- Reg Braithwaite, Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth

Skip to instructions

Back to the Linux EEE Box: I didn't expect to have a problem (neither with the OS nor changing it), but the "User'   s Manual" came with instructions for Windows XP only. Booting to the Red Flag Linux distribution was a chore. I had to:

1. Figure out that you login with username "root" and no password
2. Thereupon be presented with the command prompt
3. Find out which desktop environment it uses and try to start it, unsuccessfully

I knew the thing didn't have an optical drive, but I'm so accustomed to that process that I downloaded and burned an ISO of lubuntu anyway. After some self-imposed hassle of locating a USB thumbdrive, I was able to install a bootable copy onto it. Then I plugged it into the EEE Box.

What happened?


Art as Idea: Nothing, Joseph Kosuth, 1968 /Photo: NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

You'd have thought that plugging in the bootable USB drive would be enough. It didn't find it. I checked the BIOS, and it was set to use USB as the first boot device. I tried a few different configurations before stumbling on the epiphany that solved all of my problems:



Even though I had planned on starting with a fresh install of a *nix, I was stunned at how obscured it was, despite the fact that it turned out super-easy. Here are the steps I used:

• Download the Pen Drive Linux Universal USB-Installer (optionally download your distro of choice -- if not, it will allow you the option to do so)
• Use the installer above to put your linux distro on the USB stick
• Plug the USB stick into the EEE Box and (re)boot it, pressing F8 on the keyboard while it loads
• Select the USB bootup option that appears
• Install that version of Linux as you'd normally expect

Since it took me so long to find my answers, I'm hoping this helps you find yours. Let me know in the comments below.

Some links in this post are affiliate links!

(And don't ask me how sad it makes me feel that my favorite book as a kid has only a 240px image online. I need to find my copy and scan it.)

But just like its more enlightened brethren, tech support consists of troubleshooting. In fact, it should be the first line of defense to keep your coders coding and off the phone. Who wants them to man the phones? Certainly not the programmers. Certainly not management. Tech support is a cost center, not a customer service opportunity.

That's a lie of course. It's a bajillion times more likely that you'll sell to an existing customer than someone else¹. So why do we see such poor customer service? Especially in our own industry?

Perhaps when you have a virtual monopoly over a market like most cable companies or utilities in a given locale, you can afford to have poor customer service. The cable sphere seems to be opening up, what with satellite TV and internet and now AT&T and Verizon offering television and decent-to-good internet packages. Even still, AT&T's UVerse has its own problems, I've heard, and (at least personally) I've not witnessed the kind of customer service that competition promises with regards to cable TV and internet access.

Is tech support really that bad? Maybe it's not. There are some folks that have decent starting advice. Even if it's not How To, at least Some Ways is better than no ways.

The fact is we tend to treat support like a second class citizen. It's a position we want to fill with a minimum-wage worker (or less, if we can outsource it) who has no expertise, no clue, and doesn't care to learn the product since he can get a job in the fast food industry at about the same rate. And with no stress!

It makes it worse that we don't even want to take the time to train him, since it would take away from the productive code-writing time to do so.

The person we want to treat as an ape or worse always seems expendable. We treat them so. Should they be?



I say no. Not only am I a big fan of dogfooding, I feel like Fog Creek's giving customer service people a career path nowadays matches a lot of my ANSI artist peers' experiences from back in the day. Smart people start in support, and they can move themselves up in the organization to play more "key roles."

Bill puts on a headset, sits down, and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Microsoft Product Support, William speaking. How can I help you?"

Bill talks with the customer, collects the details of the problem, searches in the product support Knowledge Base, sifts through the search results, finds the solution, and patiently walks the customer through fixing the problem.

The customer is thrilled that William was able to fix the problem so quickly, and with such a pleasant attitude. Bill wraps up the call. "And thank you for using Microsoft products."

At no point did Bill identify himself as anything other than William. The customer had no idea that the product support engineer who took the call was none other than Bill Gates.

Like Bill.

I don't think it needs to be a full-time thing, but it certainly helps if programmers are their own support team. Like Bruce Johnson who posted that linked message, I work on a small team and can vouch: it's downright embarrassing to have to support our customers. I'm glad to do it, but when it happens, more than likely I've got to take blame for the problem I'm dealing with. You know how hard I try to make sure my code works as expected before I deploy it?

"OMG I'm sorry, that's my fault, I'll fix it for you right away." Can you get better support than that?

I'm not so sure I'd have tried that hard without the customer experience pushing me.

I think I've made my first point: that customer support is customer service is important to the health of your business. While I agree that tech support in the common use of the term is useful to shield your programmers from inane requests, I also recognize the value in having programmers take those calls from time-to-time.

Given that, I do in fact have some do's and do-not's with regards to support. The list here deals mostly with how to be a good support technician for your team, as opposed to the customer. Still, the customer is central to the theory. Although it does not make an exhaustive list, here are four contributions to The General Procedures For Troubleshooting:

1. After listening to the problem description, the first thing to do is recognize whether or not you can solve the problem while the customer is on the phone, or if anyone can. If you can, then do it. If you think only someone else can do it, and work for an organization that has multiple levels of live-support, then escalate it.
   
   If you don't think solving the problem is possible without escalating it to a level of support that won't get to it immediately, thank the customer for reporting the issue, let them know the problem is being worked on, and boogie on to step 2.
   
   
2. As support, the first thing you need to do before escalating the issue is confirm there is an issue, and do it with a test account, not the user's.
   
   It's ridiculous to ask for the user's credentials. Don't do it. If someone were to ask you, "What is your username and password?" what would you think? The average user isn't going to know your query is tantamount stupidity, but if you get someone who is slightly security-conscious, you're going to lose a customer. Hopefully, he's not a representative of your whale.
   
   If anyone found out that you're in the habit of asking users for their passwords, they can easily call anyone who uses your software and get in by just asking. Further, since many people use the same password for everything or many things, that person would also have access to your customers' other sensitive information, wherever it resides.
   
   You can point the blame at your stupid customer for using the same password everywhere they go all you want. You're being just as stupid by opening the door for that type of attack. Further, you should always try to recreate and fix the problem with as little inconvenience to the user as possible. That means doing it with test accounts as opposed to asking the user for theirs, or changing their information.
   
   Keep things simple for the user. Don't jump immediately to using their time to make things easier on the support team. Doing that is lazy at best, sloppy most of the time, and could result in disaster at worst.
   
   
3. After confirming the existence of the problem, provide the steps of how to reproduce it. Give some screen shots. If it's a web app, provide links. Don't constantly send and email and ask the higher levels about it. Doing so once or twice is one thing, but doing it for every request is a time-waster. Just send the email and the next level will get to it when they can. If they don't get to it within the acceptable time-frame for your organization, send a reminder. Include the boss if you need to. But don't do that prematurely (and that's another subject altogether).
   
   
4. Don't jump to conclusions about the source of the problem. Although Abby Fichtner wasn't speaking directly to support ...
   
   
   
   ... This is the opposite of my general approach. The parallel here is code : customer :: you : dumb². I've learned (even if through a bit of self-torture) that I should always look at the code first, if for no other reason than I don't want to be foolishly blaming others when I'm to blame. In the case of support, I've always hated the term "User Error," and that's what the tweet reminds me of.
   
   By framing it as an external problem, we miss an opportunity to teach the user how to use the product, or a chance to improve the product to make sure they can't use it "incorrectly."

What are your thoughts about tech support? What can you contribute to The General Procedures For Troubleshooting?


Notes:

1) I know this statistic, it's even intuitive, but I can't seem to find it online for free. Here's some apparently made-up stats to satisfy you. Go back to what you were reading.

2) "word1 : word2 :: word3 : word4" is SAT (and elsewhere) notation for the analogy "word1 is to word2 as word3 is to word4." See freesat1prep.com for a few examples.

Some links in this post are affiliate links. This message brought to you by the Federal Trade Commission.

I was an expert at ColdFusion. A couple of the guys who I remember racing for "the right answer" are still up there, including one who came after the guys who came after the guys who came after Dain "OMFG do they really have a book on ACM?" Anderson. You might know him. It might be from cfcomet fame.

(I have no clue why my email address from back then says I have no account, nor do I know why I'm no longer listed in the top experts even though I ha(d/ve) the points).

I used to give EE ideas on how to make their service better. I don't mean to sound like an ideaman -- I know ideas are only worth something when they're executed -- but I told them I'd implement the ideas for them. A simple one that I harped on was: instead of getting X number of email notifications on a question, send me the first one, and only send me subsequent emails if I've logged in.

This was before RSS days, so I had no way to stay up-to-date without it (or shittons of irrelevant emails). It wasn't a hard thing to implement. It didn't matter though: my suggestions fell on deaf ears. And the site, as you know, tried to maximize earnings while ensuring it's audience remained pissedoffandalienated.

That's right, when I stopped contributing, EE became an outhouse on the web. I take full credit: when I left, EE began its downfall.

Seeing as you're reading this blog, chances are that you're a programmer. Being such, you probably know how evil ExpertS-exchange became. You (used to) google for a problem, and more often that not, some spammy BS from that site would show up. If you were savvy and in-the-know, you'd not have clicked on it. And if you didn't happen to be paying attention, you'd realize you made that gawdawful click when you saw the page loading, and immediately scroll to the bottom to see the answer.

It was ripe for ripping and easy to pick off. That's a 20-20 hindsight thought. StackOverflow is in the process of taking over EE (if it hasn't by the time you read this). Thankfully.

But the two programmers' questions websites are incidental to this story. Actually, this story is more about business, and recognizing a market and capitalizing on it.

A little while ago, I was looking for content to embed in a high-school course. I thought,



It's still true. But then, at the time of this writing, I was looking for the non-clipboard-screenshot-save-as-file keyboard shortcut on MacOSX.



It looks like a pattern. But it's not yet.





Even though I already play guitar, I was wondering about how I might teach it to my daughter. I was self-taught, so I don't know how I'd go about teaching someone else without feeling like I've crippled them. Later, after spending the evening with teachers and principals, I was thinking about how they accommodate gifted kids.

As you can tell, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. About.com comes up in all these (seemingly?) random cases as an authority answer to the question. What's worse: it's hard enough to tell the ads from the content for someone you'd expect to be savvy on that. Can you imagine the hardship a "normal person" would suffer?



If it's not obvious now, the million dollar idea is to do to About.com what StackOverflow did to Experts-Exchange. I assume About.com has some good content, but it's too hard to tell by looking at it. The position is ripe for the picking. Create an unspamalicious About.com and you're rich.

Tell me about it if you make the attempt. I'll link it here.

Popout
DMX Lightshow - Part 3 from Lorenz Cuno Klopfenstein on Vimeo.

Anselm Bradford took the time to look at PureMVC and learn its underlying architecture.

Marcos Placoná figured out how to program his Sony PSP, and submitted one project for checking time zones, and another for translating common French/English phrases.





Increasing Participation
I got more submissions this year than last year, but it was still small compared to the number of readers who saw the post. There were around 20% fewer people who saw this post as opposed to last year's, but RSS subscribership has gone up around 500%. (Chad Fowler linked to last year's post, which accounts for the difference.)

Last year the ratio of submissions to people who saw the post was about 1/1000, while this year it was 5.7/1000.

What can be done to improve that number? It'd be nice to see 50 in 1000, or perhaps even 100. This year I gave a few suggestions, and judging by the entries, it looks like they were taken to heart.

But I'm not sure if we're at peak interest, or if it can be improved again next year. So here's the question for you: if you saw the post and didn't submit an entry, why not? No time? Prize too weak? Just not interested in the first place? Something else?

Feel free to use the contact form to email me privately if you'd rather not give your reasons in public.

Thanks for any feedback, and major thanks and congratulations to all the contestants! I look forward to seeing your projects again next year!

• What kind of tools are important to you for monitoring a product during maintenance?
  I rely on logs and profiling tools on occasion. I'm really interested to hear from the rest of you about this though.
  
  
• What is important when updating a product that is in production and is being used?
  I'd say it's important not to interrupt service. Surely there must be something else you're getting at?
  
  
• How do you find an error in a large file with code that you cannot step through?
  cout, puts, printf, System.Out.print, Console.Out.WriteLine, and ## have all been useful for me at one time or another.
  
  A good strategy here is to isolate the code that's causing the error by removing code and faking results. By doing that, you can slowly add code back in until the error reappears. Rewrite that part.
  
  
• How can you make sure that changes in code will not affect any other parts of the product?
  Regression tests!
  
  
• How do you create technical documentation for your products?
  Ideally I'd have comments that can be harvested by tools like RDoc or JavaDoc, but times are often less than ideal.
  
  
  
  
• What measures have you taken to make your software products more easily maintainable?
  See my answers to the questions about technical design. Also, having unit tests helps handily.
  
  
• How can you debug a system in a production environment, while it is being used?
  You can read logs if important events are being logged. Profiling tools exist for this purpose, but I don't have experience with any outside of those for use with databases.
  
  
• Do you know what load balancing is? Can you name different types of load balancing?
  One computer acts as the gatekeeper for an array of computers and directs requests to the others to "balance the load" of the entire system.
  
  I'm not familiar with different types, but just guessing I'd assume they have round-robin and need-based load balancing. I'd also presume any other scheduling algorithmic scheme could be applied in load balancing.
  
  I'm more interested to know why this is on the maintenance list of questions. Is it because you've deployed your application and now you need to scale it with hardware?
  
  
• Can you name reasons why maintenance of software is the biggest/most expensive part of an application's life cycle?
  One view is that after you write the first line of code, you begin maintenance. But more in-line with the popular view: it lasts the longest. You may take a month to build a system that will be in production over several years. During that time, defects are found that need to be fixed, business rules may change, or new features may be added.
  
  Also, we suck at writing software.
  
  
  
  
• What is the difference between re-engineering and reverse engineering?
  I didn't know this one. I thought and would have responded that re-engineering would be rebuilding an application with a white box, while reverse engineering would be done through a black box.
  
  According to Wikipedia, who is never wrong,

  The reengineering of software was described by Chikofsky and Cross in their 1990 paper, as "The examination and alteration of a system to reconstitute it in a new form". Less formally, reengineering is the modification of a software system that takes place after it has been reverse engineered, generally to add new functionality, or to correct errors.
  
  This entire process is often erroneously referred to as reverse engineering; however, it is more accurate to say that reverse engineering is the initial examination of the system, and reengineering is the subsequent modification.

How would you answer these questions about software maintenance?

As it turns out, maybe our righteous crusade is not all we'd like to think. Quoth independent artist Ben Weasel:

So the world will always have its Billy Joel's, along with its hot shot Internet sensations of the moment. But what I want to know, again, is who's going to be paying for the recording of all this free music dreamed up by small-timers (which description, if you're not aware, covers most of us)?

And if the answer is "nobody," that means that music made by people who are even a little bit outside the mainstream, off the beaten path, or just plain fucking weird, is going to disappear (save, of course, for those with disposable cash - the hobbyists and the rich kids - but those people tend to make music that people can't even be bothered to download for free).

Long term, this isn't going to work out well for music fans. I'm not scolding. I'm not trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. I just want the emperor's distinct lack of clothing noted: the alleged death of the music industry is in actuality the death of interesting music.

I said the same thing six years ago when I first wrote about this stuff. And what's happened since? Music has become more boring than ever, that's what. Even punk rock has become more mind-numbingly mediocre than I ever remember it being before, and I came of age when bands like Youth Of Today and Corrosion of Conformity were hot shit with the dimbulb set.

I haven't seen so many bands playing it safe and copying what's popular since the skulls and anarchy-symbol craze of 1984. If I hear another band aping the Dillinger Four and shouting their Cookie Monster vocals at me through their hobo beards I may begin to sob.

At the time I was first bemoaning the effect file-sharing was bound to have on the best music, I was informed (rather condescendingly, as I recall) that all those fans who were illegally downloading my music were going to be paying me back in spades via sales of show tickets and merchandise.

And while my showing in that department is dandy at the moment, it certainly hasn't picked up any in the ensuing six years. In fact, merchandise sales are almost exactly the same. Granted, these days that's cause to break out the bubbly and perch a lampshade on the old noggin, but I can't help but notice that this whole file sharing thing hasn't quite worked out as advertised - not just for me, but for any other working musicians I know either.

Now maybe that's all a big, fat coincidence, but it's kind of hard to escape the conclusion that what this is, was, and always will be about is people getting something for nothing. It's not about crazed rock fandom.

It's about as gobbling up as much free stuff as you can with little regard for what it is or might be, and virtually no patience at all when it comes to evaluating the goods because, after all, if it's free, what can it really be worth? And the reason people are doing it isn't because any sort of revolution has occurred; it's not a consequence of us poor artists having been unshackled from the chains of the evil record labels and their PR teams and A&R men and distributors and lawyers and accountants.

It's happening because people can steal music easily and without any real risk of getting caught. That's the way the music business is these days and while I'm not happy about it I'm well aware there's no point in fighting it. I refuse to allow people to dress it up as something noble when it's nothing more than simple greed and theft, but don't get the idea that I'm raging against the dying of the light; I assure you that at this stage the cupboard has been rendered so bare that record royalties are more or less a moot point.

I'd be happy to give away future albums, settling for crossing my fingers and praying for the odd licensing deal, if only I could figure out how to pay for the damned recordings!

(bolding and paragraph additions (for readability) by yours truly)

What say you?

You've heard the horror stories of Vista. Perhaps you've even experienced them?

I've only been using Vista "heavily" for a few months, but my experience hasn't been the same as what I've heard and read from others. In fact, I kind of like Vista. To this point, I've had only 3 problems:

1. My second monitor will not run at its native, high resolution while in Windows. Instead, it runs at much too low a resolution, and the downgrade is choppy looking. It ran correctly one time, but never since.
2. I cannot simply connect a projector and present - I have to boot up with the projector connected for it to be recognized.
3. I can't get SQL Server 2005 to install the database server

From what I can tell, two of those can be chalked up to Apple's NVidia Bootcamp drivers for Vista. I think that because I know people who have the older MacBook with the ATI card and both of those things work fine in Vista. For me, even trying to present from MacOS caused my computer to freeze.

Eventually, I'm going to have to get the presentation thing fixed, and the 2nd monitor resolution is so bad I never use it on Vista, so that will need to be fixed too. The SQL Server problem bothers me from a principled standpoint, but it doesn't break up my day to day work since I can easily use the client tools to connect to a different SQL server instance.

That's been my experience. Maybe Vista only works on a Macbook.

What has been your experience? If you've had these problems, how have you fixed them?

1. JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA: An awesome IDE for Java. So great, I don't mind spending the $249 (US) and using it over the free Eclipse. The Ruby plugin is not too shabby either, the license for your copy is good for your OSX and Windows installations, and you can try it free for 30 days. Martin Fowler thinks IntelliJ changed the IDE landscape. If you work in .NET, they also have ReSharper, which I plan to purchase very soon. Now if only we could get a ColdFusion plugin for IntelliJ, I'd love it even more.
   
   
2. Programming Ruby, Second Edition: What many in the Ruby community consider to be Ruby's Bible. You can lower the barrier of entry for your favorite programmer to using Ruby, certainly one of the funner languages a lot of people are loving to program in lately. Sometimes, I sit and think about things to program just so I can do it in Ruby.
   
   If they've already got that, I always like books as gifts. Some of my favorites from this year have been: Code Complete 2, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices which has a great section on object oriented design principles, and of course, My Job Went to India. I have a slew of books I've yet to read this year that I got from last Christmas (and birthday), so I'll have to list those next year.
   
   
3. Xbox 360 and a subscription to XNA Creator's Club (through Xbox Live Marketplace - $99 anually) so they can deploy their games to their new Xbox. This is without a doubt the thing I'd want most, since I got into this whole programming thing because I was interested in making games. You can point them to the getting started page, and they could make games for the PC for free, using XNA (they'll need that page to get started anyway, even if you get them the 360 and Creator's Club membership to deploy to the Xbox).
   
   
4. MacBook Pro and pay for the extra pixels. I love mine - so much so, that I intend to marry it. (Ok, not that much, but I have been enjoying it.) The extra pixels make the screen almost as wide as two, and if you can get them an extra monitor I'd do that too. I've moved over to using this as my sole computer for development, and don't bother with the desktops at work or home anymore, except on rare occasions. You can run Windows on it, and the virtual machines are getting really good so that you ought not have to even reboot to use either operating system.
   
   Even if you don't want to get them the MacBook, a second or third monitor should be met with enthusiasm.
   
   
5. A Vacation: Programmers are notoriously working long hours and suffering burnout, so we often need to take a little break from the computer screen. I like SkyAuction because all the vacations are package deals, there's often a good variety to choose from (many different countries), most of the time you can find a very good price, and usually the dates are flexible within a certain time frame, so you don't have to commit right away to a certain date.

Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating it, and thanks to all you who read and comment and set me straight when I'm wrong - not just here but in the community at large. I do appreciate it.

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share (or ones you'd like to strike from this list)?

1. My IBM Thinkpad T42 worked just fine for most of what I do (everything until last week)
2. Apple made me think it wasn't good for developers with its commercials making fun of us

But, with my class in game development with XNA, I needed a beefier graphics card than I currently have, so I figured I spend the extra dough and get the laptop a lot of developers I respect have been raving about.

The first thing I'll need to do is get over the sticker-shock. After that, it should be here in 2-3 days. Then I'll install Windows and Quicksilver. (How ironic is it that I'm getting a Mac and the first thing I plan to do is install Windows?)

So aside from the link above to the Pragmatic OSXer blog, does anyone have any can't-live-without Mac websites/resources?

Next, I'm looking for some time-boxing software. I saw this but didn't give it a try yet. I'm not really in need of its many features though. I just want a way to set tasks for specific times for each day of the week and have it repeat itself weekly. It should also reside in the system tray and just alert me when a box of time begins or ends. It would be nice if there was a way to sync it up with other computers over the internet (I regularly work on three machines), but that's not a firm requirement.

Do you know of anything? Maybe I should write it myself? (yeah, when I pull some time out of ...)

And just so you don't feel you've left empty-handed, I'll include this quote from Alberto Savoia at the blog for the book Beautiful Code:

The odds of finding truly beautiful code in most production systems seem to be on par with the odds of finding a well-read copy of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering in Paris Hilton's apartment.

Thanks for the help!

Here's a test: quickly pick two things in front of you, say this web browser and your annoying, smelly friend Rupert. Now close your eyes and imagine different ways to combine them.

If you're stuck, here are three:

1. Rupert with a minimize button
2. An annoying, smelly web browser
3. Web browsing on, or with, Rupert's face

Now while these combos might not be useful, good, or even practical, they're certainly creative. Adding a third element, say a gallon of jolt cola, might yield even more interesting combinations (a caffeine overdosed smelly web browser infused with Rupert's annoying personality).

The essay really got me thinking, so I considered it worth sharing with the rest of you. Enjoy.

Just as tabbed browsing makes holding form state with sessions obsolete, it's doing the same to the "time spent on site" metric.

Perhaps its not completely obsolete, but the way I browse - if I've visited your site and you see a huge increase in time spent for that page, its probably because I go through sites and open links in new tabs and return to the opened links often-times hours later. Sometimes I leave them open all night to return to first thing in the morning. I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one either.

It would be interesting to note the browsing habits of the general population, and only then, when we take into account the "tab effect" could you consider time-spent a valuable metric. Of course, if I'm the only one that browses that way, I don't make enough of an impact on highly-visited sites. But if a good portion of the people do? Let's hope advertisers aren't paying for that.

In the first nine chapters, Chad tells us how to choose the right market. So for my first week, he addresses supply and demand: first we want to search jobs in our home country, as well as those available offshore. Compare the results and highlight skills in demand in your home country that nobody (or very few people) offshore is offering.

Then, you just need to become good at those technologies that are in demand but aren't yet available offshore (or in high supply). This is simple economics.

To get a head start, you might want to watch the alpha geeks and see what they're doing, but you can probably afford to start a little farther along on the curve.

Sounds easy enough. So, start googling. Better yet, why doesn't someone create a service that performs this search and analysis for us?

Anyway, he told us about a couple of similar (yet less powerful or feature-complete) applications for Windows, one of which was Colibri. I like it.

I just hit Ctrl-Space and up pops my little search box, I start typing and it finds the program I'm looking for after a couple of keystrokes. No more traipsing through my system trying to remember that Remote Desktop Connection is at Start → Programs → click down arrows to expand options → Accessories → Communication.

Instead, I type "Ctrl-Space Rem" and there it is:


I hit Enter and it opens. How much quicker is that?!

I plan to blog Neal's sessions better when I've got a bit more time, but I wanted to get this quick note out about Colibri because I'm quickly finding it to be indispensable in my toolkit as well.

For web developers, InfoQ let us know aboutBrowser Shots, which is a service that will test your web sites in tons of different browsers and present screen shots to you. It lets you choose whether to enable Flash, Javascript, or certain media players, and allows you to set the color depth and screen resolution. It's quite slow at the moment (set it and come back in four hours or so), but it shows us what can be possible! (Screenshots of codeodor.com, as they are coming in more will pop up)

Also, InfoQ completed its first official year. It was "pre-released" (I forget the exact term they used) I think in May 2006, but it went officially live a year ago Friday. Congrats to Floyd Marinescu and the entire InfoQrue! (And they have a lot of relevant news (to me) I'll be posting links to today)

Does that make sense? I kept it in very high level language, but I'm happy to answer any questions regarding smaller details.

Update: I noticed a slight bug in the algorithm. The line "Read one record from each file" was inside the last loop, but should have been outside of it. The post was changed to reflect the correct way to do it.

Update 2: Here's the Java source code for external merge sort.

1. I'm equally competent in dynamic and static languages, though I've always felt more at home in dynamic ones
2. Pursuant to (1), I wonder if some people are just more dynamically minded than others, so they may excel better in those languages that fit their model of thinking
3. I wondered if the author of the Hacknot post was just using some poetic license in apparently writing in the style he was criticizing the weenie fanboys of doing, but I didn't ask because I didn't see where I could leave a comment

Your thoughts?

• In the configuration files, whitespace before the property in question matters. Took me a moment to figure out why simply uncommenting the lines in question wasn't working, but removing the whitespace did it for me.
• I didn't think the in-file documentation was especially clear regarding how to limit access to certain projects to certain users, so I'll describe my scenario:
  
  Lil' José Ramirez needs access to all the projects, while his cousin Joe Bob needs access to only one project. Each of them should have a password and username as set in the conf/passwd directory. So here it is (this was straightforward, minus the whitespace issue):
  
  [users]
  jramirez = password!
  joebob = pword2
  
  Then, in the conf/authz file, I have this:
  
  #root folder
  [/]
  jramirez = rw
  * =
  
  [/joebob_project]
  joebob = rw
  jramirez = rw * =

As far as I can tell, jramirez needs to be put in each project, otherwise it only lets him use unprotected directories. I know it's really simple, but like I said, I didn't think the directions were as easy as they might have been.

I first learned regular expressions in a theoretical automata context. I understand them really well in that context, almost to a "reflex" capability, where there wouldn't be much thought to coming up with one, or figuring out what strings could be generated from one. But, when I try to put them into practice, I'm not as quick, nor am I as comfortable as I should be with them. This is particularly striking, because from what I can tell, there should be no difference between my theoretical knowledge and practically using it (aside, perhaps for some syntax issues). This has shown up in a couple of instances lately. In particular, one I found funny instance I found was an attribute-value pair. There was a bug in CFEclipse where, when you went to edit a tag in a dialogue, it would not correctly fill out any attribute which had a space in its value. Well, it was simply a problem of splitting on the space, as I recall. So I posted a regular expression I thought would work, but which I couldn't get to do so. It really was simple: one or more spaces, followed by one or more letters, followed by zero or more spaces, an equal sign, more optional space, a quote, then any number of characters, and another quote. (There is a problem there - I didn't take into account escaped quotes and didn't force the outer ones to match, but you get the idea). I think the problem may have been a "forgetting" of how split worked, but I was convinced my regex wasn't working. I still am not sure what the problem was.

In another example, in our data management class we have to write this CSV Database, which at the moment is just a command line utility to select some columns, or select based on a simple condition, or join on a single column. I check that the input matches some expected syntax using regular expressions, and then call the appropriate function for the input. That's good. But, when I parse the input, I'm back to splitting on, say "(" to know where the arguments are (and since I am sure it meets the correct syntax, this is possible). Now, that way works, but it isn't the easiest to know what is going on just by reading the code. It just shows I'm not as comfortable using the regular expressions as I'd like to be.

Finally, I'll leave with a bit about going from practical to theoretical. I first learned about SQL and databases in a practical context - at work. So, in going back to the theoretical, I've been getting confused at selection (which is more like the where clause in your query) and projection (which is the select column clause). I'm not near as confident in that class as I am when dealing with something practical in the database world.

And again, I'm not talking about going from complete incompetence to competence, but more like competence to better than competent. Do you have trouble relating theoretical knowledge to practical, and back again? Any ideas on how you've overcome it? I just keep pushing, until it clicks (which, eventually it always does). But, I'm wondering if anyone has other strategies.

• IT Resources Barrier: This barrier is given by IT assets and capabilities. How flexible is your IT infrastructure? Better than your competitors? How good are your technical people's skills, including management? How good is the relationship between business users and IS developers?
  
  
• Complementary Resources Barrier: They use the example of Harrah's using its "national network of casinos to capture drive-in traffic and foster cross-selling" between locations as a perfect example. They also note that these complementary resources need not be considered assets, and could even be liabilities, which, when teamed with the right project could turn into assets.
  
  
• IT project barrier: This includes the characteristics of the new technology - how visible, complex, and unique it is. Further, it adds the implementation' complexity and process change. Can your competitors readily see your new technology? How complex is it to build? Is it just off-the-shelf software that a competitor could buy as well, or is it proprietary? How complex is it to implement (is it as simple as Word, or is it a complete ERP system), and how much will your daily business processes need to evolve in the implementation of change?
  
  
• Preemption Barrier: Whereas for the most part we can control the first three barriers within our own organization, or more importantly, a competitor theirs, this is less easy to control, but should be easy enough to predict (I don't think they say that, but based on the description, I think it would be). The idea here "focuses on the question of whether, even after successful imitation has occurred, the leader’s position of competitive advantage can be threatened." What are the switching costs for users of your application? Are they high enough to prevent them from leaving if a competitor was able to imitate your system? It also includes the structure of the value system: do they need another provider of this service (relationship exclusivity)? The authors use the example that you typically have only one mutual fund investment provider. Finally, is the link you are serving with the project in the value chain concentrated enough that you can capture most of the market and "lock-out" your competitors?

I couldn't find the paper online (for free), but if you are interested, you can find it at MIS Quarterly.