Another GIMP fractal image, for starters. Whipped it together because I was tiring of my blue one.

With that out of the way, next is to mention that I have taken my friends’ suggestions and am looking at finally implementing the paper folding game (aka Storycraft) for the web, and this time I’m setting out to get everything mostly finished before releasing to the public. I’ve started a little design (yes, really) in Umbrello, hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m implementing.

Lastly, I neglected to mention that the other half of my Jpop shipment came: Ai Takaoka’s Sunny. Rie fu’s realm is the ballad, whereas Sunny is a much more energetic pop that borders on rock. Pretty good stuff. I love getting music on a whim. Which reminds me that I still have some eMusic surfing to do tonight…

Dr. Victor R. Basili of the University of Maryland was in town yesterday for the Fall 2006 Distinguished Lecture to give two talks, "The Role of Empirical Study in Software Engineering" and "Defining a Software Measurement Program: Matching Software Measurements to Business Goals". Being the not-very-business-minded fellow that I am, I found the first much more engrossing, but both were interesting and Dr. Basili was a very enthusiastic lecturer.

The summary of the first lecture is that software engineering, like any other field of engineering, has some sort of relationship between the process (what we do) and the product (what we get), and that it's vital we discover patterns and trends in that relationship in order to improve our process, which is something the community at large has been very lax in doing, ultimately to the detriment of the outlook on software in general. The method described involved collecting useful process metrics, beyond the merely technical ones commonly collected, such as lines of code, and creating an experience factory which is designed to aggregate this data and allow for analysis. The analysis then feeds back into the process. Real results after years of use were then shown to provide very impressive productivity and process quality benefits, and the lecture moved on to more detailed concepts and framework expansions of the knowledge base. I enjoyed this lecture heavily, especially since it echoed a proposal of mine for the MSOE Software Development Lab which, as far as I know, regrettably never got off the ground.

The second lecture involved tying these concepts into the business world, defining a process with which to define meaningful business goals less vague than "increase customer satisfaction" and then tie those goals to software development measurement and processes. The CMMI came up, which I've always been a fan of (I guess, it's an odd thing to have fandom for), but a heavy portion of the lecture was for manager types, which is not me. Yet, as I said, still an interesting lecture.

So it was a good day, all in all. I met with Dr. Basili after the first lecture to chat for a bit and ask a question or two. The University of Maryland is on "the list" of universities to apply to as well, so it was a nice opportunity to at least do the old meet and greet with a very influential member of their faculty.

(Hey, at least this post wasn't about music again. :)