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.
Category: Geekery
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.
Today in geekery
One of these days I’m going to figure out why my nightly/hourly[1] rsync backup does something strange when the clocks change. But the problem is that I have to wait 6 months or a year to see if the change I made made any difference, and then I think “nah, I’ll just fix it manually next time it happens just like I did this time”. I think it’s getting confused by the double hour when the clocks go back and thinking it has to do the nightly backup again. Come to think of it, the nightly does happen at 1:15, and when the clocks go back we get two 1:15s, don’t we? I don’t want to make it 2:15, because when the clocks go forward we don’t have one of those. Maybe I’ll make that 4:15 and avoid the whole problem.
[1] Every hour it backs up my home Linux box to an external hard drive. Once a night, it backs up my colo box to my home box, and then backs up that to the external hard drive as well.
Today’s realization
I was trying to explain to somebody how much cooler you are if you just type a big long pipeline with a bunch of unix commands rather than putting the results of one command into a file, then processing that file into another one, and so on. And how for full geek points, that pipeline really needs to include at least one awk command. And then it hit me:
Unix is an Extreme Sport(tm). Just look how much Mountain Dew the average Unix geek drinks.