Your kid is 4 months old? Stop worrying about what technology you'll introduce first, a year or two from now, and enjoy watching him (her?) roll around the floor and make "bah gah dah" noises.
When my brother was a baby my folks were told he might have water on the brain. Both he and I lived that whole life of not being able to wear helmets in little league because they didn't fit, and so on. The only reason I can find hats that fit me now is that I don't have as much hair as I used to:). (Although on a good note I did just find "flex fit" hats at the local mall kiosk that personalizes clothing. XXXL and stretchy, the thing is just a little tight on me.)
Both my kids, ages 3 and 9months, look to be on the same curve. Both have had their heads tested and specialists called in to make sure there's no problems. My 9month old has the same size head as my 3 year old. They measure me each time, too, usually several times to make sure they got it right. I wanna say that I'm something like 3+ inches over the mean head size. I asked how many standard deviations that was but never found out.
And I have girls. Oy, the poor things. At least they'll be brilliant!
Actual quote I have heard on the subject of spam blacklists: "I don't care that you're not a spammer. Your ISP allows spammers in their midst and therefore you all go on the list. Get a new ISP."
Oh, ok. Nothing like over reacting a bit.
Searching can be one time, subscription can't.
on
The Importance of RSS
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think a key difference between subscription and search is that you may have use for searching for one thing, one time. As a matter of fact I'd think that this is by far the most common use of search. Maybe you hit google news everyday to check for "Free porn movie downloads" or something, and that you can subscribe to. But how about when I just have a one-time question, like what's a "xenops"? Google's perfect for that and I can't see RSS being a big problem.
Generic RSS subscription (where you just click the "syndicate this site" link or little orange button) is not very useful as a replacement for search because you don't get to customize anything. Unless the blog in question offers categories, then you're stuck getting whatever they push onto the feed, even though the strength of RSS is supposed to be that you're pulling the information over.
Instead, you want to go with an RSS subscription that gives you some measure of control, specified by you. But what? A search term? I watch news.google.com for "Shakespeare". And I get every hit -- shakespeare fishing rods, shakespeare references in businessweek, and some football player named shakespeare who fell off a boat and died. Not what I want. At least something like a delicious theoretically goes one step above, because by having an army of monkeys tagging URLs by the thousands, you're assuming that you've attached validated meta data to each link. When I search delicious for things that are tagged Shakespeare, I might not only get exactly what I want, but my odds are much higher that it will be what I expected.
Here's a change, Steve. I don't use iTunes anymore, which means you don't get any of my money anymore.
Forget for the moment about the quality of podcasts out there. It's no worse than the quality of your average blog was a few years back. It takes a little while for the good ones to distance themselves from the pack and define what quality really is all about in the first place. There will always be an audience for anybody that wants the soapbox, just like always. We just need to make it easier to find what you're looking for.
Everybody will find their own favorites.
The power of podcasting comes from the same delivery mechanism that RSS brings us (it's the same thing, after all, with a different payload).
"Here are some sources of regularly updated audio. Bring it to me to listen to at my leisure."
Not everybody wants to listen to music on their MP3 players. I find it boring, personally. Nor do I want to constantly go out and search for new sources of interesting audio files to listen to (a regularly asked slashdot question), or pay $35 for an audio book when I could buy the paperback for $7. Podcasting opens up the door for me to have an effectively infinite amount of new content dropped onto my ipod every day. Sure I won't like all of it. That's what skip buttons are for.
Content will come, I have no doubt of it. IT Conversations is already well on the way. I listen to every keynote of every technical conference throughout the year. Sure, I could manually go and get those as they are published, but why bother? Why not just have them automatically show up on my ipod for me?
If you're suggesting that your job is to be the unit test guy, then I would just start writing tests as you think of them. Critical mass is important - if you only have a few unit tests no one will care. Write some obvious ones for everything. And then go back and dig in where you think unit test make more sense. In the web app world in particular it is often very hard to write real unit tests without getting into a whole variety of special rigging. So focus on the logic components that tend to be more abstract and either do or do not do the right thing without reliance on databases and other servers.
As long as all the tests pass, there's really no harm in testing anything you want. Nobody's ever going to tell you to write less tests. Just remember to do breadth first and get something written for all the obvious spots, rather than getting all trivial and obscure on your favorite class just because you can.
The developer excuse is almost always "I don't have the time/energy/patience to write the unit tests for this legacy code." So what you want to do is provide a foot in the door that allows the developer to realize that maybe he is really only updating existing tests, and possible creating a few, but not all of them. Much less work.
But then again I may have misunderstood your question.
If you're asking whether it would be valuable to have an RSS feed into a jobs database that allows me to watch for Java web application jobs in the north shore area of massachusetts, then hell yes it would be valuable. If it's just a generic feed of all jobs available at a particular company, than it is no more useful than any other "jobs at our company" html page.
In the reverse, if you are a manager looking for employees, then some sort of search/feed combination on the ever growing database of resumes would be interesting, too. "Alert me whenever a new resume comes out with somebody that has 5yrs of java". That would imply that all resumes meet a certain meta-data guideline, though.
I'm confused. Weeks ago I was at "Meet the Fockers" and saw a trailer for EpIII. Is this not publicly released? There's the obligatory badass shots of Mace Windu and Yoda, what appeared to be Anakin with red eyes (very quickly), and the emperor saying "Rise, Vader...." as Darth Vader is lifted on what appears to be some sort of surgical table.
Or was I hallucinating? is that a different trailer?
How to make the QA guy want to kill you
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
Here's a conversation that happens at our shop every week, and it's funny every time:
Project manager: Here Josh, here's your test plan.
QA guy: Thank you. *tests* The results I get for #3 are not what you said to expect. Looks like there's an error.
Engineer: *thinks about it* Oh, ok, yeah. That's not really an error. Ignore that one.
QA guy: *steam comes out of ears*
What's the revenue model for the SDK?
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a coder I love the fact they've released an SDK (Java, even!). I've successfully gotten apps to run on my tv. That alone is cool, and conjures up no end of daydreams about the sort of thing that could be enabled with such a home-centralized console. When I hear the Comcast commercials and think "Saving money would be nice" I immediately think "Yes, but I can write code for Tivo," I'm not giving that up. Even if I don't write any reasonable code for it I trust the open source community to come up with some good stuff.
But that's me. I'm a geek. How are they going to make money from that, does anybody know? Is there a plan to start buying applications from the community and selling them as add on services or something? Or perhaps licensing them so that I as an author make some money based on how many people subscribe to my application? (Imagine the horror show of technical support THAT would be!)
Surely they can't have gone through all this trouble just to keep we coders thrilled. How does this scale to the larger audience and get Tivo back in the game?
So apparently they're watching out for the people out there stupid enough to say "Hey, I can go get me 100 videos and never pay! That's a GREAT deal!"
There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, people. You may not have read your Heinlein, but you should still understand the concept.
If you're trying to protect people from misleading advertising, then good lord, get in line, Blockbuster is hardly the first to engage in THAT.
Their competitor Netflix is saying the same thing - "Keep them as long as you want! No late fees!" Except I'm paying $17.99 a month and can't get any new movies until I return the old ones, so ergo the late fee is $17.99/month. Duh.
What exactly is "entertained but not distracted"? Seriously, I'm asking.
I've got pictures of my family pinned to my cube walls (on the one wall that allows things to be pinned to it:-/). On the file cabinet behind me I have 6 framed pictures, but rarely do I turn around to look at them.
I have juggling balls, which I pretty much never touch.
One statue of Buddha. Green.
Framed picture of the Red Sox beating the Yankees.
I have an iPod which I listen to on the commute in, and carry up to the desk, but it usually sits there and I dont put my headphones on. Probably because I tend to listen to podcasts rather than music, and find those distracting when trying to work.
And so on. It gives me stuff to look at when I take my eyes off the monitor, but it's not really there for entertainment. Nor is it distracting.
It's decoration. I don't think that's what you were asking for, though. You want toys.
I'll correct myself before somebody jumps down my throat...
I didnt say the human is the weakest link.
Yes, obviously, I did. I see my own post. What I meant was that in relation to mr. snorklewhacker's comment that I was not intending to suggest that the human was the weakest link in getting the job done, just in getting it done efficiently. If the measure is getting the job done, then the human of course is the most important bit. If the measure is the efficiency in which it got done, then the human is the weak part. Clearer now?
Re:Get clipboard. Stand over shoulder. Watch.
on
What Makes a Good UI?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Spoken like a true non-user. The human is not the weakest link, the human is the one getting the job done. The machine is there to serve the user, not vice versa. If the user's needs are to have two buttons to click repeatedly, George Jetson style, throughout the day then that's the interface you need (I do a lot of manual QA stuff that's exactly like that). If the user needs a thousand knobs and dials, then you need to figure out how to organize those knobs and dials. It's not your job to tell the user to get out of the way and not worry their pretty little head while the computer works its magic.
Oh, I wouldn't say that's true at all. I think that by eliminating the redundancies, wait periods and other spaces were error creeps in, you free up the more important resource - human expertise - to be applied the way that it should. QA is a great example. If because of all the manual effort that you have to do you can only properly QA 10 bugs a day, but by optimizing some of those areas I can get you up to 30 bugs a day, didn't I just make you better at your job? I didn't lessen the value of properly QAing the system, nor did I lessen your input into finding and fixing bugs. I just made the system more efficient for you to do it in.
I didnt say the human is the weakest link. I said the human is the least efficient part of the system. If you need a thousand knobs and dials then I don't want to take those away from you. But if I discover that 90% of the time you're only using 3 of those knobs and the other 997 are for very rare circumstances, you can bet that I'm gonna move them to another page. Otherwise there is a portion of your time spent scanning for the right button out of a thousand, and a portion of time spent in error, which does not need to happen.
Get clipboard. Stand over shoulder. Watch.
on
What Makes a Good UI?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The concept of maximizing user performance by observing how people do their job is hardly new to the computer world. Watch what people do, look for the redundant or time consuming bits, and fix those. Also watch for places where errors most commonly occur, as much time is spent in fixing errors.
Common places to look:
Anywhere involving the mouse. Operations like selecting or cutting and pasting are very time consuming, and open to a huge degree of errors.
Anywhere involving manual communication between programs. "The cron job emails this file to me as an attachment, then I save it and import it into Excel to run this macro."
Anywhere that the human is acting as calculator. "I click in this field and then I type today's date."
Anywhere there's a handoff between humans. "I start the server, email Jim to tell him its up, and then wait for him to tell me whether there are bugs he wants fixed."
Manual touch points that don't need to be there at all. "I generate the newsletters, which takes like 10-20 minutes, and then when that's done I upload them to the test server."
In short, if you are trying to improve efficiency, then your human is your weakest link and your job is to minimize your human's input into the system. Whittle down their input to the bare minimum that cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, and then do the rest for them.
Note very importantly that this implies there is one major audience that uses your product for one primary thing. We're not talking about something like a Microsoft Word that is used generically by a universe of different people. You said you have to optimize productivity, which implies that you have some control over hacking away at features that do not impact productivity.
Honestly, did you read how to take pictures from a kite before, or AFTER you read about Make reporting on the same thing?
Actually yes, since I follow Engadget's RSS feed.
That was how I knew where to go get that story, even though the reviewer said that googling for it did not turn it up.
I don't deny the coolness factor. I love the idea. I'm just saying that if it's nothing more than a print version of stories that have already been circulating for 3 months, then there's no real reason for me to buy it. There needs to be some value above and beyond what was already out there, and simply aggregating it all under one cover ain't gonna do it for me.
Will they publish deadtree-only content?
on
'Make' Premier Issue
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The lead time for publishing a paper magazine is atrocious when compared to webtime. Many web sites for regular print magazines will only run the articles after the print has gone out. What's the deal going to be with Make, do we know? By the time it shows up in my mailbox will I already have read the articles?
I'm pleased to say I did my part to make this happen. The Panera in my hometown has wifi. However there's no value in me hanging out there on workdays when there is another Panera exactly halfway along my commute, right on the highway. So I wrote them some feedback on their web site saying that if they had wifi then on bad commute days I could hang out there for hours getting my work done and still see how the traffic is coming.
Not only did they respond, but they actually left me on the list as they kept hitting reply-all and I got to hear all the details about the progress of the mall's wiring that was holding them back (they told me they had to wait for work being done on the mall).
The service was actually activated months before they told me that it would. I've used it several times since then. Very nice! Now if I could only bring myself to take up a table for 3 hours while enjoying a single bagel...
The bank I worked for implemented a "change your password every 60 days" rule the same year they handed us one of those motivational desktop calendars that had a word of the month like "teamwork", "integrity", and so on. The password checker would not let you repeat your previous passwords, but it did NOT check for dictionary words! So whenever it nagged me to change words I would just reach up to the desk calendar, flip over to the next month, and type in the word of the month. Certainly solved the "where can I write it down" problem. Anybody walking into my office would just think that I did not keep the calendar up to date.
This question comes up periodically at work when we fight over things like whether to use tabs or spaces (and how many), and inevitably it comes down to "Wouldn't it be nice to just store the bare minimum needed by the code itself, and have each engineer be able to retriev / prettify it at will?"
If somebody made an extended byte code so that I could canonicalize all my java code and be able to extract the same meaningful source (complete with manageable variable names and comments), I'd be all over it. if somebody wants to do that using XML, fine, as long as you don't otherwise kill me with speed/space tradeoff.
Just let me keep working with the editors I like in the syntax I know. Don't expect me to manually code it, just liek I don't manually code byte code now.
During the boom (I feel so old when I say that) I was on a "soft perks" team. The idea of in cube massage came up often (as did beanbag chairs). I went so far as to find a local place that offered corporate programs where you could buy x hours of massage a month, for company use. People would then just put their name on the list and get an appointment.
We never got them. And, I got kicked off the committee.
I was told once to expect a programming quiz. I got there and discovered that the quiz consisted of 20 questions about a completely imaginary language. Each page of the quiz would explain one rule of the language, then ask a question about it. The trick was that as you got farther in the test the knowledge from previous questions factored into the answers.
HR guy told me I had to get 18 out of 20 right or I was done. Then he said I had about 3 minutes per question, and walked out. I finished it, checked my answers, changed about 5 answers...and scored an 18. Turns out the 5 I changed were indeed wrong and I'd changed them to correct answers. Phew!
Most annoying part was when I asked the HR guy why I'd gotten the two wrong. He said he had no idea, he only knew the correct multiple choice letters, not any logic behind them. So being a geek I opened the book back up, rethought the two I'd missed, and came to the correct solution for both of them. Of course at that point he didn't care, but damnit I did.
Compare that with the job where I currently am. I was asked a programming question, I wrote some code, the interviewing manager told me that it was a good "brute force" answer. Well that bugged the crap outta me, so I thought about it all the way home, thought of a better answer, and emailed it to him with a note saying "It may be too late for this to matter but my head will explode if I don't send it." During the next round of interviews I told one of the engineers that story and he laughed and said, "Well, I know two people that did that exact thing, and both of them work here now." make that 3.
My first thought about damage was not about blinding the pilot, it was about the reaction of the pilot who notices the laser dot trained on him. You do not want those guys having what-the-fuck-is-that moments while handling a large vehicle quite possibly filled with lots of people. How exactly does he know that it's not about to be followed by a weapon of some sort? "There's no such weapon that works that way" could end up being famous last words.
Here's what I want - I want to be able to watch Tivo recorded programs elsewhere besides the family room. I figure here are my options:
Buy Tivo unit for every tv in the house. Not gonna happen, and not useful for taking stuff with me on the laptop.
Buy Tivo w/DVD burner built in. Expensive little sucker, though.
Buy regular DVD burner to add to home entertainment stack. Will Tivo let me burn stuff to DVD just like it does to VCR now? Is it worth it or will it suck?
Get this TivoToGo thing, transfer shows to PC, get DVD burner for PC, burn shows from PC. Probably a great deal of limitation on what I can burn.
Put DVD burner on linux server machine, use BitTorrent to search for movies/tv on net, burn for free. Probably won't always be able to find what I want, and is likely illegal.
Build MythTV box. Not gonna happen in my house, as I could never get away with having a noisy server sitting in the entertainment center, and I'm not motivated to spend the money to build the perfect quiet box (which would probably cost more than a tivo with dvd burner anyway).
Which option is best? Right now I'm thinking to just invest in a DVD burner for the stack in the family room, that'll allow me to do other things like burn camcorder video as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Your kid is 4 months old? Stop worrying about what technology you'll introduce first, a year or two from now, and enjoy watching him (her?) roll around the floor and make "bah gah dah" noises.
Both my kids, ages 3 and 9months, look to be on the same curve. Both have had their heads tested and specialists called in to make sure there's no problems. My 9month old has the same size head as my 3 year old. They measure me each time, too, usually several times to make sure they got it right. I wanna say that I'm something like 3+ inches over the mean head size. I asked how many standard deviations that was but never found out.
And I have girls. Oy, the poor things. At least they'll be brilliant!
Oh, ok. Nothing like over reacting a bit.
Generic RSS subscription (where you just click the "syndicate this site" link or little orange button) is not very useful as a replacement for search because you don't get to customize anything. Unless the blog in question offers categories, then you're stuck getting whatever they push onto the feed, even though the strength of RSS is supposed to be that you're pulling the information over.
Instead, you want to go with an RSS subscription that gives you some measure of control, specified by you. But what? A search term? I watch news.google.com for "Shakespeare". And I get every hit -- shakespeare fishing rods, shakespeare references in businessweek, and some football player named shakespeare who fell off a boat and died. Not what I want. At least something like a delicious theoretically goes one step above, because by having an army of monkeys tagging URLs by the thousands, you're assuming that you've attached validated meta data to each link. When I search delicious for things that are tagged Shakespeare, I might not only get exactly what I want, but my odds are much higher that it will be what I expected.
I don't know what upsets me worse, that I must not be a manly enough engineering type, or that I am unnecessarily skewing the statistics.
:)
Here's a change, Steve. I don't use iTunes anymore, which means you don't get any of my money anymore.
Forget for the moment about the quality of podcasts out there. It's no worse than the quality of your average blog was a few years back. It takes a little while for the good ones to distance themselves from the pack and define what quality really is all about in the first place. There will always be an audience for anybody that wants the soapbox, just like always. We just need to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Everybody will find their own favorites.
The power of podcasting comes from the same delivery mechanism that RSS brings us (it's the same thing, after all, with a different payload). "Here are some sources of regularly updated audio. Bring it to me to listen to at my leisure."
Not everybody wants to listen to music on their MP3 players. I find it boring, personally. Nor do I want to constantly go out and search for new sources of interesting audio files to listen to (a regularly asked slashdot question), or pay $35 for an audio book when I could buy the paperback for $7. Podcasting opens up the door for me to have an effectively infinite amount of new content dropped onto my ipod every day. Sure I won't like all of it. That's what skip buttons are for.
Content will come, I have no doubt of it. IT Conversations is already well on the way. I listen to every keynote of every technical conference throughout the year. Sure, I could manually go and get those as they are published, but why bother? Why not just have them automatically show up on my ipod for me?
As long as all the tests pass, there's really no harm in testing anything you want. Nobody's ever going to tell you to write less tests. Just remember to do breadth first and get something written for all the obvious spots, rather than getting all trivial and obscure on your favorite class just because you can.
The developer excuse is almost always "I don't have the time/energy/patience to write the unit tests for this legacy code." So what you want to do is provide a foot in the door that allows the developer to realize that maybe he is really only updating existing tests, and possible creating a few, but not all of them. Much less work.
But then again I may have misunderstood your question.
In the reverse, if you are a manager looking for employees, then some sort of search/feed combination on the ever growing database of resumes would be interesting, too. "Alert me whenever a new resume comes out with somebody that has 5yrs of java". That would imply that all resumes meet a certain meta-data guideline, though.
Or was I hallucinating? is that a different trailer?
Project manager: Here Josh, here's your test plan.
QA guy: Thank you. *tests* The results I get for #3 are not what you said to expect. Looks like there's an error.
Engineer: *thinks about it* Oh, ok, yeah. That's not really an error. Ignore that one.
QA guy: *steam comes out of ears*
But that's me. I'm a geek. How are they going to make money from that, does anybody know? Is there a plan to start buying applications from the community and selling them as add on services or something? Or perhaps licensing them so that I as an author make some money based on how many people subscribe to my application? (Imagine the horror show of technical support THAT would be!)
Surely they can't have gone through all this trouble just to keep we coders thrilled. How does this scale to the larger audience and get Tivo back in the game?
There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, people. You may not have read your Heinlein, but you should still understand the concept.
If you're trying to protect people from misleading advertising, then good lord, get in line, Blockbuster is hardly the first to engage in THAT. Their competitor Netflix is saying the same thing - "Keep them as long as you want! No late fees!" Except I'm paying $17.99 a month and can't get any new movies until I return the old ones, so ergo the late fee is $17.99/month. Duh.
I've got pictures of my family pinned to my cube walls (on the one wall that allows things to be pinned to it :-/). On the file cabinet behind me I have 6 framed pictures, but rarely do I turn around to look at them.
I have juggling balls, which I pretty much never touch.
One statue of Buddha. Green.
Framed picture of the Red Sox beating the Yankees.
I have an iPod which I listen to on the commute in, and carry up to the desk, but it usually sits there and I dont put my headphones on. Probably because I tend to listen to podcasts rather than music, and find those distracting when trying to work.
And so on. It gives me stuff to look at when I take my eyes off the monitor, but it's not really there for entertainment. Nor is it distracting. It's decoration. I don't think that's what you were asking for, though. You want toys.
I didnt say the human is the weakest link.
Yes, obviously, I did. I see my own post. What I meant was that in relation to mr. snorklewhacker's comment that I was not intending to suggest that the human was the weakest link in getting the job done, just in getting it done efficiently. If the measure is getting the job done, then the human of course is the most important bit. If the measure is the efficiency in which it got done, then the human is the weak part. Clearer now?
Oh, I wouldn't say that's true at all. I think that by eliminating the redundancies, wait periods and other spaces were error creeps in, you free up the more important resource - human expertise - to be applied the way that it should. QA is a great example. If because of all the manual effort that you have to do you can only properly QA 10 bugs a day, but by optimizing some of those areas I can get you up to 30 bugs a day, didn't I just make you better at your job? I didn't lessen the value of properly QAing the system, nor did I lessen your input into finding and fixing bugs. I just made the system more efficient for you to do it in.
I didnt say the human is the weakest link. I said the human is the least efficient part of the system. If you need a thousand knobs and dials then I don't want to take those away from you. But if I discover that 90% of the time you're only using 3 of those knobs and the other 997 are for very rare circumstances, you can bet that I'm gonna move them to another page. Otherwise there is a portion of your time spent scanning for the right button out of a thousand, and a portion of time spent in error, which does not need to happen.
Common places to look:
- Anywhere involving the mouse. Operations like selecting or cutting and pasting are very time consuming, and open to a huge degree of errors.
- Anywhere involving manual communication between programs. "The cron job emails this file to me as an attachment, then I save it and import it into Excel to run this macro."
- Anywhere that the human is acting as calculator. "I click in this field and then I type today's date."
- Anywhere there's a handoff between humans. "I start the server, email Jim to tell him its up, and then wait for him to tell me whether there are bugs he wants fixed."
- Manual touch points that don't need to be there at all. "I generate the newsletters, which takes like 10-20 minutes, and then when that's done I upload them to the test server."
In short, if you are trying to improve efficiency, then your human is your weakest link and your job is to minimize your human's input into the system. Whittle down their input to the bare minimum that cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, and then do the rest for them.Note very importantly that this implies there is one major audience that uses your product for one primary thing. We're not talking about something like a Microsoft Word that is used generically by a universe of different people. You said you have to optimize productivity, which implies that you have some control over hacking away at features that do not impact productivity.
Actually yes, since I follow Engadget's RSS feed. That was how I knew where to go get that story, even though the reviewer said that googling for it did not turn it up.
I don't deny the coolness factor. I love the idea. I'm just saying that if it's nothing more than a print version of stories that have already been circulating for 3 months, then there's no real reason for me to buy it. There needs to be some value above and beyond what was already out there, and simply aggregating it all under one cover ain't gonna do it for me.
The lead time for publishing a paper magazine is atrocious when compared to webtime. Many web sites for regular print magazines will only run the articles after the print has gone out. What's the deal going to be with Make, do we know? By the time it shows up in my mailbox will I already have read the articles?
Not only did they respond, but they actually left me on the list as they kept hitting reply-all and I got to hear all the details about the progress of the mall's wiring that was holding them back (they told me they had to wait for work being done on the mall).
The service was actually activated months before they told me that it would. I've used it several times since then. Very nice! Now if I could only bring myself to take up a table for 3 hours while enjoying a single bagel...
The bank I worked for implemented a "change your password every 60 days" rule the same year they handed us one of those motivational desktop calendars that had a word of the month like "teamwork", "integrity", and so on. The password checker would not let you repeat your previous passwords, but it did NOT check for dictionary words! So whenever it nagged me to change words I would just reach up to the desk calendar, flip over to the next month, and type in the word of the month. Certainly solved the "where can I write it down" problem. Anybody walking into my office would just think that I did not keep the calendar up to date.
If somebody made an extended byte code so that I could canonicalize all my java code and be able to extract the same meaningful source (complete with manageable variable names and comments), I'd be all over it. if somebody wants to do that using XML, fine, as long as you don't otherwise kill me with speed/space tradeoff.
Just let me keep working with the editors I like in the syntax I know. Don't expect me to manually code it, just liek I don't manually code byte code now.
During the boom (I feel so old when I say that) I was on a "soft perks" team. The idea of in cube massage came up often (as did beanbag chairs). I went so far as to find a local place that offered corporate programs where you could buy x hours of massage a month, for company use. People would then just put their name on the list and get an appointment.
We never got them. And, I got kicked off the committee.
HR guy told me I had to get 18 out of 20 right or I was done. Then he said I had about 3 minutes per question, and walked out. I finished it, checked my answers, changed about 5 answers...and scored an 18. Turns out the 5 I changed were indeed wrong and I'd changed them to correct answers. Phew!
Most annoying part was when I asked the HR guy why I'd gotten the two wrong. He said he had no idea, he only knew the correct multiple choice letters, not any logic behind them. So being a geek I opened the book back up, rethought the two I'd missed, and came to the correct solution for both of them. Of course at that point he didn't care, but damnit I did.
Compare that with the job where I currently am. I was asked a programming question, I wrote some code, the interviewing manager told me that it was a good "brute force" answer. Well that bugged the crap outta me, so I thought about it all the way home, thought of a better answer, and emailed it to him with a note saying "It may be too late for this to matter but my head will explode if I don't send it." During the next round of interviews I told one of the engineers that story and he laughed and said, "Well, I know two people that did that exact thing, and both of them work here now." make that 3.
My first thought about damage was not about blinding the pilot, it was about the reaction of the pilot who notices the laser dot trained on him. You do not want those guys having what-the-fuck-is-that moments while handling a large vehicle quite possibly filled with lots of people. How exactly does he know that it's not about to be followed by a weapon of some sort? "There's no such weapon that works that way" could end up being famous last words.
- Buy Tivo unit for every tv in the house. Not gonna happen, and not useful for taking stuff with me on the laptop.
- Buy Tivo w/DVD burner built in. Expensive little sucker, though.
- Buy regular DVD burner to add to home entertainment stack. Will Tivo let me burn stuff to DVD just like it does to VCR now? Is it worth it or will it suck?
- Get this TivoToGo thing, transfer shows to PC, get DVD burner for PC, burn shows from PC. Probably a great deal of limitation on what I can burn.
- Put DVD burner on linux server machine, use BitTorrent to search for movies/tv on net, burn for free. Probably won't always be able to find what I want, and is likely illegal.
- Build MythTV box. Not gonna happen in my house, as I could never get away with having a noisy server sitting in the entertainment center, and I'm not motivated to spend the money to build the perfect quiet box (which would probably cost more than a tivo with dvd burner anyway).
Which option is best? Right now I'm thinking to just invest in a DVD burner for the stack in the family room, that'll allow me to do other things like burn camcorder video as well.