For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off. Well, that’s more or less how they see us.
But for all of the wonders we are responsible for, there is one thing we can’t do (no matter what amazing powers some executives think we have to make them look better or earn them more bonuses):
You can’t fix stupid.
I’ve often described development as being a professional problem solver, and we are often tasked with rather challenging problems to solve. Sometimes the problems are purely technical – making something new possible that previously was impracticable or even impossible, sometimes it’s all about efficiency, other times it’s about image and controlling how people see a company. When the problem is the user though, you know you’re in for a rough day.
I was recently given such a task – the users weren’t listening to their supervisors and they wanted the software to force these users to do whatever it was that management told them they should be doing. I was given less than a week to find ways to make people that don’t want to work, work.
Basically, users fall into three simple categories:
- Power Users – these users understand software, and require little, if any instruction – more than anything, you give these users a tool and stay out of their way.
- Average Users – odds are, your mother or father falls into this category. They understand enough to get by, and with a little instruction they should have no trouble.
- Idiots* – odds are, you work with one of these users. You lead them by they hand, and show them exactly what to do – just in time for the boss to walk by and praise them for doing a good job (and 10 minutes later you find them playing in traffic, somehow defying Darwin in the process).
For users of the last category, there’s just not much you can do.
I always do my due diligence while building software; doing all I can to make it simple to use, flexible, and forgiving of user error. I always use extensive data validation, carefully worded instructions and dialogs, and do my best to follow the various best-practice guides for UI and UX; yet for all this effort and design – I can’t write software that thinks for people or makes judgement calls based on business rules that only they know (probably because they make it up as they go).
No matter how helpful or intelligent an application is, or how idiot-proof you think you’ve made it, reality is that you simply can’t fix stupid – you can’t take an incompetent person that refuses to think for themselves and turn them to into a great, productive asset. After years in this industry (which has made me just a little cynical [in the way that Sol only seems little when compared to Betelgeuse]), I’ve come to understand something rather disturbing: idiots keep getting better.
Somewhere, right now, idiots are working to build even better idiots – and that’s a really scary thought.
We can make a user more efficient by automating tasks, providing better information, or helping to manage their workload – what we can’t do is make them smarter, make them think through their actions, or force them to do what their managers tell them. Yet we are, at least on occasion, asked to fix this problem.
Despite our best efforts as professionals and passionate developers; if a user won’t think – we just can’t fix it.
* – I define an idiot about the same way I do someone that’s lazy; they have no medical issues or legitimate handicap. They just don’t want to think or work (probably both). Those that are handicap or have learning or medical issues are a very different story and not the target of this article; I donated time and services to charities that served the disabled for a number of years, I highly recommend that all developers do it – it’s a very rewarding experience to see your work make somebody’s life better and it teaches you quite a bit about how people interact with technology.
While building a new website for a small ISV, I was asked to integrate a forum – should be simple I thought, I’ll just use WordPress as a CMS and bbPress. Simple? Not quite.
To make things easier, I used Platform Pro by Pagelines (a great platform IMHO) and so used their “deep integration” instructions (while they are intended for Platform Pro users, the steps are virtually identical for all other setups). While the setup went quite smoothly, it wasn’t until it came time to test user registrations that the issue came up: when a new user tried to register they would receive an error stating that “email is required,” even if they had entered a valid email address. This effectively made it impossible for users to register, and thus made the forum useless.
After a bit of research, it looks like there is a conflict between newer versions of WordPress (3.0+) and bbPress 1.0.2 (I’m not sure if older versions have the same issue, but I would assume so). The fix for this is actually quite simple: install a plugin. The plugin itself is quite simple – containing only around a half-dozen executable lines of code, and works around the issue with a simple hack.
Unfortunately, the plugin description is rather vague and required a fair bit of research to identify as the fix, and the official documentation makes no reference to the issue or that this plugin can be used as a workaround.
Overall, a simple workaround but a major issue if you don’t notice that it’s broke (as is quite easy to do).
I recently had an idea for a small web application, and seeing as I’ve not spent as much time as I’ve wanted to using Rails – I opted to build it the latest version of Rails. A decision that caused far more grief than I expected.
If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed VPS for those that don’t know), the seemingly simple task of getting a Rails 3 application up and running is actually quite complex. The root cause of this is that Dreamhost’s OS image is based on Debian etch, which was released in April 2009 and has since been replaced; which means etch has become fairly outdated.
Here’s the process I used, and so far it seems to be working quite well:
Domain Setup:
When adding your domain to the Dreamhost panel, you’ll want to enable Passenger.
Once your application is uploaded to the server, you’ll be greeted with a particularly unhelpful error message (something like “uninitialized constant Bundler“) from Passenger (or perhaps just a 500 error page).
Server Updates:
This is where the work starts, and gets somewhat ugly. As a warning, it’s quite possible that you could damage your configuration doing this; though thankfully you can restore your server to a working state within a few minutes from the Dreamhost panel should something go wrong. You’ll also need to have an “admin user” for this task, as much of what needs to be done has to be done as root.
First step: Get your PS up to date; even after performing a restore on my server, there were a number of updates that are available to be installed. So let’s start off by getting those out of the way.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get -f install
Once you get past those three commands, the next step is to update SQLite to the latest version, as the version Dreamhost uses is quite old and won’t work with Rails 3.0 (well, to be accurate it won’t work with the latest version of sqlite3-ruby, which is the default database provider for Rails 3).
wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz tar zxvf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400 sudo ./configure --bindir=/usr/bin --libdir=/usr/lib sudo make sudo make install
If you don’t update SQLite you’ll get an error like this:
sudo gem install sqlite3 Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sqlite3: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb checking for sqlite3.h... yes checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... yes checking for rb_proc_arity()... no checking for sqlite3_initialize()... no sqlite3-ruby only supports sqlite3 versions 3.6.16+, please upgrade! *** extconf.rb failed ***
or if you install the updated version, but don’t force it to /usr/lib you’ll get an error like this:
sudo gem install sqlite3 Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sqlite3: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb checking for sqlite3.h... yes checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... no sqlite3 is missing. Try 'port install sqlite3 +universal' or 'yum install sqlite3-devel' *** extconf.rb failed ***
Once that is taken care of SQLite, the rest is easy.
sudo gem update
At this point if you visit your new Rails site, it should be working!
Notes:
- I’ve not tested this extensively, and I’ve no idea if this breaks anything. All I can say for certain, if that all of my sites still work, but your mileage may vary. <Disclaimer />
- I was a fairly early Dreamhost PS adopter, and part way through this process I reset my server to get it back to a clean state. After resetting, I noticed some differences with the behavior of
apt-get(404s onupdateandupgradeare gone), so for other early adopters it may be necessary to perform a reset to get your servers configuration in-sync with the latest official setup. - I can’t say for a fact that this is completely necessary, though you’ll likely need to selectively update a few packages if you skip this step. Also, for me,
gemwas broken until I ransudo apt-get -f install. - Special thanks to Matt for helping me get this working; troubleshooting the SQLite install was more than a little time consuming.
In a somewhat (but not entirely) surprising announcement, Google is removing support for H.264 video from Chrome. This change to their implementation of the often controversial HTML5 <video> tag is both a major step by Google and a furtherance of the already complicated world of video online.
… To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
When Google released WebM (a royalty-free codec which Google acquired as part of On2), it was clear that the intention was to take on H.264 and with this move there seems little doubt that the gauntlet has been thrown down. Although, now that H.264 has such a strong base (it’s included in Flash, IE9, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Android), it really makes one wonder if Google has picked a fight that has long since been lost.
So why would Google do this?
Here’s my best guess: Money (specifically, patent licensing).
H.264 is heavily encumbered by numerous patents owned by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco, and controlled by MPEG LA, the consortium charged with turning these patents into profit (here’s the 70 page list of patents for those interested). While I’m sure many people recall that MPEG LA made a very public pledge that H.264 would be free forever, as is often the case, things aren’t quite that simple.
Peter Csathy wrote a fairly detailed post on the matter, pointing out some key details that many in the media skipped. Here’s the core of what wasn’t discussed after the MPEG LA announcement (but should have been):
But, you say, MPEG LA recently announced that it will no longer charge royalties for the use of H.264. Yes, it’s true – MPEG LA recently bowed to mounting pressure from, and press surrounding, WebM and announced something that kind of sounds that way. But, I caution you to read the not-too-fine print. H.264 is royalty-free only in one limited case – for Internet video that is delivered free to end users. Read again: for (1) Internet delivery that is (2) delivered free to end users. In the words of MPEG LA’s own press release, “Products and services other than [those] continue to be royalty-bearing.”
Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering offer’s a somewhat similar take in “Free as in Smokescreen:”
What MPEG-LA announced is that their current moratorium on charging fees for the transmission of H.264 content, previously extended through 2015 for uses that don’t charge users, is now permanent. You still have to pay for a license for H.264 if you want to make things that create it, consume it, or your business model for distributing it is direct rather than indirect.
What they’ve made permanently free is distribution of content that people have already licensed to encode, and will need a license to decode. This is similar to Nikon announcing that they will not charge you if you put your pictures up on Flickr, or HP promising that they will never charge you additionally if you photocopy something that you printed on a LaserJet.
I’m just waiting for one of the licensors to reinterpret the license and claim that ads constitute a form of payment or some similar excuse to exclude them from the exception they granted. I’ve yet to get my hands on the latest licensing agreement to see exactly what it says about this, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this card played at some point to wring extra revenue from these patents.
Given that Google owns the massive video sharing site YouTube, which uses H.264, plus whatever unknown projects relating to Google TV – it stands to reason that Google would certainly save some money by moving away from such an encumbered technology; not to mention avoid future risk should rules change. Though personally, I also have to wonder if it could be fears of a repeat of the GIF patent debacle.
Now where does this leave us?
Right now HTML5 <video> is a mess, at best. There is a war for which codec becomes the de facto standard, and there is a lot of money at stake depending on who wins. At this point there is no single codec that works across all major browsers; to get full coverage the best option now looks to be a combination of H.264, WebM, and Flash. Doesn’t really sound like the progress that was promised with HTML5 does it?
It’s worth noting though that Google isn’t the first browser developer to reject H.264; both Firefox and Opera have decided against including it in their browsers as well. As painful as the fragmentation is now in regard to who supports what, this move by Google actually does little to change the landscape. Support has been fragmented from the beginning, and all this really does it push H.264 a step away from being the de facto standard; a title that it has been very close to seizing.
Had Firefox added support for H.264, I think the fight would be over and would have made today’s announcement almost suicidal for the project. Though with such a major player holding out against it, Google’s move becomes a minor tactical shift in the short-term (though the long-term impact could be significant).
I could go on for pages about what works are where we are now, but Mark Pilgrim (an infinitely better writer than I) sums it all up here: “Dive into HTML5: Video on the Web” – well worth reading if you want to really understand what’s going on.
So in summary – video needs to be encoded to multiple formats, which today’s announcement does little to alter due to the fragmentation that was already in place. In the long run, WebM may be better for the community due to its license, though many of the internet’s biggest players have a vested interest in H.264. So when you factor in politics and propaganda between competing companies, distrust, and possible patent claims that haven’t been addressed yet; this all leads me to an even simpler summary:
Yesterday, HTML5 <video> was a mess; tomorrow it will still be a mess.
The company I work for is hiring several developers which marks my first significant hiring effort since being promoted to management. This had led to a few interesting observations* I would like to share that may benefit both those looking for a new job and those looking for the next star to add to their team.
Immigration Law: I had no idea how complex this area of law gets; it’s a maddening maze of rules and policies that are more effective at confusing those involved than providing a reasonable solution to a problem. If you run into this (and you will), you need somebody that has dealt with this and knows what to do. Getting both parties into legal hot water is far too easy.
Resumes: I’ve seen great resumes that made it clear that I needed to hire this person and resumes so cluttered and complex it took an hour just to get through it. Here’s a few things that stuck out to me:
- DRY is good for code, and for a resume. Clean and concise is always better; if you find yourself hitting Ctrl+C even once while working on a resume, you’re probably doing something wrong.
- Length is important, but shorter isn’t always better. Unlike many other fields where a single page resume is considered optimal, technical resumes need at least a second page. Going too short on a resume is a great way to blend into the crowd; a resume should stand out, and that takes space.
- How long is too long? Unless you’ve been doing this for a very long time, more than three pages is probably excessive. This isn’t always true, but think it through before using more than two pages.
- Use whitespace carefully. Don’t leave a page half empty or pack everything in so that it looks cluttered. As with any type of design, whitespace is a powerful tool that should be used wisely and never be left to chance.
- Use color sparingly. Many corporate printers are black and white only, so if you use color make sure it looks right when printed without it.
- Use bold even more sparingly. It’s sometimes useful to point out items of interest, but it quickly degrades the readability of a resume.
Many people seem to have a hard time with this, but a resume is a textual representation of yourself. It represents you as a person and your accomplishments as a professional. Any errors or signs of haste or carelessness say much about you as a person; if you are careless with such a significant representation of yourself what does it say about your attention to detail or work ethic?
Experience: For a person that has recently graduated, experience in the field is the single largest hindrance both when it comes to securing a position and to receiving a salary they are happy with. The best advice I can find for people in this position is to look to the open source community for help. There are many projects that are desperate for developers and it’s a great way to get familiar with working in a team, coordinating with people over a distributed area, and releasing code for public consumption. In lieu of paid work experience, open source is a great way to fill in a resume (and it can be quite profitable for some, if you play your cards right).
Salary: In some companies pay is a minor issue thanks to clearly structured systems such as that proposed by Joel Spolsky; for others is can be a source of pain, envy, and jealousy. This is a topic that I truly hate; it’s uncomfortable at best and quite painful at worst. While I can’t offer much advice, here are a few things to think about:
- Money is not an effective motivator. In an ideal environment it should just stay out-of-the-way and allow developers to live a comfortable life; in reality the role it plays is a bit different. More often than not, it’s a distraction that gets in the way and outweighs the factors that do motivate people.
- Companies follow a few different pay systems, and once set moving to different system is nearly impossible. Here are a few I’ve seen:
- Clearly Structured: This system places developers on a scale, and developers at a given level receive the same salary (see Fog Creek).
- Structured + Negotiated: This is the most common system I’ve seen; it mixes a structured level system with negotiated modifications that can apply a certain percentage increase from the normal base salary for that level or other benefits (extended vacation, etc).
- Negotiated: Pay is based on negotiation skills and need; this can lead to odd situations such as where a junior developer can make more than a senior developer due to the need to fill a position quickly. This system requires strict secrecy when it comes to salary information to avoid nasty surprises, unlike the clearly structured system where salary information can be openly shared.
- Are large salary increases possible? Some companies have no issue with large increases in salary for a promotion (20%+) while in others exceeding 5% for any reason is a major challenge. If a developer is coming in on the low-end of the scale (i.e. due to lack of experience, such as a recent graduate), is there a real possibility of moving up? In my experience, people stay near the end they start at – those that start at the bottom will stay there until they move to a different company.
Interview Questions: If you are conducing an interview, make a list of questions and write them down. It’s quite embarrassing to suddenly realize that you are out of questions just a few minutes in (Need inspiration? Try this or this). Many people have said much about this, but the most important thing I can point out is just don’t wing it. Plan carefully, make sure you know what you’re going to do and when before the candidate shows up.
Interview Dress Code: I’ve been amazed at what I’ve seen people wear, everything from high-end suits to jeans. What’s appropriate? It really depends on the environment; a large corporation will expect an Armani suit where a startup is happier seeing jeans and an American Apparel t-shirt. When in doubt, I would go with a suit personally – but depending on the company that could cost you the job just as quickly as showing up in jeans.
Interviews Go Both Ways: An interview shouldn’t be a one-way affair; the candidate should be interviewing the company as much as you are interviewing them. They should be asking questions about the environment, expectations, tools and resources provided as much as you are asking them about prior experience and knowledge. If a candidate doesn’t seem to care about the company or what the working conditions are like – think carefully before hiring them.
Other Thoughts: I’ll not go into what I look for when it comes to personality or other personal traits as that would require far more than a blog post to cover. I’m also going to avoid things such as hobbies and the like; while they can tell you much about a person they can also lead to other complications. Any question in an interview can quickly lead to a land-mine and in the legal quagmire that is HR law and policies, trouble is easy to find. When in doubt, just don’t ask.
* This is based on my experience over the years; not necessarily the experiences in this round of hiring or the opinions or policies of my employer. In general, nothing in this refers to policies, preferences, or procedures of my employer. <Standard Disclaimer />
Setting up the Android SDK on Windows 7 64bit, with a 64bit JDK / JRE is a bit less straightforward than one would expect, thankfully though the solution is quite simple. There are two settings that need to be adjusted to make this work – otherwise you’ll get an error indicating that Java can’t be found.
Step 1: Modify your PATH to include the bin folder of the JRE. Mine looks like this:
C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin
Step 2: Set the ANDROID_SWT variable (you’ll probably need to add it) to the \tools\lib\x86_64 folder of the Android SDK. Mine looks like this:
C:\Android\SDK\tools\lib\x86_64
With these two changes, everything seems to work as expected. Why this is required on 64bit but not 32bit I’m not sure, but this does seem to solve the problem.
