Antimatter

The classic instruction set for mounting a shared folder between a windows host and a linux guest, found here, works as advertised except for one small detail.  If your host is a windows7 install, you must define the shared folder in Virtualbox BEFORE starting the guest OS.  If, like me, you define the shared folder while the guest OS is running, the shared folder definition will be placed under the “transient folders” section of the definitions, not the “machine folders” section which is where it needs to be.  The trouble starts when you try to mount the shared folder.  You’ll get the error:

“/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device”

Shut down the guest OS, add the shared folder to the virtual machine’s definition, and then you’re good to go.

Wireshark is killer, except when it doesn’t play well with the underlying OS.  Like how OS X finds it hilarious to hide your network interfaces from your applications.  Go ahead, fire up Wireshark on the mac and watch as it can’t find a single interface.  I’ll wait.

Yeah, pain, isn’t it?

Well, you can fix that:

sudo chmod 664 /dev/b*

And you’re back in action.

I’ve experienced this on two different laptops now: the wireless connections start to suck.  Out of nowhere the network just slows to a crawl.  Plug into ethernet and you’re jake.  All other wireless devices on the network are humming away just fine with no loss of bandwidth.  It’s just the Apple laptops.  It’s infuriating, but there’s a very simple (albeit weird) fix for it.

Just go to network preferences and pull down the location menu. From there select edit locations. Create a new location. Doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s all arbitrary. Then delete whatever location you were using, even if it is “Automatic”. Switch to the new location and set it up like normal.

That’s it.

God only knows why this works, but it does.

This isn’t much publicized, but encoding issues can bite you in the butt, especially when switching platforms.  There’s an easy way to eliminate 95% of all encoding hassles,  though — just add a single property:

<properties>
  <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
</properties>

to your pom, or parent pom.  Voila!  You’re set for life.

According to the latest Google Public Policy blog post, the big G is “reconsidering” what doing business with the big C means.  Apparently, someone (cough: the Chinese government) has been attempting to break Google’s security and steal information about human rights activists. Google’s of the opinion that enough is enough, and I couldn’t agree more.

Everyone, lend your support to Google in this endeavor.

Original post: Official Google Blog: A new approach to China.

I’ve got a new and shiny (but rough) Netflix Command-line client over at BLC.  That’s right, Command-line. Roll with it unix style.

Haven’t been active on the blogging front lately, as I took a new job, moved, and all that.  Also, I spent some spare time building a client library for the Netflix API.  You can take a look here.

I keep getting questions about closures, mostly from people who know me and my YAGNI attitude.  “I don’t get what’s so great about them.  What can you do with closures that you couldn’t do otherwise?”

Answer: Nothing.

Well, that’s only partly an answer.  It’s true, closures aren’t magic.  There’s nothing you can do with them that you couldn’t do otherwise, but there is something great about them.  For example, in Groovy, you could do something like this:

def sql = Sql.newInstance("jdbc:mysql://server/database", "sa", "pword", "Driver")
sql.eachRow("select foo, bar from foobars") { row ->
  def foo = row["foo"]
  def bar = row["bar"]
  print "Foo = $foo and bar = $bar"
}

Here, Groovy’s Sql class has a method called eachRow that accepts two parameters: a query, and a closure to execute for each row in the result.  Functionally, this is the same as:

// assume you've got your db connection setup
ResultSet rs = conn.execute("select foo, bar from foobars")
while rs.hasNext()
{
  def foo = rs.getString("foo")
  def bar = rs.getString("bar")
  print "Foo = $foo and bar = $bar"
}
rs.close()
conn.close()

…and so you may be forgiven for thinking closures are much ado about nothing.  After all, in both cases, all you’ve done is open a connection, execute a query, iterate over the results, and do something with each row.  Not a big deal, right?

Well, while functionally the two code samples are equivalent, the closure example reveals something special.  See the last two lines of the non-closure example, the calls to rs.close() and conn.close()?  You don’t need those when calling Sql.eachRow because it does it for you.  The designers of Groovy, in essence, recognized that when you’re dealing with databases it’s real common to open a connection, execute a query, iterate over the results, and do something with each row.  Oh yeah, and clean up the resources afterward.  Now, with repetitive things it’s a good idea to encapsulate the invariants (opening, iterating, and closing) and abstract what varies (the queries and what you do with the results).  The query’s already abstracted as a SQL string, so let’s abstract the code that processes the results and we’re good to go.

There’s something else.  What we’re doing when we pass a closure to the eachRow() method is metaprogramming — partially specifying, at runtime, the behavior of another object.  But we’re doing it responsibly; we’re not just clobbering or overriding some behavior, we’re fulfilling a contract.  Of course, without closures, you could accomplish the same thing by using, say, the command pattern.  (More or less this is how the Groovy runtime does it behind the scenes, anyway).  But the closure paradigm is cleaner and more convenient.

Which gets to the heart of it: using closures properly results in cleaner, more elegant code, and that’s all.  But isn’t that what you want, anyway?

Reading Neal Ford’s generally excellent book The Productive Programmer, I experimented with his multiple plugin configuration hack. In short, creating multiple plugin configurations in a single eclipse install allows for a team to keep their plugin configurations in version control, so everyone has exactly the same configurations as anyone else on the team. No more “works on my machine but not on yours” weirdness. You can even manage them on a project-by-project basis, which is good.

How many times have you heard this?

But there are two aspects of working with multiple plugin configurations that are strange: specifically, creating and deleting them. In order to create an additional plugin configuration, you have to:

1. Create a folder to hold the configuration. It must be named “eclipse” and it must not be in Eclipse’s directory structure.
2. Within your “eclipse” folder, you have to make an empty file called .eclipseextension, and two empty folders, features and plugins.

As Ford points out, Eclipse (inexplicably) won’t do this for you. You have to do this by hand. It’s not hard, just strange. At least this way you have more control over where the folders and files are located. (As I have multiple Eclipse installs, I used nesting to keep track of everything. I created a top-level folder called “eclipse-configurations”… under that, I made another folder for each of my named installs, and under each of those, I placed the “eclipse” folder as mentioned above. So, the versioned configuration for my “xquery” install of Eclipse is at /Users/haren/eclipse-configurations/xquery/eclipse.)

From there, you can go to Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration and add your configuration location(s). Then it’s a simple matter of installing your plugins to the config locations desired. You can then enable and disable multiple plugins as a group, switch between versions, etc. It’s very handy.

But I’d mentioned that there were two strange things about the process. Creating additional configuration locations was one, deleting them was the second. Just as Eclipse gives you no love in creating them, it makes it even harder to get rid of them.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve added your new location as an extension not to the top-level list, but as an extension to an extension. (Yes, you can do this.) But let’s also say that’s not what you wanted. Well, you can disable your extension-within-an-extension, but you can’t get Eclipse to ignore its existence entirely. If you then try to add it to the top level, Eclipse won’t let you, complaining that you’ve already added it elsewhere. Arg.

Well, there’s a way around that, too (but Ford doesn’t mention it). Under ${ECLIPSE_HOME}/configuration/org.eclipse.update there’s a file called platform.xml. Up at the top there are “site” nodes, and one of those will be your offender. Delete the bad guy and restart Eclipse. Now you can place your configuration elsewhere. (Or, you can just change the path in the node).

Anyway, as noted, there’s a lot to gain by using multiple plugin configuarations, once you get around Eclipse’s strange reluctance to make it intuitive. Happy hacking!

There’s an old beef in this industry regarding hiring practices — specifically, unreasonable requirements in job adverts.  Back when I was fresh out of college I learned to just move along if the job ad contained a screwy writeup, an unclear picture of the job responsibilities, or (especially) a requirements section that made it sound as if they’d settle for no less than Linus Torvalds himself.

Not having been in the job hunt myself lo these past few years, I’d more-or-less forgotten about the chicanery prevalent in tech-industry hiring practices.  But as two colleagues of mine have recently gone through a job change, I’ve been getting a glimpse of current job ads, and if anything, it’s gotten worse.  Granted, not in absolute terms.  I remember job hunting back in the immediate aftermath of the dot-com bust.  Employers were asking for the moon back then.

But today, while the ads aren’t quite as nutty as they were say, circa 2003, there’s far less excuse. Conventional wisdom holds that (a) a whole lotta incompetent chowderheads got into this industry during the boom and (b) the bust, if nothing else, weeded them out.  Eventually.  We’ve had several years of sink or swim, dog-eat-dog competition for jobs, and the devil has taken the hindmost.  Right?  And that should go for HR people as well.  I mean, engineers have this bias against HR people in general, but I have to say that most of the HR people I’ve worked with pretty much had their act together.  (There was this one really really stinker-oo exception to this, but I’ll not name names.)  Maybe the HR biz hasn’t shaken out all the deadwood yet, or maybe it’s upper management making goofy decisions, or maybe we, collectively, as an industry, still have our heads in the clouds.  All I know for certain is that requirements lists like the following still exist:

Minimum Qualifications

* A minimum 10 years of software development experience, at least half of which has involved direct Java/J2EE web or internet projects.
* Strong knowledge of development methodologies and how they can be applied to the organization.
* Firm understanding of project plans, estimates, milestones, and the overall software development lifecycle.
* Firm understanding of security issues as it applies to web applications.
* Strong experience designing database schemas for applications, and analyzing database specific issues. PL/SQL programming a plus.
* Very clear verbal ability in describing technical issues in both non-technical and technical language, depending on the audience at hand.
* Strong trouble-shooting ability in resolving tough technical problems.
* Intimate knowledge in how web servers, application servers, and database servers work together.
* Strong experience in Java, C/C++ and Perl development.
* Firm understanding and hands on experience with diverse technologies such as XML, SOAP, HTTP, JDBC, JNDI, JMS, JMX and JTA.
* Familiarity with Struts, JSF, Tapestry, Spring, Hibernate, Axis, JDO, and WebWork.
* Experience installing, configuring and deploying applications in WebLogic, WebSphere, and/or JBoss.
* Experience installing and configuring Apache Web Servers.
* Experience with unit testing.
* Comprehensive knowledge of Quality Assurance and how it fits into the development process.
* Proficiency in drawing system diagrams of large, multi-tier web applications from front to back, including networked and clustered components.
* Expertise in UML and recognizing which elements are applicable for a given project.

Sorry, guys, but your candidate doesn’t exist.  Just some of the middle-of-the-list throwaways like “Strong experience in Java, C/C++ and Perl development” alone are absurd to ask for, leastways for any reasonable definition of the phrase “strong experience”.  I’m quite experienced with Java, and I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I cut quite the dashing figure with C++ five years ago; I’ve not used it since.  Does this make me “strong” in C++ nowadays? Hell no.  Same applies for you, too.  I don’t care who you are, if you’ve not used C++ in five years you’re no longer an expert.  I do not know, nor have I ever met, anyone, anywhere at any time, who has even given me the impression that they are concurrently “strong” in Java, C++, and Perl.  As a friend of mine put it, “Being ‘strong’ in a tech skill is akin to being ‘strong’ in an athletic pursuit.  You cannot be an olympic level swimmer, boxer, and weightlifter all at the same time.”

Add to that other demands like “Firm understanding and hands on experience with diverse technologies such as XML, SOAP, HTTP, JDBC, JNDI, JMS, JMX and JTA” and “Familiarity with Struts, JSF, Tapestry, Spring, Hibernate, Axis, JDO, and WebWork” and you’re in cloud cuckoo land, if “firm understanding” and “familiarity” have any meaning at all.  Top it off with the rest of the above list and you’ve weeded out… yep, 164% of the population.  I don’t know how, exactly, but the numbers don’t lie.  And keep in mind, as the posting makes clear: these are minimum qualifications.  To me, “minimum qualifications” describes the sorts of things you should know, in order to prevent the interviewer from suing you for wasting his time, if you don’t know them.  That covers much less ground than what they’ve listed.

Look, I get it, guys.  You want top-notch personnel.  You want people who will be able to deal with the alphabet-soup world of modern development.  You want people who can adapt and learn.  Fine.  Just do us a favor and ask for that, in reasonable terms:

Minimum Qualifications

* Smart, and gets things done.  (Thanks, Joel!)
* Proficient in one of the following: Java, C++, or Perl.

There.  Was that so hard?

The fun isn’t limited to software engineers, though.  There’s this gem, courtesy of our friends at Sony.  The position: “Sr. Web Site Technologist”.  The job tasks:

1. Create and maintain content on internal company web (“intranet”) servers for the IT department and selected other customers. This will involve everything from designing “look and feel” (styles), to creating new content (technical writing and editing) and reformatting of existing content. This also includes selecting, installing and customizing scripts, content management systems, and other server-side software to enhance functionality of the sites and verify web site integrity and eliminate broken links and web site content errors. Work with other departments to establish web site usage procedures and policies.
2. Create web-enabled applications by assisting product development staff in creating interfaces to web services for existing and future internal applications, departmental “intranet” services and other web/application interfaces. Provide technical support as needed to the SCEA online game community on a wide range of issues concerning web content management, web-based collaboration systems and related services.
3. Create, maintain and optimize web servers by designing, installing and configuring highly reliable 24×7 production web servers for internal and Internet services. Optimize performance of servers by analyzing web site traffic, and present regular reports detailing analysis of internal usage of the web sites and identifying needed changes. Automate the monitoring of web server health, performance, and security. Research new web technologies, and, as necessary, implement those new technologies into existing web servers. Recommend hardware and software purchases as necessary.
4. Configure and maintain related services such as DNS, email, FTP, etc. as needed to support web site development and deployment.
5. Travel occasionally as needed to support remote offices and server collocation facilities.

Whew, that’s gonna be one busy employee, but I suppose sysadmin/content producer/writer/designer/tech support gurus are a dime a dozen.  Should be no problem, guys!  Oh, but wait… the dreaded…

REQUIRED SKILLS.
PEOPLE: Strong experience with teamwork in Internet-related server operation groups, very good technical-level verbal and written communication skills in English.
PROCESS: Ability to participate in process definition for change management and problem resolution to support large-scale 7×24 systems operations.
TECHNICAL: Must have computer science knowledge adequate to understand and communicate complex system concepts to technical teams; beginning to intermediate Unix/Linux systems administration and scripting knowledge; previous experience as a UNIX/Linux and/or web site administrator; intermediate MS Office skills; previous experience designing web sites including page layouts and use of content management systems; experience hosting web content on Unix/Linux systems; intermediate level Internet and related networking expertise; and basic understanding of PlayStation games.
PLANNING/IMPLEMENTATION: Must be able to create and maintain project plans in collaboration with technical teams and management.
INDUSTRY: Should have Internet background sufficient to understand operations, security, and network planning.

Well, okay.  Apart from the “7×24 systems operations”, that’s not too bad… I suppose a lot of people could cut the mustard in such a ca… wait, what’s this?

Responsibilities:
Administer and support existing intranet sites, applications and servers in a Microsoft environment, including IIS and Apache
Knowledge and support of Stellent content management software
Knowledge of Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Digital Assets Management concepts
Administer and support SCEA’s Content Management System
Create and edit web pages and manage Company /Consumer Services / departmental intranet sites
Perform varied maintenance duties within the intranet environment
Assist with user education and training on CMS functionality, and on the use of our web page templates.

“Responsibilities” on top of Job Tasks.  Umm, ok.  They’ve basically recapped the more verbose version above, replacing the Linux/Unix world with the Microsoft world, but now they’ve added “user education and training” and “varied maintenance duties” to the mix.  You want someone with carpentry and massage therapy skills while you’re at it?  OH DEAR LORD there’s more:

Qualifications:
Expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, ASP, SQL, VBScript, Java, XML, JavaScript Perl, XML, XHTML, , Web Services, Windows Service. Understanding of PHP
Familiar with Photoshop and web graphic formats.
Experience with Windows 2000, 2003, Internet Information Server 5 & 6, Apache and SQL Server 2000.
Knowledge of Stellent Content Management and Digital Asset Management Systems.
Database: MSSQL, SQL Server 2000
Languages: C#, Java (Applet, ODBC)
Basic graphics / UI / usability design skills are desirable.
Strong web application development and design experience.
Strong foundation in object-oriented programming.
Strong debugging skills in an n-tier application.
Must be service oriented with excellent communication/people skills.

And now, my friends, we’ve sunk into Monty Python-esque silliness.  Aside from nonsense like “Database: MSSQL, SQL Server 2000″ and “Languages: C#, Java (Applet, ODBC)” they want a sysadmin/content producer/writer/designer/tech support guru/training session facilitator/maintenence man with a strong foundation in object-oriented programming.  Oh, and you’d better be a good debugger, too.  And yes, that was all from one job posting.

Sony: you’re nuts.  Granted, I’m not serious in thinking that anyone at Sony really expects a candidate to know and do all that.  And, one could argue, ads of that sort are just the product of some know-nothing hiring committee cutting and pasting stuff they don’t understand into documents they don’t read.  Let’s assume that’s true.  It’s not a good sign, for—and this is important—it’s clear that the organization that produced the above posting doesn’t know anything meaningful about the job, in particular:

1. What the job responsibilities translate to in rubber-meets-the-road, dollars-and-cents terms for the company.
2. The difference between a job well done, a job passably done, and incompetence.
3. The number of people needed to do the job right.
4. The caliber of people needed to to the job right.

They’re just like the guy who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions.  If the organization either can’t or won’t (no real difference) understand the basic facts of the job, you do not want it, because they will treat you with the same arbitrary ambivalence as an employee.  Forewarned is forearmed and all that.