Despite my staggering ability to undermine my education, my confusion worked to my advantage–the classes that I thought I would be taking exams were actually devoted to reviewing for said exams. So, I was able to reaffirm the content I had so frantically been studying over the weekend and brush up on some of the finer points of multivariable calculus and LaGrange interpolation.

The tests themselves went reasonably well–I actually enjoy test taking. There’s just something fun about sketching out three dimentional shapes and writing elegant solutions to problems when you actually know what you’re doing. The results came back this week. I earned a 73% on the Calculus, which, considering the fact that I fear failing this class more than death, was quite satisfying. I fared better in Numerical Analysis with an 87.5%.

I also met up with a student advisor with the Dean of Student Affairs last week. She assured me that, assuming I pass my classes and file my graduation request form that day (which I did), I will actually graduate in January. Though the commencement ceremony won’t actually be until May 2004, I will officially have graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Finally.

Needless to say, after five and a half full-time semesters at County College of Morris, the loss of 20 credits by transferring to Rutgers University, and another five and a half full-time semesters there, I did a little happy dance leaving the office. In ten weeks, I’ll officially be a free man.

What am I going to do with myself then?

I’ve begun to read Francis Schaeffer again, which has been extremely refreshing for me and a welcome change from the rote consumption of technical data that this semester has been. I may have to quote extensive portions of True Spirituality in this space. Web Sites That Do Not Suck™ quote extensive portions of Francis Schaeffer. #

Speaking of which, do you know what the biggest hindrance will be to the Christian counterculture movement in the 21st century? It’s this: we just don’t understand semantic markup. I mean, com’on people—we actually believe that the Word was made flesh (cf. John 1)! Surely you’d think that this very statement in the Scriptures would express the critical importance of the written word. Context is king, subtlety is beautiful, and words have as much power to heal as they do to destroy. We have technologies that emphasize the context and subtlety and meaning of these words, but we still build web pages that are the browser-based equivalents of bad photocopies: tag soup, table alignments, and misshapen text. The web has been chosen as the medium for the voice of the Christian counterculture. I’m afraid that unless we start using the technology to its potential, no one is going to hear us. #

Sarah spent Friday and Saturday dogsitting for a friend of the family. It occurred to me in the process what kinds of sacrifice owning a large dog really involves:

* if you want to have dry feet, you must either buy slippers or wear shoes at all times
* sleeping in until 5 AM is a luxury
* eating anywhere but in the kitchen?—forget it
* washing your hands at least 3 times per hour
* entertaining friends and family by trying to make the dog turn his head to the side in order to understand you
* never, ever using the word “walk” again

Contrary to where this list may lead, we did have a really good time. :) #

If you don’t obsessively read Dive Into Mark everyday, you’ll likely have missed the CSS Zen Garden. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it: Dave Shea provides five nine (9!) completely different skins for the exact, same markup—all brought to you by the wonders of Cascading Style Sheets. #

You’re tired, you’re hungry, and you’re up to your eyeballs in Apple Computer’s 10-K report.

You want to nap, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got 10 pages left to write, and you need a way to stay awake.

What do you do?

Ramen Noodles, baby, Ramen Noodles. 20% of your NDA for saturated fat, and 33% of your sodium.

College life doesn’t get any better than this.

Later

It’s 2:44 PM, and your paper is due in 5 hours.

You’re tired, you’re hungry, and you’re up to your eyeballs in Apple Computer’s market share analysis.

You want to nap, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got 3 pages left to write, and you need to eat lunch.

What do you do?

Panera, baby, Panera. Smoked turkey breast, smoked bacon, smoked Gouda, leaf lettuce, tomato and our signature dressing, on our Tomato Basil bread.

&*#@ paper.

Later Still

It’s 5:21 PM, and your paper is due in 3 hours.

You’re edgy, you’re desperate, and you’re staring blankly at your word processor trying to come up with a conclusion.

You want to go play in traffic, but you know if you do, you’re finished. You’ve got a freakin’ page left to write and plenty of editing to do, and you need to remember that life is still worth living.

What do you do?

Frappuccino®, baby, Frappuccino®. Coffee, chocolate and coconut flakes blended with ice, topped with whipped cream, mocha syrup and coconut flakes.

I want my life back.

Finally

Done. One bowl of Ramen Noodles, one Panera Bacon Turkey Bravo plus chips plus Coke, and one Starbucks Frappuccino® later, the paper was finished and turned in on time. For those of you who may be interested in what the fuss was all about, my paper is available here in all its 35 pages of proprietary-format, diagram-ridden, poorly-edited, bandwidth-soaking glory. You can even amuse yourself with the fact that the paper gets dumber as my deadline draws nearer.

I’ll work on exporting an HTML because I’m trying to be a good netizen and get away from Microsoft Word’s proprietary format. It sure ain’t easy, though.

Update: The HTML version is now available due to my rapid web-space consumption. Thanks to Dean Allen’s Word HTML Cleaner.

Agent OE: As you can see, you’ve been my class for some time now, Team DLSI. It seems that you’ve been living…two lives. In one life, you are NJIT students, computer science majors at a respectable university. You have a student ID number, you pay your tuition, and you…help the janitors carry out their garbage.

The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias ‘Neo’ and are guilty of missing virtually every deadline we have a milestone for.

One of these lives has a future. And one of them does not.

I’m going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Team DLSI: you’re here because we need your help. We know that you’ve been contacted by a certain…individual. A man who calls himself Bieber. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by…many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive.

Your sponsors believe that I’m wasting my time with you, but I believe you wish to do the right thing. Now, we’re willing to wipe the slate clean—give you a fresh start. And all that we’re asking in return is your cooperation in bringing your senior project to completion.

Team DLSI: Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a really good deal. But I think I’ve got a better one. How about, I give you my source code…

Agent OE: Hm.

Team DLSI: …and you give me my diploma.

Agent OE: Team DLSI, you disappoint me…

Team DLSI: You can’t scare me with this evaluation crap. I know my GPA. I want my commencement.

Agent OE: Tell me, Team DLSI. What good is commencement, if you are unable…to graduate?
___

(By the way, if you’re looking for a good Matrix screen saver in celebration of the 5/15 release, these guys have it).

However, over the past several decades, thought has changed significantly regarding the development of information systems. It is interesting to note that analysts and economists have coined the phrase, “Information Revolution” to describe the latest trend in market forces. Before the rapid advancement of computer technology, the most recent market dynamic had been governed by forces put into effect by the “Industrial Revolution.” One revolution is defined by the way material things are produced for consumption. The other is defined by the way people manage the flow of information—a far less tangible commodity. This is an obvious reality that has far more subtle implications for the way their respective commodities are produced, which leads me to the topic at hand.

It was once thought that Information Systems should be constructed in similar manner to the way we build bridges. If you don’t know, engineering on a large scale is generally done in phases, during each of which various discrete tasks are given to people of different skill sets. For example, architects set out a design on paper, which is then given to several different engineers (environmental, civil, and so on) to determine feasibility and flesh out the resources involved. The engineers turn around and give their more concrete blueprints to contractors, who go out and do the work that has been defined for them in previous phases. This approach is referred to as a Cascade or Waterfall approach, where the output of one team becomes the input for another and so on down to the project completion. The first phase begins with the idea of a thing, which takes on more concrete reality as it is passed to the people who actually do the building. The builders do not have to deal with having to think about the placement of a staircase or the direction of waterlines, because all of these details have been determined before they put the bid on the project. All large-scale manufacturing follows a similar monolithic model.

Information Systems, for some time, have been modeled after a similar fashion. I spent my entire CIS 490, Guided Design in Software Engineering class learning that this is how a system is built, from idea to reality, all while filing hundreds of specifications reports as the work is passed from one level to the next. Architects architect. Analysts analyze. Designers design. Programmers program. Testers test. This approach to software engineering has official sounding acronyms like UML and advertises such stalwart names as IBM and Microsoft. With such powerful backing and proven entities, one might wonder what reason anyone would have to dissent. As it turns out, though, the monolithic approach to systems design does not comprehensively deal with the realities incumbent upon the intangible information system.

From a 50,000-foot view, the waterfall methodology looks like it sounds: one process leads to the next such that the output of one is the input of the next:

The major difficulty with this approach is that it assumes that the process of developing software is a repeatable, predictable event. Those in the trenches of software development know only too well that requirements change, budgets constrict, and timelines evolve. In order to deal effectively with this chaos, the process needs to adapt to look like this:

Here, the processes in software development occur simultaneously, with milestone releases to keep the processes in sync with each other and with the customer. It provides an inherent mechanism of efficiently and quickly developing code that is to the customer’s specification and welcomes changes in requirements. The overarching name for this category of software development is the Agile methodology, which comes in all sorts of flavors: Scrum (2), Extreme Programming, and Evolutionary Delivery.

Because the product life cycle for the senior project is approximately 12 to 13 weeks, an agile methodology really seems to be the most appropriate and will be adopted by our team. Of those available, Scrum seems to best fit the management style I believe I can contribute and is the most flexible model that can be adapted to our very busy schedules.

This document at ControlChaos.com has been most helpful in discussing the advantages of scrum.

The Linux desktop may not be ready for Joe User and his grandmother, but is it ready for the knowledge worker? This is a question I’ve somewhat accidentally been endeavoring to answer since the semester started. A lot of people go looking to prove Linux out when it comes to the desktop in a sort of anti-Microsoft methodology. My latest experimentation, though, wasn’t born out of a desire to prove Linux right or Microsoft wrong—it came out of an immediate need for tools to get my job done as project manager at school. While NJIT provides a lot of these programs for download through Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program, I wasn’t able to get a hold of them easily (the intranet site required that I authenticate three separate times, and still wouldn’t let me do it!). Read on to see just how Linux is performing in these areas.

Email Client

I had previously written about how I was in dire want of the killer email application for Windows, a task that I didn’t think would be quite so hard. I mean, email has been around for at least 25 years or so—you figure that somebody would have gotten it right by now. Much to my frustration, though, no one could suggest a viable alternative to my buggy Microsoft Outlook or the MSN-happy Outlook Express. I had, for a time, gone back to Outlook Express, but the idea of using Ximian Evolution got a hold of me and wouldn’t let go. However, this wasn’t the main reason that I started booting to Linux for personal use. Update: I just totally realized that Evolution will read XML news bites from the web! What does that mean? Well, in Geek it means that I can add a news source to my Summary page by simply typing in the address for the RDF file, such as ours, here. Woah.

Diagramming

Though I didn’t write about this, Darin and I had engaged in the search for an alternative to Microsoft’s Visio some months back because we were both so psyched about the Redhat 8.0 release. Darin really wanted to find a tool that would be able to create some of the diagrams that he worked with on a regular basis at work. In the process of looking for that tool, I found Dia. Dia is an open-source diagramming solution for Linux, which has been ported to Windows. While it can’t import Microsoft’s proprietary (read: market-preserving) file formats for Visio, the tool serves quite nicely on its own to let you create network diagrams, flowcharts, and entity-relationship diagrams. It will also export to a number of formats, including .jpg and scalable vector graphics.

Project Management

One of my requirements for this project is to provide the team and my professor with task lists and Gantt charts to show the team productivity. Microsoft Project is the standard for such project management, but as I searched the web for alternative methods (stumbling across cheesy web-based JavaScript Gantt generators along the way), I discovered MrProject. MrProject is essentially a GNOME-based Gantt generator—no frills, no huge featureset: just Gantt charts and some basic project information. But, man does it do a good job at it. Though still a somewhat buggy release at v0.9 (updated Feb 17th!), MrProject is able to deliver functionality in letting me record my project data and then output it all to a PDF (buggy) or PostScript file. This is actually the program that tipped me into booting to Linux: there is no Windows port available.

Web Browser

Of course, my favorite web browser is available in Linux as well as Windows, so there was no problem here. :) I had spent some time about two months ago getting antialiased fonts to work with it as well, and copied the Windows fonts into Linux to make for a very sweet browsing experience.

Productivity

No project manager can be without his productivity applications for documentation and spreadsheets. Thankfully, OpenOffice 1.0 is free for the taking and compatible with the Microsoft Word and Excel proprietary (read: market-rigging) file formats. So, as long as no one tries to go nuts with creating OLE-embedded movies in our specification documents (does anyone really do that?!), I should be compatible with the rest of the team’s productivity apps.

Is it possible that I will be able to successfully manage this project after having spent $0 on software? About 12 more weeks will tell the story. :)

The class is combined with Computer Science, Information Science, and Mangagement of Information Sciences majors. Each of these majors have a concentration in a particular area that is modeled to fit into a real-world team situation “when we get out”–CS majors program, MIS majors manage, etc. The idea is to form teams such as would be appropriate in a real-world scenario (mine, for example, is made up of one project manager, two programmers, two system analysts, and a database designer) and tackle a problem. The cool part is, though, that we’re not simply given a hypothetical problem by the school. Instead, they actually go to the trouble of rounding-up “sponsors” who present real needs to the class, which we then attempt to build. Students even have to compete for positions by giving applications to their prospective project managers. It’s a kind of micro-economy.

I struggled with whether or not to become a project manager based on all the other stuff I have to get done during this semester (although, unlike last spring, getting married is thankfully not one of them). In a bout of ambition or stupidity–I’m still deciding which–I applied for and got the job. The project that we’ll be working on is for the university itself, and has exciting implications for the future of the Internet. You can find out about it here: kennsarah.net/project.

So, if you find that this page is rapidly getting stale, you may want to check the other site out. :) By the way, I’ve mentioned to my wife that her audience is clamoring for her, but she’s been sick in bed this past weekend. I’ll set up a link to the blog-admin site on our home PC, though, and we’ll see what happens. ;-)