Category: software engineer

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Real Web Developers don’t do “Builds”

I don’t want to wait for some MAVEN command to execute.
I just want to refresh the browser!

So this is where Charles Proxy comes to the rescue!
The “Map to Local” feature allows you to quickly map your resources to a live implementation on a production, or development environment.

Really great feature, that saves a lot of time. Even the uploading to a generic hosting step can be skipped when doing changes to static resources. So this tool is good for Enterprises and SMBs.

Usually I would completely avoid extraneous non open source solutions. The KISS principle is something I apply not just to my coding, but to my workflow as well. Unfortunately, I don’t always get to decide what platform and workflow structure I have to interact with. And this where tools like Fiddler and Charles become indispensable in preserving my sanity.

While on the Mac environment, I am currently using Charles Proxy, Fiddler2 also provides this feature, hidden in the AutoResponder tab. Simply activate “Map URLs to local files”. And Fiddler should be able to run on Linux / Mac, although I haven’t tried it yet.

Check it out http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler/help/video/default.asp

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Mobile Web

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Maximiliano Firtman. An amazing speaker who kept my attention the entire time.
He really validated my perspective on mobile web. That even though it’s a complete fuster cluck when it comes to devices, screens, features, and may be an exercise in complete futility because as soon as your done coding everything is going to change anyway, you still can’t idly sit back and do nothing.

Though many of my co-workers were joking that his talk made them depressed about the current state of the mobile web, I really found it enjoyable, because he echoed back many of my own viewpoints regarding Responsive Web Design, system architecture, and even how job duties or roles should be defined. And since great minds think alike, I recommend you check out his books. They will reveal lots of great resources. And illuminate niches in capturing users, and getting a better ROI, when it comes to creating a mobile version of your website.

Spoiler alert, there is no easy way to go about creating a mobile version of your site. And as craftsmen, we have to first painstakingly measure, and remeasure, before we put our tools to work. Keep in mind, this gentleman has been doing web programming since 1995, and has been a subject matter expert in mobile web design since 2000, during the days of WML, and WAP.

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Parallel Processing in PHP?

So we have this requirement in our project to start up a “thread” of execution asynchronously.

First we had to come to an agreement that it can’t be done with multi-threading, but instead has to be done with multiple processes.  We can’t have our controller executing a thread, and waiting around for it to finish in memory.

This will leave a process living on the system that we don’t necessarily need. Although now that I think about it, it may have the visual effect of fulfilling our requirement, its not a good overall design.

What we really need is to start an external process that will execute not as a child of the current process.So we have tried it a couple of different ways.

pcntl_fork which doesnt work with Apache php module, so we have to redeploy as a FastCGI.

system()  call sending the shell into the background, which seems to be not working right now.

And the two things I coded in but never tested, proc_open and popen.

Now we are not trying to achieve true parallel processing, and utitlizing the computer’s multiple processes. Just a simple outside process.

Stay tuned, we’ll let you know.

_______________

The answer was popen with &> dev/null & in the command string.

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Innovation through Miscommunication

Funny story right. A friend of mine is working with some interesting people right, and he tells me about this graphic/web designer, who was asked to make a drop down during the daily standup. So my friend is telling me about how he is doing a total facepalm cause this guy is estimating the addition of a drop down as an eight hour task, right. I mean, that was all that was there, find a space on the page, design a niche spot in photoshop maybe, where this drop down will go nicely and contain some hard coded values. I gotta say, I agree with my buddy cause you think drop down you think select tag. Bada bing Bada boom. Heck the wireframe had a freaking select tag based drop down in it. But apparently the designer didn’t quite get it, so it took him a while to even answer back. He took like 5 minutes to make sure what he was supposed to do, looking all confused and the rest of the team totally accepted his estimate. So about 8 hours into his task, it becomes apparent that he is actually making a fly out pane that drops from the top! And my friend tells me its beautiful. With a great design, and nice tween, a great value added to the project.

But who would have thought it, that what someone else might interpret as a miscommunication, is actually innovation!

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Dell Suffering: A Scanner Darkly

lol. Okay that’s a dirty trick that should get me some traffic. 🙂

Anyways. The printer is finally up on the network and working great. I couldn’t be happier with that right now.
But I am stuck at a new problem. I can’t configure the scanner to ‘Scan to PC’ or to ‘Scan to FTP’ correctly.
Oh sure, there is a drop down in the printer’s web interface and tool box software.
But the drop down only gives you the choice of which do you wish to use, SMB / FTP, changing the selection doesn’t make input boxes appear or anything.
You would think the printer is not psychic, and needs to have host, username, and password information entered somewhere.

But alas, I am left in a Death Cap Daze, staring at the printer, my senses and cognitive abilities distorted, and like Keanu Reeves, all I can do is utter a: ‘Woohh.’

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Dell Suffering

Yes, I know.

I complain A LOT.

But when you waste like an hour trying to get your 1355cnw printer on the wireless network, what else are you going to do!
First, the printer itself:

I can’t make heads or tails of the experience / display / setup process. Its horrid. I feel like I’m using an interface from the 80’s.
Not just in design of the external panel, or buttons, or other hardware components. But the over experience itself. The constant restarts, the non responsive menu.
This is poor product design from the soul to the heart of the printer and even the external support for the product, the dell website, has a horrible user experience.

So second poor product from dell, their website:

I believe the dell team should realize that the first page result for the search query “1355cnw drivers” results as the product detail / buy page being the first result.
You would think that a product’s detail page would contain on it, all pertinent links to the product. Such as the drivers. The word drivers is no where easily found above the fold, but it does exist in the footer.

So having not found a direct link to the specific drivers, I clicked back, and went on to the second result.

But this was the download page for the Mac version. At least I am assuming its the mac version because it has ‘_Mac’ in the name. No where does it say for which type platform or version or processor type on the download page.

Wait, it gets worse!

So having to go to the driver downloads home, I try to search for the printer. I choose  ‘Select product from my products’ or a link to that says something to that effect.  The resulting page is a login form. I am thinking that once I login into dell, they will know what printer I bought. But the list is empty, even after I click on it, and login. I am stuck staring at a page with almost nothing on it. So I go back and select ‘Choose from product list’ and begin to refine the search down.

Finally I arrive at my product download page, select three items to download, which is also a f*king confusing page as list multiple drivers with confusing labeling system, and get prompted with an ‘INSTALL OUR DOWDNLOADER  ON YOUR SYSTEM’ prompt.

G*d Dang it.  Oh, man, I am just trying to scan a check so I can start my contract with KForce, and a routine printer installation has become a nightmare.

I have to download, before I can download. Dell, KISS my shiny metal a**.

 

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From Bill Maher’s Blog

The Endth Degree

By Bill Maher

Is going to college still even worth it? College grads are coming out with degrees, yes – and herpes – but also with student loan debt totaling $60,000, $80,000, $100,00. These kids haven’t even gotten started in their careers and they’re already saddled with what’s tantamount to a full mortgage. In this sucky economy, graduates find themselves back in their old bedrooms at their parents’ homes, taking jobs in the service industry that they could have gotten without a college degree.

…

Wouldn’t a bright, industrious kid be better off in this economy to just jump into the job market and try to excel through merit?

[full article]

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Grails is Hard

It really is difficult to get used to Grails.

Is “copy paste” really that EVIL that we must obliterate it from the programmers tool kit?

I could have copy pasted my way to a CRUD ten times faster, then trying to manage it with Grails.

It took my co-workers a lot of time to figure out “cascading” and critical ORM concepts.

I find myself regenerating views, and copy pasting my changes back in, every time I want to change the domain class.

Just doesn’t feel like a mature Web Framework.

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Mitsubishi I Facebook page

I did a couple of days of freelancing over at Possible Word Wide. A consultancy group down in Culver City. Basically they were using this awesome software called Buddy Media to do all the heavy lifting for the mitsubishi i facebook page. Well I got a call from Jon, a recruiter at silversearch, and he told me that they needed an emergency person to fill the vacuum left by an absentee designer. So I had a chance to check out BuddyMedia and tweek the quizes, polls, and all the other features and design aspects of their facebook page.

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Interviews: Sodahead and Disney

How exciting, I got a 1pm meeting today with Sodahead. I blew my chance to hook up with VC funded start up three years ago. I just didn’t know enough about MVC, and ORM, and Agile Development. The same problem occurred at Disney and Varient.

Varient didn’t like me because I had never seen ->assign(‘name’,$value) statements before. And I totally flunked one of their questions, “Create a left hand menu with 3 random links selected from a database”. I was so amped the night before, and crashing so hard that day, I went into my own world of .. use rnd() and use a loop to get 3 unique id numbers. when the answer was “select * from links order by rand limit 3”.

Sodahead didn’t like me because I didn’t know about Agile Development, or Scrum, and I had no clue what ORM, or object relational mapping is. What was I supposed to say? I mean, we didn’t have main stream frameworks at Bill McCaffrey’s setup, and their servers were getting 2 billion page view’s a month. Bill taught me that the best most efficient way to extend PHP is with C. He also taught me, screw oracle, write your own middleware, in C.

I hope to have changed this precedent, and today I will find out, as I walk into a Django backend and YUI frontend shop, Sodahead.com
And then do a phone screening with Disney.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.