Category: Rant

So I was reading a story in this month’s Analog magazine, and encountered the following paragraph:

“They company wantoffered me a promotions me to learn aboutlead a new technology group, something I saw in the Dakotas a few months ago,” Gus replied. “It’s a nice increase career move if I accept,” Gus offered.

I swear all spelling, punctuation and spacing is exactly as it is in the magazine. It’s almost as if somebody took the blue pencil markup version and put in all the new stuff without taking out the old stuff. And then later in the same story:

His The aesthetic principles approach would disappear be lost when Phil’s new technology was perfectedused.

Doesn’t Analog have proof readers for this sort of thing?

(What does it say about my age and penchant for trivial that I know this much about obsolete book and magazine editing even though I’m not a writer or an editor?)

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.

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.

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.