Myers-Briggs and software development teams

If you're interested in psychology and have ever taken a Myers-Briggs test (the one that classifies you as ENFP, INTJ, etc.), ACM's Queue has a fascinating article on how these personality types function within effective software development teams, particularly small ones. Specifically, the author studied:

• The effect of the project leader's personality on team performance;
• The effect of team members' personalities on team performance; and
• The effect of heterogeneity of personalities on team performance.

If you think the best programmers are naturally introverted, or that development teams are led best by the "sensing" type who focuses on actual details and facts (as opposed to the "intuitive" type), be prepared to have your thinking challenged.

(Incidentally, the last time I took one of these tests, I came out as an ENFP, but pretty close to an INFP. This statement certainly speaks to me: ENFPs hate bureaucracy, both in principle and in practice; they will always make a point of launching one of their crusades against some aspect of it.)

To IDE, or not to IDE

In this week's InfoWorld column ("The great IDE debate"), I discuss the timeless debate over the use of IDEs:

As a Java shop, we have our choice of dozens of tools to produce our code, but our developers have opted for the humble text editor. Our developers use a wide variety of text editors within the team (UltraEdit-32, vi, and Emacs), but each developer basically sticks to the simple text file environment. Our team is highly productive and probably the best at hitting deadlines that I have ever managed, but when it comes to writing code, IDEs (integrated development environments) just leave them cold.[read the rest here]

I also found some other writing that address the pros and cons of IDEs, either directly or somewhat tangentially:

• 10 Reasons to Dump Your Java IDE (Bradley S. O'Hearne)
• 10 Reasons (Not) to Dump Your Java IDE(Rafe Colburn)
• IDEs and their Projects (Tim Bray)
• NetBeans 4.0 Rocks! (James Gosling)

Trying out FeedBurner / Flickr

This weekend, I was trying to extend my web design skills, so I was crawling through the code of my friend Caterina's site (I've always admired her site design) and noticed that her RSS feed was linking out to FeedBurner. Then, just this morning, one of my colleagues asked me what I knew about FeedBurner, and I said, "Not much." All this after I had meaning to go back and look deeper into the Flickr / FeedBurner announcement several weeks ago that slipped by while I was on vacation. FeedBurner, FeedBurner, FeedBurner -- time to check out FeedBurner.

I decided to redirect my RSS feed over to FeedBurner. Subscribers shouldn't notice anything -- I inserted a temporary redirect into our Apache config while I'm trying this out (so please don't subscribe to the new URL!):

Redirect temp /dickerson/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/infoworld/dickerson

After an hour using FeedBurner, I'm already really pleased with the stats reporting on my RSS feed: click-throughs on individual items and the number of subscribers (something I could easily get for Bloglines, but not as easily for the general universe). So far, so good for something that is pre-alpha.

Incidentally, if you have a digital camera and you have friends (and here's hoping you have both), you have to sign up for Flickr -- now. I don't know quite how to explain the visceral thrill of using Flickr to post photos, share them with friends, and gather their comments. Not to mention your window into the photo streams of people you don't know who have made their photos public. You have to use Flickr to really get it. You can subscribe to an RSS feed that alerts you when someone has commented on your photos, which is really nice. (Full disclosure: the Caterina mentioned above works for Ludicorp, the folks who you bring you Flickr, but I'm posting this only because I think Flickr is really cool. Flickr seems to be percolating around InfoWorld right now -- Jon Udell ties Flickr into a discussion of enterprise knowledge gardening in his latest InfoWorld column.)

History of online news and information systems

The past ten or so years have been a real blur of activity for me, and every now and then I try to piece together how this whole web juggernaut came to be. I was working on a presentation today and was trying to remember when various traditional media company sites launched on the web. Thankfully, I found David Carlson's Online Timeline.

I found things like old screen shots of Access Atlanta on Prodigy, a short tour of Time Inc.'s Pathfinder, and screen shots of NandOland, the first online offering from the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer (where I had my first Internet job as "gopher administrator" and caught the online bug in a way that still hasn't left me). We have the WayBack Machine to transport us back to what many web sites looked like back in the day -- I'm glad someone captured some of the older non-web services.

Those low-down DNS blues

This week's InfoWorld column ("Digging into DNS") discusses the importance of your and others' DNS infrastructure to the proper functioning of business. I might have been tempted to file this into the "well, duh" category and never even write about it, but it seems that DNS issues pop up almost daily in the course of business. I had one scary run-in with DNS problems six years ago, and I'll never forget it:

My first encounter with serious DNS problems occurred years ago when I took over the operations of a troubled IT department. DNS administration in the group was haphazard at best, and because DNS was being administered via an over-simplified GUI on Windows NT, the administrators didn’t have to understand how DNS really worked.

Then one day, e-mail stopped coming in. And then the phones started ringing when our Web site became unavailable. After a long and grueling process, we discovered that a bug in our GUI-based DNS software had resulted in a truncated zone file -- the back-end text configuration file where the DNS rubber meets the name-resolution road -- and our domain was gradually (but surely) falling off the Internet itself, taking all our Internet services with it. We dumped the buggy GUI for open source BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). I handed over DNS duties to a talented Linux sysadmin who manually edited the zone file, and we never had those problems again.

I guess I hit on something. Within hours of my column posting to InfoWorld.com, I got a frantic e-mail from a network engineer in India who seemed to have the same problem I had on that fateful day six years ago (the name has been changed to protect the innocent):

Dear Mr. Chad Dickerson,

I am (name withheld) currently working with (company name withheld), India. I read your article which is publishing in the follwing [sic] URL

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/13/33OPconnection_1.html

I am totally stunned, after I go through your article. Now we are facing the same problem which you mention in that article. Can you plz guide me how to solve the DNS issue.

Offcourse [sic] I know,  you are in one big position in your concern. You cannot spend time with this.  

Thanks in Advance

Regards
(name withheld again)

Wish I could help, but based on my experience, I would do what I did when I had my problem several years ago:

• Go over to O'Reilly's Safari service and get DNS and BIND and the DNS & BIND Cookbook.
  
• If you're using a GUI to manage DNS, find the zone file on your system and look at it. There are some sample zone files here
  
• If that doesn't lead to success, grab the lowest-end spare workstation you have around and build a Linux (or FreeBSD) box and install BIND (DNS is not very resource-intensive, so a low-end box will do). If the step above *does* lead to success, do the above step anyway and dump your buggy DNS implementation.
  

Hope that helps.

Weblogs for personal productivity

Though we've been blogging behind the firewall here at InfoWorld for a while now, it's only recently that I set up my own personal internal weblog to keep track of what I'm working on. For things like to-do lists, it's a nice decentralized alternative to more centralized methods (like pieces of paper, a paper notebook, or even a Treo or Palm). I'm using Movable Type to do this, and I set up a "to do" category. At the beginning of every week, I blog my to-do list for that week, and select the "to do" category. Since I'm generating category pages, I've set the home page in my browser as the category page for my "to do" page. Since it's in reverse chronological order, my current to-do list always loads when I start up my browser. As the week progresses, I make notes on my to-do list in my personal blog, inserting relevant links and information as I go. For example, one item on my list last week was to investigate the ability of our Verity Ultraseek search engine to search custom meta tags. I found my answer here, blogged about it on our internal IT team weblog, then linked to that internal blog post from my to-do list in my personal blog. So, not only are my to do lists keeping me focused on important tasks, using the weblog approach allows me to document as I go. It's a nice and simple personal knowledge base.

There are only two (mild) downsides:

1. Since this blog is behind the firewall, I can't necessarily access it from anywhere -- only machines with a properly-configured VPN client and the appropriate credentials. But my home machines and laptop have all that set up, so I'm not stuck if I leave my paper notebook at work and need to reference my to do list.
2. I have to be online to reference my to do list (although that isn't even a problem if you use an offline posting tool like ecto)

Solaris vs. Linux

In my latest InfoWorld column ("Solaris takes on Linux"), I explore my thinking over the past few years as I've been one of the many IT folks who have replaced a lot of my Sparc Solaris infrastructure with Linux on Intel. That column was sparked by a recent post on Jonathan Schwartz's weblog that effectively points at some of the weaknesses in "linux" (as Jonathan calls it -- fairly, I think, since there really isn't one Linux) and why IT folks should reconsider Solaris:

So if you're running Red Hat, and feeling frustrated by their support, exorbitant pricing [see Solaris 9 pricing - CD], or weak security, it's time to look at Solaris, on any of the more than 200 hardware platforms we support. From HP, Dell, IBM and, of course, Sun (and a host of others). The migration is a very easy one. So is the free download.

In my column, I point out a couple of specific examples where Linux (I'll stick with the capitalized spelling out of comfort, but again, the "linux" spelling makes a clever point) has caused a bit of operational pain for us at InfoWorld. Jonathan's points against Red Hat are roughly defensible, although Red Hat's pricing doesn't seem so far out of line that it can't be adjusted to deal with any market challenges that might arise and the security claim could have been bolstered by a well-placed link or two.

While we're mostly a Linux/Intel shop here at InfoWorld, I don't feel nearly as fired-up and evangelical about Linux as I did five years ago when I convinced the marketing department at my then-employer to issue a press release trumpeting our migration to Red Hat Linux (spawning a Slashdot posting, a Webmonkey article, a piece in PC World, and a mention in a News.com story ). Despite the flurry of attention that migration brought, the dirty little secret of this Linux proponent was the Sun E450 I had in the server room running our content management system (which was open-source based and ran great on Solaris) and our mission-critical Oracle database. Linux was a bit risky at that time, so I wasn't foolish enough to migrate *everything* to Linux -- we had a content business to run, so the core content-producing system stayed on Solaris/Sparc. An excellent choice, but no one issues press releases about rock-solid Sun boxes running Oracle. They were just too commonplace.

Fast forward to the present. The Red Hat Linux I run isn't free (as in beer) anymore, and though the mission-critical Oracle I used to run on Solaris is now humming away on Red Hat Advanced Server on HP hardware, it's not officially supported on Debian, our Linux distro of choice for our front-end web servers, mail servers, etc., so I'm stuck working with two Linux distributions. Though I can get plenty of advice on how to make Oracle work under Debian (see here, here, and here), I find the thought of fooling around with a Debian system (even minimally) to make a five-figure software package function. . . . well, it registers somewhere between "aggravating" and "pointless." Might as well just cough up the money to Red Hat and go through as normal an install as possible. (And speaking within the "social movement" context that Jonathan asserts in his original post -- if you've already "sold out" to Oracle, why try to be righteous by using a free Linux distribution anyway? Seems a little like wearing a shiny new leather coat to a PETA rally.)

Quandaries like the one I outline above led me to conclude this week's column this way:

If I’m going to be paying license fees and support to a commercial OS vendor, what difference does it make whether the core is a well-tested Linux or a well-tested Solaris? I don’t think I would lose sleep at night going with either.

I don't think I've ever written anything dealing with this kind of ambivalence, but I think we've gotten to the point (at least with RedHat and commercial products that run on Linux and generally require Red Hat) where there's just not much technical or business difference between choosing Red Hat or Solaris. While Jonathan argues that Solaris is cheaper and Red Hat can arguably stake a stronger claim to open source, neither is free for commercial use and both run great open source software like Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, et. al. quite well. Setting aside Red Hat's open source roots for the sake of argument is not intended to diminish Linux itself and the efforts of the many generous Linux kernel hackers, nor am I intending to discount the benefits of the bazaar over the cathedral (InfoWorld has been a direct beneficiary of open source development). It's just that most folks working in IT never get down to the low level of the kernel, much less the actual *code* from the kernel, so the availability of Linux source code means little to most in corporate IT. In IT, it's all about getting particular applications to work reliably on top of your chosen (binary) OS, and once you've got a compiler like gcc, it's off to the races. Moving beyond the Linux-specific discussion, having source code for applications *is* actually quite useful at times, even for average IT departments, but I don't think Solaris has ever been behind in terms of applications (and likely ahead when you count all the commercial packages). On an application level, Sun never really failed open source proponents. It's just that Sun lost a lot of us a few years ago when we faced the choice of Solaris on an expensive Sparc or Linux on a cheap Intel box (made cheaper by stiff competition among the many vendors of Intel-based servers). Not to mention that Linux was the underdog and, frankly, being on the side of the underdog can be fun and invigorating (as movements can be) -- especially when you're delivering performance and cost-savings.

Back to Jonathan Schwartz, who continues his earlier train of thought discussing the meaning of the word "open." The post should be read in its entirety, but two nuggets stand out for me:

1. Only a customer can define the word "open." That's my view.
2. Ask a customer - open describes the level of effort it takes to enable substitution. If it's tough, it ain't open.

Towards the end of his post, Jonathan references my column with these words:

And before I conclude, I'd like to make one final point - one that I've skipped over, above. It's that the true cost of substitution is, as Chad Dickerson points out, seldom defined simply by the technical effort to port. It is as much, or moreso defined by the economic cost of qualifying or requalifying applications running on one production stack to another production stack.

and after an example from Sun, writes:

Were I a CIO facing these issues, I'd stay focused on the one thing definitively under my control - keeping the cost of substitution, of at least application portability, as close to zero as possible.

How?

You guessed it, I'd write to Java. And I'd keep my options...

open.

We're 100% in agreement on limiting the cost of substitution and application portability. These issues are not so much particular challenges of the CIO or CTO's role as the very essence of the role itself. Java is definitely as solid a choice as any to achieve this (we're a Java shop here at InfoWorld), but it's not the only one, particularly for web applications. You could also replace Java with PHP (as Friendster did) and run it all on Linux. If you're Overture, you might be looking for people who can write Perl on Solaris or Linux because Perl apps run fine on both (side note: interesting that Overture's ad states: "The team does not use IDE's to develop applications." But that's another topic.) They're hiring Perl hackers over at Amazon, too. Each of these companies' approaches more or less guarantee application portability across operating systems and give their respective companies the ability to easily switch out the OS running under the covers.

If I was forced to migrate my systems from Red Hat Linux to Solaris tomorrow. . . well, no problem. Solaris to Red Hat Linux? No problem. Firm differentiation between Red Hat Linux and Solaris? Problem.

Linux vs. Mac on the desktop

Chris Gulker points to a story on ComputerWorld.com about HP's unveiling of its first Linux laptop, the Compaq nx5000.

From the ComputerWorld story:

The Compaq nx5000 was unveiled at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here during a keynote speech by HP's vice president of Linux, Martin Fink.

"This is the year that Linux overtakes the Mac on the desktop, and maybe my laptop will help accelerate that," Fink said.

Industry research firm IDC in Framingham, Mass., said it believes that this has already happened. "Linux captured the No. 2 spot as desktop operating system in 2003," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky in a recent interview.

I hadn't looked at the OS distribution for InfoWorld.com users in a while, so I took a look at the numbers for the last 30 days and confirmed what IDC notes. The following are proportions of our users' various operating systems relative to each other:

• Linux vs. Mac: 3 to 1
• Linux vs. Solaris: 9.5 to 1
• Linux vs. FreeBSD: 66 to 1
• Windows vs. Linux: 16 to 1
• Windows vs. Mac: 38 to 1
• Windows vs. AIX, Windows vs. IRIX, Windows vs. HP-UX: 7667 to 1 (roughly, give or take a few hundred)

(Note: RSS readers are not counted in these calculations)

InfoWorld might not be the most typical site since we tend to skew towards technology early adopters. Frankly, I'm surprised that Linux has such a wide lead over Mac OS -- especially since I personally have been won over by OS X after using Linux on the desktop off and on for the past few years. Interesting stuff.

Kevin Railsback / RSS growing pains redux

I'm pleased to announce that Kevin Railsback, our IT manager here at InfoWorld, has joined the growing ranks of InfoWorld bloggers (along with Paul Venezia a few weeks ago). I really can't say enough about the breadth and depth of expertise Kevin brings to InfoWorld -- I don't think I have ever worked with someone who has such deep knowledge about very nearly everything. While this is Kevin's weblog debut at InfoWorld, Kevin isn't new to writing by any means. Before I "temporarily" drafted him into IT operations in early 2001 (sorry, Kevin), Kevin was an InfoWorld Test Center analyst, west coast technical director, and acting director of the Test Center, writing lots and lots of reviews and analysis along the way. Aside from InfoWorld, Kevin has also written for Linux Magazine. Since moving back into IT operations, Kevin has led our migration from a mixed Solaris/NT environment to Linux, rearchitected our LAN and WAN environments in many different ways, pushed our Mac environment into OS X territory (largely converting me in the process), and consolidated our web infrastructure into one-quarter of the physical space it once occupied (while making it all perform better than ever). Those are just the few things I can think of off the top of my head. Kevin is our go-to guy here at InfoWorld and I'm excited that he'll be sharing his expertise more regularly.

Kevin hasn't wasted any time contributing useful posts. As I was heading into vacation, Kevin jumped on the feedback I received on my "RSS Growing Pains" column and quickly implemented the key recommendations made by the blog world (which I recapped in followup column for InfoWorld -- wanted to make sure that the word got out in print and online). Right now, it looks like those changes have made our servers start yawning again and our growing pains are no more.

That's what I love about my job at InfoWorld -- I get to write about technology issues while having my hands deep in real day-to-day problems. Then, when I write about a problem, people send me thoughtful solutions and I get to work with people like Kevin to implement those solutions in a real-world environment. Living with the technology solutions we write about certainly keeps us honest, and it's a lot of fun.