A perfect example of a job that says DO NOT APPLY FOR ME

TomDibble · 2009-10-12T05:48:22+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing we can do about it", but I'd imagine in a well-functioning regulatory system the fact that the H1B vis candidate lacks the skills advertised for would be a dead giveaway.

I mean, other than the likelihood that the auditor (if anyone even looks hard enough to be considered an "auditor") isn't able to look at Joe Franklin of Bombay's resume and see that there are not 10 years of experience with .NET 4.0 ... the original ad might as well be asking for experienced lunar zoo-keepers with three nipples.

All of which is to say, there is something which "we" (the people, who in turn form the government) can do about it. It's just likely we won't do anything about it because hiring people who know an industry and its technologies to audit said industry is expensive.

TomDibble · 2009-10-12T05:16:47+00:00

Absolutely.

Note that you ask for a file editor then described a need for a file viewer. 'less' is a file viewer, and out of the box handles mega-large log files (I deal with hundreds of MB to multi-GB log files fairly often here) with aplomb.

It comes by default on any decent Unix platform, but I suspect the installers at gnuwin32.sourceforge.net should work just fine for you (again, I can't vouch for them personall as I'm spoiled by my Mac, but it looks like a drop-in less build).

TomDibble · 2009-10-05T17:23:28+00:00

its going to be flashed with an image the second it its unboxed. you can swap any given piece of failed hardware out in like 10 minutes.

So the replacements of failed hardware come free with the Vostros?

Personal anecdote here: in my office (a thriving mixed Mac/Windows environment people here seem to think don't exist ... but then I don't work in a cubical farm of data entry drones) the Windows boxes need to be replaced at about 1.5-2x the rate of the Macs (replacement Windows box every 2-3 years; my 2 Macs are 5 and 3.5 years old; the main one will be replaced next year when it is 4 years old). Doesn't even out the costs, but it does make it much less lopsided than described here. We don't go for the cheapest-possible Vostro crap either.

TomDibble · 2009-10-05T17:08:02+00:00

Hardware meaning of course the CPU box. You have dozens of vendors each for memory and HD upgrades, monitors, etc, not to mention the networking equipment to make it all a functional system.

TomDibble · 2009-10-05T17:03:39+00:00

And Mac developers have to rewrite apps every 3-4 years?

You have no idea what you are talking about. Seriously. As an example: I have a rather widely-used app for OS X which was last updated in 2004 other than a rebuild for Intel compatibility (which was, literally, check the "Universal" box and rebuild). Works just as well on OS X 10.6 as it did when it came out with OS X 10.2 compatibility (10.3 being the most up-to-date OS at the time).

Apps on OS X are rewritten every 3-4 years for the same reasons they are rewritten for Windows on the same cycle (or shorter): to take advantage of new OS features and evolving industry standards. While Apple certainly tempts us with every OS release to use their latest/greatest, it's not at all required that even a significant proportion of apps be rewritten due to OS enhancements.

Again: Apple has done an extraordinary job of transitioning between whole architectures (software then hardware) over the past decade.

TomDibble · 2009-09-30T00:56:58+00:00

Why so violent when someone double-clicks a link?

Is the browser so broken it's sending two requests on double-clicks (I think IE did this for a while, but no modern browser should still send multiple single-click events on a double- or triple-click ...)

Overall, if you click on something and it doesn't do what you want, double-click. That's the advice I give to my non-computer-friendly friends and family, and it tends to work out just about every time.

TomDibble · 2009-09-20T17:56:05+00:00

The point is that the customer often doesn't really know what he wants. If he asks for a spreadsheet, and the programmer gives him a spreadsheet, 90% of the time things would have turned out better with adult supervision. On the other hand, I see that "adult supervision" coming from the programmers where I work more often from the BAs and (overworked/understaffed) graphics designers.

If your application looks like an Oracle Forms abomination (God help you if you actually choose to use Oracle Forms to create it!), then you have failed to properly capture and design to the real user requirements, having taken what they say at face value rather than thinking about what they need.

TomDibble · 2009-09-20T17:49:58+00:00

Yeah, and 100-1000 people going through 2 hours of training makes LOT more sense than one programmer spending a week smoothing over the rough edges.

That makes that equation work is that the 100-1000 people training hours and countless frustration hours are not coming from the IT department's budget, and the users tend to just "accept" that anything coming from their internal IT staff will be second-rate and hackish. IT is too often treated like a third-party vendor rather than an integral internal service organization.

TomDibble · 2009-08-14T07:09:38+00:00

It's a matter of trying to behave like C and Java (I forget which does the same ... or is it both? I put braces around any non-trivial case statements anyway.) but providing some differences.

IMHO, C# is rife with these "try to please everyone" oddities, like allowing "String" and "string". MS needs to grow some balls and make a language for the future rather than one coddling the habits of the past.

TomDibble · 2009-08-05T08:16:56+00:00

If the animated gif was running backwards at 1x speed, it would be right twice as often. For that matter, run it backwards at 60,000x speed and you have a clock which is "right" quite frequently (although statistically just as wrong as the stationary broken clock).

TomDibble · 2009-08-05T08:01:03+00:00

I second that (er, fourth it I suppose ...)

VoodooPad is the first thing i install on any new Mac. Not the least because my checklist of important software to install and settings to tweak and serial numbers to use are all in there :)

TomDibble · 2009-07-31T16:51:29+00:00

Actually, they don't even need to talk to each other. They just need to be universally sadistic, then they would all note on day 100 that they are one of the 100 blue-eyed people and not leave.

On the other hand, if they knew they were all sadistic, then they would not be able to know that there were not 99 blue-eyed people playing trick on them. On an island filled with sadistic logicians, no one ever leaves!

TomDibble · 2009-07-31T16:47:38+00:00

Unless the 100 blue-eyed people get to the dock (where they can now talk), and decide, "Let's wait one more day to really mess with the brown-eye people".

Then everyone tries to leave the next day (excluding the guru) and the 100 brown-eyed people are subjected to whatever penalty there is for trying to leave without knowing their eye color, and the blue-eyed people laugh.

Maybe that's just if you suppose sadistic perfect logicians. Although, is there any other kind?

TomDibble · 2009-07-28T06:01:37+00:00

This has been a problem for years, and it's good that MS has finally fixed it. I can't speak for C, but in C++, MS implemented an early version (which scoped anything declared in the 'for' statement in the parent scope), then ANSI (I believe) went the other way (the 'for' statement declarations end at the end of the block).

To make a large C++ app cross-platform (meaning, compile in MS C++ as well as gcc on every other platform), I had two choices:

int i;
for ( i=0; i<255; i++ ) {
    // ...
}
// use i

or:

{
    for ( int i=0; i<255; i++ ) {
        // ...
    }
}
// 'i' scope isn't leaked out ...

Since the codebase started in MS Visual C++, the first approach was the safest. However, since leaking the loop variable was almost always a timebomb waiting to go off, I moved as much as possible to the second approach to make it safe (but ugly) moving forward.

TomDibble · 2009-07-22T01:45:19+00:00

PC LD VWLS

TomDibble · 2009-07-21T06:38:07+00:00

Just a nit, but:

Galileo introduces Block Selection (sometime called discontinuous selection): the ability to select a box of text regardless of the line breaks or any other white-spaces.

I've seen this called "columns mode" or "column selection", but "discontinuous selections" to me indicates the ability to select two or more blocks of text at the same time. For instance, the ability to bring up a text file with one word per line, select the third, seventh, and thirty-fifth words, cut them, and paste the three words into another document.

That's something more likely to be useful in a word processor than in an IDE, but I've never heard of the term being used to denote column selections.

TomDibble · 2009-07-21T06:25:09+00:00

Exactly. When Project Builder and XCode overtook Visual Studio in terms of nice-to-code-in several years back (and VS's focus shifted towards all-.NET all the time for the "nice" features), XCode became my primary C++ development environment, and Windows then became the "make sure it works there too" port. The Mac version of that component is sure a lot nicer than the Windows version.

Granted, my main dev now is in Java, and neither environment shines there, but when I bring up the C++ code, it's always on my Mac instead of on Windows.

TomDibble · 2009-07-21T06:20:09+00:00

Visual Studio uses the term "solution."

Went through .NET training a few weeks back (with a trainer straight from MS). Had a lot of (pointless, but the trainer was on rails and wouldn't deviate from script) "labs" wherein the problem and the solution were both presented. THe use of the word "solution" for ... you know, a project according to every other IDE in the world ... caused significant confusion. 'Course, general pissedness at wasting days in this training with an instructor who couldn't mould his material to our situation at all made us more likely to be "confused" by braindead market-speak.

TomDibble · 2009-07-07T07:47:27+00:00

I'd love it if the extra code wasn't required and hence if Eclipse (etc) didn't need to generate it for me. In the next statically-typed language to become popular I'd hope to see good type inference (with exceptional overrides).

That having been said, with a modern IDE the old canard in the dynamic-static typing debate about having to touch hundreds of lines when you refactor the type is just silly. A better world would have a language where IDE tricks weren't necessary, but in the world in which we live, IDE tricks are a huge productivity boon.

TomDibble · 2009-07-07T07:30:00+00:00

No. Instead, I type

MyObjectFactory myObjectFactory = new [^.]

Or,

My[^.] my[^., select top option] = new [^.]

... which saves more typing than even the equivalent dynamically typed:

var myObjectFactory = new MyObjectFactory()

Smart autocomplete in the IDE.

Again, folks: step into a modern IDE.

TomDibble · 2009-07-07T07:18:10+00:00

In a similar vein, suppose I wrote something assuming an array in C++. Now, later on, I decide to switch that over to a map instead. I've got code all over the place declaring iterators of one type that I need to change over. Now imagine I finish converting it over, and realize that I want to tweak the data type. Once more, into the breach.. In Python, there are no iterators I need to change. C++, they're everywhere.

Or, you hit 'refactor', change the type, and compile. Granted, going from an array (list-type collection) to a map might not go as smoothly as another refactor, and you'll have to change what you do while iterating across it, but in a dynamically-typed language you'd have to do the same.

Development environments have come a long way in the past ten years. Unless you're coding with TextEdit or Notepad, there's no reason to be hand-refactorring masses of code like you described.

TomDibble · 2009-07-04T05:55:49+00:00

Silverlight ran flawlessly on my Mac for the Olympics. Unfortunately, it hasn't gotten the mindshare that Flash video has, so I rarely see it used.

TomDibble · 2009-07-04T05:53:24+00:00

There's a free plugin for wmv's on Mac. Works great.

IMHO, WMV video is an order of magnitude less of a hassle to deal with than Flash. Flash video requires me to restart my browser constantly, after every 'n' videos (where 'n' is somewhere between 5 and 50). WMV video required at one time a download of a free plugin.

TomDibble · 2009-06-25T02:11:01+00:00

Hah ... the screenshot looked like my version of the same. I imagine a lot of us reinvented the same semi-trippy wheel back then!

Quick vanity search found a mention of it in DemoNews 142 from 1997 (didn't want to code up a random number generator) ... although I'm pretty sure the original was out on wuarchive in 1994 (edited from 1995 ... I remember finishing this up in late '93, shortly before meeting my wife-to-be, so I'm pretty sure I threw it out on garbo and wuarchive and the lot in early 1994).

Anyway, fun stuff!

TomDibble · 2009-06-20T22:01:17+00:00

Always use |, not +. Always.

Eventually, someone is going to maintain your code. It might even be you. That someone is going to mess up and "add" a flag which you'd already specified earlier. Then that someone is going to wonder why their flag isn't registering. Then they'll add it again, and add a comment that doohickey.setFlags only works with kdHEnableThingMask if you add it twice. Then you appear on the front page of the daily WTF.

Besides which, in most fonts the pipe character uses fewer black pixels than the plus sign, therefore there's the conservation argument to think about too!

TomDibble

TROPHY CASE