As I mentioned in an earlier post, I just moved into a new office space, and along with that, I set up new business service with Time Warner cable for internet and phone. I made one fatal mistake when setting it up, which was to fail to add the business line to the "do not call list" as fast as humanly possible.  My phone has been ringing off the hook with companies looking to sell me credit card processing, of all things.  Luckily, they are fairly easy to spot:

1. They call from 800 numbers or out-of-state numbers that are not known clients.
2. If I decide to pick up the phone, they invariably ask for the owner of "Dist Software", since somehow it got abbreviated in whatever registry they all get their information from.
3. They all immediately ask "Do you currently accept credit cards?"

I will never buy anything from any of these companies.  I don't accept credit cards because I have no need to.  Most clients I deal with pay by check, and for my very occasional need for credit cards, I am happy to pay the Paypal fee.  I will never buy anything from a company that is so lazy that it can't learn my actual business name, has no idea of what I do for business and therefore whether or not I need their services, and who does not see the harm or waste in endlessly calling me to sell me a service I wouldn't use.  Someday, if/when I need credit card processing, I will ask around to my contacts in the industry to find out who they use and like, get actual salespeople on the phone, and look for the right combination of features and price.  Hopefully my do-not-call list registration will kick in this week and stop this ridiculousness.

Once every few months, I get a case of what I call "The Digital 'Dropsies'", named after the problem that can temporarily affect a previously sure-handed wide receiver. During this affliction, which usually lasts about 24 hours, every technical thing I try to accomplish seems to encounter unexpected hurdles, bizarre failures, simple mistakes that get magnified into serious issues, or all of the above. Nothing that happens is critical. It's not massive data loss or huge setbacks, just a serious of breakdowns that make me want to get away from technology for the rest of the day.

I had one of those days yesterday, and I'm just now recovering from the effects. Here are some of the highlights:

• I was working on an AWS EC2 instance (a virtual server instance hosted with the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud) and needed a non-standard port open. Instead of just looking up the right way to do it, I just tried figured I would use the usual tools on the Fedora Core 4 image I was connecting with. So I ran the firewall config tool, set the port to open and saved it. Somehow I managed to accidentally wind up with a machine will all ports filtered, so I lost my ability to connect with ssh, which apparently with an EC2 instance is equivalent to"bricking" it. There was not yet any critical data on that machine, but I was forced to get a new instance created and reupload and reconfigure a bunch of stuff.
• I wanted to try out Ubuntu Gutsy, so I torrented and burned a copy of the live CD. I ran the live version, and then set it to install. Halfway through, I wound up with an I/O error, and so I ran a consistency check on the CD, which turned out to be invalid. I don't think I've ever had that happen before.
• Instead I decided to install Fedora Core 8, so I kicked off a torrent download. About 10 minutes in it crashed my network. I restarted my router and it completed without issue.
• I had the aforementioned problem with Windows Tablet edition getting locked up with some kind of DVD driver conflict. For those interested, I did resolve it, but only by running msconfig and disabling all startup items. I'm still not sure which of those processes is to blame, and I don't have time for a binary search right now.

Fortunately, it vanished as quickly as it came. Today I was able to fix the DVD problem, along with resolving a host of other nagging issues. Most importantly, Fedora Core 8 is excellent, even allowing my tablet to suspend/resume without issue out of the box, something no previous release could do. Combined with having my machine set up to effectively develop in two different environments (Linux + Eclipse/Windows + Visual Studio), it was actually worth all the trouble I went through yesterday.

I recently decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 8, and since I have been doing a lot of Windows development, I decided to back up my personal data, wipe the slate clean, repartition the disk and add my old version of Tablet XP back onto my laptop (the OS it shipped with).  It was an interesting experience, and it shows just how far Linux on the desktop has come. 

Windows Experience:

• I used the Toshiba restore disks that I created when I originally got the machine.  The restore went fine, but of course there's no option like "preserve existing partitions" so I made sure to do the Windows installer first or I would have had to redo the Linux install.  At least it offered me the option of restoring to a partition instead of just assuming the whole disk and making me fiddle with the partitions afer the fact..
• After getting it installed, I had to uninstall a dozen or so of the bloatware products that ship with it by default to make it usable.  My system tray took up practically half of the taskbar!
• It gave me some warning about one of the DVD drivers needing to be disabled and that there should be no problem regardless of which one I left enabled.  Mind you, this is on a factory-fresh restore. Why would you ship a version of your system with a conflict built into it?
• Of course, despite their assurances, I have somehow hosed the DVD drive, or so it seems.  When I insert the Visual Studio install DVD, and I get a random, unkillable process that sucks up 50% of my CPU, hangs explorer.exe, and will not let me logout, reboot, or shutdown.  Other than that, it's fine.

 Linux Experience

• Install works like a charm.  It recognizes my windows partition and checks if I want to add that to the grub configuration.
• All hardware seems to be working.  It certainly doesn't have any trouble opening the Visual Studio DVD.
• As a bonus, I get the lovely Compiz experience.  It doesn't get much better than desktops on a cube.

All in all, my Linux installation was faster, user-friendlier, and had a better outcome.  Maybe I'll check again if Visual Studio will run under WINE...

I've been working on a project that ties together a few different systems and technologies, and the whole thing is written in C++ and uses a lot of MFC and Windows libraries (don't ask, it's a long story).  I was working on integrating a third-party application that produces XML documents that are parsed by the application under development when I hit a weird snag.  The third-party application would produce an schema file with a namespace declaration like this:

xmlns:xml="http:www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace"

Note that this is technically legal.  The namespace prefix "xml" is reserved, but if defined, it must point to the W3C namespace schema definition.  Technically, it is implied so it is not present in most documents, but making the legal, yet redundant, declaration is not technically wrong.  However, the older Microsoft XML library I have been working with (i.e. MSXML which is pre-.NET) complains about it saying "the namespace prefix 'xml' is reserved and may not be declared".  It's not checking if it has been declared correctly. 

So I'm stuck between two pieces of code I don't control: one that is doing something that is technically legal but unnecessary, and the other that is performing an error check that is sort of correct, but not really.  So where is the bug?  It's a little bit on both sides, or what I call a "bug in the cracks": something that emerges from the interaction of two pieces that are doing something fairly reasonable, but in an incompatible way.  My workaround is somewhat unfortunate. I have to do a string-level manipulation of the XML document before it gets passed to the MSXML parser to strip out the offending namespace declaration, since I can't actually parse it to fix it.  Hopefully we'll soon be able to upgrade to a newer version of the XML libraries (or maybe even move the whole thing to C#/.NET) and then this problem and the associated workaround will simply vanish.

There was humorous sort of "argument" that erupted over what was essentially a product placement article. Basically, one of the DARPA driverless car competition teams ran into trouble because their code was not freeing C# pointers from an event listener data structure, and so the car would exhaust memory and then go off the road. They used a commercial product to find the problem, and provided a testimonial. Of course, it was linked on Slashdot and people quickly divided into a few camps, the "how could they be so stupid/naive!" camp, the "C#/Microsoft sucks!" camp, and the "Hey, this is just an ad posing as an article" camp. Leaving aside the hardliners for a second, I thought about the underlying problem a bit. I certainly think of this type of memory leak as a "rookie" mistake, and this team was probably not made of up top-notch programmers, but top-notch vehicle designers and AI people who were good enough coders to get to the finals of a serious competition. There is a big difference between people who write code as their primary objective, and those who see it as a means to an end, so I don't fault them for making the kind of mistake they did.

I do however take issue with the follow up comment posted by the software vendor:

There seems to be a lot of criticism of
the Princeton team, both here and on Slashdot, for missing such an
“obvious” mistake. If I had written code which managed to drive a car
9.8 miles through the desert I would be incredibly proud. I feel that
this vitriolic criticism of a group of undergraduates who had the
gumption and the vision to go out there and create a software and
hardware solution to drive a car across a desert is very disingenuous.
They had a hard deadline and did an incredibly good job given the
constraints on their time and budget.

They had tried to fix
the problem they were facing and had put in a workaround so that they
could compete on the day. Unfortunately, they had not used a profiler
which could have shown them the underlying problem.

For me the
story is a great illustration on why having the correct tools when
programming is vital – regardless of if you are developing in C, C++,
C#, SQL or any other language. At <company> we are committed to
providing these tools and ultimately, due to the attention this article
has had, I believe that we were right to publicise it and that
hopefully the message that it is easier to succeed if you have the
right tools is getting through.

I like and agree with everything up until the " the story is a great illustration on why having the correct tools when programming is vital" part. In fact, I think it's just the opposite. Going back to my "Tools are not Techniques" theme, focusing on the success that this particular tool had in this situation obscures the fact that they didn't apply the proper techniques to finding the problem. The profiler helped them see what was leaking, but I would guess that some regular debugging techniques, like making the destructor or finalize() method print ouf some info so that you can see which objects are being collected, would have been just as effective, and would have cost nothing. The fact that they lacked the techniques at the time they needed them only reinforces the notion that while tools can give you efficiencies and data that might otherwise be unavailable, but they are no substitute for knowing how to investigate a problem.

In a post a week or so ago on the United Hollywood blog added a link to someone usingTwitter to send out updates on the activities on the strike line, noting that it was "Perfect for all you nerds, hipsters and hideous nerd-hipster hybrids." I thought to myself, that pretty much sums me up. I might lean closer to geek-hipster hybrid, or hacker-hipster hybrid, but the general idea is the same: I make a lot of decisions based on both technical merit and hipness factor. Here are a few examples:

• I prefer to use emusic over iTunes.The technical reason is that they offer DRM-free mp3s, a Linux client for downloads, and you can redownload any track you have paid for any an unlimited number of times. The hipster reason is that I can get dozens of rare Jazz tracks, and bands that no one else has ever heard of, like Giant Robot.
• I am a dedicated Linux user. The technical reason is that I find it a far superior operating system in lots of ways that I care about. The hipster reason is that it's like a band that no one else has ever heard of. I'm actually concerned about it's growing popularity, especially on the desktop. If Linux gets cool, what OS am I going to have to resort to in order to maintain my geek-hipster cred? FreeBSD? AmigaOS!?!!?
• I love old games and hardware, and the world of emulation, and I insist to this day that the old games are far superior to the crap they are putting out these days (except the Wii, which is my guilty hipster pleasure).
• I will sit and debate the relative merits of hardware and software, and talk endlessly about who pioneered what, and whom was influenced by whom (like a long-winded riff on the influence of LISP on Java given that Guy Steele was part of the core specification team) without a hint of irony.

I should just get a plain black t-shirt printed up that says "Your Favorite Chip Architecture Sucks" to clearly define the genre. Hideous Nerd/Geek/Hacker-Hipsters Unite!

I feel like I've gotten into the spirit of Nablopomo this year more than last.  Last year, I had a bunch of ideas about debugging theory that I wanted to get out in some form, and each day was mostly a matter of figuring out what I wanted to write about.  With a year of on-and-off writing under my belt, and ample opportunity to write on a variety of topics, I find myself more in the position of seeing an interesting article, or video, or problem, and just immediately writing up the ideas that occur to me on the subject rather than doing an extensive pre-analysis and structuring for each post.  To me, that's what Nablopomo is really all about: getting out of the mindset that each post has to be the essence of insight and wit, and instead just turning thoughts into material as quickly and as frequently as possible.

I also have had to face more of the prospect of having nothing to write about, and using that as a springboard to come up with new and better ideas.  It reminds me of what I was taught about doing improvisational theater.  When you first start out doing improv, you cling to certain cliches: humorous "inside" references that the audience appreciates, stock characters and goofy voices that you know will get a laugh, oh-so-clever visual gags, silly plot twists, and of course, potty humor.  These things will get you a laugh or three, but they go against the essence of what good improv consists of, which is the bizarre and incredible stories and gags that a group of people who are all committed to going with whatever gets thrown out there will create when they have nothing planned in advance.

This kind of improv has a very different feel to it, both from the actors' standpoint, and the audience's standpoint.  On stage, you are caught between a lingering concern that the whole thing is going to fall apart (which it sometimes does), and the elation that somehow it just seems to be working.  Off stage, it quickly becomes clear that anything could happen at any moment and you watch with greater fascination wondering how it's all going come together, at least that's been my experience.  You don't encounter that many groups who can totally avoid preplanning what happens in the scene because of the associated fear.  It's hard to walk out on stage and just start pantomiming and talking and hope for the best.  However, after you do it for a while, and you learn some simple tricks for making it work, it becomes so enjoyable and natural that you can't imagine relying on those old planned crutches anymore.

Ideally, that's how I'd like to write blog posts.  You get a suggestion or two from the audience, in this case the many blogs and other websites I read, or the daily problems I encounter in my work, and I just sit down and try to create something right there.  In fact, that's more or less how this post was written.  The idea that I was changing my approach to writing posts occurred to me as a starting topic, but the link between my new approach and theatrical improvisation didn't cross my mind until I was a paragraph in.  Unfortunately, my posts and my improv scenes suffer from the same problem: I was never good at ending things.

I am an avid google reader user, as are many people I know.  When I first started using it, I was adding a new feed every few days, but I started realizing that once I added a feed, I felt obligated to read everything.  With a couple dozen feeds, some with multiple posts a day such as Treehugger, it's a losing battle.  I generally have somewhere between 200-1000 unread posts at any given time.  In fact, I use my unread posts count as sort of a barometer of how busy I've been lately.  Weekends are nice because few sites update, and I usually have time to whittle things down a bit, but I rarely get down to zero.  When I do, I wind up in a mental state that I can only describe as hyperinformed, since I've usually crammed hundreds of bits of info from some amalgamation of tech news, pop culture, and sports over the a short period

I've discovered that this secret hope, that I can stay on top of every feed, has made me reluctant to add new feeds, and that's my google reader dilemma.  I ask myself, is the information I'm getting enough to justify the additional feeling of inadequacy I get when I look at a high unread post count?  It's silly, because I should use the magic "mark all as read" button to make it all go away, but that somehow feels like cheating.  Instead, I think Google should add a "don't show me any posts older than X days" feature, since then I could at least cap feeds that tend to have news that "ages out of usefulness" like Techmeme.  When I can read it everyday, it's great, but three day old tech news is usually pretty stale.  

Do others out there suffer from this same problem?   Are you reluctant to add new feeds because you want to stay on top of everything?  How many feeds can one person reasonably be expected to stay on top of anyway?

I came across this brief South Park clip parodying the generally acknowledged ridiculousness of people's dedication to Guitar Hero, given that a similar level of dedication to practicing with a real guitar would lead to having an actual skill rather than a made-up skill that only applies to the game. In short, Stan's dad finds the kids playing Guitar Hero, shows them that he can actually play the songs on a real guitar, and they make fun of him and go back to playing the game. Later, Stan's dad sneaks down to try it out, and is terrible. This matches my experience in that real musicians tend to be terrible at first because the timing of the game is just enough off that you have to adjust your internal tempo to make it work, so if anything, it's slightly regressive to real playing. I'm sure it's worse for guitar players who have to fight the urge to go to the correct fret, versus me as a pianist who is only fighting the timing.

While lots of people have questioned the acquisition of this made-up skill, few have asked the question: why is it that people so readily prefer the fake world of Guitar Hero to the real world of Playing Guitar? In short, my answer is that Guitar Hero is a surprisingly good computer tutor, albeit for a made up skill, that does many of the things a good human tutor does, and it's a lot more fun too.  Good teachers tend to create students that come back for more, and this is what Guitar Hero is doing.

Researchers have been probing the question of why one-on-one tutoring is such an effective learning strategy. The problem is that the difference between a highly-trained tutor and a unskilled tutor is surprisingly small. Upon investigation, it appears that tutors tend to do a few things that seem to make a huge difference:

1. They help present and frame problems to provide a clear path for tackling subject matter. Often students have trouble knowing how to even approach a problem and knowing how to get off on the right foot makes all the difference.
2. They act as a source of general knowledge so that students can feel free to get clarification on issues in a way that they might be too embarrassed or hurried to do in a classroom setting, and which they might not have access to if they were studying alone.
3. This is the big one: they provide affective reinforcement in the form of praise and accolades for successful achievement, and this reinforcement is very close to the time of execution so that it has a very strong effect (unlike a test that you often take and then wait days for results).

It's a pretty simple set of things that almost any tutor seems to implicitly do, considering the difference it makes. Guitar Hero does a lot of this as well:

1. The problem of learning to play guitar is framed as the playing of and scoring on invidual songs, slowly increasing in difficulty.
2. Not really much here on general knowledge, but the subject matter of playing a made-up guitar is so contrived so as to make this somewhat irrelevant.
3. It's huge in this area: with crowd reaction, both in-game and often with people around you in the real world you get instant feedback, not to mention the overall "rock star" experience with star power, on-screen avatars doing all kinds of tricks, and so on.

In addition to this, it offers a few things that real-world guitar instruction can't hope to imitate: the concert experience, and the simplification of the instrument to a few frets while still allowing players to play actual music instead of twinkle twinkle little star.

So here's my modest proposal: someone needs to modify a guitar so that you have to actually play the real notes on the guitar in order for it to count. I did a search on "guitar hero real instrument" to see if this has been done. I've found the inverse and converse of this concept, with people retrofitting real guitars to play guitar hero. as well as using guitar hero controllers to make real music, but no one is stepping up to try to give people the ability to use all the support offered by guitar hero, but wind up with an actual skill. If anyone knows of an effort in this regard, I'd love to hear about it.

As I have been programming for a fairly long time now, I have noticed a very odd thing happen to me emotionally when I am writing code.  I get very invested in writing and debugging it, almost like I would a novel or movie.  When I put in a fix for a problem and rerun the test case, I feel anxious, as if some sort of gruesome fate awaits me if my assert() fails, and not just an angry red bar telling me the test failed.  On the flip side, when it runs cleanly, I get a rush that's I've dubbed the "Coder's High" because it feels like you are the smartest person on the face of the earth for at least 5 seconds.

The effect carries over to the process itself, such as when I'm interrupted by the end of the workday or a phone call when I am in the middle of writing or debugging something.  It's more than the mild discomfort experienced when leaving the flow state associated with programming. It feels like I've been deprived of the last 10 pages of a mystery, or the last 5 minutes of a suspense thriller.  I actually want to return to the keyboard to find out how it ends.

I had one of those moments this morning when I finally conquered the jquery demons that were circling around my project (in case you were wondering, .children doesn't search the DOM recursively, but .find does; I actually knew that but for some reason I looked at the function 10 times before I noticed I was calling the wrong one).  The psychological benefit has carried me through most of my day, and I feel like I was a much better programmer because of it.  I have discovered that I like that effect more than the "find out how it ends" annoyance, and I've learned to work on a problem up until I believe I have the solution, then actually wait until the next day to try it out.  That way I have something to work on right away when I get in instead of procrastinating, and I might just get a little shot of adrenaline and endorphins out of it.