Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Running's a pretty good time for me to mull out the day's issues, and today's topic was user interfaces. I've been doing my dangest to make sure I code the engine for my first sideline app so that it works independent of the GUI, so I've been coding the engine on my desktop and the GUI on the laptop (mainly just so that I can have a change of scenery - both with respect to the location and with what I'm working on). Eventually I'll slap 'em both together and make a release.

Of course this means I've got two sets of issues to worry about at one time, and I'm faced with getting the GUI right without even quite yet knowing how well, or even exactly how, the engine's going to work. Possibly not the best method for making sure I don't have to recode bits of each, but the point being that I am already thinking about interfaces.

UIs seem to run the gamut from VIm to iTunes. You can't use vi or VIm without having taken a while to read the directions and learn the quite esoteric commands. The learning curve is high and, much to my chagrin, it took me about 10 years from my first use of vi to decide to take the time to learn more than :q! and how to change my preferences in the app to use pico.

iTunes is quite nearly the opposite. Most users can fire iTunes up on their Mac and start using every bit of the program without looking at anything resembling a manual. Pop in a music CD and iTunes automatically changes one button from "browse" to "import" and you're ripping tracks. Sure, if you want to change the quality of the mp3 that are made or the location of your music collection you'll have to familiarize yourself with the preferences panel, but 80% of its users I'd have to imagine never need to change a setting.

Menus are a neat way to combine the two. They essentially serve as an on-demand reference system for your application. How do I save again? I think that's under File... And poof, after taking a look you recall that Ctrl-S also saves and you can either start using the keyboard shortcut or go back to the menu if you'd like or forget again. Menus also let you navigate with the mouse if you're mouse oriented, though they aren't, of course, quite as good as well-done icons.

But menus aren't exactly standardized from one app to another, much less from OS to OS. Sometimes finding the danged menu item that resizes an image, as a random example, is so tough to find you're better off using another program. Icons have their own problems, and like a door with a sign that says "Push", icons that need their use printed below them weren't very well-designed icons from square one on.

Mozilla is a mammoth program that combines the worst of all worlds. Ctrl-T to check for new mail? That's vi-level intuitivity. "But that's a menu item!" you say? Who thought to put it under "File"? Not what I'm used to for whatever reason in email clients today. You probably have your own set of expectations for certain apps, and there are so many "features" in Mozilla it's got to go against at least one of your expectations somewhere.

But the worst problem with Mozilla is its use of preferences. That's the tops of anti-intuitive. There's a file where I have to know what line to add to get pop-up ads to stop being shown? Sure, now that's an option that can be modified in the preferences, but it didn't start that way. Or how about...
user_pref("pref.browser.smartbrowsing.disable_textbox.add", false);
What the heck does that do? And if I wanted to substract an "enabled smartbrowsing textbox", how would I have guessed this is the name of the pref with which I'd do it? I'll try not to make any sweeping generalizations about open-source programmers, but this is ugly. For my vimrc file, I understand having something this esoteric. For my browser? Email client? I don't think so.

For a recent VB application at work, we actually used up half our screen real-estate to provide instructions for the application. As the app moved to different sections, the directions changed in lockstep. For our particular needs it was a good compromise, but is a bit of an extreme case for a "typical" app.

At the same time, things that try to protect you from dealing with the dreaded preferences GUI or *shudder* the preferences file can be just as bad. Ever tried to start a sentence with a lower-case letter in Microsoft Word? How about trying to type VIm? Word loves to change capitalization, and doesn't always learn when you retype the "error" three or four times. Having to dig through its preferences to turn off this sort of behavior is a maddening exercise best compared to navigating a house of mirrors. Even if you try your best guess at how an app should respond to make things easier for users, you can end up putting them in a straightjacket of unappreciated "features".

So what's the right compromise? Heck if I know. But these were today's thoughts while taking a run, thinking about how to finishing designing a GUI on my iBook.

Two topics for today. First, I wish people would stop reusing acronyms through extension. As a group of examples, I don't like VB.NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. When I search for Visual Basic online and I mean VB 6, I hate wading through all the .NET stuff that's around now. I'm sure the .NET guys think the same thing. I think we'd both like a Google option for, "When I use a term with an implicit version/date, eliminate hits that are from another period." Anyhow, that bugs me. I like that I can [still] search for vbscript and get exactly what I'm looking for, give or take.

Second, I had the new wired.com website design pointed out to me today. It's cute, and all standards friendly, but is missing something on a number of counts.

For one, there's still messy sections of code. Look at this crap:
<div class="clear"> </div>
<div class="storyCap">
<div class="pgToolsSolo">
<span id="pgToolsBtns"><a href="/news/print/0,1294,55675,00.html">
<img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_print.gif" alt="[Print story]" title="Version of this story optimized for printing" width="53" height="21" /></a>
<a href="/news/story/mail/1,2292,55675,00.html">
<img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_mail.gif" alt="[E-mail story]" title="E-mail this story to a friend" width="53" height="21" /></a>

<a href="http://avantgo.com/channels/_add_channel.pl?cha_id=6">
<img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_sync.gif" alt="[Sync story]" title="Sync this story to your PDA" width="53" height="21" /></a>
  </span>
<span class="pgToolsR"><img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/icon_story_page.gif" alt="" width="13" height="13" />
<strong>Page 1</strong> of 2
<a href="/news/culture/0,1284,55675-2,00.html" class="next">next<span class="ra"> »</span></a>
</span>
<br class="clear" /><div class="buffer"><img src="http://c.lygo.com/s.gif" width="1" height="1" alt="" /></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

What is that? The whitespace is horrible. XML is supposed to make machine-readable data more human readable, not less. Here, without good spacing and with triple-deep divs, one after another, we ain't got what XML is looking to accomplish.

Which brings me to the second complaint -- these tags do less for a human reader to understand format than html 3.2. Granted, I'm assuming someone reading the source understands that <td> means a table cell, for example, but at this point html 3.2 tags are practical standards. "storyCap" and "pgToolsSolo" are not. Tell me what either of those two div titles means [as far as positioning is concerned] out of context. You can't. Combine that with all the CSS includes at the top of the page to keep straight, each doing more than simply changing the way the text looks and broaching the realm of positioning, and we've managed to lose human readable information on our way to using XML in this xhtml page.

By creating homespun names for div types, xhtml like this moves html source away from standardization. There's nothing wrong with a table, folk. There really isn't.

Okay, there's a third topic for today. Where I currently work, though I've finished my exit interviews for the job today, people try too hard not to aggravate anyone, even when the aggrvation starts because of criticism with a constructive intent. In an exit interview, I was told that at least one of my managers felt that people afraid of criticsim is pretty silly, and if someone didn't like the fact that they'd been offered well-meaing criticism, well, "there's the door". (No, this wasn't an attempt to get something through my thick skull -- he was actually agreeing with me. :^D)

I'm from a slightly different camp. I don't want anyone to go away unhappy from a job they've done (go away hoping to do better? Sure. Go away feeling a little embarassed they didn't do their best? Absolutely.), but I don't mind if they're uphappy for a little while while we're sorting things out. Employees should be ready and willing to hear what another thinks they (singular and/or plural) could do better -- and, what's more, be willing to defend why they've done what they've done in return. Even if things seem to get a little heated, that's great. People should feel passionately about what they do.

But no one should feel that their options are to "suck it up or go home" (my words this time). The single most important part of professionalism is the ability to do your work better next week without being upset that the reason for the improvement in your work might have been someone else's idea. Put another way, even if things get heated, professionals can still be friends (or still not be friends! -- neither should affect your work nor necessarily be affected by it) the week after. And if someone's taking something said or written too personally, I feel that, as part of the team, it's important to understand the context in which constructive crticism was offered.

That said, I don't want anyone to think I particularly dislike the job I will soon-have-had particularly, it's just that a grade of B- in process efficiency isn't good enough for me, of which the above plays the part of a symptom. Now that's an awkward sentence.

And that's it for today's mindless ramble.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, October 31, 2002
I found this article over on Maccentral which details all the IE 5 "bugs" on the Mac. Microsoft's relationship with the Mac is really quite interesting. There's this whole little section of the company slaving away over porting Office and IE to the only mainstream desktop competition Microsoft has, and the end results are usually Grade-A software. I'm not surprised IE 5 on Mac has a few CSS bugs. The only difference between the Mac version and the PC version (other than being completely different codebase, afaict :^D) is that these sorts of things are called "features" when they crop up in IE on Windows. But while reading the article, the bit that really dawned on me is just how good a job the Mozilla team is doing. As I've said here before, if you find a bug in Mozilla on one platform, you're almost guaranteed to find the same bug happen in the same fashion with the same build of Mozilla on another. There's not much, "Mozilla 1.0.1 on Mac has these strange behaviours..." to worry about when you go crossplatform. If you want to feel good about yourself as a web coder but you're still pretty lazy, make sure your pages work in IE on Windows, because that's what "everyone" uses, then make sure they work in Mozilla. Once you've done that, you'll at least have provided nearly every user of alternative platforms access if they'll bother with the download. posted by ruffin at 10/31/2002 03:04:00 PM

Monday, October 28, 2002
Hey look! Blogger's back from the hack attack, apparently, so it's open season on more random freakinname spewings. Today's topic is documenting not only your code but what the heck the code is doing, and our case in point is Furthurnet, the peer-to-peer music trading service that only deals in legal bootlegs from bands that allow taping. I use it for tons of great free music, and have managed to collect a pretty good helping of Black Crowes sets, which is especially helpful since the band is, um, "taking a sabbatical" right now. Listening to a Los Lobos show from Furthurnet right now, actually. Just to continue that tangent for a second longer, Los Lobos really is a good show. I managed to see them in Asheville, NC one summer quite some time ago with some friends. We didn't know their stuff from a hole in the ground other than the theme from La Bamba, and kept annoyingly chanting for them to, "Play the one we know!!!" They really had a good time with it, more than once playing the first few bars of La Bamba before going into another song. The bass player, iirc, was laughing to beat the band (har har) before they finally, and quite kindly, played La Bamba for us. Anyhow, the lesson learned is that they are a good-natured band which really knows how to rock. The covers and other songs they played ranged from Jimi Hendrix to more run-of-the-mill Mexican joints. Great show for $10 and I'd catch them again if I could. Anyhow, back to the blog... Furthurnet is a neat app, but you can tell it was mostly written by one person when it was initially concocted. It's scary how you can sit down over a weekend and hack something out quickly that does almost exactly what you need it to do without writing up a single document detailing what it is you're doing. In a past project, we had planned to use XML to store our app's users' data in a text file when they saved their progress. Well, three or four months, iirc, passed and the XML programming team had flubbed up twice, producing no usable code and basically only showing they hadn't quite gotten the hang of XML. To meet scheduling deadlines, I came in one weekend and wrote I/O modules that used some wack format I rolled as I went to store the data in a text file. It worked, and I got it up and running in a weekend, but sheeeeow-dog it was ugly. Every "object" stored in the hacked text file had its own tags, usually delineated with lines like, "@#$Begin Issue Section" and "@#$End Issue Section". This, in theory, made it easy to refactor later by using CDATA sections in an XML file, but let's look at the task that lay ahead -- you had to figure out each item of data that needed to be gleaned from the GUI, translate the output from my weekend code into something solid with error-checking, formulate a good XML schema, etc etc etc. Needless to say, the final version didn't have XML, even though it wouldn't, all things considered, have been that hard to add. If it wouldn't be that tough to add, why wasn't it added, you ask? Well, I'd hardly taken the time to document my homespun text file format when I'd written it (I finally did after the app's release so that XML could be added to another, later version). New additions to the file later in the project had added some ugly hacks to the file format to account for backwards compatibility. The code, esoteric though it was, started out fairly readable, if I do say so myself, but by the end we had a commented code but an undocumented, slightly out-of-control protocol. The bottom line is that if a new team came in to rewrite the I/O to take advantage of XML's strengths, they were going to be forced to learn my weekend code, by now hacked and extended about five times. Same thing has happened in Furthurnet. They've got some code that worked in one guy's mind, but there's no document to cover the protocol. Now that the new team's in -- in this case just new open source programmers -- each new programmer is forced to read every bit of the much-more-sparsely-commented-than-even-my code to figure out what's going down. This makes quick moves to new platforms or technologies a realtively difficult task. The documentation and code are one. This is fine on a one-person project, but not so good when you're looking for code that can outlive your stay on a project. What's the lesson here? I think it might be that I can't complain that I'm having to spider through every file to port Furthurnet to Mac OS 9- on the weekends because I'm guilty of the same foible at times. But I also think too many people are unable to see what's going to happen down the road if they don't document not just the code but the software program's technical aspects before calling something done. posted by ruffin at 10/28/2002 05:23:00 PM

Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Running's a pretty good time for me to mull out the day's issues, and today's topic was user interfaces. I've been doing my dangest to make sure I code the engine for my first sideline app so that it works independent of the GUI, so I've been coding the engine on my desktop and the GUI on the laptop (mainly just so that I can have a change of scenery - both with respect to the location and with what I'm working on). Eventually I'll slap 'em both together and make a release. Of course this means I've got two sets of issues to worry about at one time, and I'm faced with getting the GUI right without even quite yet knowing how well, or even exactly how, the engine's going to work. Possibly not the best method for making sure I don't have to recode bits of each, but the point being that I am already thinking about interfaces. UIs seem to run the gamut from VIm to iTunes. You can't use vi or VIm without having taken a while to read the directions and learn the quite esoteric commands. The learning curve is high and, much to my chagrin, it took me about 10 years from my first use of vi to decide to take the time to learn more than :q! and how to change my preferences in the app to use pico. iTunes is quite nearly the opposite. Most users can fire iTunes up on their Mac and start using every bit of the program without looking at anything resembling a manual. Pop in a music CD and iTunes automatically changes one button from "browse" to "import" and you're ripping tracks. Sure, if you want to change the quality of the mp3 that are made or the location of your music collection you'll have to familiarize yourself with the preferences panel, but 80% of its users I'd have to imagine never need to change a setting. Menus are a neat way to combine the two. They essentially serve as an on-demand reference system for your application. How do I save again? I think that's under File... And poof, after taking a look you recall that Ctrl-S also saves and you can either start using the keyboard shortcut or go back to the menu if you'd like or forget again. Menus also let you navigate with the mouse if you're mouse oriented, though they aren't, of course, quite as good as well-done icons. But menus aren't exactly standardized from one app to another, much less from OS to OS. Sometimes finding the danged menu item that resizes an image, as a random example, is so tough to find you're better off using another program. Icons have their own problems, and like a door with a sign that says "Push", icons that need their use printed below them weren't very well-designed icons from square one on. Mozilla is a mammoth program that combines the worst of all worlds. Ctrl-T to check for new mail? That's vi-level intuitivity. "But that's a menu item!" you say? Who thought to put it under "File"? Not what I'm used to for whatever reason in email clients today. You probably have your own set of expectations for certain apps, and there are so many "features" in Mozilla it's got to go against at least one of your expectations somewhere. But the worst problem with Mozilla is its use of preferences. That's the tops of anti-intuitive. There's a file where I have to know what line to add to get pop-up ads to stop being shown? Sure, now that's an option that can be modified in the preferences, but it didn't start that way. Or how about... `user_pref("pref.browser.smartbrowsing.disable_textbox.add", false);` What the heck does that do? And if I wanted to substract an "enabled smartbrowsing textbox", how would I have guessed this is the name of the pref with which I'd do it? I'll try not to make any sweeping generalizations about open-source programmers, but this is ugly. For my vimrc file, I understand having something this esoteric. For my browser? Email client? I don't think so. For a recent VB application at work, we actually used up half our screen real-estate to provide instructions for the application. As the app moved to different sections, the directions changed in lockstep. For our particular needs it was a good compromise, but is a bit of an extreme case for a "typical" app. At the same time, things that try to protect you from dealing with the dreaded preferences GUI or shudder the preferences file can be just as bad. Ever tried to start a sentence with a lower-case letter in Microsoft Word? How about trying to type VIm? Word loves to change capitalization, and doesn't always learn when you retype the "error" three or four times. Having to dig through its preferences to turn off this sort of behavior is a maddening exercise best compared to navigating a house of mirrors. Even if you try your best guess at how an app should respond to make things easier for users, you can end up putting them in a straightjacket of unappreciated "features". So what's the right compromise? Heck if I know. But these were today's thoughts while taking a run, thinking about how to finishing designing a GUI on my iBook. posted by ruffin at 10/23/2002 03:54:00 PM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002
My "Linux-using friend" has given me the link to an introduction to regular expressions several times, and I keep misplacing it. Well, here it is someplace where at least I can't lose it. Blogger or Blogspot might, but I'm not. This should stop me from using crappy code like... `for(int i=0;i<intOneDot;i++) { // make sure we've got nothing but whitespace before "1." booAllWhiteSpace = booAllWhiteSpace && (strLine.charAt(i) == (char)32 \|\| strLine.charAt(i) == (char)9); }` If there's one bad habit VB 6 left me with, it's the over-dependence on its cheeseball string search functions like "inStr" and "replace". Of course, one of the first things I'll probably write once I've got regexp down fairly well is an object (using Java right now) that has these cheeseball functions in it. posted by ruffin at 10/22/2002 01:46:00 PM

Friday, October 18, 2002
Whew boy, the life of the unemployeed consultant. I believe life's first consulting lesson is that you can't underestimate the amount of time it's going to take to get your work space such that you can comfortably get something done. It's one thing to come home and hack for several hours, but apparently another completely when you're going to hole up in your home office to put in your 40+ a week. Wires that never bothered you when you were putting together weekend hacks suddenly are incredibly annoying, and things as simple as getting your toolset from, in my case, the previous life's office, replicated in the home office isn't quite as simple as you might assume. And of course there's the issue of getting your shingle hung on the Internet (ie, your company's website) while trying to get in your first few contract proposals. Nothing to stop you from going ahead and bidding on the bacon first, but without a good site to back up your work makes you feel a little naked. Of course a good site with database-powered example applications is a contract's worth of work right there! All of those intranet sites that you used to be able to show to in-house and visiting clients gone, just like that. That said, when -- and if -- I do land a few fairly (as in, "fair price") paying gigs, I can tell this is going to ultimately be a much more productive environment. Quite a bit easier to transition from hanging out with the fam-dam to putting in a few high-quality, late-night hours in the office! That is to say, it's going to be easy to make sure I'm working my most productive hours instead of spending them en route to the office or at home watching the evening news. Or even worse, having them dashed to the rocks by interruptions by coworkers who have decided now's the hour to talk about last weekend's big game. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that -- Poor Ramsey got clobbered!) posted by ruffin at 10/18/2002 12:45:00 PM

Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Was listening to Umberto Eco on The Connection this morning, and it struck me that all this Big Blue playing chess is hardly an assault on the human intellegence by computers. It's a good start; don't get me wrong. I think the ability for men to compete with computers in the game of chess shows just how resourceful men can become in an arena where there are, ultimately, a limited number of moves for any given situation. But computers can and do rule chess, even if Kasparov can play the best to a draw, give or take. Just take a shot at any take-home computerized chess set and you'll see that, for about $40, Joe and Jan Q. quite quickly go down to the silicon. The true [a truer?] test of a computer versus a human will be passed once a computer is able to quickly and easily translate between one langauge and another. Everything I've read of Eco (not that he's written that horribly much, as much time as he takes between his works of art) has been in translation, and Eco went to some links during the show to talk about how he "negotiates" a translation out of a translator to recreate in another language what he was trying to create the first go around on his own in Italian. Anyhow, I won't go into examples and the like. Take a listen online if you'd like more. Eco apparently ran part of the King James' Bible through babelfish, as well as the works of Shakespeare, apparently with pretty humourous results. One a computer can sit down and translate a work like Eco's flawlessly between langauges (as I can't imagine that we'll be able to set out a range of rules for this one -- the computer will have to have learned on its own), then we'll be in trouble. posted by ruffin at 10/15/2002 11:52:00 AM

Saturday, October 12, 2002
I'm not sure why, but version 3.4 of Netbeans, a Java IDE, is much more responsive on my iBook than it has been in past versions. I'm also finally using it in Aqua look and feel, which used to, in my perception, slow things down. I'd been using Metal to speed previous versions of Netbeans up, and that was still a bit too slow to get much real work done. Now Aqua seems to be the speed champ, which makes more sense, as it ties Swing directly to Mac OS X specific widgets. This OS X specific jive is not exactly in keeping with the whole Java mindset (where things should happen give or take the same xplat), but a neat little addition to the Mac Java VM. Not real sure what changed in Netbeans, but it's certainly welcome. posted by ruffin at 10/12/2002 08:32:00 AM

Friday, October 11, 2002
Two topics for today. First, I wish people would stop reusing acronyms through extension. As a group of examples, I don't like VB.NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. When I search for Visual Basic online and I mean VB 6, I hate wading through all the .NET stuff that's around now. I'm sure the .NET guys think the same thing. I think we'd both like a Google option for, "When I use a term with an implicit version/date, eliminate hits that are from another period." Anyhow, that bugs me. I like that I can [still] search for vbscript and get exactly what I'm looking for, give or take. Second, I had the new wired.com website design pointed out to me today. It's cute, and all standards friendly, but is missing something on a number of counts. For one, there's still messy sections of code. Look at this crap: <div class="clear"> </div> <div class="storyCap"> <div class="pgToolsSolo"> <span id="pgToolsBtns"><a href="/news/print/0,1294,55675,00.html"> <img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_print.gif" alt="[Print story]" title="Version of this story optimized for printing" width="53" height="21" /></a> <a href="/news/story/mail/1,2292,55675,00.html"> <img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_mail.gif" alt="[E-mail story]" title="E-mail this story to a friend" width="53" height="21" /></a> <a href="http://avantgo.com/channels/_add_channel.pl?cha_id=6"> <img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/storytools_sync.gif" alt="[Sync story]" title="Sync this story to your PDA" width="53" height="21" /></a>   </span> <span class="pgToolsR"><img src="http://a112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091411/www.wired.com/news/v/20020914/images/icon_story_page.gif" alt="" width="13" height="13" /> <strong>Page 1</strong> of 2 <a href="/news/culture/0,1284,55675-2,00.html" class="next">next<span class="ra"> »</span></a> </span> <br class="clear" /><div class="buffer"><img src="http://c.lygo.com/s.gif" width="1" height="1" alt="" /></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> What is that? The whitespace is horrible. XML is supposed to make machine-readable data more human readable, not less. Here, without good spacing and with triple-deep divs, one after another, we ain't got what XML is looking to accomplish. Which brings me to the second complaint -- these tags do less for a human reader to understand format than html 3.2. Granted, I'm assuming someone reading the source understands that <td> means a table cell, for example, but at this point html 3.2 tags are practical standards. "storyCap" and "pgToolsSolo" are not. Tell me what either of those two div titles means [as far as positioning is concerned] out of context. You can't. Combine that with all the CSS includes at the top of the page to keep straight, each doing more than simply changing the way the text looks and broaching the realm of positioning, and we've managed to lose human readable information on our way to using XML in this xhtml page. By creating homespun names for div types, xhtml like this moves html source away from standardization. There's nothing wrong with a table, folk. There really isn't. Okay, there's a third topic for today. Where I currently work, though I've finished my exit interviews for the job today, people try too hard not to aggravate anyone, even when the aggrvation starts because of criticism with a constructive intent. In an exit interview, I was told that at least one of my managers felt that people afraid of criticsim is pretty silly, and if someone didn't like the fact that they'd been offered well-meaing criticism, well, "there's the door". (No, this wasn't an attempt to get something through my thick skull -- he was actually agreeing with me. :^D) I'm from a slightly different camp. I don't want anyone to go away unhappy from a job they've done (go away hoping to do better? Sure. Go away feeling a little embarassed they didn't do their best? Absolutely.), but I don't mind if they're uphappy for a little while while we're sorting things out. Employees should be ready and willing to hear what another thinks they (singular and/or plural) could do better -- and, what's more, be willing to defend why they've done what they've done in return. Even if things seem to get a little heated, that's great. People should feel passionately about what they do. But no one should feel that their options are to "suck it up or go home" (my words this time). The single most important part of professionalism is the ability to do your work better next week without being upset that the reason for the improvement in your work might have been someone else's idea. Put another way, even if things get heated, professionals can still be friends (or still not be friends! -- neither should affect your work nor necessarily be affected by it) the week after. And if someone's taking something said or written too personally, I feel that, as part of the team, it's important to understand the context in which constructive crticism was offered. That said, I don't want anyone to think I particularly dislike the job I will soon-have-had particularly, it's just that a grade of B- in process efficiency isn't good enough for me, of which the above plays the part of a symptom. Now that's an awkward sentence. And that's it for today's mindless ramble. posted by ruffin at 10/11/2002 05:44:00 PM

Wednesday, October 09, 2002
Ack. If you think you've tested your html as well as your possibly can, start downloading IE 1.5 and Netscape 0.93 beta and try again! It's THE SITE WITH [windows versions of] BROWSERS THAT WOULDN'T DIE!!!!! posted by ruffin at 10/09/2002 01:56:00 PM

Tuesday, October 08, 2002
As much as I wish I wouldn't quote JoelOnSoftware.com so much, found another couple of humourous quotes. I created a very simplistic bug-report site for our latest (and first!) stand-alone VB app. Recently someone on Review Tools asplist.com list asked about bug tracking software for distributed employees, so to speak. FogBUGZ was recommended, which brings the total times I've seen Joel's company's software recommended all the way up to one. Anyhow, so links in there lead me back to his joelonsoftware pages. Here's the quote that I can imagine is all-too-true: What [Microsoft, who was reviewing the process for creating Word 1.0,] realized was that the project managers had been so insistent on keeping to the "schedule" that programmers simply rushed through the coding process, writing extremely bad code, because the bug fixing phase was not a part of the formal schedule... The story goes that one programmer, who had to write the code to calculate the height of a line of text, simply wrote "return 12;" and waited for the bug report to come in about how his function is not always correct. I joked that I was tempted on a recent project to make the mapping portion of the site always turn up with hurricane Hugo displayed, which turned out to be what people (we're based in Charleston) were looking for 9 times outta ten (no kidding) in our internal reviews. Just to say I bet this sorta thing happens a lot more often that I'd think. If that can happen. posted by ruffin at 10/08/2002 04:53:00 PM

I subscribe to the "Macworld Weekly Newsletter" and at the bottom of each is usually some silly quote from their forums intended to entice you over to register and post yourself. Usually I don't bite, but today's wasn't bad. Here it is: and the quote of the week: [from here -R] "I think there's nothing for OS 9 users left at Apple. Let's show Apple we understood the message and switch." At first I thought this guy meant, "Let's show Apple by getting on the bandwagon, crying huzzah three times, and shelling out $129 plus the price of new hardware for OS X!!!" Luckily he didn't. It's a thread about Apple users' displeasure over the death of OS 9. I think they have a good point, and this quote (from further down the page) sums it up for me. quote:"it's not Apple's fault" Of course it's not. It's me who transformed the Mac OS in a Unix shape with such a clumsy GUI that it needs the latest and the greatest hardware to make it work almost as fast as OS 9 was on three years old machines. He's bang on the money replying to another post there. I've just reset the boot disk on my 500 MHz iBook to OS 9 this week. I've only had time to surf, AIM, and email on the machine recently anyhow, and OS 9 is so danged much quicker! Add to that that Outlook Express (for Mac) is a much better email client than Mail.app on OS X, that Mozilla 1.0.1 is available for Mac OS 9, and that AIM's still AIM (sure I miss Adium a little), and, well, for those three functions it's an easy choice. With respect to speed, quite quickly, the poster is right -- OS X on a new machine gives you the performance you get out of OS 9 on three year old hardware. Now that's a big difference! I'd rather use today's computer than one from three years ago. Compare the performce difference from Windows NT to 2k or even XP -- there simply isn't a similar slowdown. Linux, strangely, has actually sped up in certain ways over the last two or three years. Furthermore, take a look at OS X's "new look". Sure Steve, it's "sexy". Compared to Windows for new PC users, OS X is much easier to figure out. But it's not what all of your past Mac users want or expect. Power users might not have any trouble switching, but some people like the old UI. Spring loaded folders are back, but that hardly fills the chasm. I hate to see Mac OS 9 users become another cult like the forelorn, slowly eroding one that keeps using the Amiga. I understand that Apple's OS needed an overhaul. I understand that OS X has moved Macintosh into a de facto standard of sorts with Darwin, allowing the OS to leverage all sorts of good software (Adium is a great poster child for that -- it slaps a Cocoa interface over a standard command-line/terminal based *NIX application -- in the end producing a great app). Most of all, I enjoy not having to reboot my machine every 4-5 hours. But come on Apple, any way you slice it, the performance sucks. And seventeen million or so Mac users around the world are a little upset over it. While I'm asking for things I can't get, can't we add a right-mouse button to the iBook and Powerbook? Even as an option? As long as the OS supports it (and they both do, 9 and X) with context menus, it's going to drive me crazy that I have to keep hitting control to get to it! posted by ruffin at 10/08/2002 11:59:00 AM

Monday, October 07, 2002
The more I think about neat apps I could make from the home office, the more and more I notice that, no matter how unweildy the concept is, distrubuted, subscription-based services are where computer OSs are headed. I don't know that Microsoft, usually pretty good about seeing good ideas overall, started in the right place. Offering Microsoft Word as a subscription doesn't make much sense at all when there are so many alternatives (previous versions of Office being the most widespread, of course) out there. But Apple's .Mac services are closer to being on the money. Does everyone need 100 megs of virus scanned storage on the net and another email address? Well, yes and no. What's the most aggravating part of reinstalling your operating system? That's easy -- cleaning up your hard drive and making sure you've got every file that you're going to need later backed up on CD-R or the like. Now think if your email, essential files, registration receipts, taxes, etc, existed in some limbo while you're reformatting your hard drive and could be immediately replaced after you're done. Not bad, but nothing special. For people like myself that interact with more than one computer a day, often before I even start work or leave the house, imagine if each computer had access to these same files, regardless of platform. This, again, is nothing new, but is obviously the way things are headed. Now let's think about this from a programmer's point of view. If I want to offer this "mobile user" services, an experience that they can pick up from whichever computer they're using, their desktop, laptop, a friend's computer, a university workstation, their work-workstation, or even a "internet bar" machine, I need someplace where I can reach these files and this information. I don't want a user to have to drag a CD around with them everywhere they go, and I really don't even want them to have to bother hooking up something like an iPod or PDA to their current machine to grab these services. I need my apps centralized but secure resources. Anyhow, back to the point. These three needs could all be fixed by a distributed computing model (wow, I'm mangling some words there). The ability to create distributed computing resources should be part of an OS. And slowly slowly, they're finding their way there (glad my fast typing managed to get all the "there's" there correctly that time) with apps like Apples iCal. There are parts of iCal that you just can't use unless you're a .Mac user. But of the millions of people who have OS X now, only 100 grand are using .Mac -- and I don't blame them. There's nothing I absolutely need there at the moment. So what if you can't see my iCal entries? Apple needs to do two things. First, it needs to have more of these sort of distributed, internet-requiring features in OS X, to the point that people "learn to not be able to live without them. Then Apple needs to pull a Microsoft and integrate .Mac subscriptions into the OS. Buy OS X 10.2 and have a year of .Mac. Buy OS X 10.3 next year and get to keep playing. Otherwise, there are enough iFeatures in the iApps that require the iNet that you're outta luck -- and feel the pain. Which brings me to the bit that's got me convinced this subscription services are the way to go and viable -- Madden 2003 (and FIFA 2002, for all that matters). There was a day when you could buy a game that you could play online and you were able to play online forever. Find another player and poof, you could play with the 1999 rosters until 2020 if you wanted. Now these games go to EA's master servers and make sure that game can still be played online. If your one year of online play is over, the servers say, "Forget it; buy Madden 2004". To continue to play with officially updated rosters, I seem to be willing to pay $50 a year (heck, that's even without online play, but you get the point -- another set of users are going to be upgrading to continue to use the online resource, including me, more than likely, if I ever get an ethernet port for the PS2). And that's "just a game". If there's something compelling about operating systems that require the inet, I'm sure you'll be able to get bigger bucks outta users. Lindows is trying it for quite a bit more -- $129 yearly for click-n-install or whatever? Heck, you pay $40 a month for cell phones, why can't OS companies get a little more dough outta the yearly renewal as well? All they need is a featureset to match. Apple's on the way there, I believe. (yes I realize many business OSs have done this with maintenance fees for a while -- I'm talking on the client side now) Phew, rambling ramble. posted by ruffin at 10/07/2002 12:32:00 PM

In totally random news, I've been cleaning out my hotmail folder (long as I'm booted into Mac OS 9, I might as well use Outlook Express and do it) and ran across this email, totally unrelated to the general flow of this blog (except to say that without gum and the Black Crowes, I'd be about 30% as productive as I usually manage to eek out). At any rate, I think their implied point is quite clear and rather humorous. Here we are, the email well over a year old. Thank you for contacting the Wrigley Company to let us know you are unhappy with the new "Longer Lasting Fresh Breath" Big Red gum. Because we want all our consumers to be happy, we're glad you took the time to share your opinion with us. Big Red gum has recently been repositioned as complete breath insurance for young, hip, socially-active adults. We're certainly sorry the flavor of Big Red gum may not be your cup of tea, but we appreciate you sharing your comments with us. Again, thank you for contacting the Wrigley Company. In other news, wow I like Mac OS 9. Very very quick on my iBook, and it even has vim. Now if only someone could get SAMBA working on OS 9 (yes, I know about Thursby's DAVE) and stop all this rebooting, I'd be awfully happy. But then I'm not the hip, young, tea-made-out-of-gum type. :^) posted by ruffin at 10/07/2002 12:10:00 AM

Friday, October 04, 2002
Hey look! An ASP cult! posted by ruffin at 10/04/2002 11:31:00 AM

Thursday, October 03, 2002
It strikes me that nothing I've ever coded while debugging with Mozilla recently has required more than a tweak to the DOM to work in Internet Explorer. I admittedly have a few things that only work in IE, but in a related realization, those are instances of me trying to do something, giving up, and only googling up an IE solution. They didn't start in IE and not work later when I pulled in Mozilla. posted by ruffin at 10/03/2002 02:20:00 PM

Wednesday, October 02, 2002
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices -- wait or eat it raw. Sofware customers have the same choices. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save -- burned in on part, raw in another. -- Frederick Brooks posted by ruffin at 10/02/2002 06:33:00 PM

Though the lists are often full of advertising and self-serving posts, the asplists.com lists do turn up some useful information. Most recently there have been a few posts referring to web services up at XMethods. The two latest references have been for eBay and Babelfish web services. I'm a pretty big fan of web methods/services. Even though they use some rather bloated standards (have you ever really looked at what SOAP does, you VS.NET addicts? Why we don't at least use XML-PRC instead, I don't know), they are standards, and web-services make well-coded applications available to anyone using any platform to code the client-side or middleware. Sure, people can still charge for web services; we're not talking "free" here, necessarily (though right now often that's the situation), but the technology's awfully good. If you can't make your source open, make the interfaces to your code open (however bloated). That's what web services are all about. posted by ruffin at 10/02/2002 01:20:00 PM

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