How Social Networking is Causing the Zombie Apcolypse

... or rather "How we are forgetting how to be human beings".

So the news is atwitter with how a couple of inappropriate jokes at a tech conference has lead to two firings among other nonsense. If you don't want to read it here's the breakdown:

1. 2 dudes are having fun at Pycon
2. 2 dudes forget that they aren't alone nor are they above reproach
3. 2 dudes make inappropriate jokes related to forking and dongles (that's what she said)
4. lady sitting in front of dudes get's offended
5. lady takes pic of inappropriate dudes and shares it to twitter
6. lady has a lot of twitter followers
7. 1 dude get's fired, lady receives death-threat and her company gets DDoS and also  she gets fired

So what's really going on here. This is a perfect example of how social media is crippling our communications skills and allowing us to forget that we are interpersonal beings. Take a look at your average social stream. What you see is a metric ton of complaints and threats and pointless drab that the sharers wouldn't ever share out loud with the people in the room with them. But thanks to the anonymity of the internet they've been empowered to speak up without saying anything or facing any consequences.

What's that got to do with this little blurb? The point I want to make is that social media has allowed this lady to forget that she's a human being. I have to wonder if it crossed her mind that she could actually turn around and 'talk' to these jerks? Let's face it, the guys should have been a little more aware of being in mixed company and kept the locker room talk where it belongs. 

The backlash over all of this isn't caused by some guy making a dirty joke, if that's the case I know a lot of people that couldn't keep their jobs and I number among them. The issue here is how somehow social media allows us as human beings to forget that there are consequences to everything we say, and empowers us to not even interact with each other in a civil manner.

Had Ms. Twitterholic taken the time to actually engage these guys in a conversation and express how their behavior was offensive then she would still have her job and a lot less headache than she's dealing with today.

So unplug, have a conversation, and for goodness sake remember that everything you say and do has consequences.

Les

Git stashing

Yesterday I had some changes that I was making in the mainline (call it master). I realized that I really wanted to check them into the branch for our Release Candidate rather than committing them to mainline and then cherry-picking the commit. So I found since I hadn't committed the changes I could simply execute:

: git stash

: git checkout release_candidate

: git stash apply 

The stash took my working directory back to the last commit but took all of my non-committed changes and put them in a safe place (the stash). The second command simple switched my working directory to the branch for the release candidate and then the stash apply command took the last stash and applied it to the working directory.

You can label stashes if you use them a lot in order to help keep them organized and you can even specify which stash you would want if it happens to be a previous stash.

until next time
Les

 

 

 

 

The world is full of jerks.

So the other day in Best Buy I'm waiting in line to pay for a gigabit ethernet switch because you know you can never have too many of those lying around. This guy in front of me is complaining into the air about the line and how they only ever have one cashier working at this place (they had 3) only he wasn't just complaining to himself he was talking on the phone with one of those little Bluetooth ear pieces.

My entire wait was listening to this guy ramble on for at least 3 different phone calls at the volume of "I-am-the-only-one-here-that-matters". Mostly I ignore him, although he had the lovely smell of cigarettes radiating from his person (seriously do people still smoke?).

Mostly I just ignore him and check out all the stuff along the line that the store would have me think I need last minute. It's possible that this guy just received this ear dongle for the holiday and doesn't yet realize how much of a douche it can make one appear to be upon use. Well that idea was short-lived as I followed him out of the store and see him get into his vehicle parked in a handicapped parking space. He was alone, he wasn't limping. he = douche.

I'm thankful for people who have respect for others.

until next time

Les

All exits are beyond the plastic.

So they started the construction of our office remodel. Things are going to be pretty crazy around here for s few weeks.

It can be pretty hard too focus in all the chaos and noise.

Just saying.

This post written in swype.

Later.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.8

The enemy of my enemy.

Since being involved in Web development for the greater part of the last decade I have to admit that Flash (once helmed by Macromedia now a part of the Adobe creative empire) has been a thorn in my side. Flash drives the majority of what I hate about the internet:

• Obnoxious Advertisements
• Flash websites
• stupid holiday memes
  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against online advertisements. I understand the value of free information and entertainment. But why you have to choke my bandwidth and interrupt my focus with some animated, noisy (before they got realistic and muted them by default) cartoons trying to get me interested in some completely irrelevant to me product? Lightweight adds can be just as elegant and communicate a product in a way that doesn't piss me off. If you piss me off I'm not going to be interested in your product.

Flash websites are the bane of the world wide web. Sure you can do some pretty cool effects and animations and page switching and all but if I wanted to play a game I probably wouldn't be coming to your website to find your information. I'd play a game. Hollywood has found that design companies who use flash are really good at marketing for their movies, and I can't say that's a completely bad thing, but if the bandwidth you use to communicate what you are presenting is almost the size of the bandwidth it takes to watch the trailer for your movie then please forgive me for finding your content on YouTube.

Holiday memes...

Recently though there is a huge brouhaha in geekdom about the choice of a particular fruit-logo'd company not giving Flash any love especially in regard to it's latest innovation of porn-on-the-go devices that has all the hipsters raving about how we've arrived.

Most people that know my technical, geeky side know my feelings toward the maker of the Mac. As such I have had to consider where I really stand on this issue. Not that where I stand really matters in the greater scope of things, but I needed to know.

I'll let you know. To be continued...

Until next time

Les

Google Chrome starting to get Serious about Extensions

After opening the dev channel Google Chrome this morning I noticed a change in the info on the home screen:

If you look closely at the bottom you'll see a message notifying you of Google Chrome support for both extensions and bookmark sync. These aren't technically new features, but it is interesting to note that the link provided for extensions goes to a Google hosted link which at the time of this writing is not a valid link:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

Also the jigsaw graphic in the corner connects to the same link.

With the rumors of the RSS feed extension for automatically detecting feeds in a web page being provided in the future as a default extension for Google Chrome this may be another sign that Google is ready to roll out full-fledged extension support, a feature which has been one of the main barriers to entry for hard-core Mozilla Firefox users.

Until next time

Les

Glipper: the clipboard manager for Gnome

I like a clipboard manager. As a programmer I find myself needing to be able to keep track of a history of copied texts and codes for pasting at any given time (yeah yeah, call me a copy/paste programmer if you must, it is the number one form of code reuse :-P ). Anyway, I have been using Ubuntu almost exclusively on my personal laptop and mostly I miss ClipX. On my work machines I use Windows XP, just haven't taken the leap to Ubuntu yet with my Windows driven work life, but I have a common toolset which includes the aforementioned clipboard manager.

ClipX is a bare-bones, no nonsense clipboard manager. It is small and simple and does exactly what I need: keeps a history of my clipboard and allows easy access to those entries. I miss that when using Ubuntu. For a while I was using KDE and it comes with the standard KDE version: Klipper. Gnome though comes with no such default and this is a bit disappointing to me.

I finally found Glipper. It was constructed for Gnome in the tradition of klipper and is simple to use.

It's in the repos so you can find it in Synaptic or simply execute a console command:

sudo apt-get install glipper

It will install and then you'll go looking for it, but you won't find it... anywhere. This is because it's an Applet that can be added to your panel. To get it to show up in my Add to Panel... dialog I actually had to log out and log back in... but then upon launching the add to panel dialog I found Clipboard Manager (or something similar, just start typing clip and you'll see it).

I have to uncheck the option in it's preferences (found by right-clicking the icon on your panel and selecting Preferences) for the mouse selection/middle click option, I have a bad habit of selecting things I don't need when using a mouse and for some reason it was adding all that stuff to the history as if I had copied it.

Until next time

Les

Slides from my Wicket: Lightning Talk

Competition and Innovation: Duh.

So another release of Ubuntu is officially out in the wild and it is just another example of the credit due to Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical for making a head-strong push into bringing Linux into mainstream PC usage. But that's all I'll say about Linux because believe it or not I'm actually here to talk about Microsoft today... no don't go... crap!

Anyway, if you're still with me I want to discuss a bit about how competition has proven to get Microsoft off of it's laurels and into some innovative business thinking, even if the ideas aren't their own at least they're trying.

Bing! Though the TV ads are catching on I don't think the ad campaign is the innovation going on here. Let's think back to a few years back when Microsoft decided to start pushing a big ad campaign for it's own search engine (Windows Live Search) in order to try and win some customers over from the ever popular and ever growing do-no-evil giant of search, Google. What ended up happening was people saw the commercials and thought: "Oh look, that company that makes computers has a place on the internet to search for stuff." Because to the general public that is what Microsoft is, a computer manufacturer (and some might even thing they run the internet!)

Some of these people might have even tried this search engine. Those who had used MSN search before would think how it was nothing new and the new people coming from Google would think how it doesn't really work. Results aren't what I'm looking for. To the former I say "Spot on!". Live Search was barely even a rebranding with a bit of new CSS thrown into the web page to make it look more web-modern. To the latter I'd have to conclude that it's not that it didn't 'work' but that it was different than the results you were used to seeing with Google. They used different ways to determine what was relevant to your search terms, and on a behemoth of data such as the world wide web that can produce drastic differences in results.

So it seemed that Microsoft went off the grid as far as their new plans of search engine domination went. But then there were rumors... Something new was in the mix and it was rumored to be a new search engine from the company that brought us PCs, the internet, AND Windows Live Search. When it finally came out of hiding it wasn't a new version of Windows Live Search at all, it was a completely NEW product. Microsoft branding all but disappeared from the product and this new brand emerged: Bing.

But they didn't stop there. If you've paid attention to the TV ads yo probably noticed a difference in how Bing is being promoted. It's not a presentation of "Hey! we have a search engine too!" but more of a claim of "Bing is new, Bing is different, try Bing". Now even taking direct hits at Google int he ads by claiming a sense of feeling inundated with floods of info from Google (which I don't find accurate, but it's an ad folks) and how Bing brings different results (their slant on different being more of what the searcher wants.. again, just ad speak).

Do I think Bing will take the reigns from Google and begin dominating the web search engine usage? No. But I think Microsoft finally got something right. I think they realized that sometimes it's not good enough to just be Microsoft and have the Microsoft brand (in fact with today's viral market it's a bit of a detriment).

until next time

Les

The Making of Our House

For those of you interested here are some shots of the house that we've taken throughout the building process. Enjoy!

Until next time

Les

Change: The Ever Present Constant

Yes it's been more than a while since my last post here. I'm sorry but I won't be like all those other bloggers and start this post with an apology.

I just rounded off the end of a year doing government contracting. Eight months of which I can't say much (too soon), the last 3 months of that though were very interesting however to my geek side. I got to brush up on my .Net skills and check out the latest in C# technologies (impressive) and I also got to dabble a bit in Java Swing with a HUGE GIS application.

But that has come to an end and I've started a new chapter in my career working back in the private sector doing Java web development. I have to say hello again to Java 1.4, Websphere, Rational Application Developer, AND EJB 2.x

So I've got to get back in the groove of these things and while I'm at it see how I can contribute to maintaining and improving these web applications into a growing industry. I may be jotting some notes here (don't count on it) while I do some digging into the in's N out's of these things again.

All in all things are good.

Until next time

Les

Municipal Headache

For the past year I've been very peeved at my city. I got a letter last summer stating that I had "tall weeds/grass" and that if I didn't mow all weeds/grass on my property I would be fined. What's the problem? My property was mowed. Come to find out the unkempt property was an empty field directly north of the property of my neighbors and my property. Last year it took care of itself with little more than headache from me as the proper owners took care of the property the same day I got the letter from the city. Convenient I say.

This year is a bit different. The owners of the property owns the house that is at the far west end of that entire field. They also are in the process of selling their house and, if I'm informed correctly, leaving the country [military]. No one has been taking care of the field, I got another letter from the city.

Here's what happens. The city 'code officers' drive around and find a lot that breaks the 'code'. They pull up their computer and go to the GIS map provided by the county. They use the nifty little tool to click a spot on the map that corresponds to the property in question and then generate a letter to the address signified according the mapping data.

Here is my property according to that county map:



See anything wrong there? Well according to the data that comes off the official legal document (the deed) This is the info about my property:


Of note you see "# of Bldgs: 1" and "Acres: .3100"

Now lets use the GIS tools to map out the plot in the pretty picture:



Interesting... 1.5 acres. Now I do NOT pay property taxes on 1.5 acres or 3 homes, as the GIS data shows. After talking with the County (Oklahoma County) authority, I was informed that the municipal authority could not use that GIS map as a legal means since the data was not correct and there was no guarantee behind it. However, the city 'code officer' tells me that according to state statutes they are supposed to use what the county provides, which to them means this GIS map.

What's the worst part? Here is the disclaimer you see (even the city sees this), when accessing the Oklahoma County GIS mapping tools (found here):



What? I asked the 'code officer' about that. He called the county, he tells me that the county told him that that site is publicly available and that the disclaimer is there for the public. That even though there is a disclaimer that says 'does not constitute a legal survey' the city is supposed to use this map.

I'm confused and on a mission. This is NOT acceptable.

Until next time
Les

a linux tip

If you're considering switching to Ubuntu, or any desktop flavor of linux, the first thing I would tell you to do is this:

Find out what hardware you are running. Especially for notebooks.

Having probably used Windows (or even MacOSX) for any period of time has probably shielded you from the pain of having to deal with hardware issues. That is unless you've done a clean install of your OS, or maybe you've seen a glimpse of this frustration by trying to connect a printer to Windows Vista. =]

At first you may be thinking something like this: Windows takes care of that for me so it must be better.

Wrong. When was the last time you installed Windows from scratch? Well I got news for you. Windows didn't take care of that hardware compatibility for you. Do a little research and find out what an OEM is. Yeah, the people that put the computer together for you, they're the one who resolved the hardware issues. Just think, if there were more OEM's that would sell a linux OS out of the box how little then would these hardware issues be?

So, dig in and find out what you are running. A few of the most common gotcha pieces of hardware is:

• wireless adapter (whether built in or external)
• video card
• sound card

Find out what you have, write it down somewhere for safekeeping. When looking into linux do a bit of research. Google is your friend. Search for your hardware with words like 'linux compatible' or 'ubuntu'. If there are problems then I can almost guarantee you that someone has already ran into them and resolved them.

Ways to find out your hardware:

• from the distributor (toshiba, hp, compaq, dell, lenovo... etc.)
• in Windows look under the Device Manager
• if you're already in linux then just google it for your distro, some have simple ways, just don't be afraid to use the command line

Take your time and have fun. If you don't like it then don't use it.

later

Why I won't get a Mac

A lot of people I know use Macs. They carry their shiny Mac Book Pro like a badge of honor, a talisman which embodies the measure of their master-geekery. It is quite funny how unknowingly religious such an iconic piece of shiny technology can make these latter-day geeks, but without many exceptions they are all very religious about it. Many times I find myself being invited to their Church of the Mac. I suppose they wish to save me from the evils Microsoft and protect me from the effort it takes to run an open source OS such as Ubuntu or Fedora. But I'm not interested. I believe in the seperation of Church and Tech.

What I find particularly interesting about this following, at least amongst the people I know, is that they are most big FOSS (Free and open source software) supporters. I ask them why not use an open source solution to their OS needs? Linux afterall is Unix based (like Mac's OS) and it's FOSS!!! But apperantly these master craftsmen, these warriors against the Big Corporation Microsoft find that using Linux distribustions to be a bit taxing on their patience. And apperantly, similar to Microsoft's Windows, Mac's OS is made to be a bit more user friendly.

What is the usual hold-up for using a FOSS operating system? In my experience it's been hardware support. This is getting better with every kernel release and distro update, but admittedly getting Linux to work with your particular hardware configuration can leave you a bit befuzzled. I happen to enjoy tinkering when I have the time, but I do realize the turn-off it can be when you just can't seem to get your wireless card to connect to the Internet of all things.

But Apple takes the fuss all out of that. They've got their proprietary, Unix-based OS that is very much like it's distant cousin's in the Linux world, but one HUGE caveat: Apple manufactures their own pricey hardware. In fact, if you read the EULA (you do read those from time to time right?) for your favorite Mac OS you'll see in plain text that it is an infraction of the Mac OS license agreement to run the OS on any other hardware than that provided by the manufacturer. Now I understand that Apple has found a niche market, but this wreaks of non-compete, monopoly-esque, the kind of stuff Microsoft get's taken to court for all time business. (Jeff Atwood, of codinghorror.com fame, compares it to the dongles of old.)

Sure Microsoft's dominance in many areas has led to product stagnation and other negative side affects, but you can take their products and run them on pretty much any hardware, manufactured by any company and it's fine. At what point of company growth will Apple no longer be able to get away with this. I'm glad their are companies like Psystar that are trying to keep Apple honest, but even they seem to be on the losing side.

So in the end, I don't see Apple as a Microsoft competitor, but more of an equal to them in their philosophies and business model. Sure they're competing with Microsoft, but only in a niche market. But they resemble that competitor more than their proponents want to admit.

For now I'll keep tinkering with Ubuntu and using Windows as deemed necessary.
Until next time
Les

Happy New Year

As I type this there are parts of the globe already five and a half hours into the year 2009. It's just 9:26am here in the bible belt of the United States of America and I'm at work (blogging in my break of course).

I'm thinking about organizations and how they view success. Each organization is it's own ecosystem, and they all have their own forms of Darwinism. The key to survival of the fittest though is first to define what particular definition of fittest that particular system accepts. In some ecosystems in the business business world the fittest might be the achiever, while in many the case you see is that the achievers are the ones considered the weak, the ones that have to go. When the herd is moving toward a stable sense of mediocrity then the ones who get ahead will be the ones to find themselves victims of the hazards of that environment (typically some form of bureaucratic, executive management tyranny), and as in most any ecosystem, the individual weak or dumb enough to be outside the strength of the herd is the one that gets eaten by the puma.

Analogies aside, I wonder what it really takes to come into an organization and introduce true improvements and get the organization to see that those improvements are GOOD. Let's face it, it's not that you can convince people that what they're doing is WRONG, they've been doing it and it works (for lack of any other results that is). So the goal in my new year is to work on demonstrating the value of improvements, and make it show real value. Instead of trying to convince people that what they have is wrong, show them what life would be like with what they could have.

So if that can be summed up in a concrete resolution: As a software developer and business person I will find better ways to demonstrate value added practices, whether in code or business process, in order the introduce improvements into my work place.

It's right up there with my other resolutions:

• eat better (suggested by my loving wife who, for some reason, wants me to live a long life)
• use linux more
• write some software non-work related (open or closed, just write it)
  

until next time, HAPPEH NEW YER!1!!1!
Les

The necessity of a daily stand-up.

Latest post on Approaching Agile.

A daily stand-up would definitely make it easier to absorb and assimilate new developers to the team.

until next time
Les

My new blog project.

In my new job I will be Approaching Agile. There is much work to be done, I'll try to fight the good fight and keep you all informed as I go.

Follow me if you're interested.

Until next time,
Les

TDD at M$??? Oh my!!!

Phil Haack is one of the few Microsoft/.NET bloggers that I follow. He just reached a milestone of 1 year with the software giant working on many ASP.NET initiatives. What I think is great about this guy is his love for open source (yes, from a microsofty), and his passion for Test Driven Development. Here's a quote from his latest post:

I’ve also been involved in division wide efforts to help other teams understand Test Driven Development so that our products moving forward will take TDD into consideration in the design of their products.

It just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to know that there are actually people inside Micro$oft who actually care about best practices like TDD.

Way to go Phil and congrats on 1 year with the evil empire Microsoft.

until next time
Les

Skreeming with foxytunes

I was recently introduced to Skreemr (http://skreemr.com). An mp3 search engine that serves up mp3 from blogs. It's a neat way to sample music and check out stuff as you hear about it (among other nefarious things since you can download the songs as well.

I heard there was a player that would allow you to play a list of songs you retrieve in your search but I didn't want to download any new player. Then as I was checking out some Gorillaz tunes I saw that I had a little widget in my browser, when I started messing around with it I realized it was a part of one of my favorite Firefox plugins: foxytunes. It allows you to play all the songs in a web page as a single playlist. heres a screen shot:


until next time
Les

TDD: Prove what you know

Accepting the concept of TDD (and yes I mean test FIRST development) was a tough task for me. At first I didn't understand the complete benefit, honestly I can't admit that I do completely now. But I've come around none the less.

When working on a project it is pretty much impossible to deliver code without having a bit of an understanding of what it is the end result of that code execution should be. The user doesn't care about implementation. All the end user knows is that when they submit this data in that field then something specific had better happen as a result. I didn't really grasp how that was a reflection of what test first meant.

Now I like to think of the end user and my unit test as the same thing. Both are simply executors of my code. I can't know what the system is supposed to do unless the end user tells me so. At first that was all I saw. The user says so and then I code the implementation, then add some tests. Now I see that if the user tells me what the requirement should result in I replicate that in a test, and that proves without a doubt that I understand the requirement. If you don't understand it enough to write a test for it then you sure as heck don't know enough to write code to implement the requirement.

Not only does this help you better grasp the requirement before diving head first into coding, it also gives you an upfront contract that is based on vernacular communication. That adds a quality check. If you write the test first based on what you understand the requirement to demand then you write the code to satisfy that test and hopefully you don't write any code outside that (unless necessary, remember to use your head but remember to prove any code changes with tests for quality assurance).

So as long as it's sane I'd like to set a rule for myself for future coding:

If I don't understand enough of what is required in order to write a test
then I don't understand enough to code period.

Keep me accountable.
Until next time
Les