How wonderful, I'm not alone in despising these modern interfaces targeted towards tiny, touch screens, with an aim to suck a user into staring at a screen all day with eternal sliding, etc. Amazing how the site, "Web Pages That Suck" is still relevant, with things like mystery meat navigation, contrast, figuring out the site in less than 4 seconds. Apparently it got so bad he had to take a break, but the author is now back. I would like to see his site as required reading for the graphic designers pushing this stuff out.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.co...
"You'll get my clunky desktop interface when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands."

Over the last 30 years, about once a decade, there is an article about how software code can be generated and that software developers aren't needed. In the late 80's my husband worked as a subcontractor on a project for IBM where the software architects had designed the system and written out the design in pseudo code. A lowly developer like him only needed to type in the perfect code they had designed and it would work. My husband kept telling the management team that no, the code wouldn't work, the logic was flawed and it would be buggy. He fixed things on his module and did testing, in spite of direction to implement the code exactly as designed and not test it or integrate it with other modules.

This perfect code also wasn't supposed to require any integration, so they went directly from development to acceptance testing. That worked about as well as you'd expect, they had to stop testing within an hour after starting. My husband's code was one exception, it mostly worked and actually ran when the tested the system. There were a few bugs but it performed better than other modules i the system. However, they had to delay the schedule so they could get everything integrated. He left that job and went to a small company where lowly developers only worked on coding. That system had few bugs and worked pretty well. Sadly, right before he left the company, they were partnering with IBM and starting to buy into the perfect code design idea. I worked on a similar project for the DoD, I was supposed to code the design exactly as written. Even if it didn't work when it was executed, I wasn't allowed to fix the software unless I had gotten a approved bug report that stated it was priority one and the software would not run at all unless I fixed the bug. Amazingly enough, the customer killed the project before delivery.

Saw the same thing in the 90's, Java and X-Windows were going to eliminate detailed coding and allow the use of low cost, low experience developers. I still remember explaining a memory overflow bug to a Java developer and that the string was probably longer than 1024 or 2048. He told me it couldn't happen, sure enough, I counted up the string to where it overflowed, the first 1023 characters were fine, it was the 1024 where it overflowed, sigh. In the 00's, it continued, the continuing trend was to use MS Office with Visual Basic, no need to code those back office applications and waste all that time designing, implementing, integrating, beta testing and gradually rolling out into production. Excel and MS Access with Visual Basic are examples of this type of thinking and I've seen how well that has worked out for database development.

Guess it's time for business types to roll out this idea, consultants to sell it to businesses on how they can cut costs, for software development and then another batch of software consultants will come in and clean up after them from the mess left behind on these systems. Would be nice to be proved wrong, but I haven't seen that much change in the state of the art for the majority of software development. I feel a major breakthrough is required for this to happen that will completely break from previous programming practices and from what I can tell only incremental changes are occurring.

Oh, and you kids get off my lawn, dang, I feel old after writing this. :-)

Dr. Grandin, thank you for taking time to answer questions. I have been familiar with your work in the autism field for many years. I first found your book, "Thinking in Pictures" when my son was a toddler and my husband and I were attempting to figure out if we could avoid an institution as a long term choice for him. Your book describing your thought process provided myself with a key and I was able to help him start communicating with us by drawing, by hand and then on the computer. He is in his 20's now, and he continues to grow and become more independent.

Based on observations of my son and myself, I have noticed that difficulties we have had in processing behavioral information has changed and in some cases, improved as we've gotten older. This has made it somewhat easier to interface with regular people, although it is also frustrating in my case because I have a higher awareness of how much social communication I still miss. I am in my early 50's and I still notice changes in how I process data and figure out how to interact with others. Have you noticed such changes within yourself or heard of these changes within others?

About seven years ago I was part of a star tup of technical writers for military manuals. I had worked with this group at our previous company and the group had many of the same problems, lost files, changes occurring that 'just happened', incorrect versions for delivery. The files were in SGML/XML, with supporting graphics, so a little different but the users were not software types who are used to digging in and figuring out tools.

When the company was setup, I was designated as the software support/IT person and I put my foot down, we were going to use version control. I selected SVN, using the TortoiseSVN client and I set up the first repository. We also had to share data with another company so I had to do some training and also provide support for this company long distance.

The first few months were a never ending set of complaints of how hard it was to use SVN, why is there is an error message when I try to commit, this is painful, we should go back to using a shared server drive, etc. I stood my ground and waited.

Then, it happened, one of the authors had accidentally overwritten a file that he had spent 2-3 days working on. In addition, the tech writers were learning a new way of tagging so there had been a lot of restarts and do overs and no one wanted to start from scratch. I came over, asked him when he had last committed and if he was okay with over writing the current file. He said yes, so I pulled out that last good version. After the tech writers looked over the file, he reached over and kissed me, a first for me. There were some more incidents of changes, someone overwriting another files, but most of the writers had some benefit after several months of use. After that, the complaints went down and we continued using the system I had setup.

Later on we used SVN to share files with the other company, including Excel documents used for tracking, a Word document for the style guide and other things. Now, 7 years later, the tech writers ask me to set up an SVN project when we start something new because it has saved them a lot of grief over the years.

In addition, the other company is now slowly implementing throughout their company because they have seen the difference it makes. I talked to the manager we had worked with a few years ago, she asked how difficult it was to setup. She wanted to set it up for other projects because she had noticed they never lost files, they always had the right version for deliveries unlike other projects. I was amazed to hear that entire directories had disappeared on other projects and they had no way of telling who had caused the problem

I have looked at other document management solutions over the years and I have been interested in possible solutions but SVN has always won out because of 1) No licensing costs required and 2) Low maintenance for myself and training time for the tech writers. I hate to spend a lot of extra time tweaking things, just because and the other company doesn't really have a lot of resources for that either so SVN works for our situation.

If our projects grew to a larger size, I could see looking at other options, but that would also mean that we would have more money for software licenses, help, etc. If it's a small business, without a lot of budget or expertise for version management or document management, there are worse things to use than SVN with the TortoiseSVN interface.

I would recommend searching for ghost hunting groups on the web, they usually list equipment that they use. Search for ghost hunters or paranormal societies, there may be one in your area. I would also recommend taking along a voice recorder. There are two ways you can use this, one is to turn the recorder on, ask questions, pause and then talk more. Supposedly if there is a ghost or some other presence there, when you play back the tape you can hear something answering your question or talking to you.

The other option is using a voice activated recorder and placing it in a room, shutting the door and leaving it until the next morning. The next day, pick up the recorder, rewind the tape and see if you hear anything. I did this once in a room that was supposed to be haunted, there was something on the tape. However, in looking back I didn't take enough precautions to secure the room and ensure that nothing else was picked up so I don't accept this recording as enough evidence of the room being haunted, just indicating that the room should be investigated more for anomalies.

I appreciate your skepticism and willingness to investigate further. Myself, I think there are instances where there may be hauntings and such but I am also skeptical and try to question what happened, is there another explanation, it can be too easy to just accept some slight happening as a haunting when there is another more down to earth explanation.

When my son was around 2 or so he was very interested in using the computer. There was a great piece of software, Mickey Mouse and the alphabet. While the program ran it locked out everything else and would only respond to letters of the alphabet being pressed. When a key was pressed, say A, Mickey would perform some action, say the letter and the word. For A, he would go to the refrigerator and get an apple to eat. When using the software my son learned his alphabet and had great fun having Mickey perform different actions. There are some older versions of the software still available, I also noticed some suggestions for other similar software.

Agree with the parent, as a technical person it's very easy to get caught up in finding 'the perfect tool' that will do all of those nasty management tasks for us.

The reality is that management consists of working with the people on the team, coordinating tasks, finding out about problems in time to solve them, work around them or get relief in schedule or budget in performing the problem tasks. A lot of communication, a lot of time with people not necessarily as much time with the technical work as you might prefer.

I currently work with someone who likes managing people, in a positive way, is interested in finding problems and fixing them before the release date and in getting schedule or cost relief before the customer gets ticked. He does this using two things, 1) an spreadsheet for documenting the tasks and tracking how much people work and 2) a lot of communication with the team. For keeping projects running smoothly he was laid off from his last job because his work was obviously 'too simple' since there weren't any crisis to take care of all the time.

If you aren't interested in the people part of the management find someone to buddy up with who does like that part, it is a huge help and keeps the stress level down a bit.

My husband was 36 when he got his Computer Science degree. It was a few months before getting his job but this was also at a time when the job market was in a slide. Once he got his first computer science job and some experience he had no problem getting other positions as follow up. Plus, he met me and have been relatively happy together now for 23 years so his degree helped in other areas as well, at least in my opinion and my husband is smart enough to agree with me. So I would definitely say go for it

While there Open Source Alternatives for groupware may not be as robust, there is Lotus Notes which does run under many different OS's. Not necessarily a solution I would be fond of but there is software out there to support groupware functions.

It would help to have more information on what you want to lock down. If you want to prevent people from running as administrator and being able to install whatever they want, that's built in to Linux with the permissions set. Setup a user template for the different users you need, with different permissions for the directories, create groups and assign them to those directories and things are limited.

And using NIS+ for managing the users, you can setup users one one main server with mirrors, have users space and environment be loadable on various desktops with a common file system and other nice things. The problem with NIS are security holes but I believe later versions have addressed some of those problems, if not, I'm sure someone will comment accordingly.

I've used Eventum and it is a nice package. Here are some of the pros and cons that I found in using the software a couple of versions back.

Pros: Nice interface for management and non-developer types, can segregate by project, allows adding in custom fields, customization for workflow, supports e-mail for communications, upload of attachments, integration with some version management software, command line options for script processing.

Cons: If you don't have managers or non-developer types than probably overkill, doesn't allow viewing bugs across all projects, login has to be associated with e-mail address, doesn't allow viewing bugs unless you are logged in.