Two days ago, the Internet access—that is, the EDGE connection—on my Blackberry Curve stopped working at my apartment. Voice calls still worked fine. Occasionally the signal would flicker between GSM and EDGE, which has never happened in the past. If I walked four blocks away, applications like the browser and mail client would work again. EDGE also worked on campus, four miles away. So, for some mysterious reason, this problem was location-specific to just the tower near my apartment. It took two days to even figure all of this out.

Three separate calls to T-Mobile did no good, mostly because I didn’t have easy access to another line so they could troubleshoot my Curve. They did something called a “location reset,” if I remember correctly, but that didn’t help. So I started googling some forums and experimenting.

From what I’ve pieced together, the problem above can occur if Service Book settings get corrupted. The way to fix this is to get a new set of Service Book data sent to your phone from the provider. On the Curve, you do this in the following way:

- Select “Options”
- Select “Advanced Options”
- Select “Host Routing Table”
- Hit the Menu key and select “Register Now”
- The phone will re-register with the provider, who will send new Service Book data to the phone.

Obviously, EDGE has to be operational for the data to be sent, so this fix only works if EDGE is broken in certain locations but you can still make the registration request elsewhere.

Hope this helps someone.

So while I no longer owned those three domains, I did now have active business registrations for them costing $4.99 each. (I actually can’t even remember what those are or why I had them in the first place.) Great.

It actually took me a few minutes of navigating the insanity that is GoDaddy.com’s website in order to figure out what had happened. Under “Domain Manager,” my settings had auto-renew set to Off for each domain, which was correct. But under the “Business Registration” page, there is no such setting. The interface only allows you to edit profile information. There appears to be NO WAY to turn off the default auto-renewal for business registrations.

To their credit, I was able to call their billing support number, explain my situation, and get a refund. The person I spoke understood immediately what had happened and was extremely helpful.

Beware, GoDaddy customers.

I’m a FixedGearGallery addict. The idea of the site is that people send in photos of their fixed-gear bicycles and usually some details about how they built them up. The site is updated every weekday with new entries. Yeah, it’s a little dorky but for bike nuts (like me!), it’s a lot of fun. There are some really creative things people have done with their bikes.

I decided to write a little script to parse the FGG listings and create an index organized by “marque” (make/model). There’s already two search functions on FGG, but my index lets you browse and also provides a count for each marque. It’s just another way to navigate the content.

Here is the link: http://codefork.com/fgg/

Enjoy.

The decision wasn’t one I made lightly. And with the economic slump, I often wonder if I’ve made a smart choice in taking a 400% pay cut, only to return to teaching and writing my dissertation. In good times, the job prospects for my field were poor; in bad times, they may be practically non-existent.

So why do it? I miss having the kind of intellectual stimulation centered upon social impact. Application programming is challenging and fun, but I no longer find it as fulfilling as I once did or as others do. Increasingly, it is a thankless job where the headaches tend to outweigh personal growth and learning. In the past year, the best gig I had involved smart architecturally-minded people and a strong project lead. And that was pretty nice, though I still felt something missing. The worst gig involved passive aggressive people who mostly feigned their knowledge. It’s interesting that since I left that job, my replacement (a “CTO” who asked for double the salary) did many of the things I recommended, including a complete overhaul of the codebase. Oh well, I guess they needed to hear it from someone other than me.

So this post is a good-bye of sorts. I may still blog occasionally here about technology when the mood strikes. And I have an idea for a project I’d like to do once my time frees up, one that is more about today’s “culture of technology” than about coding.

Thanks to everyone for reading.

Many Slashdot comments point out that the requirements specific to corporate environments are rather idiosyncratic. Some stress the “right tool for the job” philosophy, which I totally agree with.
And here’s one that makes a wonderful characterization about what perl is and is not:

The problem is, Perl is just a programming language, not a conceptual system. Arguably it is the antithesis of a conceptual system. Many teams then create their own application frameworks atop it (e.g. Mason, POE), and it’s rare for these frameworks to be compatible since Perl offers so many variations in the construction of even standard programming artifacts like classes & objects.

In addition, the level of expression (i.e. TMTOWTDI) means in practice that highly varying programming styles occur throughout large, long-lived bodies of code.

As a result, significant Perl-based business applications tend to become hard-to-maintain hairballs of divergent style and subtly variegated concept.

The root cause: as I started with; the absence of a standard conceptual framework for Perl means that during the early phases of a project, it’s much harder to reason meaningfully about the eventual form of the system than it is with, say, Java or .NET where many of the design patterns are explicitly standardised.

I wouldn’t say that “Corporates Hate Perl”. It’s just the Perl as an application language doesn’t suit the formal design & architecture process we’re seeing increasingly as IT departments start to grow up and realise that they’re not the most important people in the company.

That doesn’t disqualify Perl from being a useful tool, and it’ll always have a place in data transformation, but it does mean that Perl isn’t going to be one of the general-purpose application programming languages of the future.

Bravo. I’d add that what the author identifies as a “problem” is also Perl’s strength. There’s more than one way to do it, so do it as you please. That definitely has allure for many programmers. As a project scales up, though, I think this does in fact become a detriment, and not only for corporate projects.

In response to someone who wrote, “chomp is not ambiguous. RTFM and stop crying,” here’s another awesome comment:

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html [perl.org]
This safer version of “chop” removes any trailing string that corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the English module). It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It’s often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record when you’re worried that the final record may be missing its newline. When in paragraph mode ($/ = “” ), it removes all trailing newlines from the string. When in slurp mode ($/ = undef ) or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a reference to an integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won’t remove anything. If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_ . Example:

If anything I’m crying harder after reading that.

Amen, brother.

Python’s docstring conventions are not quite as elegant, in my opinion, but they work just as well. Documentation is so much more important in a dynamic language like Python because unlike Javadoc, the pydoc utility can’t determine types. So if a parameter for a function or object method is “user,” one needs to know whether to pass in a User object, a username string, an integer id… or whether any of those will work.

Both Python’s docstring and Javadoc let you document as-you-go, eliminating or reducing the need for documentation as a separate task. If you change something, the documentation is right there for you to update.

Perl’s POD format isn’t nearly as convenient. The markup is oriented more towards layout and formatting rather than following the structure of the code. You can write section headers, indent, and list items in the documentation, but you don’t really attach them to subroutines or methods. Well, you can, sort of, with “=item” but each item must be nested inside other markup, and it feels kludgey and weird. The consequence is that the documentation feels really much separate from the code, even if it resides in the same file. It doesn’t encourage documentation as you go.

In the perl project I worked on, I wrote some POD comments in the very beginning but it fell by the wayside. I should have kept up with it, but it felt like an extra thing to do. My client’s taken over the code, and he’s spending time reading a lot of code to figure out what the parameters should be for various calls. In a dynamic language, there’s no easy way around this if there’s no documentation. Plus perl’s subroutine syntax can make it very difficult to decipher parameter lists quickly. It’s frustrating. I can’t really blame Perl for my own failure to write extensive documentation, but I must say, the idiosyncrasies of POD don’t exactly make it easy.

if a pile of code does not work it is not software, we’ll talk about its merit when it works, OK? Therefore to say software works is to say nothing. Therefore anything substantive one can say about software is better than to say it works.

Reading this triggered flashbacks and PTSD. I’d mentioned to a manager recently that I wanted some time to do some badly needed refactoring. My explanation of why was met with a pause, then, “Let me get this straight. You want time to take something that already works, reorganize it, possibly break things, and we wouldn’t have anything new to even show for it?”

That last part was wrong–the value added comes from maintainability and extensibility, but I couldn’t get him to really grasp those ideas. He’s not a technology person. For all he knew, maybe this was an elaborate ruse on my part to be left undisturbed while I surfed porn at my desk for a few weeks.

I work in a very small shop with all non-technology people, so this sort of thing happens a lot. It’s frustrating. It’s sort of nice to know I’m not alone in encountering this mindset. But man… if even the fellow programmer in Kenny’s story doesn’t get it, I’m not sure there’s much hope for the rest of the world.

What HAS changed is that traffic from content won’t necessarily result in return visitors and loyalty. Syndication feeds have made it increasingly easy to filter exposure to websites, so that a user can maximize only what they want to see. I won’t bother browsing around a website that’s got interesting content 75% of the time, when I can grab its feed and use my newsreader to view interesting content from many sources nearly 100% of the time.

Quality content needs vibrant community interaction around it to ensure that a website gets loyal return visitors. A lot of old media still hasn’t figured this out. They try to fool users with fancy-looking websites, attempting to masking the fact they’re still, well, old media.

One example is The San Francisco Chronicle’s upcoming redesign. While the visual feel is fairly clean and consistent, the page is horribly cluttered. The flawed rationale is pretty obvious: let’s put tons of crap on the screen and maybe someone will click something!

User feedback on the redesign is very mixed. I suspect that the positive responses are coming from non-tech savvy readers, people who are evaluating the layout based on its resemblance to a print newspaper. (They’ll soon change their minds when they can’t easily find anything.) That audience isn’t very large and it’s slowly dying out over time.

Interestingly, the negative responses aren’t just about layout clutter, but the lack of interactivity. Intelligent, web-savvy users aren’t interested in being passive readers. They want to be part of the news, to help shape it and to comment on it; they want their voices featured prominently on the site, and not ghettoized in tiny comments sections, sidebar polls, or letters to the editor. Being a truly integral part of a community makes engaging people feel appreciated, gives them a reason to come back, and makes them want to spread the word.

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, it means that people are realizing the web isn’t yet another publishing medium; it’s an interface for social interaction. And this means successful websites are increasingly distinguished by the kinds of community they foster, not just their content. In the world of technology news, for example, there are plenty of sites that publish decent, timely content, original or aggregated. Sure, they each have their own editorial styles, but in my mind, what truly separates them are the unique communities: Slashdot is mostly full of snarky, pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft ideologues; ars technica is a bit more neutral with a strong gamer and “power user” demographic; reddit tends to have good conversations about submitted links in their programming subsections.

There will always be a place for online newspapers and their model of publishing, but I think their core readership and audience will continue to decline, unless they’re willing to give up their monopoly on content production and focus on fostering distinctive communities.

http://mapreviews.codefork.com

It didn’t take long to write, since I’d recently been investigating the google maps API for a friend, and I’d also been doing bits of Amazon integration for a project. The biggest pain was dealing with the 1 call per second per IP address rate limiting mechanism of Amazon’s ECS API: the service returns error codes if you exceed the limit. So the application is pretty slow, especially if others are also using it.

But if you’re patient, it’s fun to watch the map markers gradually pop up. It’s also fun to look up a book with strong political leanings, and see how the ratings are distributed geographically. For example, you can look at The Communist Manifesto by Marx, and Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior (*shudder*). Data for both are cached, so they should load very fast.