its a girl!
Posted by jonathan - 29/02/08 at 10:02:14 am
Emma Lilly Kind, 6.9 lbs, 18 inches, born 2:35 AM Feb 29th 2008.
mac attack, how the hell do I…
Posted by jonathan - 27/02/08 at 06:02:28 pmWhile the web kidz out there might be shocked, our company is making a giant leap to support more than one browser after 7 years of forcing ie on our clients. We also are branching out of windows and supporting macs as well. A few days ago I got myself hooked up with a kvm switch and a mac mini to open the bug flood gates as I test on the mac.
The first “itjustworks” feature I found was that I could not tab to a button on a form. In order to change this you need to:
- Open System Preferences
- Click on Keyboard & Mouse
- Under Full Keyboard access: in windows and dialogs press Tab to move the keyboard focus between: select the radio button, All Controls
One thing I have learned over the past 7 years doing web dev is that there is always a logical history to what might appear unintuitive or even ridiculous to you right now. I wonder what the thinking was to have the the tab button only work on textboxes and lists. Any ideas?
PS: I am posting this from the mac and I do not know how many times I have hit ctrl+home and ctrl+end only to see nothing happen on the screen. Urgh! 15 years of muscle memory is hard to overcome. apple key + shift + left arrow plus the context switch on the kvm switch is kind of funny. I do like brushing my teeth with the opposite hand occasionally just to keep myself honest.
rehab for asp.net in production
Posted by jonathan - 20/02/08 at 07:02:06 amCompared to my buddies, Noam and Jason, I have always embodied the old webmaster job title the more them. This means I tend to work the box administration and configuration as much as the code. As I release my day-time code to beta, once again I am revisiting deployment control measures.
Question 1 - Do you manipulate, muck up, mess with the machine config?
I have been burnt by the GAC before <future post/> so I tend to deploy my apps with everything they need right in the bin and app folders. This means I a bit less tidiness, having have extra dlls in my bin and that I make most tweaks in my app web.config but has the benefit of easy deployment. Deployment is not the time you want to be messing with settings!
A recent post I came across from ScottGu’s blog linked to this article, Top 10 Best Practices for Production asp net Applications. I have read similarly titled articles in the past so I went here on a lark, expecting to find nothing new, but I was pleasantly surprised. The number one new tidbit was, “Set retail=’true’ in your machine.config”. Never heard of that before, but if true it does a hat trick:
This will kill three birds with one stone. It will force the ‘debug’ flag in the web.config to be false, it will disable page output tracing, and it will force the custom error page to be shown to remote users rather than the actual exception or error message. For more information you can read Scott Guthrie’s post or the MSDN reference.
I have to test it out, but I wish I had known about it years ago when I worked in a shop with very loose deployment controls. Developers were constantly leaving crumbs on my freshly vacuumed carpet, page level trace=”true” statements. Once tested I’ll then have to figure out how to role out machine.config changes to a web farm since my current company is freakishly spendthrift with the servers.
Question 2 - Do you deploy source code?
In a compiled language such as java or c#, do you deploy source code? My only real working knowledge is in c# so I’ll stick to that domain for now. This question arises as I have some java guys on the team who want to push .cs files to the server to have the “ability to patch code”. For me this smells like a glade plug-in, the scent while nauseating is really covering up the stank of bad source control management.
Fortunately google comes to the rescue as a search for for “deploying source code” gave me this first read from a relatively good source, aspnetresources.
The whitepaper also lists JIT compilation, but I won’t go there. It’s a questionable approach which is outside of the scope of this article. Please, refer to Chapter 4 of the whitepaper, “Deployment Issues for .NET Applications”, to read more about NGEN and JIT compilation.
The white paper mentioned is this, Deploying .NET Framework-based Applications at Patterns & Practices, which is a better source, but the paper is a bit dated being published in 2003. After a quick read that did not really give me anything useful.
After changing search terms, “deploying .cs files”. The first thread, mentions publishing .cs files, but not a single person says they do it. They mostly hawk the web deployment project and/or the web application project, which is of course what I’m already selling.
Dr. Peter A. Bromberg, creator of eggheadcafe says, “I wouldn’t even consider deploying .cs files”. - eggheadcafe
Having read the esteemed Dr Bromberg a few times over the years, that quote is good enough for me, but I am still searching for the article that explains the pros of deploying source. Let me know if you find it and make sure it is a reputable source too.
To top it off here’s my favorite qoute from Jason, invoking a bit of Amy Whinehouse,
“NO NO NO… when you ‘patch’ you create and unpredictable hybrid release that isn’t really anything.”
if it does not happen at the ranch it must not be happening
Posted by jonathan - 16/02/08 at 07:02:30 am
Woodie sent me a link that was right on target; It gets my blood boiling. I knew we were in trouble when George Bush could not get out of his motorcade on Jan 20th 2000. He did not want to get pelted with rotten apples so he could not participate in the customary walk down Pennsylvania Ave to the White House. Eight years later anyone who says he was a good president should be shipped to Antartica because I don’t those people living anywhere close to me. In classic bush form he’s again trying to hide an inconvenient truth.
The U.S. economy is faltering. Family debt is on the rise, benefits are disappearing, the deficit is skyrocketing, and the mortgage crisis has worsened. Conservatives have attempted to deflect attention from the crisis, by blaming the media’s negative coverage and insisting the United States is not headed toward a recession, despite what economists are predicting.
The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:
This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself–say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site–is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.
Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1:
Generation Rx
Posted by jonathan - 15/02/08 at 09:02:25 am
Given the subject lines of most of my comment spam, the marketing power of Big Pharma, and the American quick fix mentality, I am not surprised by the recent news, brought to the forefront by the celebrity death of Heath Ledger, about how more people do prescription drugs rather than “hard drugs”.
Now “legal” drugs are our big worry. More teens 12-17 abuse prescription drugs than cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines combined. A lot are also getting a buzz from over-the-counter medicine, like cough syrup.
When you can pull these things out of your parents medicine cabinet it makes it much easier to get than “hard drugs”.
Read this interesting side-effects story from new york mag
what were you doing at 21?
Posted by jonathan - 13/02/08 at 01:02:06 pmHow about being a super-delegate for this years election?
Last night, MSNBC interviewed Jason Rae, a 21-year-old Democratic superdelegate whose vote for President carries the weight of nearly 10,000 voters. Unlike most 21-year-olds who spend their week nights drinking, studying, or exchanging bizarre gifts, pictures, and digital hugs on Facebook, Jason spent his fielding a barrage of lobbying calls from A-list political celebrities like Bill Clinton and John Kerry to secure his vote in the Democratic Primary.
- ohmygov
spider pig
Posted by jonathan - 13/02/08 at 09:02:36 amI watched the Simpsons movie last night and until this gets impregnated in one of your heads I can’t get it out of mine.
pissing on things
Posted by jonathan - 10/02/08 at 09:02:49 am
It all started a few days ago when storytime at the bar with my buddy Bill ventured in to a recent tale of a date who kicked him out of her house. That wacky mind of his called her shortly thereafter to let her know that he pissed on her door on the way out. Now he probably did not do it, he’s been known to do crazier things, but what a great mind-fuck. This whole week has been full of references to peeing on things. In The Week, a political rib described someone’s hated of another as “I would not piss on his head if his hair was on fire”. Then, on a Joel on Software post, he quoted Judge Judy as saying “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” I’m not afraid to throw-in some colorful language, and what great phrases these are to visualize the yellow.
critique: tadalist
Posted by jonathan - 09/02/08 at 09:02:13 am
While I love 37 signals articles and their strong display of the KISS principle, I can’t help but think that these marketing savvy and self-describe usability experts are given a pass when people evaluate their software. Exhibiting the corporate spin-mastery that is rarely exhibited but exemplified by companies such as apple and google, they have deftly applied marketing, message and pr to dance the cha-cha around issues which which would trip up less skilled companies. As people fondle a product, how do you transform beyond KISS and move into KIMACS, Keep it minimal and complete stupid.
The company chatter mill was discussing the recent blog-talk about the relatively low line count of tadalist. I’m not sure how one can disregard the framework line count and the years of other work which resulted in the RoR framework. Lets take a look at where this task management software is failing me, and ript it a bit.
First off the design seems to follow the personal shit/task list management style of clearing your lists proposed by management self help gurus such as David Allan
Figure 1. - My personal list.
This is a mix of people to call, crap to fix around the house etc. Hmm it quickly grew to around 20 items and seems to hover in this state no matter my relative mix of sitting my fat ass on the couch vs getting jacked up on coffee and “getting things done”.
So in this perpetual state of 20 items, the add another item link (btw, links are for navigation, buttons are for actions, but that is another point), is redonkulously placed in the middle of my list serving as the dividing line between stuff to do and stuff thats done. To rectify this problem I might throw the add link at the top instead. Maybe I’d put it at the bottom of the page, at least I’d be able to ctrl+end to get to the button. Maybe I could split the stuff to do vs stuff done lists in half, thereby pushing the bottom to the bottom, but that might invade on the google ads revenue on the right. In any case the last place the link belongs is in the middle. Finally I could add a keyboard shortcut to add a new item, this might be there but I tried some Usually combo strokes and did not find anything.
Figure 2 - DoubleClick to add an item.
Next, why the hell do I click a link call “add another item” only to expose a textbox, cancel link, and a button titled “add this item”. This design paradigm has the code smell of dhtml click-trickery. If a developer in my shop did this they would face a grilling about why we would force a user to click another link to perform a primary action, adding an item. The clutter of the textbox, button and link does not need to be hidden. This type of flashiness is common for people who are just learning the artistry of dhtml. Remember, just because some browsers supported the <marquee> or <blink> tag does not mean we should have used them.
I could continue on with how the separate click into reorder mode renders the act of prioritization more annoying than I want, or how I do not understand the sorting mechanism on the main my lists page, or how this page is not reorderable, but my point in this dissection is not to catalog the design issues.
While its an admirable but questionable fact that tadalist was written with 600 lines of code, the “simplicity” of this app actually has some critical flaws. An honest evaluation of clickability, and navigation could result in no more net lines of code but a better product. As we move agile into the mainstream look out for more sophisticated methodologies to synthesize client feedback to migrate products from KISS to KIMACS.
the week, the magazine
Posted by jonathan - 03/02/08 at 04:02:39 pm
In my house growing up we always had stacks on magazines laying around. To this day they remain a favored form of reading for their physicality, take anywhereness and adhd-friendly length. Back on the ranch, located in a 1950s era subdivision bedroom community on the poor side of a rich neighborhood in northern NJ, the pile included the usual fare, Newsweek and The New Yorker, but toppled over by the oddly shaped Foreign Affairs and slid sideways by Psychology Today and the Atlantic Monthly.
My circle of friends parents in high school never strayed from Time, Newsweek and the New Yorker. When I moved down south and met an intellectual southern bell I remember being surprised by her large rack … of US News & World Reports. While this mag is common, it was this encounter which started my accounting people’s magazine preferences, started my exploration of different genres such as the Southern Review and started my periodic grilling of friends and acquaintances always in a quest for fresh material.
Moving from the deep south to just below the the mason-dixon line, I wound up working for a now defunked, victim of time-warner-AOL web 1.0 accounting shenanigans, called enews.com (to this day I don’t trust AOL). What did we do but sell magazine subscriptions. I worked on a cool project to bring magazine subscription buying to the point-of-purchase at Barnes & Noble stores. Unfortunately, changing consumer behavior takes an awfully long time and the hissing sound of the balloon bubble deflating could be heard as the company postponed the ipo and eventually I was the 4th to last person closing the company. During this time, in the nations capital, my reads were fast company, wired, the economist, and my favorite of the time, the industry standard.
The economist fell off the list one for its sheer density, often taking me every commute for a week to digest, but mostly for its deadly boringness. The dismal science, which I studied in school only to drop in favor technology, read that way. Its lack of diversity on position, free-markets will save the world, made me realize I knew the conclusion of the article before I read it.
The industry standard was an interesting if tragic story which my young twenty something colleagues probably know nothing about. This magazine ballooned to 200 pages an issue of ad-bloated self referential material about the next big thing and the money train it rode on. I loved it! This continuous circular references documenting the hunt for vc money and the it way to make it, social networks for example have been well documented on the web 2.0 spaces such as technorati, mashable, read/write/web, gigaom which have all fallen off my rss feed. Luckily they have much lower operating costs which will keep them alive.
The only mag-rag from this era that remains on my reading list is wired which while on hiatus for a few years remains positioned on the forefront of cool ground breaking, potentially life changing technology which I often read about in more main stream publications months later as the ideas move into the more tangible everyday landscape, marked by technology sections in major newspapers and websites.
My current list of magazines is:
- Wired
- New York
- Business week
- The Week
All this blah blah blah to get to my point. My good buddy, Mark Malseed, a co-author on The Google Story, partner in ohmygov and consultant on chacha spoke highly of a magazine The Week, which my dad ended up without prior knowledge purchasing for me. This is a meta magazine, aggregating news sources in a format I have never seen before but I sense will be copied in the future. Unlike the natural tenancy to limit your sources to reinforce your given opinions online, this magazine gives a nice quick 40 or less page summary of news events I find refreshing, balanced and sufficiently global. It seems to fit the independent nature of todays modern voter. If you have not picked it up yet you should give it a try.
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