I am truly flooded with work these days and things have been getting annoying. I was searching the web for something when I came across this. It considerably cheered me up.

Conway's Law: Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Or, colloquially: Software is doomed to reflect structure of the organization that produces it.

I cam across this in Michael Feather's blog. That is an enjoyable entry, worth a read. 

Its a bit shocking that this is indeed true. Having worked on a certain large OS project once, I know this to be true about that system with surprising accuracy. So there is a good and bad side to this. The good is that some part of the org maybe actually functioning very well. The bad is that it may not be.

I recently switched to Vista and things were good for a while until some driver issues started showing up in the past few days. I haven't got a chance to chase it to its death, so I am having to proverbially 'live with it'. The strangest of the issues is this one:

I have been using a simple Logitech USB keyboard with my laptop for several weeks now. Its a normal usb keyboard - no fancy media buttons or anything. Its just plug and play keyboard. It worked fine for a while until, the other day, Vista asked me for a driver! The keyboard didn't come with one - it never needed one on XP. Also it didn't need one on Vista as well until that day. So Vista gives me a bunch of options for finding and installing the driver automagically and such. These cause Vista to search the windows database online and then do some other web search and such. Several minutes of waiting later it gives up and says it cant  find a driver. The keyboard didn't come with a CD and the Logitech website doesn't have a Vista driver for it. After that my keyboard stops working!

This is really stupid because my bios can detect the keyboard. The keyboard works fine till Vista logs on and prompts me for a driver! After some grief with this I learnt that it I simply close the window that prompts me for a driver, everything continues to work just fine. I can use the keyboard with Vista as long as I just ignore its lack of a driver.

I remember remarking to myself "How did they not notice how the keyboard worked before? This reminds of working at MS...".