Watch Mike Milinkovich debate the merits of the EPL

The Free and Open Source Learning Centre recently ran a debate about which open source license is best: BSD, EPL, or GPL. I think Mike does a great job of summarizing the merits of the EPL. Check out the video for yourself at:

http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/node/523

Up Next, Free Software and Open Source Symposium

I meant to get this post out much earlier than the night before the event but I think it will still be useful as all of the symposium content is recorded and available online for free from the FSOSS site. (You can check out last year's talks now, including my presentation about Ajax toolkits.)

Up next for me is the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) at Seneca College running from Oct. 26-27. This will be my third year at this event and the first year the event will span two days. This is another event I've found to have very high quality presentations and a lot of good people from various backgrounds. In fact FSOSS is sponsored by, among others, Mozilla, BMO Bank of Montreal, Novell, Seneca College, and Apple.

Here's my agenda for this two day event:

Thursday
9-10 Usability Anonymous: A 12 Step Program for Better User Experiences
I've really gotten into user experience and how I can improve it in my products. I'm interested to see what David and Jay's 12 step program is after reading book like The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and User Interface Design for Programmers.

10-11 Facebook's Thrift: Scalable Cross-Language Development
This is a talk about some of the technology that supports the Facebook platform. I really don't know anything about Facebook from a technical perspective and this is the first opportunity I've had to hear directly from the dev team.

11-12 Product and User Experience Design in Open Communities
Amazingly I've never seen Mike present. Although I'm interested in the topic I'm going to his talk to see if he's as funny in front of a room of people as he is in person. (My bet's on yes.)

1-2 Welcome To The Jungle: A Field Guide To Enterprise Computing
Read the abstract for this talk. It just seems like it's going to be fun.

2-3 Open Commercial Development
This is the talk I'm giving with Jeff Liu. Our talks the last couple years have been on Open technologies (Eclipse WTP and Ajax toolkits) so this is a bit of a change for us.

3-4 Keynote: Applying Open Source Concepts to Non-software Industries

Friday
9-10 Accessible Rich Internet Applications
This is real concern as RIAs break many of the existing solutions for accessibility. I'm currently building an RIA so I think this will be a useful talk.

10-11 Shifting the Focus: OpenOffice.org 3.0
IBM recently announced that it will collaborate on OpenOffice. Think I'll check out what's new and upcoming.

11-12 Open Source in the Telephony Market
Asterisk is pretty cool. My brother-in-law uses it to power the telephone system for his small business (RentMagic) and I've been meaning to set up a test box for a while to play with this Open Source telephony application.

1-2 Community as A Core Competency: Microsoft and Open Source
Although I've been disapointed by other MS talks at Open Source conferences this one again looks interesting and so I'm holding out hope.

2-3 A Linux Desktop on Every PC
Marcel is a great speaker. (I've seen him twice at this event.) I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be an energetic talk.

3-4 Keynote: Open Source Economics: Stakeholder Perspectives

Another Error Message for the Hall of Fame

I was trying to create a DVD with InterVideo WinDVD Creator V2 (which came bundled with my ThinkPad) this weekend when I was presented with an error dialog.

This immediately seemed to me like a candidate for the error message Hall of Fame. Not only does this error message contain no useful information but after failing the program seems to remove all clues as to what it had done so I can't even debug the problem myself.

I'd like to think that due to the Open Source process (with committers elected due to their proven technical expertise) that Eclipse is immune from poor error messages. Unfortunately this isn't always true. However Eclipse and other Open Source software does have a great advantage from community review (many eyes). The community is a great help in locating poor error messages.

One error message, which is partially my fault as I let it be propagated through the WSDL validator, was recently identified in a WTP newsgroup posting about the WS-I WSDL validator. The error message in question is:

"WS-I: A problem occurred while running the WS-I WSDL conformance check: org.eclipse.wst.wsi.internal.analyzer.WSIAnalyzerException. The WS-I Test Assertion Document(TAD) was not found or could not be processed. The WSDLAnalyzer was not able to validate the given WSDL file."

I think there are a number of problems with this message.

1. The message identifies an internal exception. If the exception is one that a user should understand it should probably be part of an API.
2. The message refers to the WS-I Test Assertion Document (TAD) without any explanation of what this is or why this is affecting the end user. I think a link would be very helpful here.
3. The message doesn't give the user any suggestions how to resolve the problem.

I've brought this up as I think it's a good reminder to do your best to think like your users when creating error messages. An easy way to do a quick dry run is to simply ask the person sitting next to you (either physically on online) whether they understand the message.

Oh, and in case you're interested, I've opened bug 206845 for the WS-I error message above.

Book Review: Dealing with Difficult People

For those of us in technical roles, I think too often skill set becomes equated with technical skill set. The fact is non-technical or soft skill sets are beneficial to people in technical roles. Soft skills involve your ability to communicate with others via e-mail, the phone, and instant messaging but also via articles, books, conference presentations and blogs.

The importance of working well with others is amplified in Open Source projects like Eclipse. Eclipse projects tend to be developed by large, geographically dispersed teams. These teams are comprised of people with, among other things, very different backgrounds, cultures, expectations, and priorities. These differences are further highlighted by the fact that the people on the project come from many companies and organizations meaning management structure cannot be used to enforce project decisions.

With that in mind I'd like to take a look at a book I just finished reading by Dr. Rick Brinkman and Dr. Rick Kirschner entitled "Dealing with Difficult People: 24 Lessons for Bringing Out the Best in Everyone".

Let's get the details that may prevent you from looking at this book out of the way. The book is very short, weighing in at just under 100 small pages, and can easily be read in a single sitting. (I'm not a quick reader.) And, the book's cheap going for ~$10 on Amazon. Now, on with my review.

As you've likely guessed from the title, the book focuses on dealing with difficult people. These people show up at work but also in all facets of life.

In order to deal with a problem you have to know what you're dealing with. In its coverage of difficult people the book starts with an quick overview of the ten most unwanted behaviours: the Tank, the Sniper, the Know-it-all, the Think-they-know-it-all, the Grenade, the Yes Person, the Maybe Person, the Nothing Person, the No Person, and the Whiner.

With the question of "what" out of the way the book then moves on to the question of "why". Why is this person being difficult? According to the book, the motivation of a difficult person revolves around four intents. Understanding these four intents is key as once you understand the reason someone is being difficult you can work to resolve the problem in order to remedy the difficult behaviour. This part of the book should make it clear that difficult behaviour is a manifestation of another problem and once that problem is understood you can work to make the difficult person a productive member of your team.

Empowered with an understanding of who you're dealing with and what motivates them, you are ready to attack the problem. The book then presents you with a deeper view of each type of behaviour and arms you with tactics to combat each type of difficult person.

While the book focuses on identifying difficult behaviours in others I found a secondary benefit was the ability to look inwards and discover ways in which I can and have been difficult. It's not always easy to solicit negative feedback from peers and I think this book is a good tool for looking at yourself to discover some of your own negative behaviours.

Technical people need soft skills along with technical skills. Soft skills are a key component to the success of Open Source projects like those hosted at Eclipse. "Dealing with Difficult People" is not an in depth tour of the human psyche. It is a quick read that will open your eyes to the way both others and you behave and build upon your soft skills enabling further success in your projects.