Posts

I really wish Actionscript 3 had a native decompression utility for opening GZIP compressed files. I really do. After reading (and trying to implement the advice of) numerous postings, I gave up on GZIP. In my investigation, I walked byte-by-byte through numerous binary dumps. Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern. Forget about the head and foot bytes, the basic GZIP compressed data is simply not the same as the actionscript base deflate-algorithm compressed data. ...

I finally made the jump from moveable type to wordpress. The hardest step was porting the old posts. Whereas I created posts using UTF-8 encoded characters, moveable type did a dumb convert of the characters into Latin-1 when storing them MySQL. Since the path out of the database and to the page was a reverse process, when viewing pages the characters would reappear as UTF-8. However, when exporting the data from moveable type, the round-trip was broken. The characters in MySQL were not really proper Latin-1 characters. None of the recommended processes I found through google worked for me. I’ve had to deal with this problem at work last year. The memory of that pain makes me flinch. ...

Currently, popular filesystems (ext3, hfs+) have a practical limit on the number of files and directories you can store in a single directory. Certainly, most of the unix command line tools will not work once you exceed some magic threshold. In my experience, 10,000 files and or directories is the practical limit. So what do you do when you have 1,000,000 XML files to process? I had this very problem recently. Fortunately, the problem was simplified as each file belong to one of 27,000 categories. ...

At work, we have legacy systems with problems which no one had taken the time to fix. One such legacy problem involved an FTP server. Client applications would FTP files up to the server for processing. That part worked fine. What didn’t work was knowing when the FTP was complete so we could start processing the data. Recently, I decided to fix this problem. Many people have written on the subject. One of the approaches advised, “watching the file and when the file size stops changing, you can use it.” I didn’t like that one. For so many reasons. Another recommended using lsof. Hummmmmmm. I didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling with that one either. ...

I attended the SDForum Engineering Leadership SIG talk What Defines an Early Stage A+ VP of Engineering? held on Thursday, October 16 at SAP. Matt Pérez, COO of nearsoft.com, spoke his mind on the subject in the context of his own experience. I see a lot of presentations. Matt’s style and presence puts him at the front of the class. At the end of his talk, Matt opened the floor for audience questions. He also opened the floor for the audience to answer (or simply opine on) the question. One guy asked–I paraphrase here–the question, “I am a CEO; How do you VPs of Engineering want to be managed.” ...

Monday’s morning scrum was dragging out. Scrum is supposed to be a short meeting so when it starts to drag, I’ll make a “now and later” request. What conversations can we complete “now” in a few minutes and what conversations are better served with their own “later” in their own planning meeting. I hadn’t scheduled Monday planning meetings. Sometimes meetings get in the way. Sometimes they are the way. Monday’s meetings were definitely overdue. ...

I read a lot of resumes. It’s a depressing activity. One thing I’ve gotten from reading so many resumes is an empathy for hiring managers. Don’t get me wrong. I remember those anxious, uncertain days of writing my own resume. Worrying whether I had just the right words that would keep my resume out of the circular file. The truth of the matter is that most resumes are crap. Total and complete crap. When I scan through resumes, I make three piles. ...

I saw Rorschach‘s tweet about slife and thought I’d give it a try. Wow. It is eye opening. You can read a mans whole life with slife. I installed it Thursday morning. It didn’t surprise me. I more or less know how my days are filled. Here’s two and a half days… 07:30 arrive office, make coffee, review yesterday’s notes 08:00 read originalsignal.com 08:30 scrum meeting 09:00 write code, compile code, commit code 10:00 bathroom 10:05 write code, compile code, commit code 12:00 lunch 13:00 write code 15:30 bathroom 15:35 write code, compile code, commit code 17:00 answer email 17:30 end of day meeting 18:00 depart office ...

You really don’t notice that you’re not sick when you’re not sick. But take ill, and that is all you notice. I’ve been pushing life a bit hard of late and life in turn bit me right on the ass. I had felt run down for a couple of weeks but late last Thursday, I felt simply awful. By midnight, my head was a hair from exploding. I knew I was out of commission for the next few days. ...

Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all. — Carlos Castañeda Early this spring, I made some big architectural changes in the company’s website. The two most far-reaching changes involved Amazon’s Web Services and Adobe’s Flex product. Sometimes you regret big changes. I only regret having not made the changes earlier. I admit that I wasn’t always a flex fan. Indeed, I dismissed the flex out of hand in the early days mainly as a response to Macromedia’s steep pricing model. Ouch. Since then, Adobe had bought Macromedia and the pricing model changed several times. I never noticed. Such is the cost of writing something off. ...