While Grace Hopper is often called “the Mother of COBOL,” Ms. Sammet was actually on the committee that designed it. She was 89.

Now that the ASMP/Workday migration project is about to be rebooted following what can only be characterized as a failure, maybe it’s time to look at just what went wrong.

First of all, we can’t assign any blame to the people working on the implementation and migration. Clearly a lot of hard work by competent people has been expended, without a lot to show for it.

The problems have their roots before the beginning of the project. The motivations for doing it were never clear, or at least never clearly expressed. Who actually wanted it, and why? How was it supposed to improve the University? What deficiencies in what we already had was it supposed to improve on? If these questions were ever asked, let alone answered, I missed it somehow. Just saying “modernize” doesn’t really express or answer them.

What we’ve lacked, for over fifteen years now, is a vision of how information technologies can make the University better. No one at the higher levels of leadership seems to have grappled with questions like “Why do we have IT?” or “What should we be accomplishing with IT?” or “Are there any strategic advantages we could derive from IT?” At least if they have, they haven’t communicated any answers they’ve come up with.

Until we have a vision of what we want to do, that’s clearly communicated to everyone affected, we’ll likely see more debacles like this.

IBM confirms that Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs

In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.

(via Daring Fireball)

I remember when UT was the “largest Mac deployment on earth.”

I’ve been converting my UT Forge Subversion repositories to the UT Austin GitHub site. This morning I finished converting the repository for webAgent. This repository has all the source code for webAgent 1 and the C/C++ source code for webAgent 2. (The webAgent 2 run time code is Java now.)

As I was doing the conversion (using reposurgeon) I was thinking that there might not be that much history, since as I recall Subversion didn’t exist yet when I did most of the webAgent coding. But then during the conversion I found a bunch of artifacts from cvs2svn; I had forgotten, but I did use CVS when I was writing it. So this is the second time I’ve converted to a new VCS.

From my personal blog: It’s what they do.

It’s that time of year again: the 2016 Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded.

Some favorites:

CHEMISTRY PRIZE [GERMANY] — Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.

MEDICINE PRIZE [GERMANY] — Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas Münte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).

Apparently it was a good year for science in Germany.

This is mostly for Java/C/C++, but lots of “good” advice: How to Write Unmaintainable Code.

This one made me laugh out loud:

The real reason for #define was to help programmers who are familiar with another programming language to switch to C. Maybe you will find declarations like ” #define begin { ” or ” #define end } ” useful to write more interesting code.

A few weeks ago I ran into Larry Yang while walking through the ground floor of FAC, and he gestured to the students around and asked if it made me nostalgic for when I was a student. I had to point out that things had changed a lot since I was a student; in fact, as an undergraduate I had completed assignments by punching FORTRAN programs onto punch cards. I mentioned this to Owen Allsop during our mentoring meeting, and he commented, and his comment was that he never thought of programming as being that physical.

It’s certainly true that there’s a lot more distance between the programmer and tangible objects than there used to be. In the end, though, something physical has to change for our programs to do anything.

As long as I’m going on about understanding the hardware, I’ll link to the great story of Mel, the Real Programmer. Who thinks about things like that these days?

Upgraded LIGO detectors spot gravitational waves

This is pretty cool.

Squeeze the banana to log into this office Wi-Fi

It’s good to see that creativity isn’t dead.