Simple Simon's Journal

Subject:	Now...that's geeky.
Time:	5:57 pm.

So...I have an XO, as in an One Laptop Per Child device.

I love the little device, as a piece of hardware. Software for it sucks as far as its intended purpose.

I do use it though. It uses almost no power and if there is a trace of WiFi signal its on the net.

Right now I am trying to Ruby-On-Rails running on it. In so doing I ran across this article on a Light Weight Rails Stack. A DLMRoR (Debian Lighttpd MySQL Ruby-on-Rails) to the normal LAMP stack.

The thing with that article that roxxors is that it starts right from the start, you have light weight Debian installed...now what. At the end you have:
* mysql
* postfix (with SASL configured)
* lighttpd
* fastcgi
* pcre
* subversion
* imagemagick
* rmagick
* qpopper
* webmin (for postfix)

And he does it in a 773MB image.

Awesomeness.

I am not installing all of that, but some.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Such a switch
Time:	9:11 pm.

All day today I was dealing with code that was prepared by people who were not as senior and certainly did not have the time to consider what it was they were programming. This leads to a difficult situation for someone to come into later.

Frustrating is really the better word for it. You never know where to turn to next to fix a bug and you just keep throwing extra debugging into it.

In contrast I am now looking at some code from a very large, long term project from Snap days. It is downright relaxing to be trying to navigate this code. I have not *ever* been into this section of code before, but I can follow all that is going on and why.

Once again I am impressed by J's ability to consider error conditions and to deal with them appropriately. And, further convinced that Java is a better language that PHP for anything of any weight or long lasting value.

Anyway, the code snippet that saved my butt from certain and irrevocable roasting last week was this:


try {
  /* lots of code to get a message thread from the database */
} catch (Exception any) {
  thread = null;
}

Now, you wouldn't think that just randomly catching everything and dealing with it by returning 'null' would ever be truly appropriate. Shouldn't you try and figure out what is going on and *do* something about it. Not here. The returning of null if there was any issue means that the outside code fails gracefully and just does not display that thread. Like, say, when you have removed a bunch of user accounts in a cleanup and did not have appropriate code in place to make something more intelligent happen...something intelligent is already happening.

Where for most of the day things just failed. Sometimes in screen data dump, but usually more in a causing side effects as you go down sort of way. This was in playing with code that I have been working with off and on for the past two months.

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Subject:	Looking for work
Time:	1:40 pm.

Those who have known me for awhile have heard me spout this way and that about resumes and people applying for jobs...

Now hiring managers will get to laugh similarly at me.

This also allows me the privilege of turning my critical eye to the other end of the process.

In particular, I disliked online posting boards when I was hiring, things like Monster and Workopolis. Take all things that are bad about trying to find someone for a position and then amplify it so that anyone who is inappropriate can apply, good idea.

I think I have now moved them into the category of loathing. Yes, I loathe them. I think they are terribly dehumanizing and only emphasize the skills based form of hiring.

A form of hiring I do not agree with. You need to get at the personality and the cultural fit of the person. Sure, they need aptitude for the task at hand, you cannot ask an extroverted hand-shaker to sit in the corner and type all day. Aptness is easy to figure out though, and why we have the 3 month no-hassle termination period.

Without the cultural and philosophical fit the person could be the best person for the role, skills wise, but they won't work out as well as a green recruit.

RIM has their own online board, that is even worse than normal...I cannot attach a cover letter for a particular position. I cannot craft my resume differently for different positions. I can't really use my resume at all. Worse, my check list of skills is huge in their system...but for any of the positions I would apply for is almost completely unrelated, short of showing that I have knowledge of certain fields. Even though I have been programming with Java for the number of years shown I don't want to be a Java programmer there. But they have no soft skills in their list.

Do you think this is because RIM is not interested in anyone who has some "other" abilities? Including an interest in snake pits?

But, I will not make it past the automated gating system. And there is no easy way to contact an HR person there and say to them "So....you have a big company that has lots of openings...lets find a fit."

Not that I was eager to work there anyway.

I am interested in finding a smaller company in the Guelph (or KW) area that needs someone with a rather broad set of skills and is willing to pitch in broadly to get to the next level. Small growing companies, especially tech ones, need someone like me, if they don't already have a resident me.

I can also bring Pie. It says so here on my resume.

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Subject:	Certain Reference Materials
Time:	7:35 pm.

Sometimes you just miss having a book that used to be sitting on the shelf beside you or your co-worker.

Right now I would like to flip through Design Patterns, just to get a quick idea on how to approach this particular problem.

I have a class that was programmed to access an open source flat file data base but it is not behaving well in a concurrent access environment -- it becomes corrupt.

So, now I am creating a MySQL access class, and I am contemplating how to set it up...Flipping through I would happen across something pretty quickly.

Being that this is geeky subject matter I can just browse to The Wiki article on it. I would prefer a book.

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Subject:	Inside the standard apache 404 error page
Time:	2:19 am.

There is a comment.

The comment contains this:
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error's message is "too small", specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it's pretty tricky to find switch called
- "smart error messages". That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that's exactly what you're reading
- right now.

Remember that whatever error condition you may have thought you were
in, IE knows better.

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Subject:	applications are great, searches suck
Time:	12:24 pm.

I have said this before with regards to GMail. I think that it is the
best email interface I have ever used and appreciate it greatly.

But, its search sucks. Even when I am searching for things that I
*know* exist it will return nothing.

I also use http://docs.google.com/ for much of my business documents.
Again, I think the applications are great and the interface is
awesome.

But, the search sucks.

I just did a search for 'epiInvoice' which is in the title of many of
my documents - nothing. Why? Because no document _contained_
epiInvoice.

If you were programming a search of documents would you not allow
people to search on the titles?

I don't even see an "Advanced Search" that would allow me to do it.

For a "search" company their searches often suck.

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Subject:	I understand writers
Time:	1:37 pm.

You know all those stories about the great writers sitting around in a
hotel or resort of some kind do their writing?

I understand why they would do it.

sofias_dream has brought us into the city this weekend
because of her daughter's rehearsals.

Unfortunately my work is not able to take too much of a break right
now so I have brought along the laptop.

Right now I am sitting in the very nice hotel restaurant / lounge.
The waiters have brought me my preferred drink, offered me food, and
just now have brought some nuts. All requiring nothing more than a
"Thank you." With an understanding that I am working.

Nice

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Subject:	my cat is very wise
Time:	3:51 pm.

It is scared of zombies.

If I make zombie noises, low groans, her eyes will go wide and she
will run away.

If there are zombie noises on the computer she will run away faster.

I haven't done it in quite awhile because I don't want to traumatize
her. But, I just made a little groaning noise due to code frustration
and she looked at me, with fear in her eyes. So, I couldn't resist
making full on zombie noise. She sprinted out of the room as fast as
she could.

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Subject:	buggering debuggers
Time:	8:20 pm.
Mood:	angry.

What exactly is the point of a debugger that changes the environment
so much that code runs differently?

When I run this javascript in normal mode it is broken. When I run it
in the debugger the variables evaluate to what they "should" be, but I
cannot actually run the code with the debugger running. Aside from
the fact that no user will ever have it.

Instead I am slowly building up an example/test file from scratch to
the needed complexity and trying to see at what point it breaks. It
now does almost everything I want and doesn't break. But my code is
still broken and is not very different from the running test code.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Supersize Lyrics
Time:	2:23 pm.

You know the Matthew Good song "21st Century Living"...

I just noticed what the first few lines say:
You know, today I was asked only one question
One question all day
Do you know what that was?
"Do you want this supersized?"

This is a very cool start to the song, in particular in combination
with what the Director Engineers Without Borders said about having
more mature participants.
"Unfortunately someone who has worked 10 years in a field has 10 years
of answers, and not 10 years of questions. We need people who are
willing to ask questions, and to question their life. And it only
gets worse as people work more."

I am paraphrasing and making it less diplomatic than he did. I
usually do make things less diplomatic.

But, the concept of asking questions is a good one and I am pleased to
find its (lack) in the start of this song.

We don't really *know* that much. (...anything...)

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Subject:	did we learn nothing from Y2K?
Time:	5:03 pm.

So...Here I am fiddling with some code.

I happen across someone storing a date in this format:
"0611"
Would you suspect that is a date? What date might you think it to be?
I had enough context to know it was a date, but that is the way it is
stored in the database, as a string, and with the name "GE_RUN".
Excellent.

When displayed for end users, they see it as "06-11".

Now you feel better don't you? Now all ambiguity has been removed.

But, my simple code of first two characters being the year and the
last two being the month broke. Why did it break?

I will tell you.

Because sometimes it gets stored this way:
"611"
Yep. Missing the zero.

It isn't significant, I guess. But, still. If you are going to force
me to use string manipulations to get the printable version of a date,
you could please try and be consistent.

Dates and times are bad enough when people play with them poorly.
When you do crap like that you should be shot.

PS. DB design and maintenance brought to you by your friendly
neighbourhood certified Oracle DBA supported by a fat Oracle support
contract.

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