I think that every engineer at one point or another has made it to the whiteboard to scribble some circles and arrows. Any standard which enables me to just begin drawing and know that my coworkers will understand my notation (does that arrow mean A extends B, or A sends a message to B?) is a good thing.
However, UML as a whole involves a much, much bigger business scope, and that can be a nightmare. I was once part of a project that had one person in charge of keeping the use case document up to date. It was never up to date, because no one who was actually doing any of the work cared about it -- it was an after thought, not unlike doing all your coding first and then saying "Oh, yeah...test cases." And of course we all hated the use case person who insisted that no decision was final until she had properly documented the change and gotten sign off that everyone was now on the same page. Imagine those meetings. Every engineer, marketing person and project manager agrees...but we have to wait a few days for the use case person to document what she thinks we said.
Is it good to have such a document? Sure, certainly in theory, much like it would be nice to have a single grand unification theory of physics. But that kind of talk does not meet deadlines. Go build a house. You will start with architectural plans. Then the builders will build it. When you're done, see how many times you changed the plans on the fly to accomodate problems that had to be solved on the spot.
I have a 2.5yr old and a 4month old. Last week I was down my parents house, and saw the new office my dad built. One wall contained nothing but pictures of my kids - printed on his regular inkjet printer. Such walls are the perfect use of a digital picture frame, assuming that it meets some key requirements:
Needs to look exactly like any other picture frame. That means no cord hanging down the wall, that it can be hung on the wall, and that it's not surrounded by an ugly black 2" plastic border.
Can be updated via memory card. Although my dad does have a wireless network, it makes more sense for him or I to pull a card out of a camera and stick it right in the frame than it does to copy it to the PC and then to the frame. Even better, stick a memory card copier into the frame so that I can dump my camera pictures into it and still get my camera card back.
8x10 size. 4x6 might be nice for a desktop, but if you want visitors to come and admire your pictures you don't want them all standing with their nose to the wall trying to see.
Is inexpensive. If these things cost like $50 my parents would have a bunch of them. But at over $200 apiece, forget it.
No, I'm not building him one, that's stupid. There's something to be said for having a final product that actually looks nice and not like something I cobbled together in my basement just because I can.
And yes, we will be getting him a better photo printer soon.
I'm a coder of java web apps by profession. I put Zope on my site to give it a try, and I didn't want to write an image gallery for myself. What I found was that it was very hard for me to get under the covers and tweak, like I would prefer to do. I believe there to be a bug in the code of the image gallery I'm using. But for the life of me I can't look at any source code. The content management interface just keeps saying "Oh, this is a pictures folder, so your option is to add more pictures." There is a button "manage positions" that is supposed to sort them, but it doesn't work. So can I get at the code behind that button to see why it doesn't work? Apparently not. Or at least, not that I've been able to figure out yet.
Ok, the Willy Wonka character was great. The concept of the kids getting to see what it's like inside the factory is great.
But as a movie? Can adults really stomach all the moralizing? Wait, time for a song about watching too much television! And here's one about chewing bubble gum! If Depp's version is going to cut back on that, and get back into the darker sequences like the boat ride, then I'd be all for it.
By the way, I think the poster looks too Clockwork Orange for me.
I send out a big newsletter for my company. It is all opt in. People still hit "report as spam." They may hit it the first issue of the newsletter they get, they may hit it 6 months after they subscribed. Heck, they sometimes hit it for their welcome letter. Think about that. If you're seeing my welcome letter, you subscribed to my newsletter 5 minutes ago. Maybe you don't check your email constantly, but I mean, come on, what else do you expect me to do?
Too many users use the spam button as the trash button. Even gmail, I notice, offers one button "Report spam" but you have to select "move to trash" from a dropdown. You can't penalize vendors who are playing by the rules just because the customer has become bored and is too lazy to hit the real unsubscribe button (which, by the way, is also in all the emails I send out).
I would love to see a usability test where somebody could go to AOL or other big ISP with such a button and basically ask, "Ok, you just hit the spam button. Why? What about that makes you think it was spam?" and see what sort of info could be retrieved. Personally, I will go so far as to hit the button for companies who, even though I just bought something from them, are now sending me unsolicited stuff and never offered me the chance to opt out. The Disney store comes to mind.
But if I voluntarily opted in, can I really now say that it is spam, even if I have never tried to unsubscribe myself?
Couple the "report as spam" button with a "this is a well behaved email" button so that you at least stand the chance at getting two sides of the story, maybe. I can put an email address in my addressbook / whitelist, sure - but if everybody else at my ISP is hitting the spam button, then eventually I'm going to lose that battle because only the spam complaints are getting countedm, not the validations.
As the article summary notes, this isn't a problem for dual-tuner PVRs. Most PVRs offered by cable and satellite providers , such as Charter's Motorola BMC9012 offering, are just that. And, adding another tuner (or several tuners) to media PCs, such as those running MythTV or the surprisingly good Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, is a simple task (for a person so inclined to have a media PC in the first place).
But haven't you just discounted your standard Tivo box for people without satellite? Surely they make up a big enough portion of the audience that it's not accurate to say "not a problem for most."
Where I work, the boss is a stickler for candidates having a rock solid foundation in CS. We grill on things that might seem trivial, like the differences between a list and a hashmap, how to estimate the performance of an algorithm (i.e. the O(n) stuff), and so on. You'd be amazed at how many people fail. People who don't know breadth searching from depth search, or how the List.contains(x) method might go about finding something.
Having said that, I can honestly say that people fail that test whether or not they have CS degrees and whether they came from a prestigious school or not. The only difference I have seen thus far is that, when it appears that a candidate is failing, we will all go back to the Education section of the resume and say "Where did this person go to school?" and if we know it to be a good program, it will be a surprise and a disappointment. But it's not like we started by looking at the resume and only MIT guys get to be interviewed or anything like that.
Substitute Postgres or whatever to taste, but that just fucks up a perfectly good acronym, so we'll pretend MySQL is a placeholder for $REAL_DATABASE of your choice.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't PHP go so far as to hardcode some MySql stuff right into the API? We're a Java shop, and one of the non-Java guys whipped up a PHP app pointing to his own MySQL database. Since we used Postgres, I asked him to change it. Turned into a big nightmare as he had specifically used some mysql_ something or other calls that PHP had, and to get postgres support he would have to compile it in separately??
In my experience the problem has always been that no one can really agree on limits to what a natural language should be able to do. Take the example in the subject, from the document -- "set the nectar of all flowers to 0". Fine, it's "more natural" than something like for (int i =0; i < flowers.length; i++) { flowers[i].setNectar(0); }
or something like that.
But wouldn't the most natural way be to say something like "no flowers have nectar"? This gets into a completely different level of parsing. In that statement you need to understand the logical set that is established (none of the set of all flowers) and that, although there is an attribute "nectar" that all flowers have, it is a quantity that starts with a zero value. You might even have started by saying "all flowers can have nectar" to setup the example.
Ok, with that out of the way -- Yay! Geeky content! I'm always on a quest to find stuff to fill my ipod, with which I fill my 2hr commute every day. Typical unabridged audiobooks run like $35/per which sucks.
Also, check out itconversations.com which is more about interviews and business trends and somewhat less geeky, but where you can listen to Woz or Wil Wheaton talk for a couple of hours.
Finally just about 2 weeks ago I swung by the computer show to pick up some new hardware to replace the server in the basement. Although it's only ever been a 600Mhz PIII used for email and web, I was hoping to turn it back into a rather usable machine for some software development and other things. Guy tells me that the Sempron is the way to go.
You don't say if you will have a demo, or are you just talking? If you're just talking, you have my pity.:)
I'm still a believer that programming gets a bad rap. I don't care about what you tell me a computer can do, I care about what I can tell the computer to do. (You know what I mean). Been that way all my life. If you have a demo, then find some sort of open source video game that enables you to hack up easily visible changes (like skinning the characters or something else quick and easy to demonstrate). If you don't, then start writing on the whiteboard and go with logic problems. Maybe do Towers of Hanoi in long hand. Give them a problem, let them solve it, and then show them how they basically just wrote a computer program. Or "missionaries and cannibals" or one of those others that has some good visual quality.
The advantage to taking that path, by the way, is that you're least likely to run into the "We already knew that" argument that you're gonna get if you plan to talk about information that can be found on the Internet.
Barring that, go science fiction. Talk about the Mars Rover or something that they may know about, but not necessarily have realized can be connected back to the same computers they use every day.
But how do you define "best people"? That's sort of the question, isn't it? Where's the magic set of interview questions that finds these people? Back up one step -- instead of trying to find people with X skillset, what *is* X skillset? Just coding? Communication? Management? Personality? Intuition?
That's really what the question's about. I think everybody wants the best people on their team. There are even best managers, because managers do actually add value (normally as gatekeepers to keep economics and politics away from the engineers).
One thing I've noticed on successful teams is that the best senior technical people are not those that put their head down and code like maniacs, nor are they the ones who stand in front of the whiteboard with the circles and the arrows. They're the ones that display an almost mystical ability to simply know everything that is going on in the team, and be able to redirect at will in order to optimize what's going on.
Part of this is being the listening board for other members of the team, which comes naturally as a result of being a senior member. But it also comes from always having one's ears open, without having to force your way into every conversation and say "What's this? What are we talking about?"
You'll know if you're doing it right because the world around you ends up feeling like you're in the middle of a giant coincidence. You hear two people talking about something and you say "Hey, I just saw a tutorial on that in so-n-so's blog" or the guy in the cube next to you says to anybody that's listening about a problem he's having with JSP and you shout back "Check with Ashish, he told me he was looking into something similar a couple weeks ago..."
Let stuff arrange itself in the background of your brain so that you can call it back when you need it. And then bring it up as needed, don't shove it down anybody's throats. You see an article that says Struts is out and Tapestry is in, you don't walk to everybody's cube and say "Hey, did you hear that Tapestry is the new thing?" Forward a link to the article to the team. The ones that want to read it, will. But then a month or two later when the boss asks whether you should go to Struts, then is the time to say "I hear Tapestry might be the better choice..."
Once upon a time I used to argue that hacking is understanding of the resources available to you, and creative application of those resources toward problem solving. Everything that you take in, be it what you did, read or heard, counts as "resources available to you."
You might find some useful info at Digital Camera HQ, which lets you find the camera you're interested in and then aggregates a bunch of reviews and other content in one place for you. Front page even says "Canon Digital Rebel, Most Popular Digital SLR".:)
Disclaimer: I don't work for them but I do run into them in the kitchen.
Finding customers. NEVER underestimate how important this is to the success of your company.
All other problems, and yes there are many with relation to OSS in general, are insignificant.
Can't be said enough. How many times did we all hear about a dotcom that was gonna do just fine because they had exactly *1* customer who was playing sugar daddy (trans: had a piece of the action) and they swore up and down that they were gonna sign a second customer any day now?
Technical knowledge alone won't get you half what you need. Team with a sales person. Just like there are born geeks in the world, there are born salesman. The sort of guys that see free stuff and just instinctively think "I can sell that 12 different ways, I can sell the service I can sell the support I can license the trademark I can merchandise the logo...." You should be able to at least get out of the starting gate with a good salesman on your team.
Then you'll need somebody with business savvy to start making it look and act like a real company and not just a guy with an idea and a guy selling that idea.
Here at work we have two primary ways of communicating, when you don't count chance meetings in the hall. First is a Twiki, second is a developer's mailing list. In putting up a blog I'm hoping to address some of the weaknesses of both:
Twiki seems best at spec and document level stuff, but not ongoing conversation. You have to put forth a medium amount of effort to set up a twiki topic properly (i.e. don't just put it up and then email people the link -- LINK TO IT from a main contents page someplace!)
Twiki gets out of date way too easily. I started working here and found a page called "Todo Items" for my project. Cool, I read it - it was like 2 years old, I had no clue whether anything was still even relevant.
Developer's mailing lists, which are great for conversation, are too easily branched and forgotten. I always see email to "developers" and "cc tom and steve" even though tom and steve are developers. Why? PRobably to get more attention in their inbox. Fine. But inevitably a part of the conversation will then go only to tom and steve when somebody hits the wrong reply button.
Another problem with developer lists is that not everybody wants to know everything all the time. We already all get enough email. Plus, what if somebody who is not on the developers list is interested in the topic?
Email ends up all over the place. I get my work email at home. Sometimes, for whatever reason, I respond from my home address - and then replies sometimes go there, sometimes to work, depending on how people reply. Or I'm at home and I want to see a particular message that I had already popped on my desktop at work - so now I'm grepping through my workstation's filesystem looking for it. A blog would centralize all that, and provide nice searching functionality.
My team has a number of large projects going at any time. If everybody project reported it's progress regularly to the "all" mailing list we would quadruple our traffic, and nobody would read anything. So instead I plan to set myself up a blog, tell people that it exists, and maintain it. If people want to read it, super. If they want to get into conversation, even better. I was gonna say "If it flops..." but I dont think it will, because at the very least it'll be a place where I can keep all my own thoughts on things and be my own braindumping ground.
Why I've never been a hacker of hardware
on
Hardware Hacking
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember my first job out of college where they made their own circuit boards for a medical device. While something compiled on my 286, I watched the EE do all kinds of tests and simulations at his desk. Finally I said, "That looks boring. Fire that bad boy up and see what happens."
He looked at me, pointed at a chip and said "See that? Those cost $100 apiece. I have 4 of them, and they take 3 weeks to order. I can't afford to blow it up." And went back to his work.
I always remembered that as the best demonstration of the difference between hardware geeks and software geeks. Software geeks abide by neither the laws of physics nor economics.
Check out NASTS, which I wanna say stands for North American Science + Technology thru Society organization (http://www.nasts.org). In short, their approach is to use social issues to teach math and science (primarily science). A classic example curriculum I remember was teaching kids statistics using acid rain pollution as the issue. There was a model where kids would try to predict how many dead fish show up in the local lake because of the pollution. Kids love that stuff.
So either you don't have a tv to turn off, in which case you are not in the relevant audience, or else you have a tv that you do not use, in which case you wasted your money on the thing.:)
Among the many benefits claimed by tvturnoff.org is that 90% of the people who participate in a TV Turnoff Week successfully reduce the amount of television they watch permanently."
And 100% successfully reduce the amount of tv they watch that week.
Everybody's mentioning Griffin and Sabine (or however you say it). If you actually like this style, look for Exegesis by Astro Teller. The story consists of a series of emails between an emergent AI and its unwitting creator. Nothing special in terms of story or character, but that particular aspect does make it stand out as different from the rest.
>Worry when you *arent* asked, because it means management doesnt think you know anything valuable.
When they laid you off, the already have come to that conclusion.
Only true from a given perspective. Yes, you're being laid off, therefore the company has come to the conclusion that you are replaceable. However, within the scope of those that are being laid off, there are different levels of value. If you last through five rounds of layoffs, it's safe to assume that you have more value than the crew that was laid off in the first round.
Slashdot Mirror
However, UML as a whole involves a much, much bigger business scope, and that can be a nightmare. I was once part of a project that had one person in charge of keeping the use case document up to date. It was never up to date, because no one who was actually doing any of the work cared about it -- it was an after thought, not unlike doing all your coding first and then saying "Oh, yeah...test cases." And of course we all hated the use case person who insisted that no decision was final until she had properly documented the change and gotten sign off that everyone was now on the same page. Imagine those meetings. Every engineer, marketing person and project manager agrees...but we have to wait a few days for the use case person to document what she thinks we said.
Is it good to have such a document? Sure, certainly in theory, much like it would be nice to have a single grand unification theory of physics. But that kind of talk does not meet deadlines. Go build a house. You will start with architectural plans. Then the builders will build it. When you're done, see how many times you changed the plans on the fly to accomodate problems that had to be solved on the spot.
- Needs to look exactly like any other picture frame. That means no cord hanging down the wall, that it can be hung on the wall, and that it's not surrounded by an ugly black 2" plastic border.
- Can be updated via memory card. Although my dad does have a wireless network, it makes more sense for him or I to pull a card out of a camera and stick it right in the frame than it does to copy it to the PC and then to the frame. Even better, stick a memory card copier into the frame so that I can dump my camera pictures into it and still get my camera card back.
- 8x10 size. 4x6 might be nice for a desktop, but if you want visitors to come and admire your pictures you don't want them all standing with their nose to the wall trying to see.
- Is inexpensive. If these things cost like $50 my parents would have a bunch of them. But at over $200 apiece, forget it.
No, I'm not building him one, that's stupid. There's something to be said for having a final product that actually looks nice and not like something I cobbled together in my basement just because I can.And yes, we will be getting him a better photo printer soon.
I went back to Java in a heartbeat.
But as a movie? Can adults really stomach all the moralizing? Wait, time for a song about watching too much television! And here's one about chewing bubble gum! If Depp's version is going to cut back on that, and get back into the darker sequences like the boat ride, then I'd be all for it.
By the way, I think the poster looks too Clockwork Orange for me.
Too many users use the spam button as the trash button. Even gmail, I notice, offers one button "Report spam" but you have to select "move to trash" from a dropdown. You can't penalize vendors who are playing by the rules just because the customer has become bored and is too lazy to hit the real unsubscribe button (which, by the way, is also in all the emails I send out).
I would love to see a usability test where somebody could go to AOL or other big ISP with such a button and basically ask, "Ok, you just hit the spam button. Why? What about that makes you think it was spam?" and see what sort of info could be retrieved. Personally, I will go so far as to hit the button for companies who, even though I just bought something from them, are now sending me unsolicited stuff and never offered me the chance to opt out. The Disney store comes to mind.
But if I voluntarily opted in, can I really now say that it is spam, even if I have never tried to unsubscribe myself?
Couple the "report as spam" button with a "this is a well behaved email" button so that you at least stand the chance at getting two sides of the story, maybe. I can put an email address in my addressbook / whitelist, sure - but if everybody else at my ISP is hitting the spam button, then eventually I'm going to lose that battle because only the spam complaints are getting countedm, not the validations.
But haven't you just discounted your standard Tivo box for people without satellite? Surely they make up a big enough portion of the audience that it's not accurate to say "not a problem for most."
Having said that, I can honestly say that people fail that test whether or not they have CS degrees and whether they came from a prestigious school or not. The only difference I have seen thus far is that, when it appears that a candidate is failing, we will all go back to the Education section of the resume and say "Where did this person go to school?" and if we know it to be a good program, it will be a surprise and a disappointment. But it's not like we started by looking at the resume and only MIT guys get to be interviewed or anything like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't PHP go so far as to hardcode some MySql stuff right into the API? We're a Java shop, and one of the non-Java guys whipped up a PHP app pointing to his own MySQL database. Since we used Postgres, I asked him to change it. Turned into a big nightmare as he had specifically used some mysql_ something or other calls that PHP had, and to get postgres support he would have to compile it in separately??
for (int i =0; i < flowers.length; i++) { flowers[i].setNectar(0); } or something like that.
But wouldn't the most natural way be to say something like "no flowers have nectar"? This gets into a completely different level of parsing. In that statement you need to understand the logical set that is established (none of the set of all flowers) and that, although there is an attribute "nectar" that all flowers have, it is a quantity that starts with a zero value. You might even have started by saying "all flowers can have nectar" to setup the example.
Ok, with that out of the way -- Yay! Geeky content! I'm always on a quest to find stuff to fill my ipod, with which I fill my 2hr commute every day. Typical unabridged audiobooks run like $35/per which sucks.
Also, check out itconversations.com which is more about interviews and business trends and somewhat less geeky, but where you can listen to Woz or Wil Wheaton talk for a couple of hours.
Son of a......
I'm still a believer that programming gets a bad rap. I don't care about what you tell me a computer can do, I care about what I can tell the computer to do. (You know what I mean). Been that way all my life. If you have a demo, then find some sort of open source video game that enables you to hack up easily visible changes (like skinning the characters or something else quick and easy to demonstrate). If you don't, then start writing on the whiteboard and go with logic problems. Maybe do Towers of Hanoi in long hand. Give them a problem, let them solve it, and then show them how they basically just wrote a computer program. Or "missionaries and cannibals" or one of those others that has some good visual quality.
The advantage to taking that path, by the way, is that you're least likely to run into the "We already knew that" argument that you're gonna get if you plan to talk about information that can be found on the Internet.
Barring that, go science fiction. Talk about the Mars Rover or something that they may know about, but not necessarily have realized can be connected back to the same computers they use every day.
That's really what the question's about. I think everybody wants the best people on their team. There are even best managers, because managers do actually add value (normally as gatekeepers to keep economics and politics away from the engineers).
isn't it Janis not Jamis?
Not the way my 2yr old pronounces it, you see. :) She also thinks the words to HAIR include "tangle tangle tangle my spaghetti".
Part of this is being the listening board for other members of the team, which comes naturally as a result of being a senior member. But it also comes from always having one's ears open, without having to force your way into every conversation and say "What's this? What are we talking about?"
You'll know if you're doing it right because the world around you ends up feeling like you're in the middle of a giant coincidence. You hear two people talking about something and you say "Hey, I just saw a tutorial on that in so-n-so's blog" or the guy in the cube next to you says to anybody that's listening about a problem he's having with JSP and you shout back "Check with Ashish, he told me he was looking into something similar a couple weeks ago..."
Let stuff arrange itself in the background of your brain so that you can call it back when you need it. And then bring it up as needed, don't shove it down anybody's throats. You see an article that says Struts is out and Tapestry is in, you don't walk to everybody's cube and say "Hey, did you hear that Tapestry is the new thing?" Forward a link to the article to the team. The ones that want to read it, will. But then a month or two later when the boss asks whether you should go to Struts, then is the time to say "I hear Tapestry might be the better choice..."
Once upon a time I used to argue that hacking is understanding of the resources available to you, and creative application of those resources toward problem solving. Everything that you take in, be it what you did, read or heard, counts as "resources available to you."
...somebody tk'd them for hogging the AWP and being all sux0r with it.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them but I do run into them in the kitchen.
Can't be said enough. How many times did we all hear about a dotcom that was gonna do just fine because they had exactly *1* customer who was playing sugar daddy (trans: had a piece of the action) and they swore up and down that they were gonna sign a second customer any day now?
Technical knowledge alone won't get you half what you need. Team with a sales person. Just like there are born geeks in the world, there are born salesman. The sort of guys that see free stuff and just instinctively think "I can sell that 12 different ways, I can sell the service I can sell the support I can license the trademark I can merchandise the logo...." You should be able to at least get out of the starting gate with a good salesman on your team.
Then you'll need somebody with business savvy to start making it look and act like a real company and not just a guy with an idea and a guy selling that idea.
Good luck!
My team has a number of large projects going at any time. If everybody project reported it's progress regularly to the "all" mailing list we would quadruple our traffic, and nobody would read anything. So instead I plan to set myself up a blog, tell people that it exists, and maintain it. If people want to read it, super. If they want to get into conversation, even better. I was gonna say "If it flops..." but I dont think it will, because at the very least it'll be a place where I can keep all my own thoughts on things and be my own braindumping ground.
He looked at me, pointed at a chip and said "See that? Those cost $100 apiece. I have 4 of them, and they take 3 weeks to order. I can't afford to blow it up." And went back to his work.
I always remembered that as the best demonstration of the difference between hardware geeks and software geeks. Software geeks abide by neither the laws of physics nor economics.
Check out NASTS, which I wanna say stands for North American Science + Technology thru Society organization (http://www.nasts.org). In short, their approach is to use social issues to teach math and science (primarily science). A classic example curriculum I remember was teaching kids statistics using acid rain pollution as the issue. There was a model where kids would try to predict how many dead fish show up in the local lake because of the pollution. Kids love that stuff.
So either you don't have a tv to turn off, in which case you are not in the relevant audience, or else you have a tv that you do not use, in which case you wasted your money on the thing. :)
And 100% successfully reduce the amount of tv they watch that week.
:)
Everybody's mentioning Griffin and Sabine (or however you say it). If you actually like this style, look for Exegesis by Astro Teller. The story consists of a series of emails between an emergent AI and its unwitting creator. Nothing special in terms of story or character, but that particular aspect does make it stand out as different from the rest.
Only true from a given perspective. Yes, you're being laid off, therefore the company has come to the conclusion that you are replaceable. However, within the scope of those that are being laid off, there are different levels of value. If you last through five rounds of layoffs, it's safe to assume that you have more value than the crew that was laid off in the first round.