TheGarage Tech Blog

I was at a sales meeting this morning when I loaded my personal site to access links to some other customer websites I had done previously. The client uses Internet Explorer and when I brought my site up the menu bar was all screwed up. Instead of being horizontal the menu items were staggered, stair-stepping down until hidden behind the content area. Half the menu items weren’t even visible.

Grrr! Whats more frustrating is that this site uses the same theme and menu system and this menu looks fine.

I made a change to the menu several weeks ago and obviously I neglected to view the changes in Internet Explorer. I do not know how many times I have to relearn this lesson, but as a matter of policy one should always check any change they make to a site — no matter how trivial — to be sure it displays correctly in Internet Explorer.

When you have a new site that normally gets several hundred views a month and your weekly report comes in like this

You can be sure something is broken and it probably has something to do with Google not sending you any traffic. Its always something. This is a site that I haven’t been working because I want to move it from PixelPost to WordPress before investing any more time, but still… I like some traffic coming in.

Like everyone who codes for a living I will lift a snippet of code from a website. Usually it’s very generic code — as most code is — and I never give it a second thought. There are only so many ways to iterate an object. A good portion of my Internet code searching is to look for code I need not because I don’t know how to do it from scratch but because I don’t want to have to figure out how to do it from scratch in yet a new language.

Although there is no reason for most programmers to ever write a sort since sorting is built in to everything these days, a sort would be a good example. Back in the day a programmer would find him or herself needing to sort things all the time and you could not make a decent living typing out a brand spanking new quicksort every time you needed one. So you figured out how to write any particular sort only once per language and saved the code for later reuse.

A more modern example would be something like this:

    defaultHandler=function(defaults,params) {
      var i;
      for (i in params) {
          defaults[i]=params[i];
      }
      return defaults;
    }

This powerful little bit of Javascript can be dropped anywhere you need a list of default parameters to be merged with a list of user submitted settings. If you are being efficient about your work you are not going to re-type that code every time you use it; you are going to cut and paste it.

So, like many older professional coders, I have a database with reusable code snippets that I have built up over the course of more than two decades in the business. I have snippets for every sort algorithm you can name: the quicksort, heap sort, bubble sort, merge sort, selection sort, insertion sort ; name and address validators/formatters; date/timezone transformations; list processing; form validation; dynamic tables; and cool tricks. When I need to do something which I have done already a dozen times I simply copy and paste from my vast snippets database, never wasting time re-writing the same code more than once.

That was then; this is now. The problem is that I have all these snippets archived in @formula language, LotusScript, VB, and a bit of Javascript whereas today I need PHP, Perl, Java, and advanced Javascript frameworks like jQuery. I could find the code in my snippets database that does the same thing and then port it over to the new language but why do that when almost any code snippet can be found in under a minute with a deft Google search? I haven’t even used my snippets database in half a decade. The Internet is now my snippets database. I found the above Javascript snippet here, for example, while looking for some sample JavaScript to pass different object types as function parameters.

I haven’t carried a technical reference book to work in almost ten years. I don’t even use them at home anymore. The Internet is now my technical reference library.

From FT.com, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch on paid content:

“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” Mr Murdoch said.

“If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media,” he added, predicting “significant revenues” from charging for differentiated news online.

He warned that “the big competition will be coming from the BBC,” which offers online news for free, but said: “Our policy is to win.”

Mr Murdoch said News Corp was highly unlikely to develop its own electronic reader, but took aim at Amazon’s Kindle device by praising the rival Sony Reader.

He insisted that News Corp would retain a direct relationship with its subscribers to its content via e-readers, information that Amazon has refused to hand over.

Chase Carey, who recently returned to News Corp as chief operating officer, said the online charging policy would extend to cable networks such as Fox News.

Just because the current advertising model is in a slump doesn’t mean charging for content is the way to go. That would be like raising taxes during a recession.

Mark this as an example where the decision of one powerful, but misguided individual can wreck a billion dollar company.

(Editors note: This piece was originally written in Sept 2007 but was never published; it evidently moved off the front page as a draft and was forgotten. Since the material is  still relevant, I decided not to let a bit of content go to waste. )

*  *  *  *  *

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on free data sharing:

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an “information economy”. The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world’s governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect” information: stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for it.

…

The world’s governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they’re willing to ban the PC and the internet.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

It’s a good article explaining why the Internet was no bubble for a lot of people but I think his premise is off. It’s not so much that the government bought into the “old myth” of how information needs to be secured instead of shared, it’s that they need it to be that way.

The old myth is not a myth. In a spice economy, he who controls the spice controls the universe. In an information economy, he who controls the information controls the universe.

It’s snappy, that’s for sure.

CMA never did correct the problem. I’m sure once they get it corrected my gear wont work anymore. Turns out they bind the MAC address of the device connected to the cable modem with an IP address and even though I purchased a static IP that will never change, my router still has to use DHCP to acquire the IP from the provider. No problem. The problem is that they set up the wrong MAC address so the cable guy calls in and has them change the MAC address to use which would fix the problem. Then I’m told changes to the MAC addresss can take up to 24-48 hours. I’m like what?

Anyway it still wont work with the settings they emailed to me yesterday (like I am supposed to get an email on Internet that doesn’t work) but I have rigged it up so it will work.

I was able to plug the cable modem into a network port on a PC and let the cable modem automatically configure  the network connection. Then I looked at the properties for the connection and wrote down the IP configuration, notably the MAC address that was being reported.

I then plugged the cable modem back into the router and instructed the router to use the MAC address I specify when communicating with the cable modem.

Bingo. So when, or if, they ever change the setting at CMA, my connection will go dead and I’ll have to change my router’s configuration again. I bet a dollar it never gets changed. They was just gonna leave a brand new paying customer without service until I raised hell. All because they don’t really know what they are doing.

The Internet is Dead. So says Dallas Mavericks owner and erstwhile internet tycoon Mark Cuban.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home wont increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

I think we may have a slight case of sour grapes here and what Cuban really means is that he has come to the realization that his business efforts surrounding the Internet are dead. Ironically, later in the article we found out the Internet is about as dead as the telephone:

Answering questions by email from the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his family and recovering from hip-replacement surgery, Cuban also shared his views on Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo versus Google, day-trading, his personal investment strategy, and why he won’t pull the plug on his much-criticized business journalism operation, Sharesleuth.com, in which he shorts companies that the site plans to trash-hoping to turn a tidy profit on his pre-publication insider knowledge.

Yes Mark, there are other things to do with the Internet than make Billions of dollars on a gimmick. I could have told you five years ago streaming hi def video to the home was not going to be doable any time soon. Not because I am so smart or anything, but because it is just common sense to look at the size of file that contains a full length movie and then look at the pipe available to shove it through and anyone can see that it will take forever.

It was all just a wet dream. What was I thinking; it’s August, not December.

The cable guy finally showed at about noon yesterday for the “easy install”. He did a good job hooking me up from the pole but left me hangin’ three hours later with me waiting for a phone call from the office letting me know the configuration has been corrected. It was a phone call that never came. Sometimes after four I dozed off for a bit while listening to John Gibson drone on about The Big Story. By the time I called CMA Cable, whose number I had to look up in the regular paper-based phone book, I was informed by the answering service they close up shop at 4:30.

That’s damn inconvenient.

Like I trusted the cable people to be able to roll up in here and deliver high speed cable Internet on the first try. Finally giving up on cable for the day I switched my router back over to DSL. It didn’t work, of course, but it didn’t work the same way it always doesn’t work so I knew I would at least have connectivity to the Internet this morning because in the morning my DSL miraculously starts working. Then like clockwork it goes out every evening. But there is nothing wrong with it I’ve been told.

Anyway, I’m rehashing. Maybe CMA gets it figured out today, maybe not. So far their customer service rating is not looking good.

A FIELD GUIDE TO HIRING PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS – Joel Spolsky lays it out.

Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you. So this section will serve as a kind of field guide to [recruiting]developers: what they’re looking for, what they like and dislike in a workplace, and what it’s going to take to be a top choice for top developers.

I can confirm that after having worked on two side-by-side 20″ inch plasma displays at my previous job, the little 15″ LCD I now labor over seems like torture.

But what the heck, I’m just a contractor so the advice doesn’t really apply to me anyway. Even this tech tip from Computer Geeks TechTips leaves programmers off the list of those who can most benefit from the increasingly more economical configuration, citing the typical user, gamers, engineers, and business people like stock brokers and such. But not the lowly computer programmer who makes all that stuff possible.

Is that typical? Would a real computer geek leave himself off the list of those who would most benefit from a cool display ugrade. The CEO probably works in a cube over there Computer Geeks.

I don’t think I mentioned this before but this past spring I taught beginning and advanced Flash animation, as well as some other computer courses, at the Brazosport College CE center. I am scheduled to teach the Flash advanced course this August. As an intro to the course I will definitely be using this clever piece of Flash animation creayed by Alan Becker as a demonstration of what someone with a bit of imagination and a lot of extra time on their hands can do with Flash.