I knew the Digital Cinema project that I’d been on for 6 years was doomed. But I didn’t know how doomed until the last week or so, when former colleagues on that project have suddenly started responding to the LinkedIn invitations to connect that I sent them a year ago. I’m guessing there is a lot of resume polishing and network building going on there right now. I’d say “Poor bastards”, but I’m in no better shape right now, except I did all that 6 months ago.
Author: Paul Tomblin
Got a Google Wave account
First impressions on Google Wave:
- Who thought that bringing back OpenLook’s “elevator” scroll bars was a good idea? Every user interface expert in the world said they were a bad idea then, and they’re still a bad idea. Actually these aren’t exactly like OpenLook’s scroll bars – instead they move some times, and sometimes they don’t, and they’re just weird.
- Why does Google Gears say it’s installed on my browser, but the actual Gears functionality (like being able to drag and drop pictures on Wave) not work? I tried some of the demo programs on the Gears web site and they don’t work either. Is there something I’m missing?
I wish there were more of us on Wave. It looks like a great tool for building project docs in a way that’s less likely to turn stale than just putting up a wiki and saying “update it everybody”.
Why, Google, Why?
I’ve been banging my head against this one for over a day now. My loop that was supposed to run when the value that came back from the cookie was null wasn’t running. It was only after exhausting every other option that I discovered that in GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Cookies.getCookie(cookieName) doesn’t return null when the cookie isn’t found, it returns the string “null”. You know, four characters, starts with the letter “n”. WTF? That’s just plain bizarre.
TEDx Rochester
Hey, it’s been a couple of weeks of interesting conferences. Last week I went to Toronto for Stack Overflow Dev Days, and today I went to TEDx Rochester. (Hey, I did blog about Dev Days, didn’t I? Or did I just write about it on meta.stackoverflow.com? I’ll have to check that later.)
If you’re at all interested in the Internet, and the amazing ways it can bring people together to talk about amazing things, you probably have heard of TED. If you haven’t, head over to http://www.ted.org/ and watch all the videos. But don’t do that right now, because if you do you’ll never come back and I’ll just be sitting there waiting for you. TEDx is sort of an attempt to do what TED does at a local level. It’s not organized by TED, but they’re allowed to show TED videos as long as they don’t charge any money and they don’t use it for advertising. So what TEDx Rochester did was get some really amazingly interesting people from here in Rochester, and have them give talks, and every now and then they showed one of the “real TED” talks on the video screen. I think there were 6 or 7 real “talks” and 2 or 3 videos. I wasn’t really keeping count. The talks went from 2pm to 4pm and from 5pm to 7pm. There was food provided at the 4pm break.
Like any conference where there is only one speaker track, there were speakers that I found really interesting, and ones that bored my socks off. There were a couple that I really wondered why they were up there, like the woman who seemed to be showing us her life story and resume, but not really talking about how she did things or why, or the not very good improv comedy troupe. And a couple that didn’t hold much interest for me but I could see they were well done, like the Brazilian guitar guy and maybe the weird artsy dance-like movement thing.
The only real downers were that
- the food at the break was placed at only one table (as opposed to three tables for a smaller crowd at DevDays) so the line was horrendous
- like every conference in the world these days, the wifi SUCKED
- and the woman next to me with the really bad breath who, during anything remotely technical and therefore interesting to me, would, every 5 minutes or so, sigh loudly and then slam herself back and forth in her chair, moving my chair and the next couple on the row. Yeah, my butt was getting pretty sore by then too, but I didn’t disturb and entire row of people because of it.
But those were minor and pretty par for the course. The conference was great and I can’t wait for next years.
Have some self respect!
One of the things I see a lot on the StackOverflow family sites are questions about how to minutely monitor employees. The latest one was a question on how the person could start up a continuous video capture of a remote employee’s screen from the moment the person started work to the moment they stopped, and have it stored in real time on the central office servers.
My advice on every one of these ones I see is “learn to trust your employees. If they are producing enough good quality code as to be worth the money they’re paying, it shouldn’t matter how many hours of solitaire, StackOverflow or porn they’re looking at while they produce it.” (Obviously not porn in an office environment, but you get the idea.) And if they aren’t producing good quality code, then deal with the problem. In other words, act like a manager not a slave overseer.
Ok, I can see why bosses might be so misguided as to have no clue as to the creative process and so think this is something they need to do, but why the hell would programmers be so whipped and beaten that they’d agree to such a travesty? Don’t they have any insight into how their own minds work? Do they think this is normal to be treated like cattle?
The latest one, the boss offered the excuse that he was doing it so he could check the guy’s code quality. How does watching him type it in give you a better idea of his quality than looking at the code after it’s checked in. Insist on daily checkins if you wish, but don’t sit there analyzing his every key stroke. He also compared it to an open plan office. Yeah, if a boss wants to walk around an open plan office once in a while, that’s fine. If he wants to set up a video camera watching over my shoulder, and says that video is going into my employee record, or even worse, doesn’t tell me what he’s going to do with that video, I’m walking. And I’d suggest anybody with a shred of self-respect should do the same.