Something different about this blog entry then my usual ones is that I'm dictating it instead of typing it.  Every so often my mouse hand and wrist bothers me for a week or two. The last time this happened, I decided to get a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking software and try it out. Coincidentally, a couple weeks ago, in the middle of all this miserable snow we’re having in the Northeast, a friend and colleague tore a tendon in in his elbow. I convinced him to try out the software. He needs to write all the time, and he has been using it almost exclusively and successfully.  

I have been trying to follow the problems in the new T5 terminal at Heathrow Airport. There are small project management problems and there are big ones. Ours are modest. On the scale of big, you have T5 which apparently included 400,000 hours of software development (that’s a lot of lines of code!), a full year of testing and a full year of training. Yet its open was a technology disaster.  

“Software has been and will remain fundamentally hard,” says Grady Booch, in a Computerworld interview October 29. Booch is “Chief Scientist” at IBM's Rational software division.