It seems like a week can’t go by without one of my friends/colleagues Yahoo email account being hacked and sending me phishing messages.
Yahoo must either have the worst security, or the worst users who succomb to phishing attacks.
Either fix it or shut that shit down.
Not that I am remodeling, or anything that ambitious, but I have some advice nonetheless.
When you remodel say a bathroom, and there are two sinks (his/hers, very common), don’t buy just two sets of fixtures. Buy a spare.
This is so that in 5/7/10 years when one dies a miserable death and can’t be resuscetated with part kits, you will not be pulling your hair out looking at fixtures that DO NOT MATCH.
(As you may have surmised, one of ours has died, and Delta has decided to no longer manufacture the style anymore. So I get to replace two sets of fixtures, and destroy my back doing it…)
I was in a meeting yesterday, and our engineering director made an offhand comment that made me cringe. He commented that our principal developer for one of our products (he really is the only programmer) “like most good programmers” was a physicist. He went on to say that he also did a lot of the initial code for our system, and is a physicist.
Groan.
Anyone who is a skilled developer, who has been through at least part of a computer science program, who has grounding in architecture, and data structures, and groks object oriented design, will produce vastly superior code.
I speak from experience, since I do have a physics degree and background, and I have done some scientific analysis programming (not professionally).
I believe the reason why he made the observation is that of course physicists will be better suited to understanding the detailed instrument theory, and how it all works, so they are positioned to create real world, usable instruments. (the instrument in question is an electron microscope)
But, Physicists are MASTERS of shortcuts. We get stuff done, and have no concern for the next iteration. We cut corners, use undocumented registers, and in general employ practices that make any professional programmer cringe. What we produce works, but often is a mess of procedural functions, or if we use an OO environment, we bastardize the methods and object inheritance in ways that almost assure that the code will be unsupportable.
In short, when you have physicists as your principal software engineers, you will end up with a pile of spaghetti code, lots of procedural cruft, little usable documentation, and often no real coding style and standard.
But they will deliver something that functions fast.
Gotta whine.
About once a month, I get an error in Outlook. Something to the point of “OUt of resources” yada yada. And it advises to “close some programs to free up memory…”
Has that EVER worked? Sigh. I have 16 gigs, and am running 64-bit Windows 7 so there is literally a metric ton of memory free.
Anyhow, from prior experience the only way to recover is to restart. Sucks, but that is the only way. So I save all the work I have been doing and go to restart. First warning that something is not copacetic: I get warnings that I have a modified normal.dot file in Word. And I can’t ignore/cancel past it. WTF. Finally name it something bizarre and it reboots.
Then I get a warning that PGP full disk encryption isn’t working right. That has happened before, and it always is a fluke.
Then outlook fails to start. Says it can’t find the server, or my outlook.ost file. Sigh. I know what this means, I need to run scanpst.
three iterations of that later, and one more reboot, and I am finally back working. Lost time 1 hour. Lost time if I had called support? 3 hours (BTDT).
Coda: I suspect these issues are caused by our policies and group settings in the domain. I have never experienced anything like this on any other Win 7 system, and I have been running it since 2009.
Sigh. One of those days. Back to my wireframes and product requirements.
I recently joined this company, and inherited a product that is world class. But it is missing a pretty important capability (to be fair, when the product was originally developed, this was a feature that wasn’t even a twinkling in the eye of the market).
I get that we lose orders because we lack it. We are developing a capability. It is not a 2 week (or 2 month, or even a 2 quarter) project. But there are still at least 1/2 the opportunties that do not demand the capability.
Is it too much to ask you to not waste time on lost causes? Is it too much to as you to sell what you have? Our product is vastly superior in performance to all our in class competitors. It isn’t even close. Focus on selling what you have. We will address the rest as soon as possible.
But one thing I can tell you is that continuing to chase lost causes, and sending lost order reports will not get the project done faster. In fact, it will cause me to tune out your grumbles.
The joy of working in a large enterprise.
We have been working with a web development partner for some new sites and moving some older sites to their hosting.
Part of this means that we have been exchanging details on the web sites we are migrating.
Suddenly, these emails stopped coming in.
They aren’t spam. They have no executables. There is no malware. Just business oriented emails, originated from a credible and trustworthy source.
THe funny thing is, our contractor can send me emails that are not this (like “Did you get that PDF?”) fine.
But copy that block of text, and it is halted. Save that text to a PDF and email. And it is halted. He had to friggin fallback to faxing it to me to get this information to me.
Support – snort, is useless. Regardless of how much detail I put in the trouble ticket, or how many times I talked to them on the phone, there is no resolution.
Da fuq is up with that?
Sometimes you stumble across someone who has accomplished so much in life that it makes you ponder your own life path. This happens frequently with me, but a few days ago, I bought the latest Paul Gilbert album, Vibrato (kick ass guitar work), and on it is a song that sounded familiar. Blue Rondo a’la Turk. This sounded vaguely like some Keith Emerson pieces so I went searching (Paul Gilbert had done a live cover of the ELP staple “Karn Evil 9”).
Instead, as any true jazz afficionado will attest, that it is from the Dave Brubek Quartet’s seminal album “Take Five”. Fortunately, spotify has a lot of Dave Brubeck music. But since I know nothing about Dave Brubeck, I hit wikipedia. Damn, what a long, and storied career. Here is his entry.
Feeling mighty small indeed. Still grooving to the Dave Brubeck quartet.
Two days ago, we pulled the plug on the hapless guy who was on our project. Not that he is a bad resource, but the project we handed him was beyod his scope, and it was flailing.
We consulted another group in my company as to who they would recommend (and, most importantly who know our “system” if you catch). We got turned on to a group in Pennsylvania. Quick call, I forward on my original design document, and mockups, and the next morning we got a proposal.
The price was very fair, and they were going to put extra people on it to allow us to launch on 11/27. At 10:00AM yesterday (MST) we gave the go ahead. By 2:00 PM, we had artwork. It looked awesome. They captured what I was envisioning (and put in my mockups) perfectly. Today they have another two interfaces prototyped, and after a quick review are busy coding.
I am beginning to think I might be able to start testing this next week.
Of course, they were ecstatic about the fact that I had a document that described the workflow, the use cases, some typical user stories, and detailed mockups. Apparently that is all stuff they have to tease out and build themselves. I guess being a product manager has some positive attributes.
Fingers crossed, but so far I am really happy.
I am working with my Marketing team to get a user community site built. It is a pretty straightforward project that will allow our worldwide user base to connect, share tips, scripts and other related items in the use of our product.
To spec this I did a lot of up-front work. Mockups. Detailed workflow analyses. User stories and the like.
Of course, the project has turned south.
Our marketing person used a local source for the work. We had used him before, but for nothing this complex (that allows people to register and to share documents).
Of course the local resource uses his trusty CMS, Joomla! for this project. I was a bit skeptical. It is a bit heavy weight for this project, but it is not a bad back end. (for the record, I use Joomla! for both my personal site and for a non-profit that I volunteer as webmaster at. So I do know enough to be dangerous).
We are 4 days from the initial roll out, and key functionality is not there. Apparently the plugin he is using is not cooperating. And the author is being non-responsive. And I am getting very very nervous.
Several things that went wrong:
The project still limps along, I have an internal launch in 4 days, and about 80% of the functionality is still not working.
I am not a satisfied customer. I am glad I am not taking the verbal abuse of the marketing manager (the developer is), but I can feel his pain.
If you have been following the saga, I have been working on a new, groovy and cool web community for my products. Something pretty simple to start to build a community of practice.
I have complained in the past about the contractor we are using, who seems to do about 1/2 what I ask for, and then struggles with the big functionality components.
I provided mockups, detailed use cases, “stories” for the key functions. I have provided pixel perfect graphics and expansions on what I want, scratch that, NEED this community to look like and behave like.
Today, I got dressed down by our marcom person. I am being too picky, and that these are merely stylistic issues. Essentially that I need to back off on what I want.
I am not asking for miracles. I am not asking for Google like maturity. However I do know what I want, and I know how I want it to look. So, if I bitch that the graphic used for a button gets blurry because it doesn’t scale well when you increase the screen “magnification” it fucking matters to me. If I say that I don’t want text in the menu bars to have a shadow effect, it means I don’t want text in the menubar to have shadowing effects.
Am I being too demanding? I am the customer for once, and I expect it to be to my satisfaction. (of course, there is one HUGE piece of functionality that is almost 2 weeks late, without which, I can’t launch on 11/26) Grrrrrr.