I was going to write a long post about how awesome CS Games was but Harley did all the work for me.

Case in point

Recently, Larry O'Brien was on a talk radio show called unscripted. The topic being discussed was Ottawa mayor Larry O'Brien's plans to start blogging. I missed what Larry said, probably tuning in just a little too late but kept listening anyway. Eventually, someone young called in and said that she got most of her information online and didn't think it was bad that the mayor said he didn't read newspapers. Previously, everyone had said that that was scary. The host ripped into her for quite a while, spouting nonsense like do you really want everything unfiltered? Do you want an unfiltered fireman response? Or an unfiltered police response? (What those questions are supposed to mean I don't quite know.) He said that blogs were useless vanity enhancers, just there to boost one's ego.

I tried calling in several times after that but it always said that they weren't accepting calls at that time and eventually the show ended. So instead I wrote an email. This email I wrote on Feb 25th and still haven't gotten a reply. I don't expect to ever get one but if I ever do I'll add the response. It's largely inspired by Jeremy Zawodny's blog post here. This is what I wrote:

I'm proud to introduce my new blog, the engine for which I wrote myself from scratch. For some reason wordpress started displaying everything in reverse order without me changing anything. My old host had been having a lot of difficulty so maybe it was something that happened while they were down but either way I figured I'd take that as my queue to write my own thing.

Writing a minimal blog is ridiculously easy. The longest part was doing the layout (because I suck at graphics). I did the whole layout myself too. =)

Let me know what you think.

Oh and if you're interested in the source you can get the full blog source here and a somewhat out of date version (I'll commit all the changes I made to the framework for SmokinnBlog soon) of the bare bones framework here.

The one thing I'm proud of (everything else is pretty simple) you'll notice if you try to comment. I got the idea for that kind of spam filtering from here. I still need to make a simple search box though. I used to use that pretty often.

If you run across any bugs you can let me know in the comments or by dropping me an email.

To give you an idea of what the overall blog structure is like, here's a tree view of the source:

(You can click for biggerization)

Also, you'll have to update your rss feeds. There's a link to the new feed on the right or you can just right click here. Sorry about that, I know updating feeds is annoying but I don't have a choice, I'm going to be dropping my other host in a month.

EDIT: Fixed IE bugs.

Wow wordpress fucked up for no reason. The posts on the main page are in reverse order. Checking to see if posting something new will put it on top.

I tried to give vista a chance. I really did. It does have many major improvements over XP but overall I'll still take XP anyway. I used vista for a long time (a couple of months) and it just irritated me more and more until I couldn't take it and tried installing linux again.

The first time I couldn't boot into the ubuntu live cd. It would just keep spitting out error loading something or other over and over on the console. I couldn't get to any choices so I was screwed. I figured I'd just make do with vista but eventually couldn't stand it anymore.

The second time around I decided to try fedora core 8. It installed itself fine but screwed up on installing the boot loader. I could boot into fedora but not windows. No big loss I can live with that, I didn't try to fix grub. I however failed miserably at getting my wireless card working. The reason why linux is having so much difficulty is because I bought an HP dv9000 laptop this fall. Amd 64 dual core processor (bad start) and, since it's a laptop, all kinds of random crappy internals and wireless problems. (The audio which used to always be a problem with linux a few years ago seems to generally be fine now.) After playing around with a bunch of things I read off forums and how-tos I eventually just gave up. At one point I had 3 wlan0's, none of them functional obviously. It was sad.

So I figured I'd try ubuntu's "alternate" cd, with the regular text-based linux installer. It worked fine. No problem. When I first logged in I got a little popup saying hey there are non-free drivers you can install. I click and tell it to install the nvidia graphics and broadcomm wireless drivers. It explains what non-free is and means and lets me decide whether I want to do it anyway. Then it just installs the stuff no problem. I then download updates to all the installed software and the system is good to go.

Linux is generally still freaking hard to get right but Ubuntu is way ahead of the pack. Everything is just so easy.

I'm sorry I strayed Ubuntu. <3

Oh god, not another one of these you're saying. Yeah, I never normally read anything with a title like the above either. I got tricked. Jeff Atwood posted this tinyurl on twitter and I'm a sucker for all his links. (He posts so many and they're always so good.)

This article I was shrugging off as the usual omg Facebook is a fad people! post but it put everything into perspective. Facebook isn't losing market share, they've just dropped the explosive growth. The law of exponents had to kick in eventually, the trend was that in something like a couple of years every human on the planet would be on Facebook. Obviously not going to happen. So growth has slowed, that's expected and fine (well it actually stopped entirely, uniques are stable and page hits are down but that's not my point). Beacon flopped huge (thankfully) but what company has never had a flop? That's not why they're in trouble.

First thing I look at when I decide whether I want to work at a company is whether they might go under this year. Facebook might not go under *this* year but according to that article they're definitely trending in the wrong direction.

Add to that coverage of Facebook's announcement that they plan to have a cashflow of negative $150 million this year [...]

Negative cash flow is bad. Bad bad bad. So while having people in the office jump up and scream hack night! and just hacking away at some cool idea you had in the back of your head just for the hell of it might be cool, if you're getting paid in stock options, that 15 billion $ valuation Microsoft put on Facebook must hurt and these latest financial reports from Zuckerberg must hurt too. I don't think Facebook is going to be attracting many new employees good at finance anytime soon.

I'm unemployed.

Or at least I am today.

Back in April 2007, I had my last final exam on a Thursday. I then had the Friday off and started working at Mansef the following Monday. I never took any vacation while I worked at Mansef. Now, my last day at Mansef was yesterday. Monday is my first day at the new job.

Oops, I did it again.

Ok, that might be reaching a little.

But still, I recently read this article by Rasmus Lerdorf for the first time and couldn't help but notice all the similarities to what Tim and I developed for ourselves. It obviously differs in some details (We use Mootools instead of the YUI Library for example) but all the most important design decisions are the same:

• MVC: This one is a no-brainer. Pretty much everything we currently know about building web apps tells us that MVC works well for both initial development and future maintenance.
• Keep things procedural unless something is naturally an object: We have an orm layer and deal with objects but everything else is procedural. A controller is procedural. A view is procedural. Objects for the real-life stuff we represent (and typically store in the db) and procedural for the rest.
• HTML should look like HTML: We use Savant3 for our views as a template engine. This lets views look like HTML. Smarty is retarded.

To those I'd add Keep it Simple. Abstractions are great but only if they reduce complexity, not add to it.

We added two major abstractions:

• Automatic database query handling: We'll check memcached if you have it installed and spread your reads if you have multiple read slaves while directing your writes to the master. You won't see any of this. This'll alleviate db server load.
• Automatic page generation: We'll automatically generate static pages to be served and serve them when available. This'll alleviate web server load. If you need to, you can still keep parts of pages dynamic with a simple html comment.

pecl/filter and APC aren't part of the framework but it's good to have both installed. The former will help with malicious attacks and the latter will help with performance (by caching PHP objects).

The only thing I'm not sure about is his avoid locks at all costs point. Why would a web framework lock for anything? I don't think ours ever locks. I can't help but feel I'm missing something here.

One extra thing we have that he didn't mention is plugins. Basically chunks of re-usable code with the own classes, controllers, templates, javascript, css, etc. Mini web apps inside your larger app that you can just drop in anywhere. They've been exceedingly useful.

If this framework seemed interesting, keep in touch. In a few weeks after cleaning it up a little and making it general, I'm probably going to be releasing it as open source. To be added before release: REST style url handling (we got fought on that one for framework version 1 but it's in version 2), a boilerplate generator (which shouldn't take me long, there isn't much boilerplate) and maybe clean up some syntax in corner cases. Not that much but worth doing before a general public release. I also want to write a manual (it won't be very long, the framework isn't complicated enough to need a book) and some general documentation along with a "hitting the ground running" type document that'll be the bare minimum you need to know if you just want to slap something up without understanding the inner workings of the framework (that'll be really short!). Stay tuned.

Check out his latest post. I'll discuss that soon. The previous three were ads and on the entire first page (which covers back to early november) only a few posts are actually worth reading and that's because the Yale talk is split into several. I know it's tacky to complain about free content so I'll stop. Instead I'll do what I planned from the start and discuss why I think Joel is becoming more irrelevant.

I have two possible theories. The first is that he's written so many great, amazing articles on software and software project management that he's covered everything he can. That's a possibility. I know that I don't have nearly the skill or knowledge to put out the body of work he has.

The other is a little more dire. That he's getting old and not realizing it. I only just clued into this one as I read his latest blog post.

First, he says nothing. He vaguely wanders in one direction before backtracking a little, then he turns around in a little circle and stays where he started with no statement being said, other than a quick jab at Google for hiring a lot of people. (The not-so-subtle subtext being that if you're hiring that many people they must suck.) It seems like the entire post was just a weak excuse to write that last paragraph. Getting into the bar code scan market is hardly a bad move for Google. Sure, "the world" may not have been ready for it before but now with Facebook that wants you to use your cell phone, Twitter, Sandy, and other web apps asking you to as well along with iPhones coming out and normal people starting to wander into the "mobile market", market pressure will eventually force telcos to release some of their stranglehold on pricing and hopefully soon we'll have the kind of mobile market japan enjoys. (And by then they'll be a decade ahead elsewhere and the techies here will still be envying them.)

And the Japanese buy things with their cell phone. They take photos of the bar codes and it charges their phone account the same way it could a credit card. Bar code / cell phone interaction isn't the future Joel it's the present. It's just not in North America yet. Google's trying to bring it here and I think that's good. No one wants to peck away at a long url, do Google searches to find products, etc. They want to take a photo of the bar code and have a web page with product reviews and customer comments appear immediately. A third party web site that they can trust, not the manufacturer or retail sales website. It would make buying a new tv or monitor or headphones any other expensiveish piece of equipment a lot easier and you wouldn't need to worry about being scammed by a salesman. And Google would serve you ads.

Zed's CUSEC talk hopefully inspired a lot of people to take a good look at the work conditions they're either in already (like me) or will be in soon. At my most recent job I really gave my all. I spent all my time thinking about the job, doing tons of (paid) overtime and basically making it my life. It was fun. I was interested. Then I got tired of it all and quit. I don't intend on ever stopping being passionate about my job because I don't think I could stand doing something for the majority of my waking hours and not enjoying it. I'm lucky because I know people will pay me to do something I enjoy and I'm going to take advantage of that. But like Zed said, if you're not being cut in on the profits you owe them nothing but a day's work.

I write about myself all the time though. That's not what this blog post is about. This is a story about loyalty, commitment and questioning your devotion to anything other than what will bring you, only you and no one else, the most good.

I was at a family dinner recently and a distant cousin I hadn't seen in years was there. She was talking about how much she felt she was taken for granted at her current job and spoke like there was nothing she could do about it. She felt this way not because she didn't have any other options, she does. She doesn't have a great degree but she does have professional training in the field she wants to be in (horticulture) so she can definitely get a job elsewhere. What she does now is basically water plants in a greenhouse and sell them to walk-in clients. What she wants to do is landscaping and landscape arrangements. She's told her boss this but he doesn't care and always does it himself leaving her to the menial work. She also feels she's underpaid. The reason why she hasn't left is because she "gave her word" that she'd work for him this year, that "he could count on her". She doesn't want to go back on her word but he doesn't care about teaching her anything and hasn't given her a raise in the (I think) almost two years she's worked there.

Fuck him.

We basically spent most of the evening convincing her she doesn't owe him anything, that she should be applying elsewhere to do what she wants to do and once she's found something to give her two weeks notice and be done with it. She was still iffy about it.

Another story comes from my mom. We were talking about work on our way home and her work is absolutely terrible. Her boss is misery incarnate and the conditions are absurd. Their internet is ridiculously locked down and they can't stream internet radio even though everyone *has* to have headphones on because they're in a big open space along with sales people and any number of people from other departments that talk loud on the phone all day or are otherwise distracting. She processes insurance requests and claims (If you've asked for a quote on a life insurance policy in the last couple of months my mom might have done the paperwork. She hasn't been back in underwriting for long.) and basically spends he day thinking. The distractions are impossible to deal with without some sort of audio block.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. They have mandatory overtime but are only allowed to mark 7.5hrs a day down on their time sheets. That one enraged me. If a company EVER tries to spring that on me there's absolutely no way I'll comply. The day someone makes me fill time sheets I'll fill them in honestly. No way they're going to get me to lie for their (dubious) benefit. Her manager thinks it makes her look good to get her team to do so much work in the "regular work week". Once one of her co-workers was going in for a painful operation and had the decency of telling her boss in advance so that she could plan out the work for the day in her absence. Bad idea. Even her co-workers told her she shouldn't have done that, that she should've called in sick the day of. Why? Because the boss gave her a laptop to bring home so she could do her work anyway while she was recovering. That's inhumane.

I hear these stories coming in from everywhere all the time. It's insane. It makes no sense. In my grandparents' day it used to be that you did your best for the company until your retired and they took care of you. Now the company tries to squeeze everything they possibly can out of you until you break down or have nothing left at which time they toss you aside and squeeze a fresh new employee.

Ridiculous.

It's this kind of crap that started the small to medium size company explosion. People like me watch this going on around them absolutely bewildered. How can you treat other people this way? How can you cheat, lie and destroy and still have people that are loyal to you? How can people be so masochistic?

So we opt out. Like I said before, I'm one of the few lucky ones. I have a skill set in high demand right now and I have a pretty much constant stream of job offers even when I'm not looking. I'm not going to work for BigCo. I wouldn't fit in. Instead, I get to be a prima donna and walk into work wearing board shorts and flip flops carrying my roller blades over my shoulder while others wear khakis or suits. I get to do interesting work and don't need to worry about trying to be promoted. Promotion in most places would mean taking me away from I like to do (design and write code) and instead force me to do what I want to avoid at all costs (dealing with stupid bureaucracy, office politics and paperwork). So I get to ignore crap like this and instead turn all of it on its head. If the high salary and corner offices are given to those that are well dressed, not the best workers, do I really want to be there? If promotions are based on who has cleavage and who shaves their legs do I really want to be there? Office politics are retarded and best left to the sort of people who thrive on celebrity gossip. I'll stay well clear of all that and work at a small company with a small team on an interesting project. I won't need to "dress for the job I want" because the job I want doesn't have a dress code. The job I want I wear board shorts and flip flops to.