Off to Banff

I’m off to Banff.

Tomorrow at 10 am I will be leaving to spend 9 days in Banff, attending ICCBSS 2007. I’ve been tracking the temperature there with the weather sidebar gadget of Vista and I recall a minimum of -28ºC. I’d better bring my coat.

Vista blues

I have moved to Vista. In fact, I’ve been using Vista on my main machine for almost a week now.

As I often do with new major releases of an operating system, I re-partitioned my whole system and installed everything from scratch. I still believe that doing this every two or three years keeps the motherboard relatively free of cruft.

And since Vista came along with Office 2007, I decided to go the whole nine yards and get this too. I bought a copy of Vista Ultimate full (meaning no upgrade), Office 2007 Professional and Visio 2007 Professional. Yes, I said “bought”. I know, I know. Some people find it funny that I pay for the software that I use at home for my personal use. Eccentricites.

So I did my backups, booted from the Vista DVD, waved bye-bye my old partition and kept swapping discs during a very long rainy evening.

That ended up horribly.

ISO/IEC 24744 and looking back

I am told that the new ISO/IEC 24744 international standard is available for purchase from the ISO web site since last Wednesday.

So what?

Well, I am the proud co-father of the creature. Brian Henderson-Sellers and I have been the project editors and main conductors of the standard, and we are happy that it has just been released to the public.

I am particularly happy because this standard encapsulates the results of many years of work. I might trace it all back to 1995-ish, when I started studying the Fusion method at the Laboratory of Archaeology and Cultural Forms at the University of Santiago de Compostela. I adapted Fusion to suit our needs and it became the Adapted Fusion Method (MFA) that I later described in my PhD thesis in 2000. In the late 1990s I rewrote it as a full methodology and called it Metis, and used it at Neco for internal and external projects. That was when Brian and I met and we started exchanging ideas. I soon joined the OPEN Consortium and recast Metis as an instance of OPEN, renaming it OPEN/Metis. Then I moved to UTS to work with Brian and started envisioning what would, in 2004, be published as the Australian Standard AS 4651 “Standard Metamodel for Software Development Methodologies”. This, in turn, served as base document for the development of the international standard, which has now just been published.

What is it about? Oh, don’t worry.

All right, take a look.

Generation W

It’s 9 pm, mid-February in the Basque Country. It is supposed to be winter. Cold. However, it’s 16 degrees celsius, and the breeze I can feel on my face is warm and dry. Feels like a June evening. And this is not just today; I think that the weather is changing.

James Lovelock says in The Revenge of Gaia that an ecological catastrophe will happen within this century. Well, perhaps my generation will live enough as to witness it. Perhaps I will live the greatest weather change of documented history. We will be remembered as the people who lived the Big Global Warming. We will be the Warming Generation.

We are Generation W.