Juixe Techknow

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Programming

• The way recent Ruby conference have been shaping up, I think RailsConf 2009 will have strippers giving presentations on cache girth and performance.
• What is it that you enjoy about programming? Is it the language, the libraries, the framework, the tools, or the community?
• What is your favorite code editor? On Windows I use Eclipse and NetBeans. On OS X I use Aptana and Komodo Edit.
• There are many self proclaimed programming laws, my law states: Any hack that can name a law after himself should be arrested under that law.
• I just heard a new variation to the infamous developer excuse ‘It works on my computer.’ Just heard, ‘I’ve never tried it on that computer.’
• I think software bugs like wild animals can smell fear!
• Herding bugs and bytecode!
• I would like to use a Eclipse plugin that is a Twitter client.
• JavaScript + jQuery UI + Google Gears + Twitter API = Yet Another Twitter Client! Juixe Tweetbox
• I don’t have a golden hammer, I have a golden jackhammer and when that is not enough I bring out the golden bulldozer!
• Alas, hacks make the world turn.
• Hacking away at a hack. I that like a compound hack?
• Is Scala the new Ruby? Is Scala the new Scheme?
• Some people like texting, others sexting, I like hexting.

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Math is composed of a small set of rules or postulates that together can be used to express formulas that try to explain the universe. Not unlike the Three Laws of Robotics, here are the Three Laws of Twitters. These laws are fundamental, much like mathematical axioms.

• The First Twitter Axiom: If you explicitly ask others to retweet your tweet, then your tweet is probably not worth the retweet.
• The Second Twitter Axiom: It’s not the number of followers that matters, it is how you use it.
• The Third Twitter Axiom: Don’t take the Twitter question to literal. In addition to asking what you are doing, ask how you are going to change the world?

Here is a bonus fourth rule…

The Fourth Twitter Axiom: If it takes you three or more tweets to say it, it should be a blog post.

These laws were created out of a conversation between techknow, adriandz, SeanLazer. Follow us to join the conversation.

Back in May 2007, Digg users revolted against the popular social bookmarking web service over Digg’s overzealous removal of articles that mentioned the AACS key. The first Digg Rebellion was resolved with Digg caving in their users’ wisdom of crowds. The Second Digg Intifada began when Digg launched their now infamous DiggBar, aka DoucheBar. The DiggBar iframe carjacks your content. Since the launch of the DiggBar, all the links on Digg’s front page that used to refer to third party and often independent content producers not refers back to Digg. When you link on a Digg link, they load your content in an iframe below their DiggBar. The DiggBar allows ‘digg users’ to find similar articles, vote up and down, and click on Digg ads.

We have seen similar polemic behavior from you upstart entrepreneurs before, not to long ago Facebook faced a similar uprising over their Terms of Service. Facebook reversed their Terms of Service, I wonder how Digg will save face if not their good will.

Here are some choice reactions to the DiggBar.

• The Inconvenient Truth About Digg’s DiggBar
• 19/20 Tweets and 9/10 dentists hate DiggBar
• How to Block the DiggBar
• Why Engadget is blocking the DiggBar
• JavaScript DiggBar killer (but not blocker)
• acts_against_douchebar Rails Plugin
• diggbarred WordPress Plugin
• Framekiller
• Keep your DiggBar off of my blog
• DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic On Digg
• How to Abuse the New DiggBar for Fun and Profit
• DiggBar Killer
• The Diggbar Is Evil, Here’s How to Stop it
• Drupal DiggBar Blocker
• DiggBar is a Howl of Desperation
• If You’re Not Blocking The DiggBar, You’re Part Of The Problem

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. You can follow my tweets at techknow, say hello and I’ll be sure to friend back!

Programming

• Don’t be a one track mind, and don’t be a one stack developer!
• If a picture is worth one thousand words, a running and working application is worth one thousand specifications!
• In software development there are more people issues than there are issues with specifications or features or code.
• Can we use the internal defect tracking software to enter a bug issue on people that bug you?
• Sophisticated does not need to be complicated.
• Nerds don’t dance, they programmatically move their limbs in unison.
• Writing blocks of code and upgrading your whole library dependency is rarely a practical solution that clients are willing to pay for.
• Will Code for Happiness!
• I don’t make itineraries, I use public map APIs and RSS feeds and make apps that make travel itineraries for me!
• Throwing money at a problem only cause other type of problems.
• Instead of counting backwards, a good sobriety test for a nerd is to recite the Fibonacci sequence or prime numbers or powers of two.
• Numbers don’t lie, but they omit how they where gathered, analyzed, and crunched.
• There is no better code than the one I am currently working on, and their is no worst code than the one I wrote a year++ ago.
• Can’t sleep so I’m hacking memories into dreams, counting tweets instead of sheeps, drinking tequila instead of warm milk.
• Do you think in a procedural, object oriented, tail recursive, domain specific, prototype, meta, functional or parallel quicksort of way?
• There is no I in TEAM especially when there is blame to pass around. Sometimes blame get passed around more than the ball.
• In problem solving some people also prematurely optimize and over think the problem at hand by introducing another problem.
• Some people have Personal Assistant, I need a Personal Programmer.
• Some drop bombs, others drop beats, some drop bunker buster knowledge, many more drop opinions, I drop bytecode!
• In temperate and sunny days like these I develop an allergic reaction to my cube.
• Textbook answers alone are not solutions. Chanting ‘Interface Singleton Builder pattern’ in meetings does not fix all your design issues.
• Booksmart peeps give you text book answers, but I’ve never needed to know when two trains arrive in Toledo if the leave opposite directions.
• Writing a twitter client is the new hello, world!

Business

• Google New Customer Service Motto: Don’t Be Evil and Don’t Be Available!
• Google has mapped the streets, oceans, earth, heavens. What will Google map next, the brain, underworld, middle earth?
• Why doesn’t the iPhone have a good way to delete multiple pictures at once? Am I to wait two years for this just like cut and paste!
• Can I put a restraining order out on Adobe Acrobat, it always pops up and asked if I want to upgrade! NO LEAVE ME ALONE!
• Wowza, still downloading more Kindle books on my iPhone. This makes my digital library even more accessible.
• I should pitch a nre series to ABC, Dancing with the Nerds.
• Odwalla’s Superfood is the veggie version of the hot dog in a green liquid form, it is mechanically separated and blended roots and fruits.
• What? Mark Zuckerborg is on Twitter? Is that like eating your own dog food and your competitor’s dog food too? Say hello to Mark: @finkd
• How do you politely handle a coworker coming to your office and talking about his cat? I rather be clawed to death than hear about it again.
• Customers want answers not theories.
• Show more interest in your customers than their money.
• You can’t win every argument just by being right, just as you can’t win market dominance just by having the superior product.
• It took years, well over a decade, since it’s invention for slice bread to become the greatest thing since.
• Eventually everyone sells out, if not to the establishment then to the anti-establishment.
• It is okay to wear multi hats as long as you wear your kick ass army boots.
• Save or create jobs? I just saved a job by going to work! I need a tax break and a coffee break.
• Before you can build a better mouse trap, fix your toaster.
• I’m going to make a Ol’ McDonald style burger and on this burger I’ll have beef, bacon, turkey… EI EI O
• Best Job Tittle: Aggression Researcher You Stupid Bastard!
• Just received an email from the recruiting agency my company uses, the had to layoff some staff.
• Some people hustle for money, I hustle for deals.
• There are three forms of questioning: conversation, interview, interrogation.
• My 401K looks like it did during Y2K
• Blogging is not a business plan.
• Which do you prefer first, action or planning?
• Between action or planning I prefer active planning!
• Don’t let a show stopper actually stop the show! The show must go on! Break an audience member’s leg if you have to!
• Rules and regulations should not replace common sense.
• Talking is not communicating, an idea is not a vision, and an opinion is not a sound argument.
• Don’t compete with those that are trying to help you.

Twitter

• Twitter fail whale is over weight and over capacity!
• Twitter is too big to fail! Twitter’s business model should be asking the Obama administration for a bailout?
• If you don’t have anything nice to say, retweet.
• There is famous, 15 minute famous, and then there is Twitter famous.
• If Twitter is poor man’s email, who is the slum dog millionaire’s email?
• Can’t hardly tell the diff between a twitter and a tweaker.
• Twitter should allow you to customize the question ‘What re you doing?’ to anything else like ‘Talk to me.’

I’ve am a happy owner of a first generation Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. As a die hard nerdish book worm and early adapter I was immediately in awe of the Kindle. Sure the Kindle has it’s issues but the technology and business model has definitely proved themselves. The Kindle is the size of a paperback and can carry a whole bookshelf, thousand of pages of books without the dead trees and deforestation. The Kindle is small and a perfect size to travel with but its features and capabilities overlap with other small, portable, and mobile devices such as the iPhone and netbooks. Some technology pundits saw the iPhone, with it’s high resolution and elegant design, as a direct competitor to the Kindle. I’ve personally been questioned as to why I carry both devices.

I’ve been using the iPhone since it first came out and love browsing and reading websites on it. But I have found reading PDF documents on the iPhone difficult and awkward at times. The default PDF reader on the iPhone is slow and I have had it crash when loading large PDF documents. To help alleviate the pain points of reading large documents on the iPhone, Amazon has recently released Kindle for iPhone.

Kindle for iPhone allows iPhone users to read Kindle edition electronic books previously purchased on Amazon. Once you download, install, and configured Kindle for iPhone with your Amazon user information, you can download, sync, and purchase Kindle books. Kindle for iPhone uses a technology Amazon calls Whispersync to synchronized the last page read between your iPhone and Kindle devices. With Whispersync you can switch devices without skipping a page or a beat. Unfortunately I was not able to sync my notes and marks between devices and I do hope that feature is in the works. I’ve been using the Kindle for iPhone application while standing in line for lunch when all I have is my wallet and my phone. For long periods of reading, I prefer the electronic ink on the Kindle, as reading for a while on the iPhone can tire your eyes.

Kindle for iPhone is a smart power play by Amazon, and a kewl opportunity for Kindle users to access their content in new devices. What technology pundits saw as competition, Amazon saw as opportunity. Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone application uses the iPhone application marketplace to promote it’s own electronic book marketplace.

In full disclosure, I downloaded but never used the iPhone application Stanza. Stanza allows you to purchase popular books in digital formats. Stanza supports ePub, eReader, PDF, Mobipocket, and MS Reader books.

On last note. If you are using a first generation Kindle, don’t forget to upgrade your firmware. As of this writing, the most current Kindle software version is 1.2.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants.

Programming

• JavaFX Script is a zig zag cross between Java class system, JavaScript vars, XML declerativeness, Groovy Builders, and Ruby duck typing.
• JavaFX Script has multiple inheritance and the extends keyword is overloaded to mean implements too.
• Tread.sleep(UNTIL_TOMORROW)
• Some software developers don’t know how to develop end-user focused application so they overcompensate and write an enterprise application.
• One of the pillars of Ruby on Rails is convention over configuration, but it is not always backward compatible.
• Codepath Uncertainty Principle: Debugging, and often times logging, code can change it’s behavior.
• Current development meme: Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) is wrong!
• Running Find Bugs plugin for Eclipse… An out of memory error occurred, you think it found any bugs?
• The most recommended fixes from Find Bugs are inefficient obj creation of nums and bools, and !static inner classes, !final static fields
• I’m a programmer not a short order cook, scrambling bits is not the same as scrambling eggs.
• The most common bug, next to null pointers and objects, is not escaping special characters from XML, SQL, strings, or expression languages.
• Autoboxing an object reference to a primitive can cause NullPointerException that are hard to track down.
• In the zone, in the machine, in the debugger, in the code looking out my window and thinking I rather be outside!
• There will be blood, there will be bugs.
• Can’t sleep so i’m hacking memories into dreams, counting tweets instead of sheeps, drinking tequila instead of warm milk.
• Instead of counting backwards, a good sobriety test for a nerd is to recite the Fibonacci sequence or prime numbers or powers of two.
• Haven’t seen a version control do a good job of with renaming/moving a file. At best they delete old and add new file without the history.
• Each dev here wears too many proverbial hats, it often feels like we are a team of one man bands mixing it up with too many cooks.
• “It’s snowing in NY and server is freezing to death!”

Business

• Some entrepreneurs don’t know how to bootstrap a profitable business so they fund venture backed corporations.
• Some productivity metrics seem like modern alchemy and pseudo science for dogmatic middle manager to put in powerpoints slides and charts.
• I want to do the software startup version of Hell’s Kitchen… you donkey.
• User Generated Content is one way to have users do work for sub minimum wage/free.
• If you’re running a web service whose sign up page asks for birthday, you best be prepared to send me a birthday gift.
• Companies should not require paying customers to sign up or register to use all features of a product or received upgrades.
• Just because a store is going out of business is no reason for false advertisement.
• Eventually everyone sells out, if not to the establishment then to the anti-establishment.
• Will Open Source apps, like Open Office and GIMP, gain more traction in a down market? Will Open Source contribution retract?
• Asking five questions get you closer to the truth than merely asking one, and yet most people don’t ask questions, they demand answers.
• You don’t want your boss to speculate that you are dead.
• Sometimes you have to rethink the problem, other times you have to retool the solution.
• For the average commuter in our office, working from home can save about $20 (gas, toll, wear & tear, food) and 1.5 hours travel time a day.
• Companies should get a tax incentive for having employees work from home.
• Is the bailout a new liquidity event? Some bankers are using the bailout to cash out.

Products

• The Flip is a point and shoot sort of camcorder.
• I wish my life would upgrade every year just like iLife.
• The game Age of Empires or Monopoly should come out with a social media version.
• Spammers are the terrorist of my inbox. I wish that instead of ‘delete’ the spam GMail provide the option to bomb, rip, shread, incenerate
• The problem of drawing a great piece of art with the Pulse Smartpen is that if you forget to turn it on you have to draw it all over again.
• Looking at my iPhone properties, it says I have taken 10,487 pictures.
• Vista needs to warm up on start up just like my old ’69 skylark, I need to let it run for like 10 minutes before I can get up and going.
• Wii Fit is brutally honest
• If Microsoft is the new IBM, then is Google the old Microsoft?
• Just spoke with Amazon customer support for the nth time, they still don’t got my white Google phone in stock. Been waiting for a month++.
• Huge food lines at costco, you’ve think it was a soup kitchen…
• I wish the funnies of my Sunday edition of the local newspaper had a syndication of LOLcatz.
• Publisher not in Action: If Manning Publications makes available PDF versions of their books, why don’t they have Kindle editions?
• Why would anybody buy a technical book from the publishers own website when Amazon undersells them anywhere from 15% to 30%?
• Since when does Amazon charge for a restocking fee?
• If Apple power adapter cost nearly $80, I don’t think Apple will come out with a sub $300 netbook.
• Playing Portal, I think I have two more levels to go. It’s very addictive, I want to keep going but I need to teleport to tomorrow.

Interview Obstacle Course

• Just helped a super senior software engineer how to change the printer ink cartridge. How did this guy get through our vetting process?
• Maybe the interview/hiring process should include some hands on, live technical trouble shooting obstacle course.
• How can a self respecting engineer not know how to change the printer ink cartridge, get the coffee machine going, or read a python script?