Will you look at that?

The team that won the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competion used Microsoft Windows XP Embedded to run their bot.

From the team's white paper:

The Windows XP Embedded operating system along with Matlab 7 were utilized in order to create an easy and quick development environment.

Not only did the team win, but they retained their championship title from last year.

Very cool.

Welcome to the inaugural "Developer Life Lessons" post!  Like my DevTools posts, I hope to make these a series which contain little developer life stories, tidbits, and advice (at least whatever I'm qualified to offer).

So what shall our topic be for this first post?  How about the most crucial and perhaps most overlooked (by some) tool of all: the developer workstation.

Lesson 1a: Always have a backup machine.  Hardware fails, catastrophes happen.  Be prepared by having a second dev machine which is fairly capable and has most of the necessary software already installed.  If you need to, take a day to do this on some project down time...most managers will understand and will be supportive as having a backup in place and ready to go with a few updates could be a life saver come crunch time and your workstation refuses to boot.  Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with having a good backup strategy for your code and source control to get your working code onto the new machine (we'll cover this in later editions, I guess).  If you work in a team, you should have at least one backup machine for every 10 team members (random number ).  It just makes sense, you know?

Lesson 1b: Never buy Compaq or HP.  Never.  I would not use their top of the line machines even if they gave them to me for free and paid me to endorse them.  Compaq and HP are truly pieces of turds that should have no place on a developer's desk.  I have never had a single good experience with either brand and refuse to buy anything made by these two terrible hardware manufacturers.  Be it printers, laptops, desktops...whatever, stay away, stay far, far away from these two brands.

As in all cases, a true geek never trusts his/her machine to the unknown by buying a retail PC (different story with laptops as DIY is still not as common and accessible as with the PC market).  A true geek will always hand build his/her primary machine (and of course, use the old machine as the backup (see Lesson 1a)). 

The big benefit of course is that as you pick your own components, you can optimize the pieces for what you plan on doing and you can ensure that every piece is from a known manufacturer with a good warranty.

Indeed, it requires more research, possibly more work, and possibly more money, but in the end, you have a fine tuned tool that you can be proud of, that you know inside and out, and that is far, far better than what you'd otherwise get from a retail PC manufacturer.  With the amount of resources on the web these days on building PCs, it's really quite trivial and I think it's something that everyone should do at least once.

If you absolutely must buy a retail PC, then go with Dell.  Dells suck hard as well, but not nearly as hard as HP/Compaq.  Of course, having the luxury of building your own workstation is not always possible and is in fact quite rare, but if you do have the luxury, dont' settle for a retail PC!

Lesson 1c: When interviewing for new jobs, always make a point to check out the machines and monitors that people are using in the office.  If they're using machines from 2002 with Celerons, 512 MB of RAM, and stuck with Office 2000 and still using CRTs, it's typically a sign that the company is tight with the purse strings.  This can be a good thing in general, but when it comes to development machines, it's always a bad sign as having good workstations (don't even have to be top of the line) shows that the managers understand the needs of the developers and they've invested in making sure that they've done everything they can, from a hardware perspective, to help make the developers as efficient as they can be (who wants to sit through lenghty compiles?).  After all, time is money and slow machines bog down the developer and those seconds and minutes add up over time.

Via Fark, I came across a short article by Gregory P. Smith titled "Top 10 Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs".

The interesting bit is the conclusion drawn by Smith:

Interesting, isn’t it — that all ten factors begin with the phrase “Management….” Interesting, too, just how many of these high-turnover factors are preventable? My retention survey confirmed the truth of the saying, “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” Thirty five percent of the respondents answered yes to the question, Was the attitude of your direct supervisor/manager the primary factor in your quitting a previous job?

In a seperate newsletter, logoworks cites Roger Herman:

Recruiting, selecting, and hiring a new employee takes time and money . . . neither of which you have a lot of. Then, when you do find somebody that you hope will work out, you have to invest in training time and some team building to move that new employee into a position of productivity. Meanwhile, the business keeps moving. There’s no way to push a “pause” button while you adjust.

Regarding my first job that I had out of college as a consultant at ITT Industries, I remember I was told by my manager, when I asked for a well deserved raise, that I was "replaceable" and that in fact, all employees are.  Needless to say, with this type of attitude in management, interacting with management was always stressful and my own morale was low...I lost a lot of respect for my manager after that encounter; it's one thing for management to believe some management training BS, but it's just not right for management to say it to directly to an employee...

Herman continues by adding:

People know each other, they’re comfortable with each other, they work well together. This kind of relationship can be powerful when there’s a rush order to get out or when there’s a problem somewhere in the manufacturing process.

This can be even more critical in IT as many of the people that work in this field are introverts (like myself), whom generally have a hard time finding people who they can relate to and form bonds with.  And of course, this type of employee bonding is important so that responsibility is gladly shared by teammates and coworkers come crunch time, so that morale remains high (and by proxy, productivity and quality), and so that good talent doesn't slip away.

On a completely unrelated note, I came across a goldmine of cute as I was browsing around the web.  Can you tell which one doesn't belong (at least according to Nature) with the other?

Too cute!

Despite all those Discovery channel shows, sharks are still one of the most misunderstood animals in the oceans.  They are magnificent creatures who's ferocity, for the most part, is exaggerated due to the media frenzy that occurs with each shark attack, which typically leads to the killing of the suspect shark at human hands.  Quite sad when such a creature is simply living within Nature's guidelines.

Perhaps what's even more disturbing is how the Chinese and the Japanese systematically hunt, de-fin, and then discard live sharks.  I once saw a video of this when I was in high school (you can find a similar PSA-type video here) and I will never forget the image of the blood red waters around the vessel, the writhing sharks, still alive and bleeding after the dorsal fin was cut off discarded like garbage into the ocean.

Absolutely sickening...

So it's encouraging to read that Yao Ming, a prominent role model to Chinese youth and Chinese society in general, has sworn off shark's fin soup and has apparently picked up a cause to help promote wildlife protection.  Hopefully, this leads to a decrease in the incredibly grissly, wasteful, and disgusting practice of finning sharks.

I came across an article on Tomshardware this morning regarding Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, who is now starting a social networking site/portal for seniors.

... <that's me sitting here contemplating>

Yeah, sounds familiar to me alright.  Back in the summer of 2000, I was working with a Mister Ezra Hedaya at a small startup called iCanServices.  The idea was to tap into a largely ignored marketspace: the "mature adult" (age 55+) internet user and offer them a way to stay in touch with their families, with each other, and offer a variety of services specifically tailored to these users.

It's one of those situations where the idea was ahead of its time.  One of the biggest issues was that most of the elderly were very wary of computers and certainly, the high prices of components those days didn't help much at all.  It was a big stumbling block to try to introduce a web application when most of the users didn't have access to the web. 

Fast forward to today, seven years later.  Technology has slowly melded into the society even more so since 2000 and a new generation of these mature adults are starting to retire from a business world that has embraced computers and the Internet as a daily instrument.  Computers and internet connections while certainly commonplace in 2000, were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are today and nowhere near as affordable.  With the introduction of UMPCs (Ultra Mobile Personal Computers) and the slew of really cheap desktops nowadays, Captain's dream might have taken off and perhaps I'd be a wealthy IPO millionaire today (yeah, in my wildest dreams).

Chalk this one up as another missed opportunity

I came across an article on some common myths with regards to Windows passwords (via Fark).

The short of it is to keep the password easy to remeber, make it at least 15 characters, and don't forget that you can use spaces in passwords as well to create passphrases.

Man, I don't about anyone else, but I personally cannot wait for these guys to open a can of whup-ass :D Graaaaaawr (I really mean that)!!

The schedule can be found on the Team USA subsection of NBA.com.

I'm really looking forward to this team play as it should be some fast paced, exciting basketball.

One has to wonder, what would the world by like if he had won the presidency?

I pondered this as I was laying down to sleep last night, after viewing these two videos which I came across in a thread on Fark.  I think the world would be a very, very, very different place had Gore won the presidency in 2000.

An incredibly revealing set of videos made by Spike Jonze (of Adaptation and Being John Malkovich fame) shows a very personable, humorous, incredibly intelligent, and passionate Al Gore.  His vision is not just about global warming and the environment (although he does bring it up in the video).  He has a genuine conviction to making America a better place for the lower and middle class in America through education, fostering our competitive advantages in industry, and ensuring that American's are ready for the coming (this was shot in 1999) information age.

I think that seeing his interaction with his family and especially his daughters in these videos actually reveals a great deal about him and the values he brings to the table as compared to Bush, who also happens to have two daughters.

Part 1 and Part 2.

And if there was any doubt that the election was stolen: "How Bush Defeated Gore--The Real Story"...watch how Clayton Roberts, director of the Florida Division of Elections, squirms.

So this afternoon, I received an email from Kevin Downs (as I'm on his mailing list), the developer of NDoc with the following:

I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in any open-source development work.

The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.

Once ‘Sandcastle’ is released, it is my belief that it will become the de-facto standard and that NDoc will slowly become a stagnant side-water. This will happen regardless of technical considerations, even if Sandcastle were to be less feature-complete. It's just an inevitable result of MS's 'not-invented-here' mentality, one only has to look at Nant and NUnit to see the effects of MS 'competition'.

This is not, however, my only reason for stopping development work - I have a big enough ego to think I could still produce a better product than them

As some of you are aware, there are some in the community who believe that a .Net 2.0 compatible release was theirs by-right and that I should be moving faster – despite the fact that I am but one man working in his spare time...

This came to head in the last week; I have been subjected to an automated mail-bomb attack on both my public mail addresses and the ndoc2 mailing list address. These mails have been extremely offensive and resulted in my ISP temporarily suspending my account because of the traffic volume. This incident has been reported to the local authorities, although I am highly doubtful they will be able to do anything about it.

This has was the ‘last-straw’ and has convinced me that I should withdraw from the community; I’m not prepared to have myself and my family threatened by some lunatic!

Kevin

P.S. If anyone wants to take over as admin on the SourceForge NDoc project - contact me. If not, I'll be removing myself in 14 days.

It's kind of upsetting how this has panned out as I can certainly understand Kevin's displeasure at how he was treated by a few members of the community.  But at the same time, I'm curious as to why the project, while surely utilized by many .Net developers world wide, never picked up more developers to help share the load.

While it is quite disappointing as I really liked NDoc's simplicity and ease of use, I had felt that this would be the likely end once I started reading about Microsoft's Sandcastle project.

As for the individual(s) who perpetrated the email bombs, all I can say is WTF?  That's a terrible and childish way to get what you want.

The way our lives flow through time and the repitition that each of us encounter, day after day, tends to blur the multitude of crossroads that we reach and the different decisions that we make at each of these crossroads.

In a sense, this is what it's like to walk around a crowded city like New York City.  There are turns everywhere and roads and alleys which lead to every nook of the city.  But by design, it's never difficult to get back to where you were in case you do make the wrong choice and turn down the wrong road...these decisions come in passing and perhaps you don't even think about it.

But in every life, there are milestones that approach and crossroads that split into two clearly defined paths with no readily apparent way back to where you started. Looking down either road at this intersection, we imagine ourselves in the future and what it would be like to take either path.  Will we be fortunate and meet success or will it come to be that our decision haunt us in our dreams?  The decision is never easy as unlike a city street, it may be miles before we reach the U-turn.

I've felt this rarely in my near 25 years of life.  Even marriage was an easy and natural decision for me.  And now such a decision weighs on me with a paralyzing force; I just don't know what to do.  I am comfortable, but not completely satisfied.  My sensible side tells me to continue on the path that I have taken.  The dreamer in me tells me to ditch the map and head into the unknown.

Ah, to be at a crossroad in life, to be at once filled with hope and fear as well.