Category: General Interest

  • Lottery Tickets

    I live in North Carolina and our new state-sponsored gambling program… I mean, our new lottery… opens today. At work, I’ve already overheard several hallway conversations in which lottery ticket purchases were mentioned. For my fellow North Carolinians who are considering a purchase, just remember that a dollar can buy you a tasty hamburger at McDonald’s. Oh, and burning your money will at least keep you warm.

    “Common sense is just as good a critic of the lottery as any statistical breakdown.” — Hunter Baker

  • The Torn-Up Credit Card Application

    A visual and textual warning to those of us who toss our junk mail out without properly mangling it.

  • Krugle: The Search Engine for Software Developers

    I received my access code for the Krugle beta by e-mail last night. I immediately tried it out, of course. Here are my initial impressions.

    The goal of Krugle is to make it easy for software developers to search for technical articles and code samples. Let’s face it: Google is a fantastic search engine, but it’s sometimes difficult to locate good code samples with it. Krugle changes all of that by allowing visitors to search specifically for source code, not just across web pages, but within project files from sites like Sourceforge as well.

    After executing a code search, two panes open up on your screen. The left pane contains the source code you selected. The right pane shows other source code files in the same project. As you open new files, Krugle places them in tabs across the top of the page, very similar to Firefox. The difference is that Krugle uses Ajax goodness to drive its user-friendly interface. Searching with Krugle is a real treat.

    If you’re interested in trying Krugle for yourself, visit the web site to sign up for the beta. Alternately, you could just wait a few more months for the production version of the engine to be released. If Krugle proves as useful to other developers as it has to me, I would be expecting Google to aquire yet another search engine a few months after Krugle goes live.

  • Ham radio equipment restrictions

    Amateur radio is a hobby of mine and it’s always sad to read about the restrictions being placed on hams these days. This WRAL article is especially interesting, considering the amount of help hams have provided during the aftermath of the Katrina disaster.

    73s,
    Matt / AG4TS

  • Instructions should match reality

    I had to visit the doctor yesterday for a very minor surgical procedure. The doc packed the wound with gauze when he was finished and gave me some instructions on how to remove it later that night.

    As seems to be typical with doctors these days, the gauze he used was that industrial-grade stuff. The kind they probably use to mop up nuclear waste. The point is that it persists in sticking to a wound until the bitter end. The irony is that the instruction sheet he gave me said it would “come off easily” with some hydrogen peroxide. An hour later and it was still hanging on for dear life.

    The moral of the story? Whether in medicine or software, instructions should match reality!

  • My Job Went to India

    My Job Went to India“You might not know it, but you’ve already lost your job.”

    Thus begins the back cover of Chad Fowler’s new book, My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book). Hey, it caught my attention too! I recently finished tearing through Chad’s 185-page book and have to say that it was one of the best work-related reads I’ve had in quite a while. The writing was clear, chapter organization made sense, and the content was nothing short of phenomenal.

    Have you ever questioned how much value you’re bringing to your company? Have you ever wondered when… or if… the outsourcing will stop? Have you ever brainstormed about ways to make your existing job more secure? If you’re a typical American programmer, the answer to these questions is probably, “Yep, sure have.” If this is true for you, Chad’s book will answer many of the questions you have, and give you a radically different perspective on the outsourcing movement… a perspective that will change how you treat your job.

    This book is structured very much like the upcoming Practices of an Agile Developer. It’s split up into 52 bite-sized chunks of information that can be read in a matter of minutes. Each chunk, however, brings fresh ideas to bear on the problem of outsourcing and explains steps you can take today to ensure that you remain competitive in tomorrow’s job market.

    I found Part IV, “Marketing… Not Just For Suits,” to be especially relevant. As a developer, I have a tendency to consider personal marketing as being a useless exercise, when in fact it’s a vital part of participating in the software development community. Marketing isn’t just about advertising, as Chad explains in the book. It involves engaging the community. It’s about blogging, writing for magazines, contributing to open source projects, speaking at conferences, and mentoring co-workers. In short, thinking more about what you can give to the community than what you can get from it. When an employer can see that you love the art of software development so much that you’re willing to spend your own time on it, they’ll be impressed. As Chad writes, “If you’re not actively trying to make your mark, you’re probably not making it.”

    If you’ve ever worried about the coder next door (or on the other side of the world) who is threatening your job, this is the first book you should read. A wonderful side effect of the book is that it will encourage you to be more passionate about your work, and to strive to give 110% every single day.

  • The end of the Internet?

    “The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.”

    I’ve read articles like this a couple of times before. The real question is whether such a plan could be implemented “en masse” in a short amount of time. If even a small part of the Internet was left uncontrolled, market economics would drive everyone there.

    I also wonder what this would mean for blogs.

  • The DMV and continuous integration

    My father recently had an experience which bitterly proves that minor details can have major consequences. Last week, his insurance company mistakenly reported to the DMV that the coverage on his auto had lapsed. The DMV responded by revoking his tags within the space of 48 hours (quite speedy for them). To resolve the matter, he had to take proof of insurance to a local DMV office (in someone else’s vehicle, of course).

    Here’s how the process went, in his own words:

    1. Go to the DMV office on Academy St.
    2. Find out they only do driver’s licenses there.
    3. Go to the DMV office at Walnut and US-1. Walk up to the desk.
    4. Find out that the FS-1 form the insurance company faxed me has an effective insurance date of 3/34/05 rather than 3/24/05. It’s not acceptable.
    5. Find a pay phone to call the insurance company for a corrected form. Seems I left my cell phone at home.
    6. Get the insurance company to fax the corrected form to the DMV office I’m standing outside of.
    7. Go back into the DMV office and finish the transaction.
    8. Walk out with my sticker, new registration, and the confidence that comes with obeying our state laws.

    Suprisingly, aside from the nuisance of having to physically go to a DMV office, most of the blame for the mistake lies with his insurance company. First, their computers reported him as uninsured, which was, of course, incorrect. Second, when proof of insurance was faxed to him, the date on it wasn’t just off by a day or two… the date wasn’t even valid!

    If we assume that the insurance company used a computer to generate the form (a safe assumption), this means that one of the following must be true:

    1. Their processing is so antiquated that they’re simply filling out word processor templates; the incorrect date was human error
    2. The software they’re using isn’t smart enough to catch invalid dates
    3. The software they’re using has a good, ol’ fashioned bug

    If #1, they really should consider upgrading their systems to minimize the impact of human error. If #2, they need to consider investing in a more sophisticated software package. In my book, date validation is a fairly important feature! If #3, they were either sold lousy software or their in-house development group needs to do a better job of testing.

    Minor details can have major consequences. The best way to ensure the integrity of minor details is to test them. The best way to test something is to always run tests. The best way to always run tests is to use a continuous integration system!

    Now if only someone at my father’s insurance company would read this…

  • Google Reader Beta

    I enjoy RSS feeds. Nay, I adore RSS feeds. So you can understand my consternation at having to maintain three sets of subscriptions on my work computer, home computer, and personal laptop. The lists never seem to be in synch. What a pain!

    I discovered the solution to my problem last week. It came in the form of Google Reader, a beta version, but nonetheless still a (mostly) functional online news reader with a delicious user interface. Now all my RSS feeds are stored in one place and I can access them from any computer in the world without installing SharpReader or Attensa. (And Google knows just that much more about me.)

    Now if Google would just get with it and add a calendar…

  • The Bridge Home Theater

    Yet another example of someone who has way too much time on his hands.