June 2005 Archives

I will be visiting the open days of the Royal Netherlands Air Force tomorrow. I will be bringing one of my radios to listen to the communications that the pilots will have. I'll have the scanner set up with the following frequencies:

1. 125.325 MHz - Gilze-Rijen Tower (VHF)


2. 369.600 MHz - Gilze-Rijen Tower (UHF)


3. 119.600 MHz - Gilze-Rijen Ground (VHF)


4. 336.450 MHz - Gilze-Rijen Ground (UHF)


5. 307.175 MHz - groups ops for the Pilatus PC-7 demo

Update: Both tower frequencies are linked (i.e., it does not matter to which one you listen) and they are used fairly intesively. Ground is also used and both ground frequencies are linked too. All frequencies were monitored on June 16th, 2005.

We have just returned from 18 days in de country of the SUV, the Hummer and the strecthed limo, in which gas prices in the Savannah, GA area can be as low as $2.24 per gallon (€ 0.46 per liter). While these prices seem low to us Europeans, they are incredibly high according to US standards. Especially the rapid speed by which the prices have gone up leads to many mumblings and complaints.

Despite this sharp increase in fuel prices, I had not expected to see much difference in the way that the average American goes about their daily business. Cars really are essential over there; outside the metropolitan area, public transport is of an extremely poor quality and shops, stores and malls have been designed with the expectation that everyone will go there by car.

To my surprise, after doing a lot of driving in our little Ford Focus rent-a-car, I did get the impression that the number of large gas guzzling cars, such as SUVs, MPVs and other over-sized cars on the road appears to have declined. This impression seems to be corroborated by sales figures.

Second, I noticed a sharp increase in the number of cars using a hybrid engine, most notably the Toyota Prius. I spotted several Priusus in Savannah (GA), Hilton Head (SC) and all over Long Island (NY).

These two observations, combined with simple things such as sensored traffic lights (as opposed to timed traffic lights), an increase in red-light and speed cameras along major roads, etc., seems to indicate that even in the United States, Bigger is no longer always Better.

On Steve's FurryGoat.com weblog, he poses the question:

So my question is: Why is that? Is writing software for Windows just too damn hard?

Coincidentally, I had a discussion with a few colleagues about this matter the other day as well. Of course, given our personal preferences, we did not discuss software development for the Windows platform, but thought in more general terms.

I posed the hypothesis that building software is an immature engineering discipline, which most notably shows in our lack of ability to make true black boxes. "Classical" engineering, like building bridges, dams, and other structures, has mastered the art of specifying components to such a degree that they can be described with only a few parameters. In the art of software engineering, we do not have this down yet.

For example, the Service Oriented Architecture consists of many different layers. From an engineering point of view, that is a highly desired design feature. By attacking any problem with a divide and conquer strategy, things should get easier all alround.

Unfortunately, an implicit assumption in systems theory is that each system (or black box) can be considered independently of all others, and there is no need to understand the inner workings of each system. It is exactly this aspect that we have not yet mastered in software engineering. To be able to build a software system that is layered, the application developer will have to be very intimitatly familiar with each layer, including all the interactions between those layers.

While I do not know anything about Windows programming (which I sometimes regret), general GUI programming definitely suffers too much from this. Java programming libraries, such as the AWT or Swing, the Tk toolkit from Tcl/Tk, but also applications developed according to the service-oriented computing paradigm still require too much knowledge in a programmer.

Steve's point that there may need to be more documentation is partially true. However, documentation only serves to increase the knowledge of the developer. My point is that the developer should not have to know all that he needs to know today.

Until we know how to build true software black boxes, software engineering will always remain an art, and will never become a science.

Like many more people, I am getting more and more interested in reading web logs of people all over the web. Although I personally feel that the blogging phenomenon is interesting, I also feel that is gets more attention than it is worth. In last year's New York City edition of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, Adam Bosworth delivered a keynote speech in which he touched upon RSS and Atom and their role in the dissemination of information. Later that year, Communications of the ACM dedicated their December issue to "The Blogosphere".

But, I digress. To keep track of web logs, a type of tool called an RSS Reader can be very valuable. I my search for an RSS reader that meets my personal wishes, I have been thinking about my ideal RSS reader. Should it be a separate application, or should it maybe be intergrated in another information processing application, such as a web browser or an email client?

Ideally, I want software that is portable and usable from anywhere in the world. For all intents and purposes, that requirement excludes stand-alone applications. Applications are written for an operation system, and while I prefer a Linux based solution, I also know that I will not be able to always use a Linux system.

Integration with an email client (stand-alone, or web-based) is also not something that I am a big fan of. When processing email, I am generally in a completely different mindset than when I am reading blogs. Since my email system pretty much provides me with a workflow management system, and any item in my incoming mailbox generally means that I have more work ahead of me, I prefer to keep my inbox as small as possible. Mailing lists to which I subscribe get delivered to different mailfolders, which for all intents and purposes are invisible until I decide to look at them. It seems that Steve agrees with me on this one.

Integration with a web-browser is a nice solution, since I am in full control of what happens. I decide the speed by which I browse, and where I browse to, and the web is commonly available wherever I am. The current RSS reader that I use is Sage, which is an extension that lives within Mozilla Firefox. The major disadvantage of this browser is that it is still location specific; my RSS feed URLs reside locally on my disk as a bookmarks folder and can only be shared over a network if I place those bookmarks on a network accessible location.

In my opinion, the ideal RSS reader is one that is fully web-based. I would like to be able to access my collection from anywhere in the world by pointing a browser to a web site, and have the ability to manage my feeds via that web site. That RSS reader should also be able to keep a full history of the articles that I already read, and be good enough to allow me different perspectives on my feed collection.

So far, I have not found such a web application yet. Maybe, if I have enough time, I will make it myself.