On Maintenance...

I can't believe it. I think that maybe I'm not meant to fly. My travel to and from EclipseCon 2008 (which I'll be blogging about in the very near future, once I collect my thoughts) was fraught with yet more joy (or lack thereof). I suppose it was foolish of me to expect things to get better, but what can I say, I'm an optimist at heart (or a sucker for punishment, depending on how you look at it). In hindsight, airline travel pain points aren't all about safety and security... they're often about maintenance.

My flight from Chicago to San Jose last Sunday was initially delayed because of a generator problem which somehow resolved itself, so we were cleared to fly about a half hour late (which was good, I thought, since I figured there was no way we'd all fit on later flights with all the masses heading to mecca). Once on the plane, though, the captain informed us that in addition to having to wait for the plane to finish being refueled (aren't they supposed to do that before people get on the plane?), there was an issue with the "chimes". Apparently, something about the forward lavatory was interfering with the pilots' ability to communicate with the crew. A technician boarded the aircraft and spent 30 minutes trying several things, including rebooting the plane, to resolve the issue. Another announcement informed us that a part needed to be ordered and that we were to stay on the plane and wait for an estimated hour until it arrived. Eventually it became apparent that the part would take longer than expected to arrive, and so those that wished to re-enter the terminal were allowed to de-board the plane. I decided to get off and stretch my legs, so I took my backpack with me and headed to the terminal. About fifteen minutes later, decision was made to abandon the aircraft, soon after which chaos ensued as those that had left their carry-on bags on the plane attempted to re-board the aircraft to retrieve them amidst the mass exodus of passengers whom had decided to wait it out. Miraculously, a replacement aircraft was found and we finally departed almost exactly three hours later than our original departure time.

My return flight (from San Jose to Washington en route to Ottawa) was only marginally better. All passengers had boarded and were ready to depart on time when the captain made an announcement that there was a minor maintenance issue that needed attention. I knew the drill. On comes the mechanic to go through his diagnostic routine which, again, involved "control-alt-deleting" the aircraft (to use the captain's words). Once the plane was restarted, the problem magically disappeared (which wasn't necessarily all that reassuring, especially after the captain admitted that the issue had been with the plane's navigation system), and after the ten minutes or so that were required to reprogram the coordinates of route to Washington, we pulled away from the gate only an hour later than we were supposed to.

When will the madness (maintenance) end?

On Airline Travel...

Nick blogged the other day about pain points. Well, I have a few of my own to share based on my recent experiences traveling on commercial airlines. It’s easy to let frustration get the better of you in the face of the increasing number of ways in which air travel can make you feel quite insignificant, but hey – most, if not all, of it is in the interest of safety or security and hence for the common good, right? Sometimes I wonder.

Like Ed, I generally consider myself a fairly patient person. Lately, though, it seems that every time I fly, my patience is tested. On my way to Embarcadero’s Product Advisory Council (PAC) meeting in San Francisco last month, for example, one of the screening personnel at the security checkpoint gave me a hard time about my laptop computer. Here’s roughly how our conversation went.

Screener: Is this your laptop?
Me: Yes.
Screener: It’s kind of big to be a laptop, isn’t it?
Me: Oh?
Screener: Yes. I’ve seen larger, but usually they have some kind of handle built into them.
Me: Sounds more like a portable desktop computer than a laptop.
Screener: Exactly. Haven’t you heard of the MacBook Air?
Me: Yes, I wish I had one.
Screener: Then why don’t you get one instead of carrying this thing around?
Me: I don’t make decisions about what hardware I use for my job – my employer does.
Screener: Your employer doesn’t like you very much, do they?

See, I told you that branding is everywhere. I just didn’t expect to have it waved in my face by airport security. Somehow I think that if I were the one poking fun, the conversation would have taken a sharp turn for the worse…

Coming back from the PAC, I had what was probably the most pleasant flight from San Jose to Toronto I’ve ever had. I got to catch up with my old university acquaintance, Donald Smith, and we even had a spare seat between us. That’s where the joy ended, though. Upon arriving at my connecting gate in Toronto, I discovered that the aircraft for my next flight was late arriving due to a “maintenance item” that required attention. After a while, the plane arrived, and by the time we boarded and were ready to push back, we were about 45 minutes late. But apparently we weren’t the only plane looking to push back at that exact moment, so we had to wait another 20 minutes or so until the congestion cleared. Finally on our way to the runway (or so we thought), the captain announced that before we could take off, the plane needed to be de-iced, for which, unfortunately, there would be a 45 minute wait. We waited, and at last the de-icing was done, so we headed down the runway… but just before take-off, the plane slowed down and turned back toward the gate. The captain announced that the “maintenance item” had re-surfaced and that we had to proceed to the gate for an inspection by a maintenance crew. Of course, the maintenance crew deemed the aircraft unsafe to fly, so all of the passengers were cast out and told we were on our own since the remaining flights to Ottawa that night were full. We were instructed to proceed to the baggage claim area to retrieve ours bags, where we waited… and waited… and waited some more, until finally there was an announcement that somehow a spare aircraft had been found and that we had a new departure time which turned out to be only five hours later than our original one. Of course the tipping point came when, as we were boarding the “replacement” plane, one of my fellow passengers observed that the new aircraft seemed oddly familiar…

I was supposed to arrive in Washington for the OMG technical meeting on Sunday (yesterday). But we had near-record snowfall in Eastern Canada this past weekend (52 cm in Ottawa), which wreaked havoc on airline flights. My original flight, scheduled to leave Ottawa on Sunday at noon was, of course, canceled. After an hour and a half on the phone, I was able to secure a seat on the 9:00 a.m. flight Monday morning. Naturally, that flight was late departing because of gate mismanagement, so when I arrived in Toronto, I really had to hustle to make it to the luggage claim area and through customs to get to my connecting gate for my departure time of 11:25 a.m.. I arrived with 15 minutes to spare, which turned out to be 45 minutes because, of course, there was a “maintenance item” that needed to be addressed. So, I waited in line to board the plane only to find out that Air Canada, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that since my flight from Ottawa was late arriving there was no way I could possibly have made the connection, so they gave my seat to someone else and re-booked me on a later flight… nine hours and twenty five minutes later, to be exact. I was offered the opportunity to try for a stand-by seat on the 3:55 p.m. flight, but was told that the chances were slim since most flights were full due to the cancellations over the weekend. I had to do a podcast interview at 3:00 p.m., though, so I decided to shoot for the 6:00 p.m. flight instead (can you see where this is going?). As luck would have it, I made it onto the 6:00 p.m. flight, only to be the “random” passenger selected for the extra security search half way to the plane (apparently flights to Washington require extra security precautions – go figure). I finally arrived in Washington, but, you guessed it, my luggage didn’t. So, here I sit in the hotel room waiting for a call from the concierge to tell me that my clothing has arrived. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be an (even more) interesting week…

On Due Diligence...

No, I'm not talking about e4 (surprise!). In the midst of the fray I let curiosity get the better of me this afternoon. I noticed Atoine Toulme's newsgroup post about a BPMN diagram of the Eclipse legal process and wondered what the same diagram would look like if created using the free community edition of EA/Studio, Embarcadero's Eclipse-based business process modeling tool. Here's what I came up with.


What was interesting to me, other than the obvious differences in appearance between two renderings of the same diagram, was that I would have chosen to draw the process differently. It reminded me of an article I read recently about the wide variation in the way different people choose to represent their processes. BPMN has indeed become the de facto standard for process model diagrams, but if everyone uses the notation in a different way, can we truly communicate our ideas using the same language? Food for thought.

On Branding...

So, after blogging for just under two months, it would appear that I’ve already started to adopt a particular blogging style. To folks like Alex, my style may seem like advertising without trying to sell anything, but to me that’s something entirely different – branding.

As a society, we’re bombarded by various forms of branding every day. For example, I went to the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto last night to watch a movie (‘No Country For Old Men’ – now there’s a subject for a blog entry) and was somewhat taken aback when I was greeted by the cashier with “Welcome to Scotiabank” when I went to purchase a ticket. Not “Welcome to Scotiabank Theatre”, just “Welcome to Scotiabank”. I almost felt compelled to say “Thanks. I’d like to make a withdrawal, please…”.

I’m starting to believe that the days of the hard sell are numbered, as companies are becoming more and more preoccupied with brand recognition than with marketing specific products. Can you remember ever seeing an ad from IBM that mentioned the name of one of their products? Mind you, there’s good brand recognition and bad brand recognition. Seeing as it’s often not what you’ve produced, but how (well) you’ve produced it, vendors ideally want their brand to have a connotation of quality instead of being regarded as a “necessary evil”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about branding in Eclipse-based products lately. The Rich Client Platform (RCP) does a pretty good job of providing mechanisms for branding, what with its custom window images, About dialog, welcome experience, and all, but what about products that are delivered as plug-ins to an existing Eclipse shell? How does a vendor make it known in a subtle (but not too subtle) way that they’re responsible for that great (or not so great) editor, view, or action that you’re currently using? How are users to distinguish, among the potentially many plug-ins that have been installed into their Eclipse IDE, between the dross, the slag, and the cereal topper?

On Vocabulary...

As it happens, one man’s dross is another man’s cereal topper. In case you didn’t know (it wasn't part of my vocabulary, so I had to look it up), dross is a mass of solid impurities floating on a molten metal bath. Apparently it’s used quite commonly as slang in the UK. Who knew?

Speaking of vocabulary, creation of another new component, Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR), as part of the Model Development Tools (MDT) subproject at Eclipse has been approved. I’m really excited about this because now, not only will it be possible to model the various forms of data (relational data, logical data, conceptual data, business processes, etc.) in an enterprise using components in MDT, it will be possible to capture the semantics of the vocabularies and rules embodied by that data. Could it be that it will soon be possible to finally bridge the gap between business and IT using open source frameworks and tools from Eclipse? In light of this and other initiatives like the recently announced Open Requirements Management Framework (ORMF) project proposal, I’m optimistic that the answer to that question may well be “Yes!”.

On Thursday at EclipseCon...

Wow, it's hard to believe it's taken me almost a month to select which talks I'll attend at EclipseCon this year. Since I started, even more interesting events have been added to the agenda, like the Mega Modeling Mania on Tuesday, the BlackBerry Developer Day on Wednesday, and of course the Hackathon. If you're attending EclipseCon, I hope you weren't planning on getting any sleep!

For what it's worth, here are the talks I've selected for Thursday. As it turns out, my selections for this day were easy.

Keynote - Cory Doctorow

This guy is a science fiction writer (and a blogger!). Cool. I wish I could make a living writing books...

Eclipse/OMG Symposium

This is the first of two symposia on open source and open standards (the other is being held at the OMG technical meeting in June). Seeing as I was one of the co-chairs for the program committee, I can't miss this one... nor would I want to. This a rare opportunity to focus on the synergies between open source and open specifications and to discuss how the joint future of Eclipse and the OMG can be shaped. Attendance to the symposium presentations is open to all registered EclipseCon attendees, so come join in the discussion!

Eclipse Community Project Spot Light

Ah, the always interesting conference wrap-up panel. This is also a session you don't want to miss. Of course, we'll all be anxious to see that slide with the conference statistics on it. I wonder how big a bar tab we'll be able to rack up this year...

On Super Fast Gro-Food...

I was watching an episode ("Safe But Not Sorry") of The Tom and Jerry Show on Teletoon Retro with my kids the other morning in which they pour a bottle of "Super Fast Gro-Food" onto a seedling and within seconds it sprouts into a mature tree. The first thing that came to my mind, after getting past the fact that the label on the bottle was upside down, was how fast the Eclipse Modeling Project, and in particular its Model Development Tools (MDT) sub-project (of which I am lead), is growing.

MDT started just over a year and a half ago as a reorganization of existing framework projects and components (EODM, OCL, UML2, and XSD) into a cohesive whole. The first release, as part of the coordinated Europa simultaneous release, saw the addition of a UML2 Tools component, aimed at providing exemplary GMF-based editors for UML diagrams. Since then, another end-user component, OCL Tools, has been added to the sub-project. The next release of MDT (currently under development) is scheduled for June of 2008 as part of the Ganymede simultaneous release.

Just last month, two new components, BPMN2 and IMM, were created, and another component, SBVR, was proposed. Proposals for components based on the SysML and PRR OMG specifications are in also the works, and yet another one is about to be announced. It's almost enough to make one's head spin!

A number of things excite me about these most recent additions to MDT.

• Firstly, the involvement of new organizations (like Adaptive, Embarcadero Technologies, Soyatec, and XML Modeling, among others) and committers (Dave Carlson, Nick Dowler, and Yves Yang, for example) represents growth of the community, which is one of the metrics of a successful Eclipse project.

• Secondly, these new components have introduced opportunities for greater collaboration not only within the Eclipse ecosystem (with projects like DTP and STP, for example) but externally as well (with organizations like the OMG).

• Finally though, and most importantly in my mind, these new components will go a long way towards enabling end-to-end integration of enterprise-wide data and tooling in Eclipse-based modeling applications, from business-level concerns (like processes, vocabularies, and rules) all the way down to IT-level representations of information (like relational databases, LDAP, and XML).

These are indeed interesting times! I'll be talking about the latest developments in MDT at EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara. If you're going to be there (you know you wanna), why not stop by to hear about ways in which you can be part of the excitement?