King), there's Monday Morning Blues. From True Blue by Madonna, there's True Blue. From Cargo by Men at Work, there's Blue for You. From All-Time Top 100 TV Themes, there's Hill Street Blues. From Tropico, there's Outlaw Blues. From another Forever Gold title with Ray Charles, there's Sentimental Blues. From my fellow Duelist Geoff Nostrant (a.k.a. Silvercord), there's blueshift. From Who's Next by The Who, there's Behind Blue Eyes.

So if all I say to Dee Jay is "Dee Jay, Play Blue", Dee Jay will be really confused. Thirteen different songs have "Blue" in the title. Now that's my fault as the user; but we can't blame the users if we want happy users. We want to cope with what real users do, not just force them to do what we want.

So how do we make Dee Jay understand all these potential matches? As in Part 3, there's the obvious way and the lazy way. And once again, the lazy way (relying on Microsoft to solve the problem) is the smart way. When M-SAPI returns a RecognizedPhrase (or the subclass, RecognitionResult), it can include a list of equally good partial matches, called Homophones. Now we could quibble about that term: in grammar, homophones are words which sound the same but have different meanings. Here, the homophone phrases likely don't sound alike at all; but the recognized words form part of each phrase. But ignoring the terminology, the concept is easy: every phrase in the Homophones list is just as good of a match as the top-level phrase.

So remember from Part 2 that Dee Jay is designed to select one or more songs or albums or artists (i.e., media descriptors) that match a given phrase. Well, now we want the media descriptors that match the phrase and its Homophones. So the code for selecting all the matches looks something like this:

// Music commands may include a specifier.
string specifier = "";
if (e.Result.Semantics.ContainsKey(_Specifier))
{

SemanticValue valSpecifier = e.Result.Semantics[_Specifier];
if (valSpecifier.Confidence >= 0.8)
{

specifier = e.Result.Semantics[_Specifier].Value.ToString();

}

}

// Add the best match to the media phrase list.
List testedPhrases = new List();
List phrases = new List();
AddRecognizedMediaPhrase(command, e.Result, testedPhrases, phrases);

...

///

/// Add a recognized phrase to a list of music phrases.
///

/// The command being built.
/// The recognized phrase.
/// The phrases which have already been tested.
/// The current list of music phrases.
private void AddRecognizedMediaPhrase(string command,
RecognizedPhrase reco, List testedPhrases, List phrases)
{

// Avoid infinite recursion.
if (testedPhrases.Contains(reco))
{

return;

}
testedPhrases.Add(reco);

// Only confident items with music.
if ((reco.Confidence >= 0.8) && (reco.Semantics.ContainsKey(_MusicKey)))
{

// Only matching commands.
if ((reco.Semantics.ContainsKey(_Command)) && (reco.Semantics[_Command].Value.ToString() == command))
{

// Add the key. Don't duplicate.
string key = reco.Semantics[_MusicKey].Value.ToString();
if (!phrases.Contains(_Map[key]))
{

phrases.Add(_Map[key]);

}

}

}

// If we have homophones, add those, too.
if ((reco.Homophones.Count != null) && (reco.Homophones.Count > 0))
{

foreach (RecognizedPhrase phrase in reco.Homophones)
{

AddRecognizedMediaPhrase(command, reco, testedPhrases, phrases);

}

}

}

So now we have a richer list of possible matches, based on the top phrase and its Homophones. But we could potentially make it richer still. While any RecognizedPhrase can have Homophones, a RecognitionResult can also have Alternates, a list of lower confidence matches, each possibly including Homophones. So I could conceivably add code like this:

// If we have alternates, add those, too.
if ((e.Result.Alternates != null) && (e.Result.Alternates.Count > 0))
{

foreach (RecognizedPhrase alt in e.Result.Alternates)
{

AddRecognizedMediaPhrase(command, alt, testedPhrases, phrases);

}

}

But so far, I'm not very happy with the results when I do that. I need to experiment with different Confidence thresholds, and maybe tolerance on individual SemanticValues (as discussed in Part 4), to see if there's a good way to filter out "good" alternates from "bad".

So now we have a great big list of possible media phrases that the user might have meant. How is Dee Jay to know which one is correct? Well, the same way any M-SAPI application should clarify user intentions: it's going to ask. And that will be the topic of Part 6.

A new Phishing tactic

Martin L. Shoemaker — 2007-04-17T04:04+00:00

Quick primer: phishing is email that pretends to be from some business or bank with which you might have an account, urging you to take some action to protect your account from a security risk. You click the link in the email — JUST DON'T DO THAT, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? *D*O* *N*O*T* *C*L*I*C*K* *L*I*N*K*S* *I*N* *U*N*S*O*L*I*C*I*T*E*D* *E*M*A*I*L*!*!*!*!*!* — and it takes you to a fake site which looks like the real site for the business in question. And it says that to prove your identity and protect your account, you have to give it your bank account, credit card, Social Security number, etc. JUST DON'T DO THAT, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? JUST DON'T DO THAT! You'll lose your bank account, your credit, and worse.

Here's rule one: if they sent you the message out of the blue and it includes a link, it's a phishing message. Don't click the link. JUST DON'T DO THAT, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? JUST DON'T DO THAT!

OK, but now if you're curious, you can explore the phishing email. Hover the mouse over the link. If you've got a decent mail reader, you'll see the real address of the link. In the message, it might look like http://www.PayPal.com; but when you hover over it, you'll see something entirely different. That's proof positive that you're being phished. Don't click the link. JUST DON'T DO THAT, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? JUST DON'T DO THAT! Often it will just be an IP address; and if you try to trace it down, you'll likely find it's in a foreign country.

Well, today I got an interesting one, because the phishing link wasn't an IP address; it was Google! Here it is, in part:

http://www.google.com/pagead/[Whole bunch of junk omitted]&adurl=http://[IP address cleverly encoded]/departament/index.php

I didn't put the whole thing here, because I don't want some moron somehow copying it into the browser and visiting the phishing site. JUST DON'T DO THAT, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? JUST DON'T DO THAT!

But look at what they've done: they've highjacked the Google ads mechanism. Google ad images always include a link to redirect you to the advertiser. Well, instead they're making Google's servers do the work of forwarding you to their phishing site. So if you hover over the link, it looks semi-legit, because it is a legitimate Google link.

Except, of course, that the phishing email claimed to be from PayPal, not Google.

Still, someone gullible might believe the two companies were working together somehow. And so the "hover the mouse" technique might fail, since some readers will only show a short stretch of the total URL. The one with my Web mail, for example, only showed part of the address, not including the &adurl=http://[IP address cleverly encoded]/departament/index.php part. Microsoft Outlook 2007, on the other hand, shows all 209 characters of the URL.

So unless you're careful, the hover approach can still fail to alert you to a phishing address. There's really only one safe course: JUST DON'T CLICK THAT LINK, OK? DID YOU HEAR ME? JUST DON'T DO THAT!