Torto

Torto Presents the Torto Network

Juwanna Kumiko — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:00:30 +0000

Lap Dancing Mexico

Lap Dancing is my favorite pastime. It should be yours too.

Juana Loves Pol

Juana and Pol are my office mates. They are married and have 72 kids.

Stumbling and Mumbling

Jason is a stumbling and mumbling idiot. Read his blog.

Xruseksousiwtissa

I can’t even begin to pronounce this. So should you.

J&J Janitor Johnson

Weblog of the greatest janitor for Johnson and Johnson’s

Turning One Room Into An Office

Juwanna Kumiko — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:23:49 +0000

My fiancee and I are in the process of buying our first house (had enough of renting), and we will soon be faced with the prospect of having to furnish the place. Luckily, the place is quite small, a flat with only 2 bedrooms, so we won’t have to try too hard to fill it!

At the moment, we rent a 3-bedroom flat. My fiancee is a teacher, and consequently has a _lot_ of files, papers, resources, etc. I have a lot of computing books, and spare hardware. We have a PC each. We therefore have two offices in our current place, one for me and one for her.

Since we will be losing a bedroom through the move, we will have to turn the one spare room in the new place into a shared office. We won’t be having a spare bed in there, so the entire space can be used for office furniture.

So basically, we need to turn the room into an office with enough desk space for 2 PCs and 2 chairs, and plenty of shelf space for books and files. The room is about 3m x 4m. Can anyone suggest somewhere to get some good-quality office furniture that makes good use of limited space? I’ve seen some large corner desks that look like they might be the way to go, but I’d appreciate some feedback from someone who may have had a similar problem on their hands.

Tax Law Sucks

Juwanna Kumiko — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:16:37 +0000

The tax law has been drafted to prevent employees from deducting the expenses of an office at home. Even if the employee should meet one of the tests, such as doing administrative work at home, the employee must also show that the home office was required for the “convenience of his or her employer” in order to claim the deduction.

What exactly is “required for the convenience of the employer”?

In this case the employee lives 1/2 hour away from office, has an office at work, but works occasionally at home and most evenings.

Software Engineer vs Systems Analyst

Juwanna Kumiko — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:56:20 +0000

A Systems Analyst is concerned with requirements specification. The term is pretty much obsolete today because it was coined back in the days of Structured Development. SD was very much focused on the hardware computational models. The problem was that customer domains generally are not as rigorously defined as the computing space so requirements tended to get garbled by the time they were implemented by the developers.

So the position of Systems Analyst was developed to essentially convert the customer’s natural language specification into a complete, precise, and unambiguous requirements specification. The developers would then presumably have no difficulty converting that specification to correct software. Thus the Systems Analyst was supposed to be a domain expert who also understood some rigorous notation for specifying the requirements.

Alas, in practice that was a problem because the only notations around that were sufficiently rigorous and were readily mappable to the computing space were those already used by the software designers. As a result the Systems Analyst typically overspecified the requirements by also defining the software design. Since knowledge of the computing space was a very secondary requirement for the Systems Analyst, this often led to big problems.

Unfortunately Software Engineer has been so broadly used that it has become synonymous with “software developer”. Historically, though, the term referred to someone who was concerned with the process of
developing software rather than the software itself. IOW, the people who design and understand how to apply processes and process frameworks like RUP, CMM, and XP are software engineers.