Where Is Joel?

On occasion I have been known to leave my student card in the gym.  For those of you who are unaware, in Edmonton, at U of A, this means that I have to pay for transit, which I generally do with whatever coins I happen to find lying around.  It’s not optimal that I spend an extra 10$ per month getting around, but I live with it.  What drives me insane however is when the train is arriving right as I walk into the terminal and I still need to buy a ticket.

Buying tickets is obviously a necessary evil, but how come I need to navigate through a ridiculous menu system to buy a ticket??  I am the 98% scenario, an adult traveling not during a special event.  Why can’t I just put money in and get my ticket??  Just in case I overspend on a kids ticket?  Poor.  Drives me insane.

Joel out

Recently I have noticed a ton of new websites that prominently feature a big “SIGN UP” feature on their front page.

• twitter
• DreamHost
• DailyBooth
• disqus
• weebly
• others…

Some of these services, like weebly, are services that I think are absolutely awesome web services, and it does make sense for a growing website to put it’s emphasis on drawing in new users. The issue that irritates me however is that they make existing user login a pain.  It’s usually an itsy bitsy little thing somewhere in the corner. Worse yet, usually after spending some time locating the itsy bitsy little sign up button I then need to go ahead and click on it to get some sort of javascripty pop up that I can type in. Every time this happens I feel a little bit more mad and like finding the website creator and giving them a giant wedgie, or something equally horrible. Is it actually necessary to punish existing users to sign up new ones.  The one that irritates me the most is weebly, they actually put my focus in the sign up form so when I type I’m entering sign up information. Actually scratch that…  I’m actually pretty sure disqus is trying to *hide* their login form.

What’s the right way to do this?  I’m not sure, but check out the following sites.

• Voxli
• Prezi
• gmail

These sites all decide that it’s not necessary to punish you because you are already a user. Gmail actually keeps your account info filled in with the focus in the password field, so when you get there all I need to do is type my password and press “enter”.  Thank god, I don’t even need to look at the page to log in.  Prezi and Voxli do the next best thing, which is requiring me to only press “tab” to get to the login field. What’s more these sites *still* manage to include a big sign up button that I don’t need to spend a ton of time searching for.  Well done!!

Obviously everyone in Canada is flipping out about this right now. Apparently something ludicrous like 50% of all Canadians watched this hockey game. It may as well have been our Super Bowl.  And we lost. And everyone was stunned. One of the people I was watching the game with mentioned after the first period “I thought we’d be up 3-0 by now”.What I don’t get is why is everyone so surprised? Does Canada have a better roster than the Americans?  Yeah, obviously. Do the San Jose sharks have a better roster than the Edmonton Oilers.  Yes. But no one ever says “It’s absolutely stunning that the oilers beat the sharks”. Even on ice Canada was obviously the more talented squad. They dominated in time on attack, and embarrassingly outshot the Americans.  But Miller made Brodeur look like a rookie who didn’t understand the game of hockey and the Americans capitalized on their opportunities.  That’s it.  The fact of the matter is in one game elimination tournaments variance plays a huge role and the best team doesn’t always win.

So Canada, yeah, our team is stacked, but don’t count on anything.

About a month ago I was chatting with a friend of mine about web-based software.  I was talking about basecamp, which I really like but was unsure if I could justify paying for as a starving Masters student.  My friend said “….  Wait, you are thinking about *paying* for a web app?!?”  The concept completely stunned him, paying for something on the internet when everything he used, facebook, google docs and gmail were all free seemed ludicrous.  Sometime more recently another of my friends mentioned in passing to me “I would never pay for software.”

Although linux never really took off as a mainstream operating system, popular web platforms and applications like wordpress, nginx and rails seem to be making a strong case that free software may be the way of the future on the internet.  Maybe soon we will never pay for things that people with college degrees who could easily have been highly paid engineers spent years working on.  I have only one caveat, and that is What The Hell!!?!

I was recently reading an article on “The developer as a starving artist“. This article claims that as tools for development make development faster, simpler and cheaper, developers will be churning out great projects for free for fun. There will still be money in software but it will be in providing these “for fun” applications, in the same way people make money using apache to sell web hosting. The excellent developers will make money while most will be like artists “scraping by”.

The issue with this is that to be a *good* developer you actually have to be really smart. Really smart people go to college and take degrees that are hard to get into and pay them money, they don’t decide to work for free. If we stop paying developers then the same really smart people currently becoming developers will abandon software development for other lucrative professions that require being very smart.  This will make software crappy and good software will once again be in greater demand.  (aka able to charge.)

What about my thoughts on the future of the industry? As software development becomes easier and cheaper smaller teams of devs can build more extensive applications faster. What this means is that something like ebay, which was written by and employs many developers, can be replicated and improved upon by a dedicated group of 2-4 developers in under a year. Amazon took massive amounts of money to develop, now I can build an online store in under a month by myself. the key being to do this well, you still need a group of *good* developers. I think more startups will start to challenge big complacent companies, and we will begin to see more competition across product spaces. For a developer to make 180 000$ per year, a pretty dang good salary, they need to make an app that only 1000 people are willing to pay 15$ per month for! Once upon a time starting a serious software company was a large capital and time investment, now it’s more like opening a McDonalds. Given these economics and the speed of creating good applications it almost doesn’t make sense to go work a full time job unless a developer *needs* a stable income because they have children or something.

Developers go forth and prove me right. Make good apps that people will pay for and let the free software enthusiasts be damned. Good software is worth money and always will be.

Here’s a little problem for y’all, how do I decide if the following equation has a solution?

y1 < a1×1 + a2×2 + … + anxn < y2

or rather more generally Ax < y where A is a mxn matrix, x is a vector of size n and y is a vector of size m.  x is constrained to be all integers.

where all unknowns x are constrained to being integers but all y and a may be any real number.

Been pondering this on and off for a bit now and I finally found a solution and am in the middle of implementing it.  Answer to come.  ;-)

All my macy web developmenty friends can never seem to get over the fact that I do all of my initial development and testing of site in firefox.  ”It’s so clunky compared to safari”, “It’s so slow” etc. etc.  And I have tries safari.  I have tried using it many many many times.  I would use it.  It feels nicer and slicker like they mention, but am I the only one or is the safari debugger bugtastic?  It is actually absolutely stunning to me that it ever made it through QA.  I find about 50% of the time when I put a breakpoint into my JS in Safari I get the following:Safari happily breaks, wags it’s tail and asks for a pat on the head, but it completely refuses to show me my code!  Where is the code paused?  I have no idea, somewhere in this blank screen.

So then there’s the webkit nightlies.  People swear by them up and down and promise they will do all the fancy things firebug let you do like edit css inline.  So on a few occasions I brave the nightlies.  The problem is they always work even worse than my vanilla Safari. Sometimes they don’t even show the JS files as existing.  The last time I tried webkit the debugger did the following mysterious thing basically making them totally unusable.I can’t read that!!!  That’s two files in one window…  It seems like you would have to *try* to make something that bad happen.

So for all the safari developers out there.  Am I missing something??

1) You drive the whole way in the lefthand lane. The lefthand lane is actually known as a “passing lane”. This is not because they ran out of names for lanes that did not involve the word passing, it’s actually a description of what the intended use of the lane is. If you were unaware of this fact you may in fact be illiterately stupid. If this is the case try sounding the word out P-A-S-S-I-N-G. Now consider what you were doing in the lane the entire time.

Corollary 1a) People keep passing you on the right.  Yeah, those people are probably jerks as well, or at least some of them.  The fact of the matter is that you are clearly not paying attention to what is going on around you.  Is that big pickup zooming up behind you at a mind-blowing 4 kilometers an hour over the speed limit.  Maybe you should move over and *let them pass*.  Novel concept.

Corollary 1b) You keep passing people on the right.  Yeah, I get it.  Apparently you are the only one aware of the fact that the speed limit is 63% too low.  It’s clear that when this highway was designed no one whatsoever gave any thought to what a safe driving speed should actually be and the speed limit was totally arbitrary.  It’s a good thing you’ve come along to enlighten us all.

2) You leave your high beams on all the time in traffic.  …  Ok, seriously.  There is a big long line of cars in front of you. A long snake of red lights you can follow that will show you where all the turns are.  If you can’t see that line of cars without your high beams you are too blind ti be driving.  Which coincidentally is what the person in front of you is going to be any time now if you don’t start behaving like a respectable human being.

3) You drive at 70 km/hr on the 110 km/hr road because it is dark out and there is a little bit of snow on the road. Yeah, I know, you feel safe at 70 km/hr.  You feel all nice warm and cozy, like maybe you won’t go careening off the highway.  This is true. You know when else you wouldn’t go careening off the highway? Stopped.  Please don’t tell me you think it is a good idea to sit stopped in the middle of a highway in sub-optimal driving conditions??  It’s also not safe to go unreasonably slow.