This was a flyer for AnsiCon, which we held at Woodlands Mall a couple of times. We also had a PezCon at Willowbrook one year. It seems mall security was always involved in those things. I once wrote a skapunk song about it called "Misplaced Priorities."



Here we have a menu for a board called Nitrous Oxide. I don't remember who the sysOp was:



I had a Save the Sheep foundation, and promoted it in a couple of bigger pictures. This one was for a board called Pandora, whose logo was cut off at the bottom:



We have here a skinhead that was done for another BBS called Shadows of Darkness:



Sometimes the SkinHeads Against Racism and Prejudice would come to our punkrock shows and start fights with antidisestablishmentarism punks. I normally got along with them though. Once, when I was stuck in the mud in some guy's yard, a group of them brought their truck and tried to pull us out. They ended up getting stuck too.

I've also been paying attention to Sixteen Colors since the same friend who sent me the pictures above pointed me to it a little while back. To prove to you how k-rad 31173 l338 (I was more than 1337) I was, you can see I was greeted in the AvengeView documentation in the same paragraph as RaD Man.

When I first went there, I couldn't find any of my art even though I did find myself in a lot of greetz. But when I went back today, I did find some. Looks like someone uploaded a few art packs from MAD. A couple of pictures I couldn't find through the Sixteen Colors search, but they did come up through Google. If you can't tell, I rather liked drawing cartoons. Here's an alien with his hand down his pants:



You might think his hand is down his pants because I was trying to be funny (I was 15 - juvenile humor is funny at that age.) But it wasn't that I was trying to be funny, so much as I thought a two-hook-hand alien would be less believable than a one-hook-hand alien. And since I couldn't draw hands very well (still can't), I hid the other one in his pants.

This one is my favorite on Sixteen Colors, found through Google:



Were you ever in the art scene? Who were you? Got any art to share?

1. Interesting Work: You can only write so many CRUD applications before the tedium drives you insane, and you think to yourself, "there's got to be a better way." Even if you don't find a framework to assist you, you'll end up writing your own and copying ideas from the others. And even that only stays interesting until you've relieved yourself of the burden of repetition.
   
   Having interesting work is so important to me that I would contemplate a large reduction in income at the chance to have it (assuming my budget stays in tact or can be reworked to continue having a comfortable-enough lifestyle, and I can still put money away for retirement). Of course,the more interesting the work is, the more of an income reduction I could stand.
   
   Fortunately, interesting work often means harder work, so many times you needn't trade down in salary - or if you do, it may only be temporary.
   
   The opportunity to present at conferences and publish papers amplifies this attribute.
   
   
2. Competent Coworkers: One thing I can't stand is incompetence. I don't expect everyone to be an expert, and I don't expect them to know about all the frameworks and languages and tricks of the trade.
   
   I do expect programmers to have basic problem solving skills, and the ability to learn how to fish.
   
   
3. Sane Management: Don't make me delighted to have a broken watch. I shouldn't have to turn back the dial on it to meet deadlines. Or put more strongly, management/customers shouldn't be given the latitude to control all three sides of the iron triangle of software development.
   
   Scope, Schedule, and Resources. Choose two. We, the development team, get to control the third.
   
   
4. Trust: One comment in the reddit discussion mentioned root access to my workstation and it made me think of trust. If you cannot trust me to administer my own computer, how can you trust me not to subvert the software I'm writing?
   
   Additionally, I need you to trust my opinion. When I recommend some course of action, I need to know that you have a good technical reason for refusing it, or a good business reason. I want an argument as to why I am wrong, or why my advice is ignored. If you've got me consistently using a hammer to drive marshmallows through a bag of corn chips, I'm not likely to stay content.
   
   I don't mind if you verify. In fact, I'd like that very much. It'll help keep me honest and vigilant.
   
   
5. Personal Time: I like the idea of Google's 20% time. I have other projects I'd like to work on, and I'd like the chance to do that on the job. One thing I'd like to see though, is that the 20% time is enforced: every Friday you're supposed to work on a project other than your current project. It'd be nice to know I'm not looked down upon by management as selfish because I chose to work on my project instead of theirs.
   
   I wouldn't mind seeing something in writing about having a share of the profits it generates. I don't want to be working on this at home and have to worry about who owns the IP. And part of that should allow me to work on open source projects where the company won't retain any rights on the code I produce.
   
   
6. Telecommuting: Some days I'll have errands to run, and I dislike doing them. I really dislike doing them on the weekends or in the evenings after work. I'd like to be able to work from home on these days, do my errands, and work late to make up for it. It saves the drive time on those days to help ensure I can get everything done.

There are some other nice-to-have's that didn't quite make the list above for me. For example, it would be nice to be able to travel on occasion. It would also be nice to have conferences, books, and extended learning in general paid for by the company. I'd like to see a personal budget for buying tools I need, along with quality tools to start with.

But if you can meet some agreeable combination of the six qualities above, I'll gladly provide these things myself. If you won't let me use my own equipment, and you provide me with crap, we may not have a deal.

That's my list. What's on yours?

I'm on Twitter
I've finally started using my twitter account. I started the account a while back, but never really "got it." I guess the other day the light bulb went off in my head. It's like email + IRC + instant messaging + blogging all in one.

Anyway, if you're on twitter and want to start following me, I'll get notified and probably start following you as well. Of course, if I start getting too many updates, I'll randomly stop following some people. Try not to take it personally if that happens.

I try not to give the minute details of my life like "I just woke up" or "I'm voting for so-and-so." Instead, I've been trying to stay on topic of this blog (programming and technology), but with small thoughts about whatever I happen to be working on. Of course, you'll find some responses to other people won't always be on my main topic.

I hope to see you on there. And if you can help in the C++ IDE department, please let me know!

You've heard the horror stories of Vista. Perhaps you've even experienced them?

I've only been using Vista "heavily" for a few months, but my experience hasn't been the same as what I've heard and read from others. In fact, I kind of like Vista. To this point, I've had only 3 problems:

1. My second monitor will not run at its native, high resolution while in Windows. Instead, it runs at much too low a resolution, and the downgrade is choppy looking. It ran correctly one time, but never since.
2. I cannot simply connect a projector and present - I have to boot up with the projector connected for it to be recognized.
3. I can't get SQL Server 2005 to install the database server

From what I can tell, two of those can be chalked up to Apple's NVidia Bootcamp drivers for Vista. I think that because I know people who have the older MacBook with the ATI card and both of those things work fine in Vista. For me, even trying to present from MacOS caused my computer to freeze.

Eventually, I'm going to have to get the presentation thing fixed, and the 2nd monitor resolution is so bad I never use it on Vista, so that will need to be fixed too. The SQL Server problem bothers me from a principled standpoint, but it doesn't break up my day to day work since I can easily use the client tools to connect to a different SQL server instance.

That's been my experience. Maybe Vista only works on a Macbook.

What has been your experience? If you've had these problems, how have you fixed them?

1. JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA: An awesome IDE for Java. So great, I don't mind spending the $249 (US) and using it over the free Eclipse. The Ruby plugin is not too shabby either, the license for your copy is good for your OSX and Windows installations, and you can try it free for 30 days. Martin Fowler thinks IntelliJ changed the IDE landscape. If you work in .NET, they also have ReSharper, which I plan to purchase very soon. Now if only we could get a ColdFusion plugin for IntelliJ, I'd love it even more.
   
   
2. Programming Ruby, Second Edition: What many in the Ruby community consider to be Ruby's Bible. You can lower the barrier of entry for your favorite programmer to using Ruby, certainly one of the funner languages a lot of people are loving to program in lately. Sometimes, I sit and think about things to program just so I can do it in Ruby.
   
   If they've already got that, I always like books as gifts. Some of my favorites from this year have been: Code Complete 2, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices which has a great section on object oriented design principles, and of course, My Job Went to India. I have a slew of books I've yet to read this year that I got from last Christmas (and birthday), so I'll have to list those next year.
   
   
3. Xbox 360 and a subscription to XNA Creator's Club (through Xbox Live Marketplace - $99 anually) so they can deploy their games to their new Xbox. This is without a doubt the thing I'd want most, since I got into this whole programming thing because I was interested in making games. You can point them to the getting started page, and they could make games for the PC for free, using XNA (they'll need that page to get started anyway, even if you get them the 360 and Creator's Club membership to deploy to the Xbox).
   
   
4. MacBook Pro and pay for the extra pixels. I love mine - so much so, that I intend to marry it. (Ok, not that much, but I have been enjoying it.) The extra pixels make the screen almost as wide as two, and if you can get them an extra monitor I'd do that too. I've moved over to using this as my sole computer for development, and don't bother with the desktops at work or home anymore, except on rare occasions. You can run Windows on it, and the virtual machines are getting really good so that you ought not have to even reboot to use either operating system.
   
   Even if you don't want to get them the MacBook, a second or third monitor should be met with enthusiasm.
   
   
5. A Vacation: Programmers are notoriously working long hours and suffering burnout, so we often need to take a little break from the computer screen. I like SkyAuction because all the vacations are package deals, there's often a good variety to choose from (many different countries), most of the time you can find a very good price, and usually the dates are flexible within a certain time frame, so you don't have to commit right away to a certain date.

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, and thanks to all you who read and comment and set me straight when I'm wrong - not just here but in the community at large. I do appreciate it.

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share (or ones you'd like to strike from this list)?

1. My IBM Thinkpad T42 worked just fine for most of what I do (everything until last week)
2. Apple made me think it wasn't good for developers with its commercials making fun of us

But, with my class in game development with XNA, I needed a beefier graphics card than I currently have, so I figured I spend the extra dough and get the laptop a lot of developers I respect have been raving about.

The first thing I'll need to do is get over the sticker-shock. After that, it should be here in 2-3 days. Then I'll install Windows and Quicksilver. (How ironic is it that I'm getting a Mac and the first thing I plan to do is install Windows?)

So aside from the link above to the Pragmatic OSXer blog, does anyone have any can't-live-without Mac websites/resources?

Next, I'm looking for some time-boxing software. I saw this but didn't give it a try yet. I'm not really in need of its many features though. I just want a way to set tasks for specific times for each day of the week and have it repeat itself weekly. It should also reside in the system tray and just alert me when a box of time begins or ends. It would be nice if there was a way to sync it up with other computers over the internet (I regularly work on three machines), but that's not a firm requirement.

Do you know of anything? Maybe I should write it myself? (yeah, when I pull some time out of ...)

And just so you don't feel you've left empty-handed, I'll include this quote from Alberto Savoia at the blog for the book Beautiful Code:

The odds of finding truly beautiful code in most production systems seem to be on par with the odds of finding a well-read copy of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering in Paris Hilton's apartment.

Thanks for the help!

Here's a test: quickly pick two things in front of you, say this web browser and your annoying, smelly friend Rupert. Now close your eyes and imagine different ways to combine them.

If you're stuck, here are three:

1. Rupert with a minimize button
2. An annoying, smelly web browser
3. Web browsing on, or with, Rupert's face

Now while these combos might not be useful, good, or even practical, they're certainly creative. Adding a third element, say a gallon of jolt cola, might yield even more interesting combinations (a caffeine overdosed smelly web browser infused with Rupert's annoying personality).

The essay really got me thinking, so I considered it worth sharing with the rest of you. Enjoy.

Just as tabbed browsing makes holding form state with sessions obsolete, it's doing the same to the "time spent on site" metric.

Perhaps its not completely obsolete, but the way I browse - if I've visited your site and you see a huge increase in time spent for that page, its probably because I go through sites and open links in new tabs and return to the opened links often-times hours later. Sometimes I leave them open all night to return to first thing in the morning. I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one either.

It would be interesting to note the browsing habits of the general population, and only then, when we take into account the "tab effect" could you consider time-spent a valuable metric. Of course, if I'm the only one that browses that way, I don't make enough of an impact on highly-visited sites. But if a good portion of the people do? Let's hope advertisers aren't paying for that.

In the first nine chapters, Chad tells us how to choose the right market. So for my first week, he addresses supply and demand: first we want to search jobs in our home country, as well as those available offshore. Compare the results and highlight skills in demand in your home country that nobody (or very few people) offshore is offering.

Then, you just need to become good at those technologies that are in demand but aren't yet available offshore (or in high supply). This is simple economics.

To get a head start, you might want to watch the alpha geeks and see what they're doing, but you can probably afford to start a little farther along on the curve.

Sounds easy enough. So, start googling. Better yet, why doesn't someone create a service that performs this search and analysis for us?

Anyway, he told us about a couple of similar (yet less powerful or feature-complete) applications for Windows, one of which was Colibri. I like it.

I just hit Ctrl-Space and up pops my little search box, I start typing and it finds the program I'm looking for after a couple of keystrokes. No more traipsing through my system trying to remember that Remote Desktop Connection is at Start → Programs → click down arrows to expand options → Accessories → Communication.

Instead, I type "Ctrl-Space Rem" and there it is:


I hit Enter and it opens. How much quicker is that?!

I plan to blog Neal's sessions better when I've got a bit more time, but I wanted to get this quick note out about Colibri because I'm quickly finding it to be indispensable in my toolkit as well.

For web developers, InfoQ let us know aboutBrowser Shots, which is a service that will test your web sites in tons of different browsers and present screen shots to you. It lets you choose whether to enable Flash, Javascript, or certain media players, and allows you to set the color depth and screen resolution. It's quite slow at the moment (set it and come back in four hours or so), but it shows us what can be possible! (Screenshots of codeodor.com, as they are coming in more will pop up)

Also, InfoQ completed its first official year. It was "pre-released" (I forget the exact term they used) I think in May 2006, but it went officially live a year ago Friday. Congrats to Floyd Marinescu and the entire InfoQrue! (And they have a lot of relevant news (to me) I'll be posting links to today)

Does that make sense? I kept it in very high level language, but I'm happy to answer any questions regarding smaller details.

Update: I noticed a slight bug in the algorithm. The line "Read one record from each file" was inside the last loop, but should have been outside of it. The post was changed to reflect the correct way to do it.

Update 2: Here's the Java source code for external merge sort.

1. I'm equally competent in dynamic and static languages, though I've always felt more at home in dynamic ones
2. Pursuant to (1), I wonder if some people are just more dynamically minded than others, so they may excel better in those languages that fit their model of thinking
3. I wondered if the author of the Hacknot post was just using some poetic license in apparently writing in the style he was criticizing the weenie fanboys of doing, but I didn't ask because I didn't see where I could leave a comment

Your thoughts?

• In the configuration files, whitespace before the property in question matters. Took me a moment to figure out why simply uncommenting the lines in question wasn't working, but removing the whitespace did it for me.
• I didn't think the in-file documentation was especially clear regarding how to limit access to certain projects to certain users, so I'll describe my scenario:
  
  Lil' José Ramirez needs access to all the projects, while his cousin Joe Bob needs access to only one project. Each of them should have a password and username as set in the conf/passwd directory. So here it is (this was straightforward, minus the whitespace issue):
  
  [users]
  jramirez = password!
  joebob = pword2
  
  Then, in the conf/authz file, I have this:
  
  #root folder
  [/]
  jramirez = rw
  * =
  
  [/joebob_project]
  joebob = rw
  jramirez = rw * =

As far as I can tell, jramirez needs to be put in each project, otherwise it only lets him use unprotected directories. I know it's really simple, but like I said, I didn't think the directions were as easy as they might have been.

I first learned regular expressions in a theoretical automata context. I understand them really well in that context, almost to a "reflex" capability, where there wouldn't be much thought to coming up with one, or figuring out what strings could be generated from one. But, when I try to put them into practice, I'm not as quick, nor am I as comfortable as I should be with them. This is particularly striking, because from what I can tell, there should be no difference between my theoretical knowledge and practically using it (aside, perhaps for some syntax issues). This has shown up in a couple of instances lately. In particular, one I found funny instance I found was an attribute-value pair. There was a bug in CFEclipse where, when you went to edit a tag in a dialogue, it would not correctly fill out any attribute which had a space in its value. Well, it was simply a problem of splitting on the space, as I recall. So I posted a regular expression I thought would work, but which I couldn't get to do so. It really was simple: one or more spaces, followed by one or more letters, followed by zero or more spaces, an equal sign, more optional space, a quote, then any number of characters, and another quote. (There is a problem there - I didn't take into account escaped quotes and didn't force the outer ones to match, but you get the idea). I think the problem may have been a "forgetting" of how split worked, but I was convinced my regex wasn't working. I still am not sure what the problem was.

In another example, in our data management class we have to write this CSV Database, which at the moment is just a command line utility to select some columns, or select based on a simple condition, or join on a single column. I check that the input matches some expected syntax using regular expressions, and then call the appropriate function for the input. That's good. But, when I parse the input, I'm back to splitting on, say "(" to know where the arguments are (and since I am sure it meets the correct syntax, this is possible). Now, that way works, but it isn't the easiest to know what is going on just by reading the code. It just shows I'm not as comfortable using the regular expressions as I'd like to be.

Finally, I'll leave with a bit about going from practical to theoretical. I first learned about SQL and databases in a practical context - at work. So, in going back to the theoretical, I've been getting confused at selection (which is more like the where clause in your query) and projection (which is the select column clause). I'm not near as confident in that class as I am when dealing with something practical in the database world.

And again, I'm not talking about going from complete incompetence to competence, but more like competence to better than competent. Do you have trouble relating theoretical knowledge to practical, and back again? Any ideas on how you've overcome it? I just keep pushing, until it clicks (which, eventually it always does). But, I'm wondering if anyone has other strategies.

• IT Resources Barrier: This barrier is given by IT assets and capabilities. How flexible is your IT infrastructure? Better than your competitors? How good are your technical people's skills, including management? How good is the relationship between business users and IS developers?
  
  
• Complementary Resources Barrier: They use the example of Harrah's using its "national network of casinos to capture drive-in traffic and foster cross-selling" between locations as a perfect example. They also note that these complementary resources need not be considered assets, and could even be liabilities, which, when teamed with the right project could turn into assets.
  
  
• IT project barrier: This includes the characteristics of the new technology - how visible, complex, and unique it is. Further, it adds the implementation' complexity and process change. Can your competitors readily see your new technology? How complex is it to build? Is it just off-the-shelf software that a competitor could buy as well, or is it proprietary? How complex is it to implement (is it as simple as Word, or is it a complete ERP system), and how much will your daily business processes need to evolve in the implementation of change?
  
  
• Preemption Barrier: Whereas for the most part we can control the first three barriers within our own organization, or more importantly, a competitor theirs, this is less easy to control, but should be easy enough to predict (I don't think they say that, but based on the description, I think it would be). The idea here "focuses on the question of whether, even after successful imitation has occurred, the leader’s position of competitive advantage can be threatened." What are the switching costs for users of your application? Are they high enough to prevent them from leaving if a competitor was able to imitate your system? It also includes the structure of the value system: do they need another provider of this service (relationship exclusivity)? The authors use the example that you typically have only one mutual fund investment provider. Finally, is the link you are serving with the project in the value chain concentrated enough that you can capture most of the market and "lock-out" your competitors?

I couldn't find the paper online (for free), but if you are interested, you can find it at MIS Quarterly.