Category: development

Here are my completely baseless blogging/internet-related predictions for 2003:

• This year will sound the death knell for the Meme. All the cheap content creators (weekly impersonal questionaires and personality tests) will go out of style and people will be forced to actually post stuff that won’t be seen in a million other places.

• This year will see another giant explosion in the sheer number of people who blog. With the big ISP’s like AOL and MSN soon to be offering blogging platforms, there will be an exponential growth in daily content to read and/or ignore.

• As all these new folks come into the blogosphere (jeez, I hate that word), we’ll see a mass departure of the second and third generation bloggers who have now been blogging for a year or two now will either get bored or they’ll find they have nothing else to say.

• With all this new content, people will stop visiting sites directly. They’ll still go to the photoblogs, and design sites, but for text-only blogs, people will begin using an aggregator (like NetNewsWire). This will stymie the folks who want to start making money from their blogs as they’ll need to take into account the fact that people get to their content from another application.

• Major sites will start incorporating blogs as either an incentive for signing up, or as a way to build their brand (think Salon, only crappy – “Get Your Coke Blog Now!”). Oh, please spare us.

• Several high-profile bloggers will “sell out” and go corporate either through corporate sponsorship or incorporation into a larger site (like Slate or Salon), giving false hope to all of us marginally talented/interesting bloggers that someday we’ll hit it big through our blogs.

I’m feeling the stirrings of that design inspiration I’ve been seeking for the past couple months. I want to do something totally different. There are thousands of blogs out there, and lately, they all (rash generalization, there are those that don’t, and you know who they are) look alike. Mine looks like everyone else’s now, and it didn’t use to. Everyone has a white background with black text, a semi-interesting header (and a lot of people using photos of musicians or actors, which bothers me for some reason), a menu with the standard bloggy content (last X posts, blogroll, links to photos, etc – ummm, just like me), and sometimes a third column (because three column layouts were the big trend this year) containing often useless information. Some people resort to a fourth column with even more useless info which I don’t think they realize causes all kinds of problems in non-maximized browsers. See, it’s all the same. The problem is partly that there’s only so much you can do with bloggish information. You have your posts, comments, links, etc and there are only so many different ways to display them.

There are other ways to do things. I honestly believe someone will do something completely original with a blog in the next year that everyone will copy (poorly in most cases). So, what’s my inspiritation? Which sites inspire me? Here’s the list, and why:

• Jeffrey Zeldman: Everyone knows who Zeldman is. If you don’t, you probably haven’t been playing in the design/web-building arena very long. I love his most recent redesign for his decision to use a middle-o’-the-spectrum color in a not-too-dark shade, and then use text that’s really not that much brighter. It works better than any of my attempts at the same thing. If you’re interested in design at all, start a new habit and read his site daily.

• k10k: Their semi-recent redesign shows you CAN do four columns well. It’s not a blog, but the right-hand column is semi-bloggish. Also, it’s a great place when you need to feel inspired. The links in the News section are a wealth of designatory goodness.

• Six Apart: From the folks who brought you Movable Type, it’s just a great subtle design job (as is Movable Type). I love the subtle background image in the top header. They also perfectly balanced the padding between page elements. Nice, clean, professional (not that I’ll use any of those, because I’m D: None of the Above).

• Daring Fireball: Minimalist, grey, usually things I hate. But, there’s something that really works about the design of this site. The spacing between that spartan logo and the beginning of the content is just great. I love the warmth of the grey background. Just groovy.

Now, I’m not planning on using any elements from these sites, but all of them have given me ideas and spurred me to think about different things I can do with this site. I may not do any of them here where you can see them, but I’ll get around to it (another reason I love OS X – I have Movable Type and a copy of this site running in my local copy of Apache).

There are many kinds of people who end up working software development. I’ve been writing code for half a decade now and I’ve discovered that there are only a few general categories people fall into. There are strengths and weaknesses in each category, and you’ll be able to tell which category I think I fall into when you read them:

• The Doer: This person has a way of becoming a single point of failure. They’re always in the middle of things, and are the person you go to when something has to get done right and quickly. They adapt well to changing requirements. They may be a little anti-social and have other odd habits, but they are forgivable by the volume of work produced. The one thing the Doer doesn’t do well is document things. The Doer sucks at documentating because they’re always writing code and “doing”. It’s always best to pair the Doer with the Librarian.

• The Talker: This person never seems to get things done, but loves to talk about everything. This person will talk about a product like they actually know it, and will be extremely vocal in meetings, but when it comes time to write actual code, the Talker is nowhere to be found.

• The Laurel-Sitter: This person probably used to be the Doer, but now they’re tired of doing and want to spend their time telling other people how to do their job and never turning out anything of their own.

• The Geek: This person is so into new technology and using it that they often miss the obvious (although not as exciting) solution. They’re sometimes hard to corral into doing their job because they’re always out hopping from bleeding edge to bleeding edge instead of writing the code they’re supposed to. They’re great to have around when you’re brainstorming on a new project or problem because they often know a little about a lot of different technologies and can point you in interesting directions. But, they often spend a lot of time in experimentation that they should use writing code they know will work.

• The Droid: The Droid will do what he’s told, and usually does solid work, but can’t be counted on to always find the best solution to a problem. They’re not someone to go to with those wacky problems. They frequently try to apply the same solution to every problem, even when it doesn’t apply.

• The Professor: The Professor is somewhere between the Talker and the Laurel-Sitter. The Professor loves to talk about standards, conventions, rules and how they would do things. The Professor’s problems lie one of two areas. Either the Professor spends so much time thinking about tabs vs. spaces or the number of comments he should put in his code that he forgets to write anything. Or, the Professor has never actually written anything using these rules, and their code is extremely messy. The Professor will deny this, but of course you know it’s true.

• The Inquisitor: This is the guy who makes your meetings more fun. He asks the either impossible or ridiculous question that make people sweat or giggle. They’re good to have around for entertainment sake, but the Inquisitor usually has a little too much of the Professor in him to be useful when actually writing code.

• The Lump: No one is ever sure what the Lump does, what their role is or why they’re still around. Either the Lump is a legacy system or someone’s relative. The Lump always finds a way to get out of work. They like to procrastinate until the job doesn’t gone, or someone has to jump in at the last second and do it for them. The Lump is entertaining in normal circumstances, but under a deadline crunch, the Lump is likely to discover that no one will talk to him anymore.

• The Librarian: This is the person you let handle all your documentation. They’re usually OK in the coding department, but never much beyond the Droid. They do put great comments in their code. My favorite use of the Librarian is to send them to meetings and make them take notes, write requirements documents and run post-mortems. Librarians usually have amazing recall when it comes to facts and meetings, and are a great asset to have on a team.

I’m sure there are some I’ve missed… anyone? Any guesses as to which one I am?

I’m sure that if you pay attention to such things, you know that AOL laid a lot of people off today. I’ve been through several (I think this is my sixth or seventh, I can’t keep them straight now). They’re no fun, and it always feels like people have died when I hear they’ve been laid off. I still have a job. Most of my friends still have jobs, but some of them don’t. For those that don’t, I don’t know what that feels like and I hope I never do.

No one feels much like working right now, but I’m working anyway. Through my cold and running nose, I’m plugging along writing more Java, trying to make things speedy and happy and light. Inside, I don’t feel like any of those things. In fact, the worst part about this is that I’m afraid I’m not feeling much of anything. I’ve been through so many of these that it’s almost routine. The rumors start a week or so before they happen, then there’s quiet as people wait for that knock. There are constant IM’s asking if I know anything, and me asking the same. Then, it starts. People drop off Buddy Lists. IM’s start… “They got X who sits next to me. He’s crying,” and “I guess this is my last day… know anyone who’s hiring?” If they’re lucky, they get to send a good-bye e-mail that tries to sum up years of work, relationships and feelings in the fifteen minutes before their e-mail address is ::poof:: gone and they’re gone along with it. And here I sit, feeling guilty for still having a job, and trying not to think about the imminent re-orgs I know are coming. All the while, I keep working. I keep doing the same thing I’ve done since I got here, through a dozen re-orgs, a new position in a new groups and now a half-dozen layoffs. I’m all alone in my little office… typing.

I’ve been visiting the site for a few weeks for the pictures, but wow, the Amelie Effect just posted at a.lifeuncommon.org is just the coolest! It makes the colors really pop out in an image. Cool stuff. If you’ve got PhotoShop 7, definitely check it out. She has some other cool unsharpitating (yes, i made it up) actions you can hoark as well.

Remind me to tell you about The Brotherhood of the Wolf before I forget all about it. Work is rabid this week as I try to do everything in the world before we leave for Tucson on Saturday.

Apparently, I’m not as dumb as I thought I was. I’ve been working on this photo blog because keeping them all on Max’s page just isn’t working. I wanted an easy way to create Movable Type export files from PhotoShop exported web galleries. Sounds reasonale enough, right? Since I’m doing all this on my Powerbook, I figured I could do it with a shell script. I’ve been procrastinating since I didn’t really want to deal with it. Here’s where the dumbitude comes in. I went poking around the /usr/bin directory and… TA-DA!!! I see tclsh and the light goes on. Duh. I know Tcl. I know Tcl better than most . So, last night I do a quick and ugly script that rips JPG’s from a directory and creates the export file; worked like a charm. Tonight, I created a holding directory where I can put all the web galleries. The new script reads in the directories, uses the directory name as the category, then reads all the images in the images directory and creates the entries. Then, it copies the images and thumbnails into two separate directories to make them easier to copy and returns the export file (which I pipe to a new file which contains aaaa-aaaall the entries). Smooth, huh? You wanna see it? Well, OK, if you really wanna, here it is. I may clean it up and put sweet happy comments in it, but it works.

The network was down here at work for about half an hour. It’s amazing how connected I have to be in order to do my job. Everything I do here entails connecting to some external system, getting data, formatting it and then spitting it out somewhere else. When the connection is broken, there’s nothing to do but sit and wait.

Before the network went down, I installed Webmin on the uberBox (Dual-Xeon Linux Monster). I have to say that I’m extremely impressed with its features and ease-of-use. It was a cinch to install (rpm –install webmin*.rpm), run and connect to. The best part is the MySQL admin tool, because MySQL pretty much sucks when it comes to providing any usable admin interface. With MySQL up and running, a db created and users set up, my pal Al can go create cool Perl-based calendars and stuff without having to use AOLserver’s Tcl interface that we have set up for Postgres (he don’t like Tcl so much).

Yes, this is a geeky ramble, but what else am I going to do? The network’s down and I’m stuck here staring at code that has nothing to do.

While we wait, let’s talk about RedHat 8, shall we? Guys, what happened? RedHat 7.3 was the coolest, most stable Linux distro I’d ever had the pleasure to use (yes, even more stable than when I had YellowDog on my Powerbook. I had high hopes for 8.0. I’d heard great things from beta testers and the press. As soon as it was released, I hopped on an FTP mirror, downloaded and burned it and installed it. The installation went fine. Booting up went fine, and then the problems began. While it certainly is pretty, it’s really unstable for me. Even simple commands like ls take an inordinate amount of time on directories that don’t have a lot of files in them. The telnet server didn’t come pre-installed. There were other things missing that I can’t remember now. KDE won’t even start up. GNOME works, but it’s almost too pretty. It won’t work correctly when I choose the mouse I actually have (not a weird one either, a regular old PS/2 Intellimouse), and I had to switch back to the regular 2-button profile. No scroll wheel!! How will I get anything done?!!

Ok, enough of that. I apologize for this post. It would have been about the election, but I’m still too angry about all of it to talk about it here.

You know, if you have a Postgres database with over 500k records that you delete and reinsert on a weekly basis, that you should run vacuum and reindex on it frequently? See, I’m not a database administrator. I’m not even a system administrator, but I play one on TV.

Sometimes, I’m such a user. I don’t care how things work, just that they do. I’ve been happy with the way Postgres works up until now. I don’t have to mess with it, I just do my inserts, updates and deletes and it’s always just worked. Now, it’s not working like I need it to, and it’s bugging me. So, I’m doing the unthinkable and messing with configuration options, like the amount of memory used per select, and sort and that kind of thing (because I figured, hey, I’m selecting a ton of things at once and I have a ton of memory, so let’s use it instead of the hard drive!). We’ll see what happens.