This article from Fast Company about software process gives insight into how true mission critical software gets written. Their development process is essential for their requirements, but very few software projects have requirements that stringent. Buggy software is a function of the rate of changing requirements. Most business are willing to accept some level of uncertainty(aka bugs) to reduce development time or cost. In the places I’ve worked at(none of which develop truly mission critical software), the business requirements change so quickly that bugs are a way of life.

Bug-free software is like secure software: business all want to do it, and all claim to be working towards it. But when you really get down to it, it’s very expensive and almost no one is really investing the time and effort required to get it done. From a business standpoint, writing buggy software is not inherently bad, it’s more like risk management. Businesses will find an acceptable level of uncertainty and risk for the software and they should accept it with the requirements. You want bug free software? Fine, be prepared to spend a lot of time and money on requirements, testing and QA.

I have a friend who might be looking for a job at any promising startups in the Bay area, preferably South Bay, anyone know of any hot companies that are good to work for? I tried to talk to him about Shutterfly, but I think he’s looking for a smaller company(<50 people).

Lucas is standing up a lot now and can walk around while he’s leaning up against something. He’s pretty fun. He likes to be tickled and thrown up in the air. So I’ve been working out my chest by throwing him straight up and catching him as he comes down, it’s good for me and baby likes it too. I’m trying to find new interesting baby exercises where I can toss him around, if only he were boomerang shaped.

Finally Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica has gotten good. Last night’s episode was the best of the year. It wasn’t the best episode from a storyline point of view, but the action was excellent. The Starbuck segments were again particularly good.

In a bit of nostalgia, I started playing Warcraft3 again. I still pwn at it. I’m not a top player, but I can beat all the n00bs out there, and there are a lot.

I read the following about Iraq: “You’ve got a situation where it’s not possible to lose militarily,” Rumsfeld said. “It’s also going to require more than military power to prevail.”

This quote for Rummy is talking about how the administration needs to work Sunnis and Shiites to win the war. But for the Bush administration it’s even more important to win the political battle at home.

It reminds me of what one my college professors said when I took a course in the history of the Vietnam War. His hypothesis was that every presidential administration except for the last one succeeded in Vietnam. However the goal of each president was not to win the war, the true goals were to minimize the number of troops in Vietnam and not lose the war. This is a strategy for disaster and one of many reasons that Vietnam was not a decisive victory. My professor believed that a true victory in Vietnam was possible at the cost of occupying Vietnam for another decade, hundreds of thousands of troops, and billions of dollars.

At this point, cut and run looks pretty viable to me.

We’ve added a couple of new shows to the Tivo, we’ll see how long they last. Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Six Degrees have caught my attention so far.

Being a West Wing fan, it’s not a surprise that I like Aaron Sorkin’s latest creation Studio 60. I liked The West Wing better, but maybe this will grow on me.

Also Battlestar’s season premiere wasn’t quite as good as I wanted, but it was good. The Starbuck bits were great. The scenes about the Resistance were fine, I wasn’t that thrilled with the disagreements between the Cylons. I was amused that they made Apollo go soft.

Lucas has finally shown the tip of his first tooth, it’s just barely showing, but it’s definitely there 8 months later. He’s been a bit slow with the teeth but he’s crawling and standing earlier than his peers. He got to see a lot of other kids today at Amelia’s 1st birthday party. Tracy took him to a pumpkin patch with his Halloween outfit and took the cutest pictures, including this one.

I hate Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, and Active Directory. Talk about a terrible interface and crappy interoperability. Everytime I have to use Outlook(which is daily) it annoys me. It’s a an average mail client and a terrible calendaring system. I also hate Word simply because there’s everything that it does can be done better with the web. Excel however is awesome, Access is fine, Powerpoint is fine.

So you wonder where the nick hubt comes from… Back in high school, I used to sign my name Hubert T Chen. With large H, T, and C characters. Some friends of mine used to make fun of the size of my T(which stands for Tai-yuh and means something like The Glory of Taiwan). So a couple of them called me Hubert T Chen with emphasis on the T. After that it later became Hub-T, and then its final derivation occurred when I got to college and had to choose a login name for my unix account. hubert was taken and so was hchen, so I went with hubt because of course no one uses caps or punctuation with a login name.

The origin of Habuchan as a nickname goes back to when my my brother Tim and I took Japanese in high school. The common diminuitive suffix for a Japanese boy’s name is -chan so naturally it’s Timuchan and Habuchan.