Ablog

Salespeople may live from a suitcase, but I’ve lived from a PDA for over a decade. I’ve bounced from Palm to Windows Mobile to BlackBerry before landing on my iPhone about six weeks ago. I love the big, crisp screen, the usability touches, and the abundance of apps–I tap the App Store icon far too often for my bank account’s viability. This is my favorite PDA so far.

However much I fawn over my iPhone, though, I still bump against its limitations and cringe when its flaws puncture my desires.   (more...)

As a management team, we recently crafted and presented a list of development principles for our developers to follow. The goal was to provide vision and direction, not to dictate the outcome of every scenario. Here’s a somewhat sanitized version of what we presented.
The Elite Eight Development Principles Code with your teammates in mind. Don’t break the build. If it ain’t in source control, it doesn’t exist. If it ain’t testable, it doesn’t work. If it ain’t repeatable,   (more...)

In recent months, two computers in my home reached the ends of their useful lives. The first was the HP desktop that my children use; they’ve loaded so many game demos on it over the years that it had become painfully sluggish. I was going to wipe and reinstall the OS, but the DVD drive doesn’t work. I had replaced the drive some months ago, and it worked for a week then quit working again, so it’s probably an issue with the motherboard. The computer is old enough, and my time is valuable enough, that it   (more...)

I love Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog. Today he wrote about how important it is for programmer’s to be able to type. Good post. The line I loved, though, was this: “Don’t just type random gibberish as fast as you can on the screen, unless you’re a Perl programmer.” Zing!

In my post on interviewing Java developers, I explain how and why we make prospective hires write code on a whiteboard. In a similar vein, Imran on Tech posts about making developers write FizzBuzz. Several of us read the article, got caught in the, “Huh? That doesn’t sound hard. Let me code it really quick!” trap, and decided to add FizzBuzz to our standard suite   (more...)

My oldest child turned 15 yesterday. We had planned a family party for him–eat barbecue, open presents, eat cake–but we ended up canceling after he cussed me out at church the day before. He doesn’t live at home, and we decided he’d rather not spend his birthday with his parents. You see, this child has bipolar disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. I could tell you stories; parents of children with mental illnesses would nod their heads knowingly, and the rest   (more...)

I walked past our office plotter the other day and noticed this message on the console:

This picture is blurry but says, “Cartridges will expire in days: 8.” Are you kidding me? When did ink start expiring like 2% milk? I’ve heard of invisible ink, but expiring ink? How dumb do they think we are?

One of the IT guys happened by while I spluttered about the stain of injustice. He opined that, since plotters weren’t pressed into frequent enough use to turn over enough ink cartridges   (more...)

People are always careful when typing emails.
People are now always careful when typing emails.
People are not always careful when typing emails.

Emailers often both read and write the above statements synonymously, simultaneously asserting and negating their intents as they saunter through communication wreckage. I’m not sure why correctly typing “not” or correctly reading “not” poses such a challenge, but I bump into this problem at least weekly, if not daily.

To   (more...)

Last week macZOT offered a discount on an application called Peek-a-Boo Process Throb. I’d never heard of the application, and am not yet sure how often I’ll use it, but I found the concept interesting, the execution well done, and the price negligible, so I paid the registration fee. Some time later, I received my registration key in an email, so I copied the key to the clipboard and command-tabbed to Peek-a-Boo   (more...)

I just released version 0.5 of Safe, the open-source command-line password management program written in Ruby. This version adds diffing and merging Safe password files. I keep my Safe file on a USB thumb drive, but I also copy it to the various computers I use in case I don’t have my USB thumb drive with me. Sometimes the files get out of sync. Now I can diff and merge the files.

I also ran into some problems with passwords not authenticating. It seems that the XML parser   (more...)

YazSoft has just announced version 5 of Speed Download, its download management product for Mac. They charge $25 for this product. The price may or may not seem reasonable to you, depending on your need for a download manager and your willingness to pay for software, but it’s certainly not outrageous. They offer a reduced price to upgrade from previous versions ($15 - $20, depending on which previous version you use), as well as a cross-grade “switcher” price for $15.   (more...)

By the time people who knew nothing about soldering guns started buying home computers, memory was measured in kilobytes. My first computer, an Atari 400, had 16 kilobytes of RAM, and my second, and Atari 800, tripled that. Even the lowly Timex Sinclair had a full kilobyte, which could light up the screen and not much more. People running IBM machines and clones soon had 640 kilobytes of RAM, and and about this time Bill Gates never said 640 kilobytes would be   (more...)

Last Thursday I attended the inaugural meeting of RubyJax, the new Ruby users group in Jacksonville, Florida. I drove straight from work and strode into the meeting wearing a golf shirt, crisp khakis, and tan Cole Haans, and instantly felt overdressed. A few people sported clean jeans and polos, but I’d have blended much better in a techno T-shirt, battered dungarees, and sandals. Hoops and baubles festooned nostrils and earlobes,   (more...)

The rain Florida has received over the past few weeks has revealed some roofing shortcomings. We apparently have a roof leak in the building where I work–I walked into work the other day and saw this:

Yep, that’s a hose taped to the ceiling, running down to a trash can in the hallway. And there it’s sat for a week.

Or maybe the leak wasn’t caused by the rain–maybe one of our programmers slipped in a Leaky   (more...)

After using the MacBook Pro for a little over a week, I must confess: I miss Outlook. Admittedly, Outlook 2007 has three years on Entourage 2004, but I’m using Outlook 2003 so Entourage has a one-year advantage. My struggles:

Meeting Requests do not display whether they conflict with existing calendar items; I have to view the calendar to check for conflicts. Meeting Requests do not automatically delete when I accept them. The Move Message dialog does not remember the last-selected folder, but always has the   (more...)

Apple fixed my MacBook Pro for free. They replaced the surface of the laptop–the part that surrounds the keyboard. No more random reboots. The IT guy from work temporarily misplaced the power cord, which delayed a fruitful reunion, but I’m now happily typing away on the backlit keyboard. I may never touch a Windows machine again!

Incidentally, I’m typing this blog entry on a trial version of MarsEdit, which I downloaded because of (more...)

I bought my first Mac in 2004: an iBook G4. Before then, I called Macs “Etch-a-Sketches that you don’t have to shake.” My iBook quickly supplanted my HP P4 laptop as my personal-use computer, and remained in heavy use until I put together a high-powered Ubuntu desktop about a year ago. I still fire up the iBook occasionally, but it’s no match for the newer, beefier machine.

The Senior Director of Infrastructure where I work, the guy in charge of “anything that plugs in,” buys Dell: laptops for management, desktops   (more...)

Day three started with Bruce Tate, Ruby, and Rails. Tate isn’t entertaining nor dynamic (a la Scott Davis), but his presentation skills suffice and his material is excellent. Leading Java developers bemoan his defection to Ruby for a reason.

I’ve been playing with Rails and Ruby (see my password management program at http://safe.rubyforge.org), but I have much to learn about the Ruby way.   (more...)

I spent the morning of Day Two with David Geary, JSF, Seam, Facelets and Ajax4jsf. The session came in two parts, and I could have stayed for a part three and a part four if they’d been offered. The Seam/Facelets/Ajax4jsf development model represents significant advancements beyond the Servlet/JSP model we’re preparing to upgrade, and Geary does a terrific job presenting those technologies. He seems to get into a lot of different technologies; he also presented Rico, (more...)

I’m at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel in Orlando, Florida, at No Fluff Just Stuff. Both an offsite management work meeting all morning and an accident on I-4 delayed my arrival past the registration, opening remarks, and the first session, but I arrived in time for the second session: David Geary’s   (more...)