Java, of the caffeinated sort, you rescuer, you time-redeemer, you sleep snatcher and protector of the purpose of my Java (non-caffeinated) conference attendance… don’t fail me now.
(This post inspired by both sleep deprivation and an interesting article on a poet in san francisco magazine. one of those interesting neural collisions…)
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Add comment June 30th, 2004
I’m collapsed in a bean bag chair in the Moscone Center in San Francisco at 10 pm (Pacific). It’s been a long day - sessions from 8:30 this morning, one more session that I’m waiting for (at 10:30), and then the 11:30 set of options that I’m skipping in favor of sleep. This bean bag is mighty comfortable. Wouldn’t take much for me to fall asleep here.
More blogging to come as I digest all tha I’m encountering here at JavaOne. Lots of neat technical stuff, some of it presented by better speakers than others. And, of course, there’s the whole city of San Francisco waiting outside, with all of its wonderful experiences. In the course of literally a city block, I encountered (1) a homeless guy who conversed me with about his theories of why library security officers give him such grief - discussion complete with him pulling out a copy of the NIV Bible and reading verses from Deut 23 (?) re: slaves….. (2) a drag queen / cross-dresser / transvestite (insert appropriate term - I’m not conversant enough with the differences and don’t particularly care to be educated) - this drag queen appeared to be listening discreetly to the homeless guy, though not participating in the conversation. [This all happened in StarBucks, btw, in case that puts an even weirder spin on things.] (3) And then there were the 4 (!) women carrying shopping bags from a shopping expedition from their boss, the CEO of a hospital. I had commented about what studious shoppers they seemed to be, when they informed me incredulously that this lady had bought 3 leather coats. The worse offense, it seemed to at least one of them, was that these leather coats were not suitable attire according to the dress code of the hospital. Just having spoken to the homeless guy and having passed many this week who were shivering in the chilly SF evenings, I think there were worse things to be offended about.
Add comment June 30th, 2004
Something for my next employment contract: if it remains necessary for me to work at some large threshold above normal for more than 3 weeks in a row, I get an automatic bonus in the paycheck. This idea came to mind as part of the wrapup for our phase 1 deployment. This phase has been a beast - since December and up until just a few weeks ago, our whole project team was consistently wracking up work weeks in the 55 to 60 and up range. Software professionals expect that once in a while; it’s an accepted necessary evil to hit “crunch time” and work a bit harder. To do it for as long as our team did it, though, speaks of a team’s commitment to making the impossible happen, and is an expression of just how near impossible what we pulled off was. High personal cost, to us individually and to our families. Low corporate cost: there’s no financial indicator that any of this happened, since we’re all salaried. Salaried does imply a bit of leeway for the corporation, hence setting the performance bonus out after a lengthy period of overtime, rather than at the first bit. The idea is to remind somebody who runs the purse strings that this isn’t the way things should work. I’m a bit cynical: corporations learn best, I believe, when someone looks at cost versus benefit. It’s hard to quantify personal cost…. it’s a lot easier to quantify dollar cost. So it makes some amount of economic sense to make the picture clearer by assigning a dollar value to the personal impact.
Add comment June 25th, 2004
I was intrigued to see a new book by the guy who wrote The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley. His new book is ‘Millionaire Women Next Door’. Apparently in his research for his first set of books, he discovered that some 92% of the folks he ended up speaking with were men, and he decided that it was time to look for the millionaire women and find out what their secrets were. I haven’t read the book yet - want to check it out of the library - but according to the book review on Amazon, “While many characteristics such as frugality and simplicity of lifestyle are similar to those of their male counterparts, Stanley demonstrates that most millionaire women work harder and do better at school, in business, and in investment practices”.
So it highly amused me to see the book that Amazon is offering to pair it with in one of its ‘Buy Together’ promotions - ‘Lottery Master Guide’. So the secret of millionaire women has nothing to do with financial or business acumen or personal achievement; it’s that they know how to pick those numbers??
1 comment June 24th, 2004
I sling code for a living. Done COBOL (bleah), VB, ASP, Java, C#, ASP.NET, PHP… and there’s all the supporting stuff - SQL, JavaScript, HTML, UML, XML … The bevy of acronyms can cause your head to swim.
Today’s adventures had me crawling through SQL query execution plans and trace logs, and .NET memory profiles. Two very different application life-threatening bugs, requiring two different investigation approaches, neither of which is encompassed by all of those acronyms above. (Just because I can write SQL doesn’t necessarily mean that I usually care how SQL Server decides to execute that SQL, so long as it returns the right results. Today’s exercise in query locking, however, had me wading.)
Hours later, our project no longer looks like it has the potential to founder on the rocks of architectural weaknesses. We’ve found the bugs (or, at least, in the case of the memory leak, found the big one causing the kaboom) and corrected them with relatively little changes to the code-base. So, our testers will be happy that we didn’t need to do a total rip and replace. We’re happy that the problem is solved (?). And the system will deploy on schedule.
None of the stuff I learned and exercised today will show up neatly on my resume. The skillset recruiters look for doesn’t usually go into that level of detail - they want to see the language acronyms, the systems lifecycle buzzwords, the application domain areas. The person interviewing me may or may not have experience with this stuff themselves. But I’m a better software and systems engineer for the day… and hopefully quicker out the gate next time with an answer to the problem at hand.
Add comment June 23rd, 2004
‘You have 19 users in your list of banned IP addresses. ‘
You know who you are, you scum who plaster my entries with comments that say things like ‘Reduce your credit card debt’. (Hey, how about the time-honored technique of spend less than you make??) Who leave notes that suggest that I can easily enlarge parts that I don’t have, or use creams to reduce cellulite (that I unfortunately do have). All with neatly embedded URLs to take me to your product of choice. Surprisingly, Disney was actually one of the embedded URLs that came across yesterday. You’ll note that none of these things are still in the archives for my entries. I blast you into comment oblivion with the click of a mouse, and then add you to my list of folks who can never bother my site again. Count’s up to 19. And my comment phaser gun’s waiting.
Add comment June 16th, 2004
We’ve got this tester named Doug. Doug’s name strikes fear in the heart of developers on the teams to which he’s assigned. He specializes in finding those boundary conditions, those way outside the scope of anything you’d expect a user to reasonably do (a reasonable user, anyway, and we all know that there are bound to be a subset of them who are unreasonable in just the code-terroristic sort of way as Doug), the ones that break systems in ugly ways.
An example from a bug report he filed today:
Entering the following search term causes the user to see
an unfriendly server error:
!@#$%^&*()`-=[]\;’,./~_+{}|:”?
Now, I’m not certain that this blogging system is going to handle that text well. Computers don’t generally like to be cursed at anymore than humans do.
Or from this bug report filed earlier:
A vendor cannot upload more than 25 Contract Mod Attachments.
Now, Doug sat there and uploaded 25 separate files to find this bug. With no special knowledge of the system to know that 25 was the magic number. For the record, I did correct that bug, but I’m not going to say what the new magic number is, except to say that it’s sufficiently higher that I’ll personally throttle Doug if I discover he’s tripped that particular boundary.
The stuff Doug discovers is key, actually. Lots of security problems in systems end up boiling down to things like this, where the system just can’t handle some data input at the boundaries of what anyone thought was reasonable. No one ever thought that a user would put in such data, and so they didn’t guard against it, and the system broke in some way that offers a hacker a chance to either directly get in, or just gather some information that lets them try another avenue of attack. For instance, if I’m not careful, the error message that the computer returns tends to be the sort that makes it easy for developers to track down sources of bugs, including database table names, code line numbers, etc. But that also gives Joe Hacker a heck of a lot of info to start with.
So, thank you, Doug, for forcing me to be a better developer. I have aspirations of writing a set of objects that do all sorts of bounds-checking, data validation, etc, and somehow plug them in an aspect-oriented kind of way so that a developer can’t neglect to apply the validations. And I think I’ll label the package something .doug.
Add comment June 8th, 2004
Seen whilst skimming the Washington Post’s Style page in the “bite” for their bridge column -
“I’ve got to take the rest of the week off,” Unlucky Louie told me. “I’m as broke as the Ten Commandments.”
Add comment June 8th, 2004
I’ve finally managed to trim my in-bin at work to 10 messages, give or take a few depending on what’s going on for the day. What a pleasure to see everything in my in-bin in one screen! How unlike me, in general… Coworkers swear that they keep their inbins empty, regularly either deleting their email or filing it. I had never been able to keep up with the flow, no more than I can keep up with the stream of industry magazines that crosses my desk at work, or the pile of mail that threatens to overwhelm me at home. This empty in-bin thing is giving me hope that I’m not doomed to endlessly be digging through information.
Add comment June 3rd, 2004
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