January 31, 2006
Watch your language
I understand that natural languages are evolving constantly and that new words, new expressions and new spellings trickling into our everyday speak is what makes the language alive. It also explains why artificial languages such as Esperanto have utterly failed to gain momentum.
I am ready to endure a certain amount of abuse when I listen to the TV or to people. Fair enough.
But something that really irritates is me when these blatant misuses of English creep into written text.
Here is a short list of that improprieties I have noticed these past years:
- Don't start an article or a blog post with "so". Ever.
- "Anyways" is barely a word and it's dubbed archaic. But can I interest you in "anyway", "either way" or "at any rate"?
- As for "irregardless", even the dictionary says "don't use it". So don't.
- "Criteria" is plural. The word you are looking for is "criterion".
- When something doesn't matter to you, you "couldn't care less". Note the negation. Just think about it for a minute and it will make sense.
- In "weird" and "receive", the e comes first. I know, it's weird. Just learn it by heart and don't think twice.
- If you're not sure if you should use "its" or "it's", replace it with "it is". If the sentence still makes sense, then "it's" is correct. Otherwise, use "its".
- In "gauge", the 'a' comes first.
- A pandemic is global, by definition. If you really want, you can say "global epidemic" but "pandemic" by itself is enough.
- "Déjà vu all over again" is a cliché. Find a different phrasing. And use the correct accents for extra karma points.
... and finally, the most rampant misuse that certainly deserves the award "Best impropriety of 2005":
- Don't say "people that drive", say "people who drive".
User that choose. Users who choose. Thosethatsay. Those who say.
Did I forget anything?
January 24, 2006
One thing you don't know about Google Talk
There have been many comparisons of the various messaging clients available today: Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and hybrid ones as well, such as Trillian. These studies usually do a good job at comparing the features offered by these clients, but for some strange reason, I have yet to find one that really nails the one thing that makes the difference for me with Google Talk: presence ubiquity.
Throughout the day, I typically move between three or four different PC's (work, laptop, home, etc...) and this particular feature means that not only do I not need to log on constantly, it also means that I can start a conversation home and finish it at work without having to do anything. The logic behind the message broadcasts is sometimes a bit mysterious, but it works most of the time and is a joy for computer vagabonds like myself.
Since no article ever mentioned this feature, I am guessing my situation is pretty unusual, but since it's the only one that only exists in Google Talk, I am stunned that it hasn't been emulated by any other client.
Having said that, I do agree that Google Talk is very austere and I have to confess an unending fondness for Yahoo's cute smileys, but presence ubiquity is the main reason why my Friends List on Google Talk keeps getting bigger why my Yahoo's Buddy List has been stagnant for over a year now. People who need to reach me now know that Google Talk is the first client to try. If they don't know where I am, Google Talk certainly does.
Of course, the fact that Yahoo keeps nagging me about upgrading without giving me a chance to opt out and that it will change my home page if I'm not careful during the installation doesn't help. It could be worse, though: you could install AOL Instant Messenger and spend the next ten minutes hunting down and killing all the "Free AOL" shortcuts that suddenly pop up in unexpected places on your desktop. I hear their latest experimental version, codenamed Triton, goes even further and changes your home page, installs Plaxo, a toolbar and a modified full-screen version of IE that lands on their page. Oh and you can't refuse the installation of this software: you will need to uninstall it by hand later.
That's clearly not "not evil".
I feel some comfort thinking that Google Talk uses open standards and doesn't
come with any additional baggage, but I wouldn't mind if it added some of the
bells and whistles found in its competitors. How about them smileys for a start,
?
January 18, 2006
Lost in "Lost"
I like Lost a lot. Its innovative plot coupled with strong acting and ingenious twists is like a breath of fresh air that is almost making flashbacks look cool again. I TiVo all the episodes religiously and I have hardly been disappointed by any so far, which is quite an achievement for a show in the middle of its second season (a feat that has only been topped by 24, which just started its fifth season).
However, I'm beginning to notice a disturbing trend in the storyline: the Lost writers seem to be very good at coming up with startling scenes and puzzling twists, but they do very little in terms of explaining them. Instead of tying up loose ends, the episodes keep adding new implausible twists that make you wonder if the authors really know where they are going or if they just shoot for cheap one-liners and hope that viewers will forget them later.
Well, I'm not forgetting. Here is a quick list of the unresolved facts that I can think of so far (spoiler warning: these facts cover both season one and two, you might want to stop reading now if you are not caught up with the show as of January 15th):
- Mutant animals.
- The mysterious "others".
- Winning lottery numbers that pop up in unexpected places.
- A semi-crazed French woman.
- A virus that makes people hear voices.
- A quarantine shelter buried in the ground.
- A man who's been sequestered in said shelter for years and ran away (how convenient).
- Jack happens to know that man.
- A mechanical arm that pulls people into the ground.
- An underground machinery that requires numbers to be punched in on a regular basis.
- A heroine cargo that was flying out of Nigeria and ended up crashing on the island.
- A swirling cloud of black smoke.
And I'm sure I am forgetting quite a few.
I hear that enough of the plot has already been written to occupy five seasons, which is great news, but I'm really hoping that we'll start seeing the explanation of some of these mysteries soon, or my patience will start wearing thin very fast.
January 15, 2006
TestNG at JavaOne
Congratulations! Your submission entitled '' Beyond JUnit: Introducing TestNG, the Next Generation in Testing " was so compelling that the JavaOne Program Committee made an early decision to accept your proposal to speak at the upcoming 2006 JavaOne(sm) Conference in San Francisco, California, May 16-19, 2006. As an accepted speaker, you will receive a full complimentary pass to the Conference.
Sadly, the dates conflict with a previous engagement, so I will not be able to make it to JavaOne this year for the first time in almost ten years. The good news is that I worked with the JavaOne committee and we have found a substitute to make the presentation. I will disclose his name once everything has been finalized, but you won't be disappointed.
On a similar note, here is the schedule of the TestNG Tour, "Changing the way we write software, one test method at a time":
- Oakland Java Users Group (February).
- TheServerSide Symposium (March).
- SD West (March).
- TheServerSide Symposium Europe (June, Barcelona).
I will also make a second presentation in Barcelona that is not related to TestNG. I have a tentative title and some content, but I'll hold on to the details until everything's been finalized.
January 11, 2006
Mass hypnosis
Ah... Mac World. And I don't mean the conference, I mean "Mac World". You know, this weird parallel universe where all those who have fallen prey to the Steve Jobs Cult dwell and sneer at the rest of the population with a look of utter pity in their eyes. I'm sure you know a few of these people if you're a developer or you work at a software company. Maybe you're even one of them.
It never misses: whenever an Apple conference approaches, the tech world gets all abuzz and Macboys can barely avoid exploding on the spot in a thousand tiny droplets in anticipation of whatever Steve will throw in their direction as long as it's introduced as "One More Thing".
Witness my good buddy Michael, someone who would certainly not be described as irrational, and much less exuberant, by his peers. Michael decided to sign a check for $3,200 payable to Steve just to pre-order a MacBook. I bet that thousands of people are doing the very same thing as I write these words, so Michael is hardly alone. But that doesn't make this behavior any more explainable.
What I find really ironic is that after Jobs spent so much time explaining that the Power PC was a speed demon and hearing tireless Mac users claim that their machine was "plenty fast enough", these new announcements allow the Mac community to breathe a common sigh of relief and finally say "okay, okay, we admit it. Our PowerPC's are impossibly slow, we've been lying all along, but it's all going to change now! So please stop disrupting our fantasy with your facts".
Don't get me wrong: I can understand being excited about a product that will bring new features or radical innovations, but paying forward $3,200 just to get a faster machine? And of all companies, to *Apple*, which has a long track record of:
- Exaggerating and omitting some vital facts in their announcements (any
word on the battery life of these new Core Duo-based beasts?).
- Making a terrible job at provisioning their stock supply (any bet on the percentage of orders that will actually be delivered in February?).
Maybe it's just me, but with the power of the Internet at my fingers almost twenty-four hours a day, I find it absolutely impossible (and unforgivable) to make the slightest purchase before doing a quick research and seeing what other people think of the product I'm about to buy.
What makes things worse with the MacBook is that we're talking about a completely new product that is guaranteed to have flaws in its initial versions. Yes, yes, I know, Steve says it runs flawlessly, but just stop staring at the pendulum he is swinging in front of your eyes for a second and trust me on this one (and stop drooling too): You're better off waiting. A couple of weeks will do.
You've been stuck with a machine slow as molasses for almost two decades, surely you can hold off for a bit, can't you?
So, dear reader, what's your excuse for preordering one of these chimerae?
Update: Erik pointed me to this piece which seems to indicate that indeed, the benchmarks used by Apple to compare Duo Core processors to PowerPC ones are flawed. A technique not unlike the one they used a few years ago to prove the opposite, though, so you can't accuse them of being inconsistent in their misinformation.
January 08, 2006
Use Print to read annoying web pages
One thing that really irks me is articles that are split into multiple parts and that force you to click Next every time you are ready to read more. Here is an example.
Whenever I encounter such an article, I immediately search for a Print button, and most of the time, it takes you to a page that not only contains the entirety of the article, but also removes all the ads and other clutter from it.
January 02, 2006
The language of interviews
When I interview someone, I usually let them use the language of their choice with between C, C++, C# and Java. There are several reasons for that:
- I want them to be comfortable. It's already hard enough to be in
an interview, much less being forced to use a syntax or an API they are not
familiar with. Of course, I don't pay too much attention to syntactic
details or making sure they use the right method name as long as the logic
of what they write is sound.
- It's not that I have something against Ruby or other fourth generation languages, but I found that these languages work at a level of abstraction that is a little too high to give me a meaningful insight on the candidate for a forty-five minute interview. There are plenty of very interesting problems that are hard to solve even in Ruby or Python (and actually, it's quite likely this is the kind of problem that the candidate will be struggling with if she gets hired), but formulating the question and writing the solution would take several hours.
The real challenge is therefore to find a problem that is very easy to express and which solution in one of the languages mentioned above will give me enough information on this candidate to formulate a verdict.
Interestingly, the choice that the candidate makes already reveals a few things on their abilities. I found that typically, C/C++ people tend to be very comfortable with low-level algorithmic questions ("pointers and recursion", to quote Joel) but fare very poorly as soon as we "move up the stack" (object-oriented design, design patterns, enterprise frameworks, etc...). Conversely, Java/C# people are more comfortable with these concepts but get easily stumped on "tight memory" types of questions.
Of course, great candidates excel at both, which brings me to my next point.
Good developers are born good. Their brain is wired a certain way and they can chew on any CS concept thrown in their direction and spit it out with a bow tie. Most of these developers then go to school and move from the "gem in the rough" state to that of a "pure diamond". School accelerates and expands their knowledge. Of course, there is hardly anything they learned in school that they couldn't have learned by themselves, but the formal process of learning, reading book and listening to teachers saves them years and years of work. It also expands their minds to concepts they would probably never have encountered in their professional career.
With that in mind, I find Joel's obsession on pointers and recursion quite baffling.
There are two important facts to keep in mind about pointers and recursion:
- They are important concepts and any serious developer should probably be comfortable with them.
- You will hardly ever use any of these concepts for today's typical programming jobs.
How's that for a paradox? How do you interview for this?
Well, it's actually very easy to do a quick check on pointers and recursion, even in Java, but it's equally important to spend most of your interviewing time on other areas that are more relevant to the job the person will be asked to do.
One of my friends pointed out that what we are seeing today is a more distinct separation between "system programmers" (kernel, device drivers, etc... which require C/C++ and pointer juggling) and "application programmers" (for which pretty much any programming language will do, including Visual Basic). What's really puzzling is that Joel's company produces a bug-tracking software, and it's hard to imagine why you would need an army of superstar programmers . A few selected senior tech leads and designers? Sure. But an entire team of them... doubtful.
As for Joel's reference to Paul Graham's vastly over-hyped essay "Beating the Averages", I am still trying to decide which of the following two quotes is the most ridiculous:
- His start-up had an edge over its competitors because of the implementation language they chose.
- Because of this choice, they were able to implement features that their competitors couldn't.
Actually, I'll call that a tie: both claims are equally preposterous.
Paul Graham has been a dinosaur for a long time and his disturbing elitist stance ("if you don't know Lisp, you're an idiot") oozes from every paragraph of every single programming essay he has ever authored. So far, Joel had managed to remain reasonably objective and interesting in his posts, but his extremely narrow background (Microsoft technologies in C/C++ and bug-tracking software) is beginning to take a toll on his objectivity and I find that most of his writings are more and more missing the big picture. I hope he'll turn around soon and open up to modern programming topics, because frankly, I am having as much fun using Ruby on Rails or Eclipse and EJB3 today as I did writing Copper list based demos on my Amiga fifteen years ago or coding floppy disk drivers in 6502 on my beloved Apple ][ twenty years ago (gasp).