by Philip Yurchuk | Sep 13, 2009 | Software
It occurred to me that by keeping launch dates secret, Apple never appears to suck at software estimation. Microsoft gives a date, sails right past it, and everyone is up in arms about it.
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, 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.
by Philip Yurchuk | Jul 11, 2009 | Software
I recently had some more frustration with Eclipse, with no solution on the web, so I’m posting mine.
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:
- Go to Window >> Preferences, then Java/Compiler/Task Tags. Select the TODO task tag, or whatever accursed tag haunts you.
- 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!
- 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
by Philip Yurchuk | May 5, 2009 | Software
I had this idea and considered creating it as a service, but I’ve got my own web startup going and don’t need the distraction. Several sites, such as Zap2it, TV Guide, and TitanTV (beta) already have the infrastructure (as well as the TV listings I’d have to license) so hopefully this won’t be too hard for one of them to implement.
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.
by Philip Yurchuk | Mar 27, 2009 | Software
That question was posed on the LAJUG mailing list in a response to a rumor about IBM buying Sun. I think it’s clear that Apple doesn’t really want to get into enterprise computing. Their entry, the OS X Server, at that price point, shows they are not serious about it.
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.
by Philip Yurchuk | Feb 27, 2009 | Software
I’m starting a new project with some new (to me) technologies and finding the start up process – setting up my IDE and build script to play nice together – to be somewhat frustrating. I kept thinking to myself, “Somebody already solved this; wouldn’t it be great if I could grab their project and just start coding?”
My idea is for a directory of Java example projects. 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.
by Philip Yurchuk | Feb 7, 2009 | Software
Joel Spolsky recently posted a transcript of a conversation he and Jeff Atwood had on the Stack Overflow podcast. It’s a nice reminder to think about the situations where unit tests add value and where they add maintenance hassle.
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. 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”.
