Still alive, not that you'd notice#

Tue Jul 8 14:42:44 2003

Still alive, not that you'd notice. A couple of URLs for your reading pleasure:

• IEEE's "Body of Knowledge" for Software Engineering

  The SWEBOK is written as the basis for licensing exams for professional software engineers. If your state requires you to get a license to practice software engineering (and more will, if they are convinced that they can create fair exams based on a consensus document from the profession), the SWEBOK is the document you will have to study.

  I am most familiar with SWEBOK\x{2019}s treatments of software testing, software quality and metrics. It endorses practices that I consider wastefully bureaucratic, document-intensive, tedious, and in commercial software development, not likely to succeed. These are the practices that some software process enthusiasts have tried and tried and tried and tried and tried to ram down the throats of the software development community, with less success than they would like.

• Tom Robinson on the music industry

  By far the most important factor in a successful artist's career has to do with identity and focus - in a word, PACKAGING - the one area musicians most often neglect. [...]

  For music fans, wearing an Oasis T-shirt or getting a Skunk Anansie tattoo is a public statement about who they are. Others impress their friends with Pavarotti or Sting CD's at a dinner party, while Billy Bragg has always carefully packaged himself for people who loathe packaging...