Author: bryan

Being a subscriber [either by email or RSS] to various sites, i get a plethora of handy hints each morning which i archive, either physically or mentally- depending on the juiciness of the hint. Over time, i have noticed that the number of code samples being published daily is increasing. Some are new, some not. Others; interesting twists on old concepts and every once in a while, a real gem. Regardless of their subjective quality, it is encouraging to see the larger developer community thriving and eager to share. Yet, not without it’s a funny little twist.

It’s easy enough to code and it’s also getting harder 🙂 Gotta love paradoxes. In getting easier to code, it’s getting easier to do the cool stuff that used to take “rocket-scientists” many lines of code and various libraries to get right. It was fragile work and the versions between languages, compilers, linked libraries and even OS’es sometimes, had to be just right. Not so much anymore though. But gettting the fragile stuff right taught you things you didn’t know you needed to know. And on the plus, your application failed fairly quickly [yes, that’s a plus], keeping that feedback loop tight. Now, that feedback tends towards the false-positive.

Applications take longer to fail because the semi-automatic cleanup of resources and layers of abstraction [framework of a framework of a framework] do their best to hide the fragile stuff away. They’re not perfect [yet] but we do rely on them to the point that we can end up writing code with “unknown” consequences [to ourselves that is]. Particularly when we do something outside the majority solution scope. More than it being a problem for us, in our enthusiasm, word is spread too quickly and it becomes a problem for someone else too. Hence an equally growing number of “You did what?!” and support forums 🙂

And this is where it also gets harder because the framework of the framework of the framework is so overloaded to accommodate every conceivable situation that the volume of required interacting objects increases. And it’s knowing the nuances of each object which is not always easy to do, particularly if you’re not working with it every day. So when your brain hits upon an ingenious little trick, how sure can you be about the assumptions the frameworks below you made about your neat little implementation?

Nonetheless, the ecosystem of sharing we have created thus far is well balanced with a lot of diligent watchers out there making good catches and as enthusiastically sharing the gotchas. It’s keeping that balance in harmony which is interesting as the increasing number of developers communicate their increasing learnings in an increasing technology set within the increasing scope of business possibilities. All this, within the increasing number of mediums in which to communicate…

Of course, the disclaimers about the code not guaranteed to be working in a production environment, yadah yadah yadah, are all good and fine… but you do need to take responsibility for what you publish 🙂

Experience with service providers over the years has taught me one thing and that is that they all share the same common philosophy:
“We are not responsible for the service we provide you”

Telkom, the South African telecommunications monopoly has this in their terms and conditions, amidst a bunch of other CYA [cover your ass]:
“Telkom may provide hyperlinks to websites not controlled by Telkom (“target sites”) and such hyperlinks do not imply any endorsement, agreement on or support of the content, products and/or services of such target sites”

So, more than just not being responsible for the service they provide you, it seems they are not even responsible for their own website 😮 How many other companies out there do the same? And then we perplex at the breakdown in the fabric of society. It comes as no surprise really when the public examples are so insipid… aaah, but that itself is another discussion.

Vodacom too has it’s fair share of CYA. I’ve had *issues* with the software they provided [there is no alternative] for monitoring data usage. On more than one occassion i’ve been short-changed 80MB-100MB. Their customer care [less] response: The software we provide you cannot be used to reliably track data usage. Again. Another weak and, quite frankly, pathetic excuse- in the sense that is “so miserable as to be ridiculous”.

ADT, a security provider also suffers the symptoms of this modern day lukewarm customer [dis]-orientated behaviour. After waiting outside our house, in the rain, at night, for 45 minutes for their patrol vehicle to respond- we demanded an explanation. That was weeks ago. Still no word after many phone calls. Again, it seems that they are not responsible for the service they provide.

Edgars, yet another clueless organisation, allowed my mom to purchase a gift card for me which had no credit on it 🙂 Again, that was my problem. What i have had to go through to NOT have this problem resolved, is unreal. The rest of the list is thick with these weak-willed corporations who make it your problem once you’ve signed a deal with them. And read the fine print. You will see that any problem that does arise: eventually becomes yours. Afterall, you made the decision to deal with them, so deal with it 🙂

‘Cos remember:
“We are not responsible for the service we provide you”

Disclaimer: the author of this blog cannot be held responsible for any thoughts, messages and opinions expressed herein… yeah, riiiight! puhlease 🙂 imagine that? what would be the point of saying anything if you weren’t held responsible for it?

It’s perhaps appropriate that i should update my blog with a post on Software Updates. Been quite busy with some exciting delivery my side along with getting a new machine mid-iteration, which is a decent distraction: T60 2.4 Duo. VERY Nice machine and overall impressed with, well, just about everything- particularly ThinkVantage. But in getting my machine production-ready, the sheer volume of updates that i had to do was *staggering* [slightly exaggerated] which got me thinking about my Gran…

Approaching 80, she’s actually about 60. She emails and uploads photos from her digi cam and keeps track of her budget using Excel. Not bad for a soon-to-be octogenarian. But how often does she update her PC?

First, there’s the OS updates- in this case: Windows Update. Then there’s the driver updates for anything particular on your machine. Then there’s manufacturer-specific system management updates and that’s before you get to your “third-party” application software updates like anti-virus, for example. And these are not small updates either.

Windows Updates: about 21 in total [many MB] and the machine came preloaded XPSP2.
Driver updates: ATI as an example: 47MB! Thats’ not including updated drivers for fingerprint readers, wireless drivers and yadah yadah.
System Management Software Updates: Yes, ThinkVantage itself needs to be updated before you can use it to check for updates 🙂
AntiVirus updates: using AVG and that totalled about 15MB from my current installation. Could have used preloaded Symantec but the updates are just as heavy.

Granted, not all these updates are critical- but how grokkable is determining severity levels based on the information presented:

“No, ma’am the ATI update is not critical, but we do recommend it” – or-
“that update for XP 64-bit is optional, so don’t worry about it.” Which means what [to my Gran]?

With all these updates needing to take place, and getting back to my Gran… What happens if i DON’T run these updates regularly? And another thing: WHY are there so many updates?

Is the software just poor quality?
Are all these companies finally adopting Agile and releasing incremental “enhancements” as opposed to fixes? 🙂
IS QA just getting better at what they do and finding more and more problems?
Are systems become so complex that inter-operability and coding for it is laying a foundation for latent problems?
Is software been pushed out the door because the market has become so aggressive that an incremental release strategy helps keep the company competitive?
All of the above?

Too many questions for a Saturday morning, but i wonder just how many new PC/laptop owners install updates knowingly? And if they don’t know they’re actually updating [preconfigured under the guise of “user-friendliness”] if they notice their bandwidth getting hogged every so often?

…there’s a surgeon doing a remote heart transplant operation and s/he accidently removes the kidney as well because the system software was not configured to update automatically… 🙂

I think we still got quite a way to go before we can comfortably integrate technology easily into our lives…

Guy recently referred me to an article on how user’s read the web. It’s implications were poignant when mixed with the motive of acceptance and market share.

We know the most efficient way to consume online information is through the technical process known as “scanning”. From emails to advertising, knowledge to news, online users inundated with information have established a coping mechanism of scanning. As presenters of online education material, do we acquiesce to the the masses and achieve acceptance and market share by presenting radically shortened content? Or do we draw the line and encourage proper reading habits through presenting albeit verbose; accepted educational tautology?

A different discussion, but one closer to this thing called software development; how much of what we do, as a software community at large, results in encouraging bad behaviour?

When you sing, you begin with doh-ray-me, when you code you begin with “what say ye?”. Indeed, what sayest the project investors? Beginning with the processes we choose to manage and define our project, how much of what we do becomes an AntiPattern? Further, do we aspire to eradicate that strangling weed in future projects. This is not a process-related condition, it’s a human behaviour condition and so it affects the traditional plan-driven, the agile and the anything in between processes.

Language support too has its fair share of nasty accommodations. I recently ended on the guilty side of calling a pure virtual function from the constructor. Oops. Now, in C++, you’re likely to get a nasty dialog box or even better: a compiler warning. With C# and Java though, although not a recommended design [and sometimes classified as unpredictable, depending on whose documentation/interpretation/blog you’re reading], the memory model does allow you to get away with it- and what’s worse: all your tests will pass! 🙂

Lets look at browser differences and XML data islands. They make life very easy [for simple things]. Building that into a dynamic-content interactive online small-medium enterprise application has great potential for building another BLOB. Granted, anything can become a BLOB if you you don’t manage it properly. In this context, as handy as they are, are not the norm for this project which implies extra process burden in terms of managing it’s lifecycle if included. So without even going into CSS differences, browser standards can breed their own demons. And considering CSS support, IE lets you get away with a lot, but at what cost to your career as a designer?

Database engines suffer the same potential for disaster. There’s a standard which is not always designed for rapid development and then there’s the exception to the standard [eg. self-incrementing fields] which does make development a little easier. Again, at what cost?

Of course, the counter-argument is concept focused on pioneering; trend setting and evolutionary. So you can, as with everything, form an opinion first and then pick your arguments to justify your position. Be that as it may, CheeseOriented debate is quite tiresome.

In your arena you need to decide what’s ultimately detrimental and control that within your area of responsibility. In a largely collaborative software community the decision makers that defend or propose standards determine the greater good. They engineer the breeding ground for the programming quality of the future. No wonder these standards issues are so hotly contested. Regardless of how much is motivated by purity of intent and how much by market share opportunity, we will ultimately be forced to work with the standard of quality we didn’t fight for.

What makes one language more popular than another? Why would a language like ‘C’ be so visible and popular amidst today’s advancing 4th generation languages? Methinks the same reasons why English is such a popular communication language today…

Tear and tear. Look the same but quite different. Tear has more in common, phonetically, with bare while the other is closely related to beer. Hair and hare. Red and read, the past tense of read. Break and its past tense broke, yet brake and braked, as applied to a motor vehicle which came to a sudden stop.

So we have a range of words that break all the rules and it has been said, more than once, that there are more exceptions to the rule than not in the English language. And let’s not even consider the variances in English, which we all assent to being, by and large, English. American English, British English, South African English and then Spanglish and the like.

Yet with all it’s complexities, it’s gaining popularity around the world. One reason [out of many] why it continues to be so popular is because you can do so much with it and still be understood.

I sed tht i’d b l8. w8 4 me. c u sn!

There are times when de-intellectualising a conversation can be welcomed.

In most other languages you can’t even do half of what i’ve just achieved above. Yet, most anyone reading would understand what’s been typed. And for the non-legalistic in us, that’s enuff. And more. It’s a sign that we can explore boundaries of that one human domain of ours which is so sacred and yet so vulgar: communication.

So if a programming language, regardless of its complexities, gives us the freedom to create within itself, it will prove to be popular. Classes, templates [aka. generics], polymorphism, reflection; facilitating the art of creating in order to communicate is of paramount signifigance in terms of a language’s popularity. But it depends on “what” you want to create.

Adressing memory, pointers, embedding assembly; different kinds of creational facilities but again, oriented towards enabling your creative side in effecting communication.

C#, C, C++, Java, php, perl, vb, sql, python, shell, delphi, ruby, fortran, smalltalk, erlang, cobol, tcl… they all remain popular, within their own right, contrary to any “silver bullet” promotions in any one particular language because they continue to provide the programmers with their creativity fix as part of getting the job done. When the language becomes so inhibiting that there is one and only one way to do something, it shall quickly die a welcome death.

“What do you mean i can only ever have one type of Class: sealed?!” 😮

Rules are meant to be broken, or so the popular expression goes. There’s something about that phrase which strikes a chord of assent within ourselves. There’s also another chord which repels strongly and begs for rules to be followed. As a result, we swing between judgements as to wether or not a rule should be followed or broken depending on circumstance. We confuse this swing with perspective because we have failed to implement a principle concerning rules. And we fail to implement principles because we fail to understand the intent of the rules.

From software processes to religion, politics to social behaviour, there are rules. Divined or ordered, these rules become established within a context and serve as an education for acceptable behaviour. From the start of implementation, two extreme camps set up early to hold the rules in dynamic tension. The legalists and the liberalists. Those who obey, to the letter, and those who don’t.

In the those who don’t obey category, some break rules because there’s another rule which justifies their position. Others break the rules through ignorance and others through a conscious anti-social drive. In the those who do obey rules category, there are also interesting differences.

Some will cross their t’s and dot their i’s so carefully, they end up missing the purpose of the rule itself. The rule itself becomes the end. The reason for the rule’s existence forgotten and not as important as actually keeping the rule. Others will keep the rules steadfastly in the hope that the end will be achieved through the means. The motives for any one position [and this brief list is by no means assuming it’s complete] are numerable and can even be the same motive for different positions. So what are the essentials of the rule?

Before the rule, there was a condition. In order to [usually] discourage the growth of that condition, a rule is established to improve that condition. When that rule starts to be applied outside of that condition, or is contrasted with another rule, more rules are entrenched to further clarify an increasingly complex set of conditions.

So, if we get back to the essence and reason for the rule in the first place, a decision to “break” or follow the rule becomes simpler. It can also take more courage [either way] since it could fly in the face of a traditional interpretation; however wrong that interpretation may be. But challenging rules and breaking them are 2 very different actions that may actually manifest with the same result.

Now that the essence of the rule is defined, a decision needs to be made regarding its worthiness in keeping. But that’s a moral decision based on belief systems and is impacted by who exactly the rule-giver is; and that’s another discussion…