rant « ihumanable

rant

rant — 16 Comments
18
Mar 11

Fuck You Internet Explorer

This is for you IE

Be Warned: This post has very little technical value, more just a rant against my most hated enemy

I hate Internet Explorer, with a fiery passion. Normally I just code along in beautiful browsers and use cross browser CSS and JavaScript frameworks. It’s gotten to the point that I can code something up in Firefox and make it pretty and go over to old IE-saurus Rex and load it up and it looks 90% of the way there and a few hacks later it’s fine. You see I still hate IE, but I’ve ingrained in my brain somewhere what things are “safe” and will probably work in that POS browser and which will require hours of tweaking, reading, googling, hacking, gnashing of teeth, and general misery. I try to avoid the latter.

So If I’ve developed this system to insulate myself from the misery of IE, why the hate today? IE9, that’s why. I’ve read several reviews both positive and negative, but at the end of the day I’m not switching browsers, so I really care about one thing and one thing only, does IE9 make my job as a web developer better or worse. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s worse, and for that I have a lovely pile of “Fuck You” cake sitting right here with IE’s name on it.

Not Available for Windows XP

First of all, IE9 is not available for Windows XP. Great, game over right there you fucking idiots. I don’t think people should use 10 year old operating systems, but people are stupid, see: the continued popularity of American Idol for proof. Firefox is taking the responsible route and helping these poor souls bring their browser into the 21st century even if they are fine with an ancient OS. As Firefox Engineering Director Johnathan Nightingale says about XP, “…the best metrics that we’ve got say 40 to 50 percent of the web is still on XP. That’s too big for us to just leave them behind”

Missing a metric ton of shit

IE9 is just missing a ton of stuff. Stuff that web developers care about, stuff that would make our lives easier and happier, stuff that IE9 rapes right before sleeping soundly on a pile of skulls. Paul Rouget of Mozilla makes this case, let me quote some of the juicier parts.

No CSS3 for you

Here’s a list of CSS3 stuff IE9 won’t support: CSS3 Transitions (for animations), CSS3 Text Shadow, CSS3 Gradients, CSS3 Border Image, CSS3 Flex box model. Great news, don’t put photoshop away just yet, you are going to need 1px wide gradients and text with shadows baked in, and fuck it.

Suck it UX

Hoping you might get HTML5 History API, Drag’n Drop from Desktop, or Web Workers to speed up your applications. Not with IE9 you won’t.

Not the point though

Let’s not get caught up in a feature list shoot out though, because that’s not the point. Let’s move onto the next subject.

Fractured even further

Does IE9 make my job easier, nope not at all. Microsoft’s all consuming obsession with backwards compatibility means that they won’t force anyone to upgrade. While other major browsers are moving to a model of strongly-recommended / automatic background updates to keep everyone on the latest and greatest, Microsoft is still playing the game by the old rules. Now the browser landscaped is fractured even further, I have to make sure my code works in IE6, IE7, IE8, and IE9, and if I want to be really sure I should also check in IE7-compatibility, IE8-compatibility, and Quirks Mode. Microsoft has never made it easy to run different IE versions side by side, I’ve used several products to do this and they all work to varying degrees. Now I will have to run another different virtual machine with either Vista or Win7 so I can test in IE9. And with no / terrible developer tools for all of these browsers, well its a fucking nightmare.

Conclusion

I wish I had one. At this point the only thing I’ve concluded is Fuck You Very Much Internet Explorer. Here’s an idea, stop already Microsoft. I don’t care how good you make IE10, the fact of the matter is that since you won’t force upgrades, it isn’t fucking helping. The only thing you are doing is making more work for the people that actually make the web beautiful. I fucking hate you. Fuck you very much.

rant — 1 Comment
4
Oct 10

sanity please

I’m sure this tale of woe will be shared by many of my web development colleagues, it has to do with Facebook. As a web developer I have to pay a Facebook Tax, Facebook has an API (I think they might be up to their fourth API now) and they have 500 million people, and so management everywhere wants their product to integrate with Facebook. Here’s the problem, Facebook fucking sucks at documentation.

There are as far as I can tell at least 4 competing technology stacks going on over at Facebook: FBML, Javascript SDK, Old REST API, and Graph API. There could be more, some of those might not be fully APIs and are just components, I’m not really sure. I’ve been reading the pages at the official documentation website for weeks now trying to wrap my head around this thing. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m dense or something, but I can’t seem to figure out what the fuck is going on or what I should be using.

Here’s a great example, let’s say you want to integrate Facebook Connect (if that’s still a thing, I’m not really sure), but more succinctly you just want to allow users to sign in using Facebook as their identity provider. How are you supposed to do this. Well there is this section on Single Sign-On that looks promising. But then later on if you follow the link to learn more about the Graph API you will find a section about Authorization that will lead you to this page on Authentication which I think is showing you how to do the same thing, maybe.

The problem seems to be too many ways and pages explaining the same thing or slightly different things, I just want one canonical authoritative place to look that says, “This is the API you MUST use for Authentication.” I don’t think that is asking too much. But I’m sure once I finish my primer on OAuth 2.0 and figure out how the extended permissions works it will all be more clear.

The API could be forgiven for giving you more than one way to skin a cat, if it then gave you specific details on how this stuff actually works. Let’s say I want to build a website that displays events and then let’s people use my website to mark themselves as attending that event in Facebook, is that possible… I have no idea. Here’s a section of the Graph API about Publishing data to Facebook and it might be in there somewhere, but I can’t tell. I guess I’ll have to play around with how this supposedly RESTful API works when I have some state, maybe if I’ve successfully negotiated an OAuth Secret Consumer Token UID then I can call /EVENT_ID/attending and that will mark me as attending the Event with EVENT_ID, it seems to make sense a little bit, but the extremely helpful description of “attend the given event” and the arguments of none make me have to play around to figure it out.

Seth Call is similarly frustrated and makes a very nice detailed case for why the Facebook API is so woefully inadequate. I couldn’t agree more, and I hope that help is on the way.

The problem I’m running into now is frustration and discoverability. There doesn’t seem to be a particular flow to these documents, they are just disparate documents hyperlinked together in no particular order. I’m new is there a tutorial or common use case section, maybe somewhere buried 9 links deep. If you are going to embrace and extend then at least have the common courtesy to make our lives easier as you try to take over the world.

Facebook seems to have too many developers working in the API space not communicating, the “Old” and “New” APIs overlap in some areas and miss each other in other areas, there’s no definitive answer on when support will end for any of the “Old” APIs, is it safe to use the “Old” REST API for functionality the Graph API doesn’t support or will they turn off the tap at some point. When trying to navigate through the documentation it just feels like they made someone do a braindump and didn’t try to organize it in any fashion.

Well I’m going to head back in because with the draw of 500,000,000 potential users we can’t afford not to pay the Facebook Tax, which is a real shame considering how shitty the Tax Code they published is.

rant — 1 Comment
7
Apr 10

sitting

In case you didn't read it: None of Us is as dumb as All of Us.

<rant>

There is a lie we like to tell ourselves that goes something like this, “I am in control of my life.” You are not, it’s a cultural lie though, one of those things that we’ve all agreed makes us feel better so we politely nod our heads and lie to each other and all get through the day a little easier. It’s similar to that radical 90′s style lie I grew up with during school that went something along the lines of, “Everyone is special and magical and made out of ponies.” Everyone gets a trophy, even if you didn’t win, because you are special just for trying. It’s a lie that everyone knows is a lie, but it makes people feel better, so what’s the harm.

Well over the last few months it’s become apparent to me that these things are lies, that I’m no more in control of what goes on in my life then my dog is of his own. At any moment someone could walk through the door and kill us all just for laughs, or someone could hand me a million dollars. The uncertainty of it all is unsettling and exciting. The one thing that has slowly crept into my life recently is the subject of my post, and that is the hallowed institute of meetings. Somehow I went from a code ninja hacking down mountains of whatever was thrown in front of me to a table jockey. I am now scheduled to attend no fewer than 8 meetings per work week.

That works out to 1.6 meetings/day, and rest assured there is at least 1 meeting everyday. I know people that do nothing all day but meetings, it boggles the mind. I would say that I “hate” meetings, but that really doesn’t convey the depth of my loathing for them. Meetings are the bane of my existence, I could stomach maybe 1 a week, a short sweet status meeting, but what I can’t handle is the bread and butter corporate meeting, and I’m going to detail why.

Marketspeak: I don’t know what the fuck happens to people when they get in meetings but everything, everything gets some fancy new moniker. Sure I could say that I’m working on some stuff, but wouldn’t it be better to say that goal-forwarding has been achieved on several Tier-1 action items. There are no people anymore, just assets and resources, dehumanized by the cruel tongue of Marketspeak. Every concept, no matter how simple, is wrapped in shiny new clothes, as though you might confuse the dog turd covered in whipped cream as a delicious fudge sundae.
Teleconferencing: There is always some person (sorry, meant to say “stakeholder touchpoint”) who thinks its appropriate to call into the meeting on a 1992 Nokia Celfone while in the middle of a monsoon while driving through a tunnel. Bonus points if this person has a thick accent that makes even high-fidelity communication less than understandable. The other issue is having 10 people on one side of the conference line and 10 on the other, and the fun of each side trying to figure out who is talking.
Pointless Status: Managing people is difficult, so management is obsessed with the idea of status. The problem is that status is normally not quantitative but qualitative, too bad that doesn’t fit into the Holy Spreadsheet. People are forced to turn things into percentages, I’m 80% done reflanging the spline, even if that doesn’t make any sense. Status reports are a proxy for involvement, they are a way to feel connected to a process you don’t have any part in.
Workturbation: Meetings are insidious, if you have 8 hours of meetings you will go home mentally exhausted, more than likely frustrated, and with a feeling that you’ve really put in a hard day’s work. The problem is that when you try to figure out what you’ve actually accomplished the list is either non-existent or incredibly paltry. Meetings feel like work but rarely accomplish anything of actual significance. Meetings also have the incredible ability of spawning meta-work just for the sake of the meeting itself. Before the meeting you have to prepare whatever pointless agenda you have for your meeting, secure a place to have the meeting, work around everyone’s schedules. Afterward someone prepares the minutes and it gets emailed to the companyname-all mailing list where inevitably the tiny list of things that were actually decided are rehashed again and again. Personal bikesheds are floated around, and more than likely all the chatter on the email list will require ANOTHER FUCKING MEETING to sort out.
Punting: Punting is the amazing technique where something interferes with the meeting so it is moved down the road to another meeting. Punting is sometimes necessary when someone wants to discuss in detail some trivial point, but the best and most frequent kind of punting is the following. Design meeting is convened, difficult non-trivial thing is brought up that requires actual thinking and problem solving, meeting participants get frightened by the idea of actually having to dust off the critical thinking part of their brain instead of blithely parroting made up statuses of underlings, issue is tabled to be dealt with in the future, a piece of me dies inside. Keeping the meeting moving becomes MORE important than getting anything decided or accomplished.

The list is in no way exhaustive or universal. At the end of the day though, a meeting is taking up time you could be doing something, they should be looked at that way. All that time you are sitting in meetings talking about all the stuff that could be getting done if everyone wasn’t stuck in meetings all the time… my head hurts. What we need are people with their hands on the problem empowered to make decisions and move things forward. Then we can meet once a week to talk about how things are going, instead of sitting around all week wondering why nothing is getting done.

</rant>

meta / rant — 6 Comments
23
Feb 10

to tweet or not to tweet

web 2.0 kids these days with their tweeters and facespaces, I used to have to text on a 12-button phone and I liked it!

Ever since I started writing ihumanable.com so many many years ago (actually it was the beginning of October) I have tweeted the birth of every new blog post. For those who follow me (see the button at the top of the page to join the elite group of @ihumanable followers) I expect that you spend most of your day with bated breath waiting for the singular moment of glory that a new ihumanable blog post is ready for your consumption. I was pointed to an article today by Shawn Blanc about how to handle the tweeting of blog posts. The logic boils down to the following

Some folks don’t care a dime about my nerdy posts, but have great concern about what I eat for lunch.

Some folks are already subscribed to my RSS feed and would prefer to keep it there and nowhere else.

The solution Shawn Blanc comes up with is to have two separate twitter accounts @shawnblanc for personal “what I ate for lunch” tweets and @shawnblancnet for stuff about his blog. So the question that leaps to your mind is, should you immediately start following @ihumanablecom for all the updates about the great free content / ranting with oddly captioned pictures that I produce? No, no you should not, and I’m about to tell you why.

I have an RSS feed and twitter, some people would argue that I shouldn’t tweet about blog posts because what if someone is both subscribing to my feed and following me (thanks to anyone who is so devoted). This poor unlucky bastard will get the grand news of a new post in gasp 2 different places.

This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Twitter is passive, it is the un-email. You follow people you like, you see their tweets, there is no “unread count” or really anything expected at all by the tweeter from the tweetee. This is why people love to tweet, its the best part of any conversation, the part where you are talking. Look at some of the recent important tweets.

Faught an old man for a parking spot at ihopp – AmandaSollenne

A man is a man when he can offer his hand. The Who – wealthmoneynow

Straight up doing nothing. Have a dentist appointment after school. then have to go to court for 5:30. Then have a bunch of homework. Great. – JamieBaskett

Now I’m not picking on these people (I don’t even know them) I just went to the public timeline to see what was currently running through the tweet stream. The point is that these are low-value easily ignored communications. If something shows up in your tweet stream that you don’t care about, at most its going to waste 140 characters of mental processing power.

The second argument is that somehow people could care more about what I had for lunch than my blog. What I have for lunch is some meaningless data point about my day it means nothing to me (although today’s Grinders Chicken Parmesan Stromboli was amazing). This blog which I spend all kinds of free time and energy on actually means a great deal to me. I want to be out there promoting it and if you are following me on twitter I would imagine you would want to see the things that are important to me. If not then why are you following me.

I have people following this site on RSS and people following me on Twitter and I would imagine its not a perfect overlap. When I first started this blog I had no RSS subscribers because it was fresh and new, so I promoted it with a simple (usually less than 140 characters) tweet, one per day. Now I have people following me on twitter solely because of this website, and it would be a disservice to them to stop tweeting about the blog posts now, changing the rules all up midstream.

This blog is important to me, me @ihumanable. The things I write here are an expression of the frustrations, lessons, and victories that make up my life. I could easily start an @ihumanablecom (if its not taken) twitter account and tweet new posts out through that. But that doesn’t make sense to me, @ihumanable is where I tweet things about me, ihumanable.com is about me, and so tweets about ihumanable.com will continue to be broadcast through @ihumanable.

The argument against blog post tweets fails to understand the very nature of twitter, it is a passive, non-blocking, stream of information. If someone is spamming hundreds of tweets a day about pointless blather (well then they are probably using twitter) then stop following them. If someone is trying to share something that they have worked hard on and care about once a day, then I would hardly think we need to erect walls of netiquette around it.

rant — 2 Comments
12
Feb 10

arbitrary

Fucking arbitrary decision, but a good one!

Rant time, oh it’s Friday rant time! You see we are making progress on our project at work up to the point that I will be traveling to beautiful Indiana next week to get some specialized training and toolkits. It’s a big deal for our project and we are all very happy, I’m glad to get to be an important part of all this and actually look forward to it. I will be heading out there with two other guys from the company and they will be leaving on Wednesday while I stay until Friday. Here comes the fun part, how to drive around after Wednesday?

Rent a car! I hear you shouting at your computer (don’t worry I can’t really hear you, you are just very predictable). Well it may shock you to find out that I’m only 24 years old and because of the actuary tables I am not allowed to rent a car. You see you have to be 25 years old to do certain things, like rent a car or hotel room or get a nice break on your car insurance. Less than 25 and you are a hellbent young rogue ready to destroy any car you get your hands on. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent the last 6 years working hard studying at University to get 2 degrees or designing software for a Fortune 1000 company, no the table says 25 years old and by the hammer of Thor we are going by the table.

Now there is a monkey wrench, one I’m sure we’ll get settled and figured, but it’s not the first time arbitrary decisions have been made that have negatively impacted me, and it probably won’t be the last. On this current project we deal with messages and messages have many pieces parts, in the old system you could have thousands and thousands of different pieces parts. In this new system you are limited to about 1,000 unique parts, it has been a challenge trying to figure out how to get everything to work. Is there some reason for this, NO! its completely arbitrary, they just chose a large number, and in the next iteration of the product that limitation will be lifted.

I remember hearing a story from a fellow developer about how new software was installed that all webforms had to send their data to so that it could be sanitized (despite the fact that it was already being sanitized by our program). This new cog in the machine had a limit of 100 fields per form, now only in the dreams of a fevered madman would you need more than 100 fields. Well it did, it was a complicated form dealing with complicated government requirements and to make it easy for the user it was dynamic and beautiful and everyone loved it. Then they had to completely break it, make it work in chunks and find some clunky workaround so that it would never submit more than 100 fields, the users hated it, the developers hated it, everyone hated it. Some digging went forth and the 100 field limit was completely arbitrary and you know in the code somewhere was something like this.

  FormField fields[100]; //No one will ever need more than 100 fields

This arbitrary decision causes a world of hurt. Now we don’t want to go down the super configurable, just change this XML file which will regenerate this XML file which will be used to partially populate this .properties file which will be dynamically…. fuck you. Just that if you have limits there better be good fucking reasons, or else remove them.

If you are going to limit me to 140 characters there better be a good reason, oh because of the inherent limits imposed by SMS, fine Twitter I understand perfectly. You can’t open two spreadsheet with the same name even if they are different files, what are you doing Excel?!

The next time you are about to code something that will result in a clearly arbitrary error message down the road, you better have a good reason to. There better be some sort of machine limitation or design limitation or something, because its not the limit that pisses people off, its their arbitrary nature.

philosophy / rant — 3 Comments
3
Feb 10

bureaucracy

Wait until he meets the Undersecretary for Reduction Planning and Appropriation's new Assistant

Bureaucracy, long the scourge of people who want to git-r-dun. There are some people out there that hate bureaucracy with a passion I can only really muster up for the pending zombie apocalypse. Make no mistake about it, I dislike bureaucracy, I think it is a wasteful but sometimes necessary evil. I’ve found myself ensnared in a bureaucratic nightmare for the last few months so I thought I would jot down some observations on bureaucracy.

Zombie Bureaucracy

(Wow lots of zombies in this post so far) A Zombie Bureaucracy is a bureaucracy that had some reason (however flimsy) for existing in the past but no longer needs to exist. Not unlike a zombie this bureaucracy manages to live long past its usefulness shambling into the future pointless and frustrating. This is caused by the ease that more bureaucracy can be created, at the stroke of an email someone can dream up a committee or process, but the difficulty in disbanding bureaucracy. It is disproportionately difficult to reduce bureaucracy because it looks like work, and people don’t like having their work taken away, it reduces their sense of job security.

Dev: Why do I need 3 developers to sign off on every commit?
Mgr: Because 4 years ago two of the lead developers got into a pissing war over code formatting
Dev: Why didn’t they just work it out?
Mgr: Because they had huge egos and management was too scared to fire either one
Dev: Is this still going on?
Mgr: No, Frank left 3.5 years ago because he didn’t want to put up with Mark anymore
Dev: So why do I still need 3 developers to sign off on every commit?
Mgr: Because 4 years ago…. I guess it doesn’t make much sense anymore…. That’s the way it is!

Just like misery, bureaucracy love company

Bureaucracy is an attempt to control something, to take organic chaotic processes and make them orderly. The problem that often arises is that bureaucracy is its own organic chaotic system, that then requires more bureaucracy ad infinitum. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where all you decided was the schedule of meetings, congratulations, you are in the Matryoshka doll hell of bureaucracy.

Meetings

I loathe meetings, a bunch of people talking about the work they could be doing if they weren’t in meetings all the damn time. Meetings are seductive, they sound and feel and look like work, but they are occupational masturbation. No one has ever brought a product to market because they were able to make it to 10 meetings a day. Meetings have almost no value, sometimes they are necessary, but not nearly as common as corporate culture would have you believe.

And the rest…

Forgot to file the A34C-Bh amendment releasing liability for tongue trauma

I could go on and on, but I will cut the rant short and get to the point. Bureaucracy at its core is about trust, or more importantly the lack thereof. I don’t have my girlfriend fill out the A34C-B form (Confirmation of Confection Purchase Agreement) before running to the store to ensure that she understands that I would like her to pick me up some Hot Tamales. I trust her at her word, there is no need for such ridiculous formalities.

When an organization has enshrined itself in a monument of bureaucracy what it is really saying is, “We’ve been burned before and now we don’t trust you.” We don’t trust you to deploy your code correctly, we don’t trust you to design things properly, we don’t trust you to do X, so let’s get a bunch of people together to review it. This is fine in small doses, frankly I want people to review my code and my designs, I make mistakes like everyone else. But when taken to the extreme it takes a toll on your motivation, on your creativity, and on any preconceptions that you knew what you were doing. Bureaucracy is the surest way to crush your workforce into a homogeneous mix, you will catch the awful at the expense of the great.

meta / philosophy / rant — 12 Comments
30
Dec 09

minimalism

minimalist staircase... looks really dangerous

I am a minimalist at heart, I like simple things with clean lines and no clutter. This is one of the reasons I love my new iMac, its just a beautiful magic floating screen filled with win. Minimalism is more than just an artistic movement or an ironically expensive interior design style. Programming is by its nature minimalistic, we programmers (as I have said before) are a lazy bunch. No one wants to type the same code over and over again, so we came up with functions, and then classes, and then inheritance, and frameworks, and aspect oriented programming, and so on and so forth. We want to reduce the amount of work that we as the developer has to do.

Here is a simple windows program that pops up a hello world screen using Visual C++

// GT_HelloWorldWin32.cpp
// compile with: /D_UNICODE /DUNICODE /DWIN32 /D_WINDOWS /c

#include &lt;windows.h&gt;
#include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
#include &lt;string.h&gt;
#include &lt;tchar.h&gt;

// Global variables
static TCHAR szWindowClass[] = _T(&quot;win32app&quot;);
static TCHAR szTitle[] = _T(&quot;Win32 Guided Tour Application&quot;);

HINSTANCE hInst;
LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM);

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) {
    WNDCLASSEX wcex;

    wcex.cbSize = sizeof(WNDCLASSEX);
    wcex.style          = CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW;
    wcex.lpfnWndProc    = WndProc;
    wcex.cbClsExtra     = 0;
    wcex.cbWndExtra     = 0;
    wcex.hInstance      = hInstance;
    wcex.hIcon          = LoadIcon(hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_APPLICATION));
    wcex.hCursor        = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW);
    wcex.hbrBackground  = (HBRUSH)(COLOR_WINDOW+1);
    wcex.lpszMenuName   = NULL;
    wcex.lpszClassName  = szWindowClass;
    wcex.hIconSm        = LoadIcon(wcex.hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_APPLICATION));

    if (!RegisterClassEx(&amp;wcex)) {
        MessageBox(NULL, _T(&quot;Call to RegisterClassEx failed!&quot;), _T(&quot;Win32 Guided Tour&quot;), NULL);
        return 1;
    }

    hInst = hInstance; // Store instance handle in our global variable

    HWND hWnd = CreateWindow(szWindowClass, szTitle, WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, 500, 100, NULL, NULL, hInstance, NULL);

    if (!hWnd) {
        MessageBox(NULL, _T(&quot;Call to CreateWindow failed!&quot;), _T(&quot;Win32 Guided Tour&quot;), NULL);
        return 1;
    }

    ShowWindow(hWnd, nCmdShow);
    UpdateWindow(hWnd);

    MSG msg;
    while (GetMessage(&amp;msg, NULL, 0, 0)) {
        TranslateMessage(&amp;msg);
        DispatchMessage(&amp;msg);
    }
    return (int) msg.wParam;
}

LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) {
    PAINTSTRUCT ps;
    HDC hdc;
    TCHAR greeting[] = _T(&quot;Hello, World!&quot;);
    switch (message) {
    case WM_PAINT:
        hdc = BeginPaint(hWnd, &amp;ps);
        TextOut(hdc, 5, 5, greeting, _tcslen(greeting));
        EndPaint(hWnd, &amp;ps);
        break;
    case WM_DESTROY:
        PostQuitMessage(0);
        break;
    default:
        return DefWindowProc(hWnd, message, wParam, lParam);
        break;
    }
    return 0;
}

Holy Shit! This is after I stipped all the comments, removed whitespace, and reformatted to 1TB. But here is how much code you need to do something similar in C++ leveraging Qt

#include &lt;QtGui&gt;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QApplication app(argc, argv);
    QLabel label(&quot;Hello, world!&quot;);
    label.show();
    return app.exec();
}

This is great news for the developer, we can accomplish the same result with much less code. We are now much more productive and so we have freed up some precious developer time that we can spend on something else. Our code is much smaller, much more minimalist now, which is good because we are lazy. This ends up being a dual edged sword because there is now the temptation to start coding up more features, because they are so easy to implement now. We have made our code more minimalist but in doing so have enabled developers to make their applications feature bloated and anything but minimalist.

Jeff Atwood wrote a post yesterday, Responsible Open Source Code Parenting, in which he asserts that John Gruber is being a negligent open source parent.

I don’t mean this as a personal criticism. John’s a fantastic writer and Markdown has a (mostly) solid specification, with a strong vision statement. But the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is … kind of a problem.

The question I had, and still have is why. I wrote this comment on Hacker News yesterday regarding this post

The idea that since markdown hasn’t done anything in years its somehow being stewarded improperly is a bit foolish. Look at Gruber’s vision statement, he wanted to make an easy-to-read easy-to-write markup.

He did it, it is done, it’s called markdown. If Atwood had his way Gruber would have spent the last 5 years filling it up with features and today we would be reading a post about how Markdown went from slim and sleek to fat and bloated.

Gruber set out to do something, then he did it, now it’s done. It’s a minimalist approach. Atwood would have rather he spent the last 5 years allowing for “open source collaboration” that would help in “moving forward and maturing” Markdown. To what ends?

It is easy to add feature after feature to something with the belief that you are somehow adding value, but the whole world doesn’t think this way. Let’s illuminate this with an example.

Apple Remote	Windows MCE Remote
There are 7 buttons	The technical term is an assload of buttons

That’s how the Apple Remote is intended to look, it’s not lacking buttons because they haven’t gotten around to putting some more on, they intentionally kept it simple. Now I’m not trying to argue that one remote is superior to the other, I prefer the Apple Remote, but the important word there is prefer. Atwood makes the mistake of thinking since something hasn’t changed in 5 years its a problem. What if Gruber did the cost-benefit analysis of the new features for the last 5 years and decided that it just didn’t need anything else.

People have asked me if I’m going to use Disqus and although I tried it for a bit I decided to just use the simple built-in commenting system. Disqus was all kinds of bells and whistles, it is (in my opinion, which since it’s my blog is the only one that counts ) ugly, and it’s benefit doesn’t outweigh it’s cost in my opinion. By the time I took out all the stuff that made Disqus feel bloated to me I realized I basically had the simple built-in comments, just hosted by a third party, so I abandoned it.

There is a cost to every feature you throw into your software, the cost is added complexity. I have decided that complexity better come with some gain for the user, otherwise I won’t add widgets and gadgets and features just to add them.

rant — 1 Comment
17
Dec 09

bing and what?

look a bird, now I'm deciding I guess

I keep seeing commercials on TV, I’m sure you have to, where there is one person and another person asks them a question, the commercial then goes something like this:

Normal Person: Hey want to get lunch
Freakazoid: Lunch from the latin luncha for eating during the daytime
Normal Person: Huh?
Freakazoid: Oklahoma abbreviation OK, OOOOOOklahoma where the wind goes…
Normal Person: I said “huh?” not “ok?” you stupid fuck

These terrible abortions have been shoved onto the world by Microsoft to promote bing. The idea here is that using Google / Yahoo / etc. causes such a delude of useless results that querying a normal search engine is like talking to the freak from our vignette. The alternative bing is a decision engine and by using that you can “stop searching, start deciding”.

First off for full disclosure, I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft, I think they make expensive sub-par software. On the other hand though, I program in .Net and work in XP and Vista everyday, I also own a Mac and have ubuntu installed at home. I use Microsoft products, there are some that I even like, but their corporate culture and quality control bugs me. If you want to write a snarky comment about me being a linux-head or a mac-fanboy or a windoze-m$-hater, feel free to.

The whole “Decision Engine” thing is what pisses in my Corn Flakes, its such nothing market-speak. They synergized outside the box with a shifted paradigm to come up with Decision Engine. Here is the thing though, what the fuck does it mean? Does it mean that it will make decisions for me, is it a big step forward in finding stuff on the internet? So I decided to do a completely scientific comparison of bing and google.

The first step in this was searching the term “ok” as this is the most annoying example from the bing commercial. Here are my completely scientific results.

bing	bing search of ok
google	google search of ok

Bing’s first result is for Oklahoma! Think about that for a second, and now here it is again because it bears repeating, BING’S FIRST FUCKING RESULT IS THAT OK IS AN ABBREVIATION FOR FUCKING OKLAHOMA! You’d think after the commercial they would have thrown something into their indexing algorithm. Google correctly points me to a wiki article about the term “okay” before suggesting Oklahoma. But let’s move past the obvious and focus on the fact that besides bing fulfilling their own prophecy, what about bing helps me decide? Nothing, they are the same page layout, they are the same thing, they do the same fucking thing.

But what is there to decide, maybe this is user error, maybe I should ask it something it could actually answer. I want chinese food for dinner, let’s see what happens when I search bing and google for “chinese food near me” (note: I made sure to sign out of each so that neither would have an advantage knowing my location from an account).

bing
google

Here Google clearly wins, Bing thinks I want to know about chinese food in Maine (ME) and proceeds to tell me all about it. Google makes the same mistake but then also uses some google magic to determine that I live in Columbus, OH and provides some chinese food that is actually in this state.

I don’t want this to turn into a who’s better at this query or that query type thing. Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture, bing doesn’t help you decide, it is a search engine. And that’s the whole point of this post, fuck your market-speak Microsoft. Don’t obfuscate, innovate. If you want to take down Google go spend some of your money to design something that is actually better. Bing as it stands today is a moderately effective search engine with pretty pictures, nothing more.

There is plenty of room to innovate, there are things people could do to help me make decisions, but Bing doesn’t do any of this. Search engines could start leveraging social networking information to understand the person that I am and tailor my results, they could allow the end-user to vote results up and down for a query so that the group prunes the result set, they could do some research and development and come up with something that would blow my mind.

The problem with Bing isn’t that its not a good search engine, its that its not a good decision engine, its not any kind of decision engine, its a fucking search engine. Microsoft is famous for and probably makes a ton of money off of sprinkling marketing fairy dust on their shitty shitty products, so they won’t stop, it just pisses me the fuck off. Stop with your dumb commercials with annoying fucks rambling like idiots because you’ve completely revolutionized searching and you no longer present results in a big list sorted by your concept of relevance, until you actually revolutionize searching, like Google did with their pagerank algorithm.

philosophy / rant — 4 Comments
16
Dec 09

making a sandwich

sam waterston is getting ready to rip your still beating heart from your chest, then he's going to go do some lawyer stuff

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I don’t even pretend to be one, except after watching law & order marathons where I shout “I object!!” at people and that one time I asked my girlfriend if I could treat my dog Harvey as a hostile witness in the case of me vs. whoever pooped on the floor.

I want you to close your eyes (but don’t actually because then you can’t read this). Imagine a world, a terrible world much like the one we live in, but lacking a certain invention, the sandwich. A time-traveling goat went back in time to the 18th Century and decided to kick John Montagu straight in the temple before he could ever ask for “meat tucked between two pieces of bread.” The world never got the grand invention of the sandwich, humanity’s suffering was unbearable.

Then one day as I’m eating a large pile of cold cuts while blogging and I notice that my fingers, slick with deli meat residue, keep slipping off the keys and the hilarious and witty things I wish to share are being turned into unreadable drivel. Spying the bread I keep handy to fend off attack from a flock of pigeons, the feathered rats of the sky, I have a sudden moment of inspiration. I place some bologna between two pieces of white bread and invent, the sandwich!

Being an enterprising young man I decide that this “sandwich” I’ve invented is quite the big deal, I decide that I should patent it and live the rest of my days fat and happy off the profit. I write up the vaguely named “Methodology for encasement of edible substances within grain derived substrate” and submit it to the US Patent Office. Then I show family and friends alike the delicious culinary brilliance that is me and my new “sandwich” to hearty congratulations and spontaneous ticker tape parades.

Then the darkness comes, swift in the night like a badger attempting to steal your young. An evil so despised that merely typing his name brings a cold sweat to my brow and a burning desire to my punch-him-in-the-face-center of my brain. Jared Fogle.

his evil can not be contained

Mr. Fogle decides that this sandwich is big money and so takes my idea and open up a sandwich shop where people can buy a foot long sub sandwhich for $5. He begins pulling in big bucks, soon others join in on the fun and profit, Wendy’s starts putting their signature square patties between buns, McDonald’s hamburg style hand-steaks become “hamburgers” with the addition of a bun, even chipotle starts packing their rice and meat piles in a wrap they call a tortilla. The last straw though is one day, walking down the street, I encounter a young child skipping off to school, after roughing him up and taking his lunch, what do I find?!? A Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich!?!?! Where is my royalty check you freckled bastard?!

“I invented the sandwich!!” I scream in my head, and then out-loud to the young lad’s startled mother. With a “harumph” I head back to my home, stewing with anger. When I arrive I find a letter from the US Patent Office, after 4 long years of waiting, my patent, “Methodology for encasement of edible substances within grain derived substrate” has been approved. A low rumble of laughter begins deep in my belly and it becomes a diabolical cackle emanating with an other-worldly resonance from my maniacal grin, as I pull out my cell phone and begin to dial my lawyer.

PB & Patent Infrigement

The lawsuit with Mr. Fogle’s Subway sandwich shop is long and arduous, but thanks to East Texas’ interesting take on justice and patents, I’m awarded a $500 million settlement. Arguments abound about how there is prior work and talk of inevitable discovery. These are swept aside in a tidal wave of lawsuits, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Chipotle, even that freckled young lad. I begin handing out subpoenas like Tiger Woods picks up women, anytime, anyplace (zing!). My team of high powered lawyers are figuring out ways to sue people I hadn’t even dreamed of, I guess a pizza is just an open faced sandwich, sue away my pretties!

My madness grows as I become obsessed with everyone that has ever eaten a sandwich, couldn’t they see my brilliance, where are my residuals!? The populace rightly decides that I am a douche bag and I’m roundly mocked on the late night circuit. This darkens my cold heart into a black pit of vengeance, sandwich vengeance. People are wary of making sandwiches at home, what liability have they opened themselves up to? No one can rightly answer, “experts” abound on the internets claiming this or that, but the murky waters are indecipherable. The Patent Office is challenged, people roundly criticize them for allowing someone to patent such a vague and wide reaching concept. They review the patent and decide that it is in fact a fine and upstanding patent, one worthy of their seal of approval.

The nightmare of a world without sandwiches has been replaced by the new nightmare of a world where I control sandwiches.

Thank goodness though that this is not the world we live in, that such insanity would never happen in this day. Oh, fuck

rant — 6 Comments
10
Dec 09

weakness

..who drank a soup primarily made up of Zug the Viscous...

As I promised yesterday, today’s post will be all about the question ‘What is Your Biggest Weakness?’ Jeremiah Peschka threw down the challenge at me, the challenge coming to him by way of Brent Ozar who himself was tagged by David Stein. This is starting to remind me a bit of the episode of Futurama where Fry becomes King by drinking the previous King, which has my all time favorite quote, “It’s just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns and also he got a race car. Is any of this getting through to you?”

The question being posed though is What is Your Biggest Weakness? now before I answer I would like to examine this question and its prominence in hiring people. Frankly this question is bullshit, you may as well ask someone any of the following because they are about the same.

How well can you lie to me?
Are you ready to debase yourself for the promise of money?
I think you are fucking stupid!*

*Not technically a question

The question is a social contract we have all entered to for reasons unknown, it is like the dance we do when someone sneezes.

Sneezer: *sneezes*
Sneezee: Bless you
Sneezer: Thank you
Sneezee: You’re welcome

Four steps to every sneeze, why, because we are afraid our souls are going to shoot out of our nose. No, now it has just become ingrained in the culture as the polite thing to do, even though the reason for its existence long ago stopped being relevant. I’m sure at some point in history the “What’s your Biggest Weakness?” question was original and clever and useful. There were people in the world who hadn’t heard it and prepared a canned answer. It was a probably a great way to see how someone thought on their feet and could wiggle out of a tough spot. That is no longer the case.

Sometimes when I fart it smells like cinnamon rolls, that can be distracting for others

Now this question is an insult to both the person asking and the person being asked. The person being asked knows this question exists and if they have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being employed they have an answer all cued up and ready to go. Some clever little spin on how they work too darn hard, are too much of a perfectionist, or are just too damn likeable for their own good. In that fake answer is the insult to the person asking the question, but really, they deserve it.

If you’ve ever answered that question with one of these fake answers, don’t bother, I have your greatest weakness, you are a whore for money. And guess what people, that’s my greatest weakness. When I was interviewing for my current job I recall clearly being asked that question and giving some cock-and-bull “I work too hard and am a perfectionist” line. The truth of the matter is that I’m a bit obsessive compulsive about my code, I am a bit of a perfectionist, but is that my greatest weakness, no. My greatest weakness was that I was too gutless to refuse to answer that stupid question, or too timid to respond with an actual weakness instead of some shrink-wrapped bullshit about working too hard. My greatest weakness that day was letting my fear of living on the streets eating catfood overcome the voice in my head calling out this faux question for what it is, a slap in the face to any prospective employee. I could have answered with any of a wide range of actual professional weaknesses that I have:

I get bored easily
I don’t test simple fixes as thoroughly as I should
I don’t work at consistent output, I have times when I’m incredibly productive and times when I just want to nap
I don’t agree with most corporate culture, telling me what to wear, when to show up, how to act, is understandable, but it shows a lack of respect that I find insulting, its a rigid structure in which I am less productive not more.
I value my free time more than I value money which makes me a less than ideal candidate when the idea is trading time for money.
I like people, sometimes I’m more interested in talking to someone about code (or monkey or robots or zombies) than writing code

Those would have all been great things to say, but I didn’t. I sat there with a phony smile and a phony answer, I lied and it worked. I’m hired, I’ve worked on several projects and they have all been successful, on-time and on-budget. I’m cognizant of these failings that I have and I think that that is my greatest strength.

If I had it to do over again I would have answered with my actual weaknesses, and then I could have spun it a bit. I know that these are the things that can derail me and potentially derail a project. I don’t overlook my failings anymore, I remain conscious of them and actively work to counteract my natural tendencies. I’m aware of the fact that I don’t test thoroughly the small stuff, so now when I’m pushing a small change that fact pops up and I have to ask myself, did I test this thoroughly or did I cut corners and just run it in the compiler in my brain (which is full of all kinds of bugs and edge cases). The first step to dealing with any weakness is admitting it and being aware of it, the second step is doing something about it.

I’m going to continue this game of blog tag by asking Mark Essel to respond to this question next.

ihumanableusable in any place a human can be used