Category Archives: Rants

The Ultimate in “Not Invented Here”

1
Posted by admin on October 8, 2007 – 3:16 am
Filed under Rants

I was reading an article about the Chinese space program and it kinda reminded me of a few projects I’ve worked on.

Don’t get me wrong, working on a space program could possibly be the geek’s ultimate dream, and I’m all for space exploration. Mission to Mars, manned stations, space tourism, you name it.

But think about it this way:

They’re working on sending an exploratory mission up sometime in 2012, and then a manned mission around 2024. This is pretty cool in and of itself.

But then, somebody else has already done it.

Those on that project would seem to be in a pretty thankless position.

  • If they succeed, after years of work, they’ll get a “Congratulations, you’ve done something that was done almost 50 years ago, again.”
  • And if they fail, they’ll get “Somebody else did this 50 years ago, you’ve got 50 years worth of modern tech behind you and you still couldn’t pull it off.”

Makes me wonder how many IT projects wind up in that same boat.

It also seems that the safest way out for everyone involved is for the project to simply get canceled. Maybe that’s why so many are.

And therein would be the benefits of being first, even with the inevitable casualties of diving headlong into uncharted waters, literally or metaphorically.

VB and Dirty Laundry

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Posted by admin on October 2, 2007 – 1:09 am
Filed under Rants, VB Feng Shui

No, I don’t do Don Henley impersonations. But I was starting a load of laundry the other day and something struck me. Once I’d recovered and put the broom back where it was supposed to be, I realized something.

Take your standard, run of the mill washing machine. It’s essentially a variable speed motor, a few belts and pulleys, a water pump, and big cog timer wheel that sort of looks like the sheet music for a player piano*.

These things will run several times a week, for years on end and only rarely have any issues. Even then, the most likely problems are things like belts wearing out, bearings getting squeaky, or the timer cogs breaking off causing cycles not to start or stop properly. Further, I’d be willing to bet that just about anyone can set one up, plug it it, connect the 2 water hoses and the drain line, and be doing laundry within 30 minutes to an hour, and just about never think about any of that “configuration and setup” again till they move. 

Compare that, then, to the lastest washing machines, with “steam” cleaning, LCD consoles, touchscreens, dozens of “operating modes”, delay start timers, and even internet access.

I love gadgets, but seriously, does being internet-enabled or using an LCD touch screen get my clothes any cleaner, or prevent me from actually having to lug my laundry to the utility room? Do they actually save real people any time whatsoever over a 200$ (or cheaper) model with knobs instead of touchscreens and mechanical timers instead of microchips? Is this really progress?

I gotta stop hitting myself with brooms.

* and yes, that’s an oversimplification, for all you washing machine enthusiasts out there.

Syntactic Sugar

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Posted by admin on September 6, 2007 – 3:44 am
Filed under .NET, Rants, VB Feng Shui

What’s with this?

I’ve seen this term bandied about, usually referring to some new feature in VB, and usually in a disparaging way.

Why?

I thought pretty much everything about a 3 or 4GL was syntactic sugar. Without that sugar, we’d be coding in assembler or hex opcodes. I mean, an IF THEN ELSE construct is just syntactic sugar for a bunch of JNEs or JEQs, right? Hell, object oriented code is nothing but syntactic sugar for an array of type structures and function calls with an index as their first argument (the hidden ME pointer in all OO compiler code).

Sounds more like just so much L337ism to me.

I say bring it on. As long as it makes sense, expands the language in useful ways, and isn’t required to make use of the language, the more the merrier. My only concerns would be:

  • Any additional syntax that’s required in order to successfully use the language. That’s VB.NET’s biggest problem now, with respect to adoption by users of VB.
  • Compatibility breaking changes

Still, I think ANDALSO is a tad corny, nice, but corny. So shoot me.

Snippets

2
Posted by admin on August 24, 2007 – 1:27 pm
Filed under .NET, Rants

So, how useful do you find code snippets to be in VS2005? I mean, beyond the “I don’t know how to do something, aha! here’s an example!” use that would be better served up in expanded help file examples.

On the surface, I suppose they could be handy in some circumstances. For instance, setting up TRY CATCH blocks maybe, or….um… ok, having a hard time coming up with other examples. I suspect snippets are one of those gizmos that make you “feel” more productive without actually making anyone truly more productive. They seem like Stephen Colbert‘s answer to developer performance.

My problem with these kinds of macro code “generators” is that they just seem like so much “cut and paste” programming. If you’ve every had to work on code that was built by cut and paste, you know it’s more fun to steam your eyeballs out of their sockets.

If a piece of code warrants being “set up” as a snippet, it probably ought to be encapsulated into its own function/sub/method/whatever, where it can be reused properly.

Here’s a sample snippet for “iterating through a collection”:

      ' Iterate through a collection
        For Each name As String In names

        Next

Now maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon here, but that comment, I’d have to redo, and the rest of it, I can type in less time than it’d take to find the snippet, esp with intellisense. Sure, I could also set up a shortcut for it, but even then, does this sort of thing really save time? Or rather, does it save real time?

You might make the argument that the snippets for creating properties can save time, but if I’m creating that many properties, that consistently, I’m guessing I’m going to use something like MyGeneration instead.

And in the end, a snippet might save a few keystrokes here and there, but, when you look at the entire life span of a project, I’d wager that even if you snorted snippets and peed the Quake physics engine, you’d be lucky to save yourself a few thousandths of a percentage point of the total time you spent coding.

Makes me wonder what the Freakonomics guys would say about them.

Online Apps, Good or Bad?

4
Posted by admin on August 21, 2007 – 10:10 pm
Filed under Rants, Software Architecture

John Dvorak wrote a very interesting article for PCMag on 8/14, Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point.

I’ve been saying web apps were overhyped ever since SalesForce first came out and was getting tons of hype back in the 90’s, and that’s not because I used to work at a competitor (gotta love the wayback machine).

On the surface, it’s a great idea. No installation. No deployment headaches. No massive, multi machine upgrade pains. And with AJAX, and now SilverLight, you can get a user experience approaching a traditional fat client. Plus, with broadband nearing ubiquity, some of the bandwidth issues of the past are no more.

And for many installations, where users can connect to a centralized server within the company’s domain, it often is a very smart architecture.

So what’s the problem?

Dvorak points to the demise of the Google DTO/DTR program as exactly the problem. Imagine if it was YOUR BUSINESS that was running off the DTO program and Google pulled the plug. “Oh, you won’t be able to access your customer records after Aug 8th, but here’s a coupon for 2 bucks at Google Checkout you can use for the next 2 months.”

I doubt SalesForce is going anywhere anytime soon, and they do have a compelling product. I’m not even picking on them, per se. But the whole idea of putting that kind of trust into an app that’s running completely NOT under your control is just a little, eh, bothersome?

In fact, I tend to believe that the absolute BEST thing that could happen for everyone is for a few more biggies, like Google Apps, or SalesForce, or Microsoft MSN Mail, etc, to bite the dust and strand millions of people.

It’d hurt, but people would take a serious look at the implications of relying on ASPs to supply services like that.

There were some big reasons back in the early 80’s that the personal computer and the fat client app, as opposed to the mainframe and the dumb terminal, because so popular. Some of them have been forgotten, and unfortunately, it might take a few tough lessons to remind people.

More Vista Explorer Helpfulness

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Posted by admin on August 2, 2007 – 11:56 pm
Filed under Rants, Vista

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend with Windows Explorer in Vista.

It tends to want to choose a “helpful” view of your files, regardless of what you have TOLD it to use for the view.

For instance, even though I’ve explicitly turned off grouping, it seems to want to turn it back on arbitrarily, and once it’s on, it seems like it’s back on all over the place, not just for a single folder.

And to add insult to injury, Explorer offers this helpful grouping:

image

What the hell? I know. I just blogged about Star Wars. Explorer must have hooks into Live Writer!

“A long time ago” ?!^$*!@#?

It’s bad enough that I didn’t say to group files in this folder, but to group them and then use an arbitrary “group” like this?

I can’t wait till I group by size, and at the top of the list is:

“Big ol’ honkin’ files”