Author: Tim Jarrett

Catching up

I’m starting to become that guy that I always laughed at at the office–staying up late working while the wife and family go to sleep around him. It isn’t that funny when it happens to you, though.

We’re in the final run to a big release, coming out in a week, and the days are packed between now and then–getting ready for my webinar tomorrow, two back to back big demos next week, lots of work coming on the horizon. I love this feeling when I’m on the cusp of a lot of big things happening, but already I’m looking forward more to beginning the next phase of work than I am to the release. There’s just so much waiting to be built. Maybe that’s why I never took to product marketing. I like building things more than talking about them.

Backstage at the Hatch Shell, July 4, 2010

At rehearsal at the Hatch Shell

This weekend I had one of those eerie experiences where you step into a picture you’ve always watched, but never imagined yourself in.

When I was growing up, the Fourth of July meant band concerts at Fort Monroe–if you’re growing up in Tidewater Virginia, military base concerts are your best bets for live music and fireworks–but it also meant the Boston Pops on TV. I remember vividly watching in the late Fiedler years, then later in the John Williams era. I made a pilgrimage to see the event in person in 2001, at the dawn of this blog. When we lived in Seattle we’d watch the show televised from the Hatch Shell and think about being in Boston. When we moved back to the area, we watched on the big screen at Robbins Farm Park, or else simply flaked out in front of the TV (the best place to watch the Aerosmith spectacle from a few years back).

But I never dreamed I’d be singing on the stage, in front of about 800,000 people. We had a warmup concert on the 3rd with an audience in the tens of thousands, but it was no preparation for the crowds, the heat, and the excitement. The music for a July 4 concert can be expected to be the usual patriotic numbers, and this year did not disappoint, but there were also some truly moving moments, such as the tribute to the Kennedy brothers–which, judging from the feedback on Twitter was a highlight of the show (at least for some). I hope we get a chance to do the show again soon–maybe with a few more lyrics and less humming.

See also: my photos from the weekend.

Doing secure development in an Agile world

My software development lead and I are doing a webinar next week on how you do secure development within the Agile software development methodology (press release). To make the discussion more interesting, we aren’t talking in theoretical terms; we’ll be talking about what my company, Veracode, actually does during its secure development lifecycle.

No surprise: there’s a lot more to secure development in any methodology than simply “not writing bad code.” Some of the topics we’ll be including are:

  • Secure architecture — and how to secure your architecture if it isn’t already
  • Writing secure requirements, and security requirements, and how the two are different.
  • Threat modeling for fun and profit
  • Verification through QA automation
  • Static binary testing, or how, when, and why Veracode eats its own dogfood
  • Checking up–internal and independent pen testing
  • Education–the role of certification and verification
  • Oops–the threat landscape just changed. Now what?
  • The not-so-agile process of integrating third party code.

It’ll be a brisk but fun stroll through how the world’s first SaaS-based application security firm does business. If you’re a developer or just work with one, it’ll be worth a listen.

Blogdentity crisis

In the beginning of my tenth year of blogging I find myself thinking more and more about what my blog is for.

In the early part of the decade I thrived on reading blogs, because no one else that I knew was doing it and no one else knew what was going on. The tech press was moribund, though it didn’t know it, and all the interesting stuff was happening on people’s blogs. My blog was a voice among that group.

To a certain extent that’s still true, except that a lot of the blogs that I read now aren’t “people’s blogs.” Oh, there are exceptions: Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball is certainly one strong individual voice, and so is Dave Winer’s Scripting News (which never really stopped being an individual voice). But others are collections of writers with an editorial voice. And they are always, mercilessly, on topic.

I don’t think I could keep this blog “on topic” if I tried. Bad enough that I have three or four topics (Glee Club history, singing with the TFC, listening to music, software industry stuff, product management) that I can’t quit, but I can’t imagine making the blog all about any of them. I know I lose readers that way, but what am I to do? This blog is just about me, not about me the product manager or me the software business theorist, or me the singer.

And sometimes that makes it that much harder to write. Like yesterday: a bunch of things at the office that I can’t blog about, a sick kid, a short TFC rehearsal. Not much blogging matter there. So I missed a day. Part of what made blogging fun before was always thinking about things that I could blog about. I need to get back into that habit.

Glee Club president search

Over at the Virginia Glee Club Wiki, I’ve embarked on a mini-project-within-a-project, trying to find and list as many presidents of the Glee Club as possible. So far, we’ve got 37 presidents named, including five whose last names begin with M and a full nine Bs. (Still working on getting a representative set of data to see if those distributions are skewed.)

In the meantime, you can help a VMHLB brother out by identifying any presidents who are missing. There is definitely some low hanging fruit–I’m missing many from the 1980s and late 1990s and almost all of them from the 2000s, for instance. Even better is if you have any other officer names from those years. Just leave a comment on this page, or–even better–put ’em in the wiki yourself.

Update: Thanks to Frank Albinder’s contributions, we now are up to 44 presidents, filling in most of the 2000s.

My first Pops Independence Day concert

This Fourth of July will be a first for me. After five years of membership in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, I’ve hit the big time. Bigger than singing with James Levine? With Sir Colin Davis? With Renée Fleming? Maybe. I’ll be singing my first Fourth of July concert with the Boston Pops, as a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

I don’t know yet whether I’ll be on stage, but I think just being there at the Hatch Shell on the Fourth is going to be reward enough. I grew up with local Independence Day concerts at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, but even I knew that the Boston July 4th was The Real Deal. But somehow I missed my opportunity the last time the TFC performed with the Pops, and for a few years they haven’t sung.

But now–the year of the 125th anniversary of the Pops, and the 40th anniversary of the TFC–I’ll be there. You can even watch me on local TV — though, alas, not the national broadcast, as all our numbers will be in the first half of the show. But if you’re in the Boston area, set your DVRs!

On being on the Business Blogs list on Boston.com

For about the past week, my blog has been linked from the Business page of Boston.com. Which is odd, because this isn’t really a business blog. Sometimes I write about technology strategy, occasionally about marketing; frequently about product management. But you’re just as likely to find posts about music, or turning 40, or the history of a 140-year-old singing group here.

So in the interests of truth in advertising: if you want all business writing all the time, better check somewhere else. If you don’t mind coming in on the middle of nine years of my writing about things that catch my attention: welcome.

Things that make you feel old

I have a few more years before I cross the rubicon of 40, and I don’t spend much time dwelling on that approaching milestone. And yet, there are days…

Today, it wasn’t observing the greying roots in the mirror, or wishing another friend well as they turned 40. No, it was paging through the second volume (1982-1984) of the collected Bloom County, snickering at strips that I first read when I was ten…

Then reading the margin notes and finding Breathed apologizing for the obscurity of all the pop culture references. All of which I remember just fine, since I was there.

Ah well. As Binkley says to Milo when asked if Adam and Eve had navels: “Well, YOU can just rock me to sleep tonight!”

Upgrade day: iOS 4.0 (with iTunes 9.2), WordPress 3.0

For reasons best known to my shrink (maybe I wasn’t exposed to enough risk as a child?), I decided to tackle two major upgrades yesterday. Of course iOS 4.0 was released yesterday, so I had to get multi-tasking working; but WordPress 3.0 was also released last Thursday and I figured it was time to check that out. In the process of doing the iOS upgrade, there was also an incidental iTunes upgrade. Of the three, guess which one was the most problematic?

WordPress 3.0 went absolutely smoothly in manual install mode. I haven’t been able to use auto updates because my FTP user does not have the WordPress directory as its home directory, but manual installs have generally worked well for me. I reviewed the sample wp_config.php file, updated a few parameters that had been added in the recent past, then copied all the other files over. A db upgrade later and everything was up and running. The downer of WP 3.0 is that most of the features are available through new theme capabilities, and the author of my theme appears to have left WP theme development in favor of the preacher’s life. Best of luck, Armen, and if you ever revive the Excel theme let me know. In the meantime, it looks like I have to learn how to hack themes to take advantage of flexible menus and some of the other new features.

Now iOS and iTunes 9.2 is another story. I hadn’t remembered to do the 9.2 update over the weekend, so I was prompted partway into the iOS 4.0 installation. I had to step back and do that install first, then restart iTunes. And of course, somehow, iTunes lost my music directory location again (I keep all my iTunes files on a NAS since I have much more music than will fit on my MacBook Pro’s HD). I don’t know why it decided that I had my library back in the default location, but it did, and it spent a half hour rebuilding my library file only to lose all the file locations. I had to change the location and rebuild again, and only then was I able to do the sync. In spite of the multiple rebuilds, iTunes was still confused about the location of some files, and it took another restart of iTunes to fix the problem.

By comparison the iOS 4.0 upgrade was a piece of cake. Everything about the phone seems snappier now. Multitasking and folders work as advertised; I like the new iBooks reader (though it’s much slower on initial start than the Kindle App or Classics); and it was a kick to see a photo of my daughter (my normal wallpaper) behind all the home screen icons.

But there was one big glitch. For some reason, name server resolution stopped working through my VPN. The VPN was working, and I was able to find my Exchange server and other resources by IP address, but there were definitely some frustrating moments this morning as I tried to get everything working. I really hope that that was a transient glitch, or this new OS is not going to work out too well for me.

Father’s Day 2010

I’m a relatively new father; my daughter is 3 and a half. So I can perhaps be forgiven my surprise at enjoying Father’s Day as much as I did this year.

When I was growing up, I didn’t really understand what Father’s Day was all about. I always felt lame with the poor excuses for gifts or cards I would find for my dad. After all, how do you put “you made me who I am” in a card and have it mean something? And how do you provide a gift that acknowledges the magnitude of that debt, even slightly?

Based on my experience yesterday, I guess the answer is: you just relax and enjoy it. I think the best parts of yesterday were the dedicated hours I spent with my daughter as she helped me sort through the pieces of her gift to me and put it together. Or sweating together at the playground until we made the happy mutual discovery that the ice cream truck sold bottled water. Or having her ask for a bite of my steak at dinner.

The nice thing about Father’s Day is that, when it’s good, you don’t have to do anything to make it a happy Father’s Day. You just have to be.

Friday Random 10: It’s been a while

Well, I have to confess that writing a proper blog post a day has been more challenging than I anticipated. Which is why today’s “proper blog post” is a Friday Random 10. iTunes is on shuffle; let’s see what happens.

  1. Bill Cosby, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
  2. Miranda Sex Garden, “Exit Music (For A Film)” (Carnival of Souls)
  3. The Negatives, “Stakeout” (John Peel Singles Box)
  4. Elvis Costello, “Brilliant Mistake” (King of America)
  5. Mclusky, “The Habit That Kicks Itself” (To Hell With Good Intentions (single))
  6. Pharcyde, “The Rubbers Song” (Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool)
  7. Hüsker Dü, “Broken Home, Broken Heart” (Zen Arcade)
  8. Josh Haden, “Show You The Way” (Devoted)
  9. Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra/Saulius Sondeckis, “Trisagion” (Arvo Pärt: Litany)
  10. Broken Social Scene, “Almost Crimes (Radio Kills Remix)” (You Forgot It In People)

What’s the difference between iPhone and Android?

I work with iPhone users and Android users. I see no end of technology demos from both. It’s clear both phones are wonderful devices capable of doing amazing things.

So why do iPhone reviews make it sound like the device can walk on water, while a lot of Android reviews sound like this?

Unfortunately, these groundbreaking features come with enough fine print to give the White Pages an inferiority complex.

First, the screen… you can’t have a big screen on a small phone. The Evo is nice and thin, but it’s also tall and wide. It is not for the small of hand. People might mistake it for an iPad Nano.

The Wi-Fi hot spot business is slick…. this feature eats through a full battery charge in as little as one hour. (More on the Evo’s amazing disappearing battery in a moment.) And beware: the hot spot feature costs an extra $30 a month.

O.K., so what about Flash? … The Evo runs something called Flash Lite, which is marketing-ese for, “Sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.” It plays videos on some sites that the iPhone can’t — on Engadget, for example, plus all the blinking ads (a mixed blessing). But it still can’t play the Flash videos on CNN.com or, sadly, TV shows on Hulu.com.

All right, what about video calling? Surely this is the killer app. Imagine: your friends and family can not just hear you, as with normal phones, but see you as well (assuming they also bought Sprint Evos, of course).

Well, let’s hope they’re NASA engineers, because this feature is head-bangingly unstable….

And this?

There’s a sense, not just from reviewers, but from fans of the device, that what Android really needs is just killer hardware.Which is just absolute horse shit.

Android is an asshole of an operating system.

… I discovered software I could find no way to uninstall; programs which hung around after I was done with them with no way to quit I could find; interfaces which featured tiny poorly placed buttons near impossible to click without concentration; inconsistent search functionality where the “it’s right there on the phone” search button worked or didn’t work or did work but not as you’d think it’d work. I nearly started a tumblr called “Jesus Christ I Hate This Fucking Phone” just to document all the utterly asinine behaviors my iPhone-killer-anyday-now exhibited.

There’s an argument to be made (so of course, I’ll make it) that the Android experience failures described above are not technology failures. Android’s technology and operating system are impressive. But the whole package doesn’t seem to add up very well. Compare to iPhone, where (App Store policies to the contrary, and it’s a big contrary) the whole experience is consistent and wonderful and hangs together.

The whole experience part, I think, is the key. One suspects that on most Android phones that there’s no one–not Google, not the handset maker, not the carrier–who is taking responsibility for the whole end user experience. And it shows. David Pogue’s review describes a phone whose makers, if they made tradeoffs between features and constraints at all, traded off things that most people consider essential (size, battery, stability and consistency of experience) in favor of flashy features. The result is a phone that demos well but handles poorly. And Jack Shedd’s experience with the phone describes something that’s inconsistent and hard to use when you consider it as a whole device.

Does any of this — feature prioritization, product packaging design, user experience — sound familiar?

What’s the difference between iPhone and Android? Product management is the difference.

I’m willing to bet that the product managers on the Android phones had organizational limitations on how much of the user experience that they controlled, or edicts about must-have features in which the end user experience carried little weight, and that they could do nothing about those limitations. But show me a product manager who allows organizational pressure to impair user experience, and I’ll show you a product manager who has prioritized organizational harmony against sales success.

The Jane Siberry oeuvre

I’m most of the way through listening to Jane Siberry’s collected works, which she has made available for free download on a “pay it forward” basis. It’s a rare opportunity to listen to an artist’s evolution over a short period of time.

I had only ever heard, really, Siberry’s 1993 album When I Was a Boy, and some of her soundtrack work (“It Can’t Rain All The Time” from The Crow and “Slow Tango” from Faraway, So Close!). I was really, really into When I Was a Boy, to the extent that I forced “Temple” on anyone who would listen, with occasionally embarrassing results. (Okay, so “You call that far? You call that hot? You call that darkness? Well, it’s not” isn’t exactly high poetry.) But some of her songs reach so deep into the psyche, including “Slow Tango,” “Sail Across the Water,” and of course “Calling All Angels,” that I remained in love with the music anyway.

I’m not sure why I never found another one of her albums after that. Maybe it was the typography on the cover of Maria (I’ve never liked that particular script font). Or maybe it was because one album later she was self-releasing her albums and distribution fell off.

Or maybe it was because the two recordings that followed Maria were, respectively, Teenager, an album of modern recordings of songs that she wrote as a teenager, and A Day in the Life, a found-sound recording that followed her through a regular day. I think some artists benefit from editing.

But listening to the whole catalog puts those two albums in perspective. She followed them with a three disc set, New York Trilogy, that went all sorts of unexpected places, like a live band rendition of her trippy “An Angel Stepped Down (And Slowly Looked Around)” that might better the studio recording, a full album of songs about finding one’s own voice, and a moving double album of untraditional Christmas songs. And before When I Was a Boy were some deeply worthwhile albums, including The Walking, which feels like a successor to both Laurie Anderson and Astral Weeks. And Maria? A very cool album of offbeat vocal jazz — though, again, I’m not sure I needed the entirety of the twenty-minute “Oh My My.”

So it’s been quite a gift. Not sure about the best way to “pay it forward,” though, since I don’t have any music of my own to release. Maybe telling you to go download it is the right call. Strongly recommended: The Walking, No Borders Here, When I Was a Boy, Maria, New York Trilogy, and Hush. I’m not done listening yet, so maybe I’ll expand the list.

[audio:http://www.sheeba.ca/MUSIC/m02CY_08_Calling_All_Angels.mp3|titles=Calling All Angels (Choir version, no k.d. lang, from Sheeba.ca)]

Lush Life

There are certain records, certain tracks, that instantly take you back to where you were when you heard them for the very first time. John Coltrane’s “Lush Life” (the first version he recorded, the 1958 version with Red Garland, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, and Louis Hayes) is one of those albums, and one of those tracks.

The whole record is unusual in Trane’s discography. The first three tunes are performed by a pianoless trio (Red Garland apparently forgot to show up for the session), and they show a keen sense of rhythm and a searching intelligence while still demonstrating Trane’s mastery of playing over the chords. The fifth track, a quartet session with Garland, Chambers, and Albert Heath on drums, is a straight ahead reading of “I Hear a Rhapsody”–a nice enough performance, but unremarkable by itself.

No, it’s the title track that makes one sit up and pay attention, as I did when I brought it back to my dorm room in the fall of 1990, a story which I’ve told before. All the more if you think of the story (not the words. The words themselves have so little poetry that it’s a miracle that Johnny Hartman brought what he did to the song five years later)–the sad, romantic story of the man who was idly bored until a miracle of love came into his life, and then quietly heartbroken when love departed. So he tries to bolster his spirits, only to confront his own solitude: “Romance is mush/stifling those who thrive/I’ll live a lush life/in some small dive/and there I’ll be/while I rot with the rest/of those whose lives are lonely too.”

Only the artistry of Strayhorn could take us through the gorgeousness of the tune into the depths of that solitude within a single song. One thinks, he must have been a lot of fun at parties.