Yow-Hann Lee - Software Happens

Recently, I wrapped up my duties as a lead developer at myspace and headed to ArenaNet over in Bellevue, Washington. My team is hiring and we’re looking for awesome services and web developers. If you’re looking for a new challenge and would like to be part of the next Guild Wars gaming experience, check out the descriptions at:

Services Programmer

Web Developer

And you can hit me up at yow-hann at arena dot net. Hope to see some of the GWB community folks out there!

Been playing around with IE8 RC for the last couple days and am pleased with the upgrade from IE8 Beta.

The features are well publicized on IEBlog: Overview of Platform Improvements in IE8 RC1; it’s not really the web slices and accelerators that are of interest.

Two favorites thus far:

1. Debugger/Profiler

You no longer need Visual Studio or to download a script debugger separately. It has all the features you know and love from IE Dev Toolbar along with a decent script debugger/profiler.

 

2. XDomainRequest

Will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Other notable include the security and performance improvements since Beta. Perhaps this will help recover some of IE's lost market share?

I was recently reminded of an article for "Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument". In recent years with RoR and ASP.NET MVC, you've probably come across Reason #66 more often. What's old is new again. How many of these have you run across? And how would you re-sort the list if judged on frequency?

Interesting Maintenance page when you check out LinkedIn domain today.

Not having attended PDC 2008, I have been catching some of the recorded sessions online at: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx.  The above screenshot from The Future of C# (after 4.0) opens up a can of worms. Nice!

 

 

Waiting to sign in to Windows Azure and seeing what it offers to Amazon’s EC2.

Catching the keynote at: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/. More information on Azure can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/default.aspx.

http://bluehoo.com/, with 121,476+ hoos found, as an example in action.

Earlier this month, Google released “Enhanced Snippets for Discussion Boards”. Below is an example in action:

Since their experiments here and here, Google has taken a different approach to presenting search results. On the other hand, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey was aimed towards customizing search results and presentation layers to the third party developer and users.

Several month’s after Yahoo’s approach, the search results space also has its version of an open approach vs. a walled garden…

Seattle Code Camp 2008 is once again held at the DigiPen campus. I never got around to recapping the one held earlier this year (v3.0) but have recaps of v2.0 here and here.

Check it out at: https://seattle.codecamp.us/default.aspx.

Well, someone finally stepped up and wrote that article. The one where he/she puts a different spin on the same initiatives in hopes of better adoption. And it was none other than Roy Osherove. Like some sports that are a game of inches, so is software design and testability.

The article is everything that most folks in the industry know about but were afraid to mention or unable to put into a lighter context. Good read at: http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2008/09/20/goodbye-mocks-farewell-stubs.aspx.

All the tooling that came from TDD were intended to drive people into the “pit of success” as they say. Unfortunately, it meant a much steeper curve that most weren’t willing to adopt. There is a funny inertia with masses; even if the given situation is bad (albeit there may still be progress, I didn’t specify good or bad..), an old saying holds strong. “If it ain’t…don’t fix it”.

So by removing as much overhead and putting a spin on the terms, the aim is to drive the masses to those similar goals. Does it mean a smaller “pit of success”? Sure. But it also means the social aspects are really put to the test.

With so much press already here, here and here, it should be interesting to see just how much “value add” there is. Sure, the claim to V8 JavaScript Engine is appealing but how is this for ubiquity?

Another company did it bottom up several years ago as we now witness it being done top down.

 

What’s the big story of these olympics besides Silverlight enjoying a nice boost in user adoption? How about the folks behind all of the streaming videos, Limelight Networks?

Amongst all the hype, bits of high level information can be found at:

Limelight Networks: Why the Olympics didn’t ‘Melt’ the Internet. Ironically, this is from the same group with the original dramatized predictions.

Others at:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9693

http://www.contentinople.com/document.asp?doc_id=158320&page_number=2

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10003752-56.html?hhTest=1

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2008-08/limelight-networks-interview-streaming-the-olympics/

Albeit, this #2 CDN has had its legal troubles and not many papers are published revealing infrastructure details (as opposed to Akamai).

All too often in the software industry, if you are one that follows the latest tools and technologies, you risk getting pigeonholed as the guy who only wants to play with the latest toys. One of the typical sayings being that tools only accelerate your rate of failure (or success)..blah blah blah…

While this is true for some technologists, there are those that look beneath the surface of a technology and truly connect with the problems the new offering is attempting to solve. Most of the time in doing so, you see it is as coal slowly transforming into diamonds. And it is in this potential transformation that excites you as a developer. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the typical “old habits die hard” stereotyped personalities.

In my own past entries, I had mentioned new technologies in passing without fully conveying these. The assumption was that the underlying paradigms were obvious to any observer. But recall the other end of the spectrum? You need to convince those guys you aren’t a bandwagon jumping hippie.

By conveying your focus on paradigm and fundamentals, you can shed more light upon the new technology. No, I’m not talking about the evangelist regurgitations, but the real meaty substance. And ideally, an anecdote or two about life before this “paradigm” and life afterwards. People love war stories; so if you have the scars, feel free to show them. :)

This is one of those things where you just get a tad lazy and forget to do; hence the title of this entry. Fiddler, like a lot of other tools (i.e. Search as an example), is generally good out of the box.

So while troubleshooting a particular item today where we were only interested in one response type, rather than going through the typical diarrhea of fiddler entries, I opted for filters. Along with the “Show only HTML” option in the Filters tab below, there is also a slew of other options to slice and dice that incoming traffic. This is one of the areas I enjoyed as the Fiddler builds progress.

 

 

If you’re looking just to ignore images (from say user generated content pages), you can just hit “Rules” –> “Hide Image Requests”.

Just like how traditional TV ad targeting is the lazy person’s way of doing targeted search ads (ok, so maybe that’s arguable), avoid laziness and target your fiddler sessions to what you really need. Anyway, that’s the back to basic of the day.

A picture is worth a thousand words. So in honor of a technology icon, I present the following picture:

 

What does the above image represent?

Of course, one can point out the irony in the image itself. The fact that the Start button is where you go to "Shut Down" your machine. But we'll let Andy Rooney's flame take care of that. Speaking of that, Andy represents a good portion of typical users. For other BillG videos over the years, you can check out the Microsoft collection.

Bill Gate's vision was to bring PCs and the power of computing to the masses. Obviously, this is an extreme nutshell of all the epiphanies on his credit list. But this was a double edged sword and generated the love/hate relationship you see today. Having a plate so full already, the polish became secondary. Yet the audience always craves more...

What is the polish?

The polish was in the UI and interaction design. One needs to look no further than the fanboy mentalities of Mac users. As an engineer and particularly non-UI centric developers, it becomes easy to forget that "polish" and the intended audience. After all, for a long time and even today, the interface has been treated as an afterthought or beneath a "real" engineer to work on.

Who are our users?

For typical consumer software and web applications, they are our grandmothers, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, sons and daughters.

And on the day BillG's exit, we are inspired by all his contributions and are reminded of the "polish" for your own software initiatives. Love him or hate him, he does inspire others either way.

Usability, Availability, Accessibility and Intuitiveness

In going with the old new saying, you sometimes remind yourself of an old new thing.

You know... the kind of thing that at one time that you know you knew but now has fleeted away thanks to the meat surrounded by your skull? And you know that you keep a blog to keep you from forgetting the very things you don't want to forget?  <--- How's that for grammar? Now repeat the above five times fast :)

Well, today's example is the very reminder that HTML alt attribute tags are not honored as tooltips in all browsers. http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html#alttooltip has describes this and the original intents. Darn you Internet Explorer and your mind corruption games!? Where have all my standards gone?

Let this be a reminder to self about memory lapses and being subdued by IE's ways and even going to the extent of installing IE8 Beta 1. Guess that is you get for using beta-ware, software happens.