Category: Uncategorized

A little background . . .

Joel Spolsky writes articles about software development and often times ends up saying that unit tests aren’t important because they don’t ship and take programmers away from writing more features or a new produce (well, that’s my less than 140 version of his stance on spending time doing unit tests).  Rob Conery, a former Microsoft employee that also write articles about software development wrote an article about how Joel is hurting the industry and needs to shut up.  Below is my response that I left in Rob’s blog.  Rob even responded!

I’m an apologist . . . I admire both of them.  As a debater I can take either side!

But Jim said something that stuck with me and that is we need people on the far left and the far right of issues so that we can pull the reasonable people toward the middle and reach a consensus.  If there are no crazy people on the left then you end up with solutions that lean right!

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I read “duct tape programmers” and came away thinking Joel was putting down programmers who used the duct tape method of getting things done even though that’s exactly the opposite of what was there.  Maybe that’s because I’ve read all these articles from him about how important the craft is and how writing maintainable code is so important and blah blah blah.  And now Zawinski is a hero for not caring about any of that?!?

I think the point of the article is that a) anyone who cares about what they do wants to do things the “right” way and b) doing it the right way gets in the way of shipping.  Strive for the golden mean!

Oh yeah, lets not forget about the secret that the “right” way isn’t defined and never will be because things change so much and once we figure out the right way someone is going to come along with something cooler, faster, easier.  Damn you Ruby!  Damn you Python!  And of course, damn you C# . . . you are so much safer than C but C is the right way . . . it’s the only way . . . and Joel said if I don’t know C I am useless!

Sheldon

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Yesterday I checked the status of my House Party application for the Windows 7 Launch Party I was hyping up with several friends and was *sorely* disappointed to see a red dot and something about how it wasn’t going to happen and how there were lot of applicants and they were sorry blah blah blah.  I had been thinking about my funny retort and how MS dropped the ball once again!  I was going to use the following key phrases:

• LAN Party
• Carne Asada (thin sliced marinated beef for the people not from AZ)
• XBOX 360 Halo with 4 players!  I have 4 controllers already.
• Try to convince a friend to bring his flat screen and XBox 360 for 8 player action!
• At least 3 of my computers set up with Windows 7 (for demos and maybe we can play Halo or some other game with the XBox people) and a few others set up for some AoE action late in the night!
• I already have a Kegerator with Kiltlifter and it’s more than 50% full!

It was going to be an epic post!  But then look what happened:

I’m an “Active Applicant”!  Don’t let me down Microsoft!

Sheldon

P.S.  I know MS has no control over getting me a party invite but I’m going to blame them anyway if I don’t get in.

Gmail changed my life and I have no right to complain . . . but this is driving me crazy!

I try to block people (using the chat interface there on the left) and it doesn’t work . . . they still show up and can see I’m online and then when I go back to check they are not blocked.   Plus, people that have more than one email address show up on the chat list several times I guess once for every email address.  That’s annoying but I can deal with it.

It all happened around the time that Google Contacts came out (even before the cool, easy to remember URL).  I wish I could submit a bug report or something.

UPDATE:  I just tried to block again to verify it wasn’t working and now it looks like it *IS* working.  We’ll see though.  Now I just need to figure out who is blocked and who isn’t.

Sheldon

Google Checkout is evil.  No, seriously.  Bad newz!

Whenever I see a site where I can buy something with Google Checkout I know it’s going to be easy and I won’t have to enter my billing address and my shipping address and my cc number and one more password for a site that I’ll never go to again.  It’s too easy.  I know PayPal provides about the same service but for some reason I never ran into Paypal very often.

So just now I just spent $15 at some online retailer and it was too easy . . . if I would have had to sign up for some new account and entered all my data I would have thought twice and never spent that $15.  Damn you Google Checkout!

Sheldon

My wife’s like Hyundai Accent is almost 10 years old and it’s falling apart.  Still runs but we have to start looking.

I want three rows of seats AND 50 mpg but that’s not an option we have to settle for one or the other.  So I start looking at the Prius.

Right from the Toyota website the lowest model with an “Available Solar Roof” is $23,000.  I looked all over to find out how much the solar roof would add to the cost of the car but it was nowhere to be found.

So we decide to go to the dealership . . . it was 112 degrees outside but at least we would be in a showroom.  We walk in and a guy greets us at the door.  He asks if he can do anything and we say we want to look at the Prius and head over to the one in the showroom.  The sticker price is $29,xxx and it’s the Prius IV which has leather seats and all these upgrades we didn’t want.  So we ask for the cheaper Prius and one with the solar roof.  The guy tells us that the one on the showroom floor is the cheapest one he’s got and that none of them have the solar roof option.  I tell him I can’t believe that in AZ where in the summer it can be hotter than 150 F in a car that none of the cars he has have the solar roof.  He said that the solar roof doesn’t work if it’s hotter than 104 F.  I try to get more details like if it’s a safety thing or if somehow the fan can’t keep up with the amount of heat in the car but he doesn’t know much about it.  He does know enough (in that we were not going to buy that day) to send us to the used Prius area to look at the cheaper options.  The used area is outside.  We left and will never go back to San Tan Toyota.

I read “The Machine that Changed the World” recently and it was about how lean production is why Japanese companies were doing so well and would continue to erode the market share of Ford, GM, Chrysler. The book “ends” in the 1980’s and after all this time I thought that more of the principles of the book would be true now.  One is how dealers had to be lean too and respond to customer needs and bring customer feedback all the way up the line to the designers of the next model year.  It may be that way in Japan but in the US the dealers for lean producers (even Ford is probably considered lean in the factory now) are just as backwards at the people at any other dealership.  Why does buying a car have to be such a horrible experience?

Sheldon