When I was at ParaSoft, I did a number of trainings when I went to some company and showed them how to use whatever product they had purchased. We did one-day tutorials all the way up to five-day classes, where we would use our product with the customer’s code.
This week I am attending a training for Microsoft C#, and it’s interesting to be the one out in the audience with a computer in front of me, and not the one in front with a projector screen behind me.
One thing I noticed pretty early on is how hard it is to type and listen at the same time. When we’re writing code– or even copying code from a book– whatever our instructor is saying might as well be Swahili. But I also know from experience that some people will type 78,000 words per minute, and then talk loudly to their neighbor, or start checking email, or whatever. With developers especially, you can lose them to whatever problem they were tackling back at their cube before they were told to attend your meeting.
Another thing is that I notice little presentation tricks I used to use. For instance, our trainer has been talking non-stop about some small annoyance that causes a slowdown when your web service is running the first time, when IIS is compiling your code. And he’s doing it over and over, because he knows that there’s a simple fix, and when he reveals it we’ll all think “well, it’s a good thing that’s not a problem anymore.” It’s not REALLY a problem now, but it sure seems like one when it’s mentioned every hour. We used to do something similar to talk up flaws in developer processes that are, technically, flaws, but that no one really cares if they’re fixed. But it sure looks great when you can point to it and say “we fixed that.”
Bottom line: don’t believe everything a trainer tells you.
Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times:
“And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft’s Windows.”
It’s a great little thing called industry standards. It took Apple a long, long time to find them, but they are like strapping a rocket booster to development.
At work I program in Java, and one of the most recent things I did was implement our report system. It works like this:
- A user makes an HTTP request to a web page.
- A Java Servlet gets the request.
- The servlet makes a series of SQL calls to a database.
- The servlet then marshalls that data into XML.
- The XML is then transformed in XHTML using XSLT.
- The user gets a normal-looking web page that they can print, save, or whatever.
Each step in that process is an open standard of one form or another. That entire system took me a little less than a month to make, while I was doing other tasks. If I had had to start from the beginning and do all of this by myself, it would take forever. And I would have to return to my boss and tell her that our ship date would have to be pushed back. Repeatedly. Which is what the Windows guys are having to do. Repeatedly. Because Microsoft doesn’t follow standards unless it was one of the guys at the standardization table. They’re doing better with RSS and Atom, but they have a ways to go before they realize that there’s a lot of projects out there that they can leverage, if only they’d try.
I just came across this little film via the Re-Imagineering Blog, which is trying to rekindle the Magic Kingdom.
And I gotta say, I would pay rent to live in Walt’s EPCOT. Would you?
Why hasn’t anyone done something like what Walt talks about? Make a new city that is completely different, where things make sense because someone actually thought them through?
I want to take a monorail downtown and get out of the rain, walk around the town center like you can in some parts of Europe.
I want to live in a city with a big old greenbelt.
Oh, and I want “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” to play lightly in the background at all times when I’m there.
Yeah, it goes a little socialist there in the middle when they’re talking about how central planning makes us great. Maybe that’s why no one has done it: it’s not a “market-based-solution.”
And admittedly, upgrading anything in these subterranean transport areas is going to be a pain.
And I like traffic circles, but you’re going to need a second one-way circle going the opposite direction.
“No one company can make it happen alone,” said Walt, and he was right. When he died months later, EPCOT turned into something very different, and Walt’s last big dream died before it was born.
It’s a pity; it would have had a very interesting life.
There is a quote from George Lucas talking about how he wanted the world of Star Wars to feel like it had been around forever, and that not everything was perfect. He called this idea the “used future.” It is one of the things that makes the original trilogy engaging: this is a place that you could imagine actually exists because you can empathize with the mess all over the Millineum Falcon and the rust on the ships and the sand that gets everywhere on Tatooine. The prequels lacked this lived-in feel, and as a result the worlds seemed sterile, lifeless, and boring. It mirrors the acting, which was by and large done on blue screen stages that were sterile, lifeless, and boring.
A few weekends ago, Sonja and I watched the entire extended The Lord of the Rings DVDs set in three consecutive nights, one movie each night. It took forever to get through it all, but it was fun. And while we were watching, I sudddenly thought “The Lord of the Rings is the ‘used past.’” Everything is deliberately meant to have a weight, a history, a backstory. There are ruins everywhere, a testament to the past civilizations that are now lost. The main action is a reprecussion of a war that happened 3000 years ago. Even the swords have names and histories.
LotRs was also filmed on sterile, lifeless, boring bluescreens, but nothing else is allowed to even approach that level of banality. The costumes are embroidered with patterns of elvish runes. The props are made by real blacksmiths. Theodin’s armor has decoration inside, where no audience member will ever see it. The production department went to great lengths to make every item the actors touched have that same history that embues every bit of Tolkien’s world. Throughout the special features is a drumbeat of ‘make it seem real’ and ‘attention to detail.’
One of the things I love about LotR (and Harry Potter, and the Head First books, etc) is that they engage in world-building, which is this niche little interest that I don’t think many people really share with me, but that everyone I know reacts to in a very visceral way: “yeah, those Oliphants rocked.” This is why people come back to these worlds: it’s because you get a sense that there is so much more to it than just the little slice of story you were served, and you’re wondering what it is. The original Star Wars has that, and I think we were all a little disappointed that the backstory was a whiny kid.
Friday my brother Ben came over and we played old Video Games using an emulator and a USB controller. We had a blast.
We spent quite a lot of time marveling at how different games are designed nowadays. In QuackShot and World of Illusion, two Disney games, there is level after level of rote memorization. If you don’t know which direction to jump before you start falling, you die, and start the level again. The goal is to make you play the game one hundred million times.
Today, a game is designed so that something is always changing, and something is always new, and that makes you want to play it one hundred million times, because there is an unexpected element around every corner. In old games, you are expected to know each corner, because if you don’t, you’ll die immediately after you turn it.
But honestly one of the coolest things was just going back in time and remembering the titles for all these games we used to play. Populous. Shadowrun. Centurion: Something about Rome. We got them all, and each time, it went like this:
- Seth: Oh, SuperMegaCoolGame! We’ve gotta get that!
- Ben: I remember that! Here it is!
- Seth: Oh yeah, I forgot that in order to finish the first level you had to dunk your head in acid. Yeah, this was great!
- Ben: Man, I don’t understand what’s going on.
- Seth: No one does. And the graphics all suck compared to my memories.
That last part, where I realized that the graphics were awful, happened in every single game. I remember thinking that this stuff was magical. And indeed, some of it was. Shining Force looks great next to BattleMaster, but they both look childish now. It seems odd that I’ve retroactively upgraded each games’ look and feel in my brain. Even now, two days later, I am picturing the memory-enhanced version of BattleMaster and not the real thing. And in terms of nostalgia, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. In a few more years, I can come back to them again and be surprised all over again.
In my inbox this morning I was greeted by a message with the subject “FWD: Chenney shot a lawyer” Inside it offered to sell me Viagra.
It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the guy. Not quite, but almost.
Sitting at work, waiting for unit tests to run. Read all of Slashdot. Read all of Digg. Read all of Boing Boing.
See a random link to the Geek Code. “Hrm,” sayz I, “I’ve never done that before. I’ll be just like Wil Wheaton and put it on my Blog.”
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/H/TW
d-- s:+ a- C+++ UL+ UX++++ !p L-(++) !E W++++ N++ ?o ?K w--(++) !O M++ !V PS++ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5++ X- R++ tv b++ DI++ D G e++>++++* h---@ r+++ y+++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
