tea time with meowkins

Code To Intentions, Minimize Your Variables

 
There's a couple things I've been trying to focus on when I work on code. I feel like it's yeilding good results.

1) Make Your Intentions Clear

If your intentions are clear, you get two good things out of that. First, the person maintaining your code will be able to understand it quickly. Second, that person will be able to understand what the code was supposed to do, not just what it is doing. Obviously, if the maintainer is able to quickly understand your code - both what it says, and what it does - she saves time, and code strong like ox.

2) Minimize Your Variables

If you have to track 20 variables in your head while you're thinking about some piece of code, you're probably going to screw it up. Ok, you're a super smart programmer dude, but still, it's going to be much easier for you to handle one or two variables than 20, no matter how ripped your memory muscles are.

How Do You Do It?

Sure these are nice ideas, maybe, but how do you go about implementing them? Well, here's some ideas.

Use names that highlight the important concepts. If you think about your names that way, it's pretty easy to come up with names that are very clear and concise. Take into consideration what is in scope and what's nearby. If it's obvious that you're working in the List class, maybe the name "settings" is good enough. And if you're using settings but it's not immediately clear that they're list settings, "listSettings" is a good name. Poetry - a few words say so much.

Extract methods - factor-out the algorithms. Do you have a 20-line chunk of code with a comment at the top saying what it's doing? Move it into it's own method, and use that comment as the name. This is a standard refactoring straight out of the Refactoring Book - it is goodness. This reduces your cognitive load when you're reading the code, and it minimizes the variables that are in scope. Now you won't need five cans of Coke to get the job done - you'll drink them anyway, but you'll be able to get more work done!

Keep an Open Mind

See the state of things. See the possibilities. React appropriately. Sometimes you'll be able to code like this, and sometimes you'll have to leave things be and move on.

Happy Coding!

Personal Information Management

There are certain pieces of information where you don't need them very frequently, so you tend to forget them, but when you do need them it's a pain to find them. I'm talking about notes about this or that, things at work, things at home, even things that aren't so important having to do with our social lives or hobbies.

I haven't found a system yet, that keeps all this information and makes it really easy to find it, no matter how frequently you access it. I've tried lots of things. Notebooks, electronic files of all sorts (eg word docs), and some special software apps like OneNote and PersonalBrain (still using my thinking aloud system).

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Microsoft's Growing A Great Lock-In Platform

We've been looking at Microsoft's Crecent lately, and Today I thought, you know - with all this new BI stuff and SharePoint, Microsoft is starting to look a lot more like Oracle to me. If you use one piece of their stuff, it’s hard not to use all of their stuff. Great lock-in strategy.

I guess they’ve always been like this, but it’s becoming more pronounced with their new BI products.

The Risk of Failure to Evoke an Accepted Idea

Here's an interesting idea I just had.

If you can’t explain something to someone, they probably suspect you’re lying, stupid, or mistaken. In such cases, it may be best to hold your tongue. On the other hand, collaboration and creativity demand this sort of risk – so keep an open mind and try to see the possibilities.

I think this has implications and importance in all parts of life. What do you think?

Can't Install Google USB Device Driver

Trying to install the driver and you can't see your device listed?

I just tried installing the Google USB Driver for Windows 7. When I got to the step about selecting the device in the device manager, I saw that my phone wasn't listed. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable to no avail. Then I noticed Windows was notifying me that the device driver didn't install correctly. I disconnected the phone, shut it off, turned it back on, and then connected it once it was fully booted. Voi-la! Success!

However, I didn't actually have to do anything after that. Windows said the driver was already installed. And my Android device disappeared from the Other Devices list, and instead appeared under a Portable Devices list as F:\. So I went to the <sdk>\platform-tools directory and ran "adb devices" which listed the device. It was some weird ID number like SH97BP401359.

 

Happy Hardware Testing!

Setting up a Fedora 15 Hidden Wireless Network Connection

This was a total PITA for me, so here's what I found after a bit of playing around with the UI.

I'm using GNOME 3 (the sexy new tablet friendly interface). I didn't see a place in the network connection drop-down to connect to a hidden wireless network, so I clicked on network settings.

You see three options on the left, Wired, Wireless, and Network Proxy. I clicked Wireless, but everything appeared to be disabled. It's not! Click the Network Name drop-down and select other. This takes you to the interface that let's you easily setup a connection to a hidden wireless network.

Yay! Now you can go to Facebook and complain about this.

I couldn't figure this out for a while. Instead, I went to network connections and tried to setup a connection manually. I had everything except for the MAC address of the access point. You need that, and the easy interface will give it to you. The old, less wise version of me didn't know that.

Happy Networking!

How to Deal with Smoke Blowers and Attention Seekers

I think a lot of times, people are blowing smoke just to get some positive attention. Heck, I know I do it sometimes, and I'm always trying to be on guard about that because I see it as a form of delusion.

A benevolent truth seeker might be compelled to correct the smoke blower, but a lot of times, it's a touchy situation. If you raise a flag on the person, it's reason for them to be embarrassed, and embarrassment tends toward anger.

I think you really have to just feel it out for yourself and do whatever you think is right at the time. Sometimes it's better to point out someone's mistake, to help them avoid failures in their work for example. Other times it's better to ignore them, or leave them be, probably because they're not in a state of mind suitable for humble reasoning.

What do you think?

Windward Code War One - Tomas' Perspective, or What the #%$& was the Yellow Guy Thinking?

We had our first code war at Windward this Friday, which I am dubbing Windward Code War One! It's a battle to see who can write the best solution to a problem in a relatively short period of time. My team, Nuclear Pony, lost horribly. So let me share my thoughts with you about this, and feel free to give me your own. If you want the code (original and final), hit the link above.

The Challenge

For this challenge, we had to write AIs to play in the strategy boardgame, Broadside. Basically, you get a set of ships; each one has a certain number of sails, and when it gets hit, you lose a sail. You get hit when a boat moves into the square adjacent to yours with their broadside facing your ship. In addition to that, you also have islands in the water, and surrounding land where you can place a couple of batteries (cannons) that will hit any opponent that passes the square in front of them.

Postmortem Analysis

I thought a lot about why we failed so badly. Our AI's moves were all considered invalid, except for our first two setup-moves; and so aside from the small edge we got from those, we had nothing, and experienced complete devistation. I could say a lot about what happened, but I think it ultimately ties to one simple lesson.

Test Early, Test Often

Basically, we over-spent on planning. We developed a truly fearsome strategy before we even started coding. But this cut out some much needed debugging time which left us with failing software. We should have written some code earlier, so that we could find the hang-ups earlier, and have more time to figure them out. In this case, I'm quite sure we would have hit our major hang-ups right away, and if we did, we would have been able to make a couple minor changes in implementation that would have corrected the invalid moves problem (take a look at the final code if you want to see if you agree with me). Even if our strategy had not been as great as I think it was, we would have been a lot happier to see it performing as we had intended.

In My Element

While I was truly disappointed in my own performance - and quite embarrassed, I admit - I absolutely had a blast! Time flying. Lost in the moment. Hacking with hardly a thought of anything else (leaving me quite thirsty after the event was over). This is my utopia!

I hope you found this insightful and/or inspiring, but in any case, happy coding!

How to find out What People Want and Need

I've been thinking about this for a long time. If you know the answer, you probably make a lot of money. But I think everyone in the business world is trying their best to figure out a way to figure out what people want and need.

Well, I think I've just realized that the best way to do this is by communicating with people. How else could you possibly know? At least, you need to be able to observe what people are doing in order to see what challenges they face - then you can create something to help overcome those challenges. Take my company, Windward, for instance (hey hey! finally snuck in a link to Windward - seo win!) - the way my boss, David Thielen came up with the brilliant idea to design reports in Microsoft Word is through the people he worked with. There was a back-and-forth between the designer and developer, and he said, "why don't you just create the general layout in Word, and then I'll make the report to match it." Voilà! Windward Reports and AutoTag!

But there's a limit on how many people we can physically interface with, so I'm now realizing that social media is probably going to be the key to going past this limitation.

Now, time to start digging!

What is REST?

Let me give you a very simple, practical explanation.

• REST is a methodology for creating web services.
• The point of RESTful web services is to be as simple as possible.
• RESTful web services use HTTP Methods: GET, POST, DELETE, PUT. You do not use the URL or the request body to specify the method.
• RESTful web services use URLs specify what objects should be operated upon.
• RESTFUL web services use HTTP status codes as return values.
• The HTTP request body of a RESTful web service call is used only for data - not to specify the method, target objects, or return value.

The point of writing web services using REST is to take advantage of the simplicity of the HTTP protocol, and not to work against it. Your web service calls end up being very simple and easy to understand.

Here's an example of using a REST web service. This is a javascript function that retrieves a task object from the web service.

function sendGetTaskRequest(packet, template, task, handler) {
// This line creates a web request
requestGetTask = new XMLHttpRequest();

// This line specifies the HTTP method and the URL.
// Notice the URL is simply a path to an object.
requestGetTask.open("GET", baseUrl + "/v1/packets/" + packet +
"/templates/" + template + "/tasks/" + task);

// This line hooks up a method to handle the response
requestGetTask.onreadystatechange = handler;

// This line sends the request
requestGetTask.send();
}



So to get a task, I just have to make a GET request to the task URL. To add a task, I could just POST to the tasks URL. REST makes web services very easy to use.

If you want a really good book to learn about REST, I recommend RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby.