Vagaries of Nepali Politics

When Maoists became a cleaner winner of constituent assembly election of Nepal in 2008, I had written in my blog on what could have caused it. But at the same time I also felt sad that despite being clear winner, Maoists had hard time forming the government and getting the prime minister position. If a member from Maoists had not been a prime minister, it would have been a big slap on the whole election process.

Unfortunately and not surprisingly there is still no change in status quo as far as writing constitution goes but there is a change in government. And in most likely hood Mr. Madhav Nepal of UML is going to be prime minister. It's the same Nepal who lost both constituents from which he had filed his nominations. I have no insight into politics but should not prime minister be a candidate who has been elected by people? IMO, it's even a bigger slap on constituent assembly election process. What it shows definitely though that Nepali politicians do not learn from their mistakes. They have lots of fun forming government and then bringing it down. I don't have problem with UML leading the government and I don't have problem with Mr. Nepal as prime minister if he had been elected. In current situation, I wonder how Mr. Nepal's moral allows him to even think about being a prime minister?

Maven archetype for testng + selenium

Lately I have been working a lot on front end stuffs such as JBoss Portal and Richfaces although my preference has always been to work on back end. Well life is full of these conflicting choices, isn't it?

I write sample applications for these JBoss Web Interface projects and testing them are included as part of continuous integration testsuite. To help with automation and to give easier ramp up time for new team members, I created a maven archetype for writing test cases using TestNG and Selenium. I purposely decided not to add cargo stuff as most of time we have preconfigured application and web servers. To use this for your own project, here is what you need to do


mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.jboss.maven.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=selenium-testng -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 -DgroupId=org.whatever.project -DartifactId=myproject -DarchetypeRepository=http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/


This has .classpath and .project for Eclipse/JBDS projects as well so you can import the generated project into Eclipse/JBDS and your project build path will automatically be set correctly. This was my first real foray into maven and I still think that maven needs to mature more in terms of usability. I hear good things about Maven 3 so I am looking forward to that.

Bug fixing: Two Steps Forward and One Step Backward

Currently I am leading the testing effort of couple of software frameworks which have fairly good user base. They are frameworks because they allow software developers to build a software product as opposed to provide an out of box software product for end users. While fixing bugs and testing them, all of sudden, I realized that bug fixing overall does not necessarily improve the inherent quality of software whether it's a software framework or software product. This self realization some how had a theoretical familiarity to me.

Going down the memory lane, I had read few good books on software design and development as well as software project management as part of my preparation for job interviews when I was about to graduate. One such book was The Mythical Man-Month by Mr. Frederick Brooks, JR. Back then it had made some sense but it it was one of many books that I had read. Its significance and relevance might have fizzled in elegance of other good books that I read notably GOF book on design patterns. I revisited Mr. Brooks literary creation and behold, it talked about exactly what I felt in chapter 11. ( I did not think Mr. Brooks had any pun intended when he talked about bug fixing and maintenance cost being 40% of development cost. These days I hear too many chapter 11 instances in financial news ;-) ).

In this chapter, Mr. Brooks describes bug fixes as two steps forward and one step backward. Here are the main points on why:

• Fixing a defect has 20-25% of change of introducing another.
• Whole set of regression testing is very costly.
• All bug fixes tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes.
• Things are always at their best in the beginning. Bug fixes increases disorder of the system and users get more sophisticated
• Software Development is an entropy decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. But maintenance is entropy increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.
  

Given that Mr. Brooks and many others observed these so many years back and I observe it as well, I wonder how much improvement we have made in terms of software project development as a whole. May be it's because of the fact that the only constancy is change itself and designing a system for change is more widely discussed in the literature than practiced. Mr. Brooks, you definitely make more sense to me now than what you did four years back. Not your fault though.

JSR-286 talk at Austin JUG

I will be giving a talk/presentation at Austin JUG about new features in JSR-286. The details of talk at http://www.austinjug.org/index.jsp?p=events-20090224 .

Technical Review of a book on JBoss Portal

I had the pleasure of being one of the two technical reviewers of a book on JBoss Portal. The details of book is at http://www.packtpub.com/jboss-portal-server-development/book. This book is another example of world being flat.

I was electronically contacted by publisher who till date I have not met and don't even know where exactly it is located. I electronically signed the contract. I got book chapters one by one through a mediator who was liaison between me and the author. I have not met the author yet and book is published.

I hear that if publishers get break even with technical books then it's usually considered a good thing. This also means that a technical reviewer does not usually have a monetary benefit and my case is no exception. I did get two free copies of the book and most importantly a very brief bio which is printed in "golden" letters. And, I am grateful to publisher and author for that. Now back to book.

I believe that book is a good introduction on Portal servers in general and when to use them. You will also get a good feel of different features such as CMS, Security, Management of JBoss Portal server. It has working examples of how to use JSP, JSF, AJAX in a portal environment. The book ends with a good introduction of JSR-286 aka Portlet 2.0 specification.

So, if you are curious about Portal world and looking for a spec compliant open source portal server, then this book is a good to have item in your bookshelf. If you find something not working as explained in book then feel free to comment over here. I will hit myself for a while but make sure its errata is updated accordingly. If you find everything working as it should, I wont mind seeing few words of appreciation. ;-)

We got electricity. Finally !!

Most of the world is agog with upcoming Obama's inauguration and I also belong to that part of the world. But I have something else to cheer for which depending on how you look at is equally exciting.




Sisautiya, the village in Nepal where I was born, finally has electricity. Yes. Yes and Yes. This is the village where I spent the first 16 years of life and went to a nearby high school which also did not have electricity. I hope my grand parents have saved the lantern that I used.

Friedman's 10 World Flatteners

Thomas L. Friedman's "The World Is Flat" is probably the best non fiction book I have read so far. It gives an amazing insight into 21st century: starting from why things are the way they are, how they will be and what factors will shape them. Here the "flat" is in reference to level playing field where each nation has almost equal opportunity to be a player at a global level. He provides a list of ten forces that flattened the world.

1. Fall of Berlin Wall (Nov 9, 1989)

• It was not only blocking our way but was blocking our sight. World was sort of like a frog in a well. Demolition set the frog out of the well.
  
• End of communism which in the simplest term is "a great system for making people equally poor".
• Created a chain reaction of freedom.
• Simultaneous birth and popularity of IBM PC/Microsoft Windows
  

2. Birth of Internet Browser Netscape

• Created a dot com bubble which helped corporation realize the power of internet which ultimately resulted into huge investment in connecting the world through fiber optic network.
• Dot com bust lead into cheap availability of these fiber optic data transmission network which third world countries could use.

3. Work Flow Software

• Automated communication between different departments of a corporation. New standards for software to talk to each other (SOAP, XML for Web services etc)
  

4. Open Sourcing

• Tell me about that. ;-)

5. Outsourcing

• Definition: To take a limited function of a company that was being done in-house such as research, call centers and have another company perform the exact same function and then reintegrate their work back to overall operation.
  
• Dot com allowed country like India, China and some Eastern European countries to use all the data line practically for free.
  
• World could use India's millions of engineering brain power not only in software but in accounting, medical data analysis, customer support
  

6. Offshoring

• Definition: When company takes one of its factories say in Canton, Ohio and moves the whole factory offshore to Canton, China.
• China wanted to attract foreign manufactures not simply to manufacture 1 billion pair of undies for sale in China but to use low-wage Chinese pairs of undies to sell 6 billion pairs of undies to the works at price that were a fraction of what companies in Europe and America.
• Companies started breaking their business into three parts: part to do in China, part to sell to China and part to buy from China.
• China flattener has been wrenching for manufacturing workers but a godsend for all consumers. By mid-1990s alone, cheap imports from China have saves U.S consumers $600 billion and saved US manufactures untold billions in cheaper parts for their products. This saving in turn helped Federal Reserve to hold down interest rates longer, giving more Americans to finance home and new business.

7. Supply Chain Management (SCM)

• Wal-Mart's uber cool efficiency on SCM. Its system is inter connected to such an extent that the moment a customer purchases something, the record goes to all the way to manufactures through corporate headquarter and wholesale dealer without a single intervention from a person.
  

8. In Sourcing

• UPS story: When you return a Nikon camera, it does not go to Nikon headquarter all the way. UPS has certified engineers to fix the camera. If they can not fix it, they ship a new camera to customer thus saving on extra shipping that would have been needed otherwise.
  
• Def: a new form of collaboration and creating value horizontally.
  
• Even small companies can do business globally without opening a shop in rest of the world. UPS acts as your global supply chain manager.

9. In-Forming (easy access to knowledge - Think Google)

10. Influx of Gadgets - Digital, Mobile, Virtual

• Being able to print boarding pass at home
• Blogging from anywhere through various devices - even mobile phones.
• Engines talking to computers, talking to people, talking back to the engines, followed by people talking to people - all done from anywhere to anywhere.
  

BTW, above is only one third of the book.