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: Rant
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 in job requirements FAIL
I got a call from a recruiter asking if I had experience with “ETL”. I’d never heard of it, so I truthfully said no, I had no idea what it was, and she went away.
After the call, I looked it up. Evidently it stands for “Extract, Transfer and Load”. Isn’t that what 90% of computer programs do? Isn’t that what the programs I’ve written and maintained for the last god-knows-how-long to extract aviation data from various sources in various formats, transfer it into my own format (combining data from several different places into one semi-coherent whole, throwing away the data that doesn’t interest me), and load it into my database for future use does? Or when I took data from Island and RediQuote and massaged it so that it looked like what SunGard’s trading system was expecting so that SunGard UMA users could trade stocks on them? Or when I converted data from the SMPTE ShowPlayList schema and stored it into our database so we could schedule movies and disassemble and re-assemble our own concept of what a show schedule was?
So yeah, I think I understand the concepts behind “ETL”. But because I was honest to a recruiter, I’ll probably never get a job doing it when it’s called that. The problem with the whole job market is that it’s full of cases like that, where recruiters and HR departments have a checklist and are just looking for people with the right keywords on their resume. That’s why I hope that careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.stackoverflow.com catch on with Rochester companies, or companies who understand that off-site doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of idiots you see on Rentacoder who think they can solve the Halting Problem for $500.
Oh, that’s worrisome
My colo server crashed last night. Nothing in the logs, no indication of why, it just hung up. A power cycle fixed it, but that’s the first time it’s crashed in so long I can’t remember how long it’s been. The last note about downtime I can find on my blog, from March 2007, wasn’t the fault of my box, it was a general problem with the hosting facility.
I hope the hardware isn’t crapping out after years of faithful service.