A better question is why doesn’t MS keep things secret? Or all software companies, for that matter? I know with sales, everyone wants to know when the next version is out so they can hold off on buying the current one. Or the sales person tries to keep you from buying their competitor’s product because their next version will be much better. But everyone knows there’s no guarantee of that happening, and there’s a potential opportunity cost in waiting. And since the estimates that drive the schedule were done by the wrong people at the wrong time, without being updated,¹ you’ll probably be waiting longer than they claim.

I think the best policy would be to launch whenever it’s ready, and everyone who purchased within the last 60 days – or better yet, has a support contract – gets the new version for free.

Of course, this only applies to software. For hardware, you’re forced to apply common sense: do I need this right now? Does it do what need at a fair price? Or you can visit http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ and hope they’re right.

1. See the Estimation section of Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.

The problem:

I had an auto-generated task (TODO) from creating a class that implemented an interface. At some point, I noticed the task comment was gone, but the task indicator (checkbox icon) was still there. Probably because I have it set to reformat on save, but maybe I deleted the task comment without hitting the task button (or both). Anyway, I could not clear it no matter what:

• Double clicking the icon didn’t work since it couldn’t find the comment.
• Clicking the “Clean and Redetect Tasks” button did nothing.
• Restarting Eclipse (which I do more often than a Windows admin reboots), did naught.
• The Task View displayed the offending tasks, but the Delete option was greyed out. Selecting the task and hitting delete 3 million times while cursing furiously at the screen brought no justice.

The solution:

1. Go to Window >> Preferences, then Java/Compiler/Task Tags. Select the TODO task tag, or whatever accursed tag haunts you.
2. Click Remove. When it threatens a rebuild, call it’s bluff (that is, agree). When it’s done (and it took its sweet time), the offending tasks will be gone. Rejoice!
3. Click New… and restore the TODO tag. All legitimate TODO tasks will be restored.  Callooh! Callay!

keywords: can’t delete tasks, task tags, eclipse 3.4, mylyn

This is similar to telemarketers who give phone surveys and, because of some stupid rule set up by their management, must tell you what the numbers 1 through 5 represent for every single question. At that point, I’m thinking 1 for slightly annoyed, 2 for really annoyed, 3 for angry, 4 for hanging up right now…

And offering a chance of winning a single $100 Amazon gift card (which seems to be a new survey standard) is really no incentive at all. If you really want to incentivize, why not say 100 people will get a free month of Rhapsody to Go? Wouldn’t that improve your image without costing you much, since it’s your survey to begin with?

Look, for many topics, I’m a guy who actually cares. I’m happy to give you my opinions and insights. Please stop making me care less.

I’m looking for a clone of the Tivo Wishlist. The difference is that instead of recording, you get email alerts. I imagine if you have a DVR/PVR that is internet programmable, the service could take advantage of that, but I’ve got my cable company’s DVR (Scientific Atlanta) like most people and must program it with the remote. So this provides a wishlist feature for everyone without a Tivo, which I think is compelling.

The search features of current TV listings sites are missing critical fields for a wishlist to work (not to mention the email reminder part). Filtering (both inclusive and exclusive) by genre and channel are required.

Here are a couple strong (IMHO) use cases:

• You want to be notified if anyone on a list of people is scheduled to be on a talk show. You enter description:”Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow” and genre: talk and every time any of them appear on a talk show you’re notified. If Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is played on HBO, nothing happens.
• You’re planning a vacation and you want to record travel shows about various places. You enter keywords:”Prague,Tokyo,Paris” and interest:travel (or perhaps channels:travel,discovery,tlc,pbs) and you get notified for any travel shows relevant to you.

Of course, the above would be done via a nice GUI/query builder.

When you get your email, there would be links to hide/exclude shows in the future, which is useful for anything that gets rerun frequently (especially basic cable shows).

You can monetize this through targeted ads, since the user is telling you what he/she wants.

Another service would be to send a post-mortem email that includes links to the shows you want on Hulu, YouTube, the network’s website, etc. after they’ve been uploaded.  At that point you’re much closer to a real Tivo service and could possibly charge for it. Possibly.

I should point out that Tivo’s own advanced search is great and includes categories (and subs) and is open to the public.

And if you are only interested in the talk show part, you can set a calendar reminder to check the talk show lineups page once a week. However, I’d much rather have something automated that allows me to set it and forget it.  I could probably whip up a script to parse that page and run it as a service/cron job to notify me when there’s a match, but still, it would only work for talk shows. And parsing poorly formed HTML is a pain.

No, the easiest solution is to convince someone else to implement it for me

Update: If you want to see Yahoo TV implement this, upvote it here.

This may sound ridiculous, but I believe Apple doesn’t think enterprise computing is a cool enough market to enter. They really seem to love being in the spotlight with consumer products. And the fact that the art and entertainment industries use their stuff. It’s glamorous and I don’t blame them for it.

Because of all that, acquiring Sun, or even merging with them, doesn’t make strategic sense. The only major synergy would be Apple’s GUI and integration from their server OS added to Solaris. Sun would lose training income driven by an OS that’s unwieldy to manage, but they could charge for it as a product. It would certainly save their customers money on admin labor costs. However, they could probably license that from Apple and avoid a fruitless merger.

In addition, Sun is a bigger pill to swallow than most realize. IBM is much better suited for them. And despite heavy list traffic on the subject, I haven’t heard anyone voice their opposition to the idea.

My idea is for a directory of Java example projects.¹ It would make it easy to search projects by stack: IDE, tools, frameworks, libraries, and app server. Projects would include the minimum to show the integration points. The directory would also have basic social features: a way to vote up projects and a forum for discussing integration, setup, and architecture best practices. This is probably something a CMS expert could tackle fairly easily.

I admit there are a few problems with this idea. People expect to thrash around during project startup. They learn from it. When it’s over, they start doing real work. They probably don’t want to share their lessons learned. Those that do are typically evangelists for a particular framework. Spring, as an integration framework, comes to mind with its Pet Clinic and Pet Store examples. Hibernate’s Caveat Emptor is probably the best example app I’ve seen. AppFuse also demonstrates integration, although earlier versions seemed more explicit (the new version built with Maven seems to hide a lot of the details).

However, these apps don’t cover IDE configuration, and the IDE/build tool mismatch problem is where most of the difficulty lies. The most important IDE features, IMHO, are incremental building for syntax checking, and debugging. So you have this natural duplication of effort. The IDE/build script conversion tools (in either direction) seem narrow in scope; granted, I’m limiting myself to Eclipse/Flex Builder to/from Ant. I don’t know if full integration between the IDE and the build tool is the answer, but it would certainly go a long way in making things easier.

In the meantime, however, a project directory would be a welcome resource.

1. You don’t need to host the projects themselves when there are already sites like code.google.com and Source Forge.

This includes Thunderbird. Sure, it’s not as polished or mature as Outlook when it comes to contacts² or tasks, but I am no longer getting error messages every 10 minutes. Unfortunately, Blackberry Desktop software won’t sync Thunderbird contacts and calendar items.

Enter Google. Now, I still haven’t jumped on the Gmail bandwagon; I use Yahoo Mail for my spammy accounts, simply because I already had that account. But I do have a Google account, and I recently learned that their Contact Manager and Calendar apps have their own home pages that don’t require Gmail accounts. And they allow 2-way syncing! So here’s what you need:

A Google Calendar – use the links above. Make note of the private XML link; to find that, you must click on Settings, then the link for your calendar.

Lightning
This Thunderbird add-on gives you calendar and task functions. I’m assuming you already have this installed.

Provider for Google Calendar
This Thunderbird add-on allows syncing with your Google calendar. Unfortunately, your current Thunderbird calendar is no good anymore. If you already have stuff in it, you have to export it. Use iCalendar (.ics) format! The other formats do not support recurring events like birthdays or any weekly reminders you have set up. Import that file into Google Calendar, disable your current Thunderbird calendar (under Properties), and then create a new Google calendar within Thunderbird (this requires the private XML calendar link).

Zindus
This Thunderbird add-on syncs your contacts with Google Contact Manager. Make sure your contacts are clean before you sync. For instance, I imported my Outlook Contacts into a Contacts address book, but Thunderbird defaults to a Personal Address Book. I should have copied them over right away, but didn’t. Thunderbird automatically collected addresses, so I wound up with duplicates I had to merge or delete. Zindus will spot duplicates during the syncing process and let you pick one and delete the other, but it’s probably safer to do this by hand. When that’s done, go to Tools >> Zindus and sync.

Google Sync

This mobile app syncs your contacts and calendar with what you just set up on Google. It can be installed from within Google Mobile, which I already had installed so I could get Google Maps Mobile.³ Install it, sign in, and you’re done!

1. This was after switching from SquirrelMail to Outlook.
2. Why can’t I highlight text on the contact card? This drives me nuts!
3. BTW, Maps is way better than Sprint Navigation. Sure, there’s no voice nav (which I admit is important), but for seeing where you are, scrolling around that map, and doing local searches, it wins hands down. Its routes are far superior, so if you can remember the directions, you’ll get where you’re going faster than the Sprint voice navigation.

The takeaway was that there are a few places where code coverage makes a lot of sense because change is rare and breakage has a big negative impact. These include APIs, especially plugin architectures where others are depending on the contract of your code, and mature business logic that should rarely change.¹ You really want to think about the number of people or LOC that are depending on that code to work.

In contrast, there are a lot more places where you’re slowing down your coders and their ability to respond to customer needs.

Another contradiction Spolsky suggests: many of the same agile programmers who espouse YAGNI require an arbitrary percentage for code coverage (often close to 100%). Shouldn’t YAGNI also apply to unit tests?

I believe the key is simply thinking about what you’re doing. Here are some guidelines:

• If it’s foundation code (frameworks, libraries, etc. – anything that gets called a lot) write the tests.
• If you’re about to refactor the code, write the tests.
• Even if you’re not going to write the test, channel the spirit of Test First Development – design the code so that it’s easy to unit test should you have to later on.

I realize this might sound obvious, but a) not everyone agrees with this, and b) sometimes you can lose sight of what’s “obvious” when others are persuasively defending blind adherence to “principles”.

1. Like, say, the state mandated 7-day waiting period for the purchase of weasels.

Not good.

The last thing I had done was add a Spring @Autowired annotation. I saved the file and voila, everything goes to crap. I then spend a stupid amount of time trying to track down the cause. I took the changes out. I did a clean and rebuild and retest (everything passed; this was Eclipse-only). I added new classes to see if they broke (they did). I did a false modify (add space, remove space, save) to see if that broke said file (it did). It was a death spiral. No matter how I changed the code, the same problem was there.

Turns out, it wasn’t the annotation, or anything else in Spring, or any of my code, or any of my Eclipse plugins. It was a step before that killed me. I was doing a little cleanup and I created a temp directory at the top of my project folder so I could move some files there. It wasn’t nested in anything, other than the top level directory. What could go wrong?

Apparently, that makes Eclipse see red. Squiggly red.

The solution was simply to do a refresh (F5) on my project. Just as quickly as it started, the problem went away. That smells like a bug to me, but if it was I figure I’d see a lot more mentions in Google or the Eclipse bug tracker. I’m really hoping this helps someone save some time.

Update: If that doesn’t help you, see more solutions in the comments. Thanks to those who contributed them.

Keywords: false error, bogus error, eclipse bug

Enter Indeed job trends. Indeed is a job website that searches many databases at once. They have launched a nifty tool that allows you to graph job trends based on keyword; it even does comparisons.

Comparisons are perfect for choosing technologies. To do a comparison, you separate keywords with commas. You can also have multi-keyword searches by separating them with spaces. And you can quote exact phrases. Yeah, that’s not terribly clear so I’ll just give examples.

Consider the many technologies used to create rich internet applications (RIA). It’s ridiculous. You want to know what’s in demand and what’s gaining ground. I used a context keyword in my search phrase since some frameworks use common words with multiple meanings (dojo might be found in karate instructor jobs, flex in body builder jobs, etc.). So requiring “ajax” to be in the job description makes the search more relevant:

ajax scriptaculous, ajax yui, ajax dojo, ajax flex

Here we can see that my choice to begin Flex 3 classes was freakin’ brilliant.

Since these are statistics, they can help persuade others by lying. For instance, two popular Java build tools are Ant and Maven. You want to use Maven 2 because it’s newer so it must be better. Let’s compare:

java maven, java ant

Crap. That won’t help convince your boss. Which is bad, because the real reason you want to use Maven 2 is that you’ve heard Atlassian uses it, and you want work for them so you can move to Australia and be around sheilas with cute accents (never mind the spiders the size of small dogs). No worries, Indeed has you covered. Just change the scale from Absolute to Relative:

Wow, Maven is taking off like crazy – 600% job growth! That totally makes up for Ant having 4 times as many jobs. And this technique works with every other cutting edge framework and tool. I mean, it has to; that’s just how math works. You go from zero jobs to some jobs, that’s like infinity percent increase for significantly small positive values of zero. Math doesn’t lie.

Hopefully by now you’ve realized I’m employing some tongue in cheek humor. At the same time, being able to chart industry trends is valuable for both your business’s technical strategy and your career planning. Use it wisely.