This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 23.0.1251.2 was out with a few nice fixes for crashing bugs. I haven't noticed them, but I'm not hammering on it with Javascript like a lot of the other folks are. Still, it's nice to see the decent release notes, and the improvement in Chrome continue.
Well… here again today I got the hint that maybe I'm living right. Maybe. The manager that was asking for 8 million log statements came by and thanked me for looking into the problem and getting it all solved. Sure, this included a lot of work from others as well, but I was happy that he made the effort.
Really happy. This is nice. Have a nice place to work, and decent people to work with. I just need to be a little firmer about pushing back. I don't think I'm doing anyone any favors by getting upset and grumbling through something.
I get to leave with a smile on my face.
This might sound harsh, and I'll concede that it's certainly something that's bugged me at more than one job over the years, but it's also why I end up being highly paid and one of the more influential people at those jobs as well. It's really simple.
Thinking has become a lost art.
It's like everything else in life, you have to work at it to get good at it. You can't do it just a bit, and think you're 'good to go' for a while. Nope. Thinking is something you have to really work on, and really apply on a daily basis to keep sharp on the skill.
Why is it so important? Because no matter what you do in life, thinking will make you more efficient and better at it. Period.
You want to manage technical people? You need to think. In something that happened to be recently, a manager asked to look at all the outcomes of a matching. But didn't even stop to do the simple math that what he was asking for was in excess of 8 million matches. Even at a few minutes per match, that's way way too long to really be a useful strategy. Had I followed his advice, we'd have a giant Excel spread sheet that no one could open, and we'd still be going through the data.
Think, people! Think!
Don't just act… Think!
I recently read a story about two very famous original Unix architects that were sitting at a workstation (because they were scarce) and when there was a bug, one started hitting the debugger, and the other stopped doing anything -- he started thinking. His approach was that if you understood the system, then debugging was in your head. Thinking was more powerful than doing.
This isn't an invitation to analysis paralysis - that's taking something to an extreme. But you can't shoot first and ask questions later, either. Certainly when you're doing a lot of technical managing.
So let's all practice this a little more, OK?
This morning I read that the latest Gimp on OS X had a native GUI build - very exciting! They didn't abandon the X11 GUI, they simply made a version that looks the same, but has the native Cocoa GUI so that you don't have to be running X11 in order to use it.
This is really neat! I'm not a huge Gimp user any more, as I've found some really great replacements, but it's got a lot of power, and some of the provided scripts are simply amazing. So to see them port the GUI to Cocoa is a really nice feat. I'm very impressed with these guys.
Well done!
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 23.0.1246.0 was out, and the release notes are back to being a little more descriptive. This guy a new V8 javascript engine as well as a new cut of WebKit and addresses a few other bugs. Nice to see the notes are back to what they used to be, and that we're still seeing progress. Nice.
I've been at The Shop about six weeks, and I thought this morning it was about time I updated my resumes and my web site. It's something I like to keep up to date because going back and figuring out what you did when, and for whom, is one of those things that you have to do when you're looking for a new position, and that's typically a pretty stressful time. There's no need to add to the stress by figuring all this out when it's possible to do it a little at a time, when it's all fresh in your memory.
So I took the time to update my three resumes, and the four web pages as well as my WordPress 'About me' page. I had updated LinkedIn a few weeks ago as I was still getting a lot of interest on that front, and it was only fair to shut that down by posting the new position.
It's really quite nice using the tools I have for this: Pages and Coda, as I really only need to write the text once and then I can just move it from document to page to document and simply reformat it. Sweet tools. But hey… it's a Mac - it's gotta be sweet!
All done and it only took me a few minutes for everything. Love to stay up to date.
I was looking for something to do as a good excuse not to solve this problem in LKit today, so I dug into the latest news on GeSHi and the version I'm running on currently is 1.0.8.6, but 1.0.8.11 is out, and the language count is now above 200. Nice. Not that I usually write in more than 200 languages, but the odds that APEX code, for instance is supported goes up as the number increases.
Anyway, the first thing was to download the GeSHi package and place it into my repo for CodeHighlighterPlus. It's basically the root of the repo, but I hadn't realized that in the last time I updated GeSHi.
The only thing I needed to watch out for were those few edits that I made to geshi.php the last time, and those were pretty easily isolated. I'd repeat them here, but the fact is with the repo on GitHub, you can just go there and get everything you need. Simple.
The new language support is:
4cs dot lscript pycon 6502acme e lsl2 pys60 6502kickass ecmascript lua python 6502tasm eiffel m68k q 68000devpac email magiksf qbasic abap epc make rails actionscript erlang mapbasic rebol actionscript3 euphoria matlab reg ada f1 mirc rexx algol68 falcon mmix robots apache fo modula2 rpmspec applescript fortran modula3 rsplus apt_sources freebasic mpasm ruby arm freeswitch mxml sas asm fsharp mysql scala asp gambas nagios scheme asymptote gdb netrexx scilab autoconf genero newlisp sdlbasic autohotkey genie nsis smalltalk autoit gettext oberon2 smarty avisynth glsl objc spark awk gml objeck sparql bascomavr gnuplot ocaml-brief sql bash go ocaml stonescript basic4gl groovy octave systemverilog bf gwbasic oobas tcl bibtex haskell oorexx teraterm blitzbasic haxe oracle11 text bnf hicest oracle8 thinbasic boo hq9plus oxygene tsql c html4strict oz typoscript c_loadrunner html5 parasail unicon c_mac icon parigp upc caddcl idl pascal urbi cadlisp ini pcre uscript cfdg inno per vala cfm intercal perl vb chaiscript io perl6 vbnet cil j pf vedit clojure java php-brief verilog cmake java5 php vhdl cobol javascript pic16 vim coffeescript jquery pike visualfoxpro cpp-qt kixtart pixelbender visualprolog cpp klonec pli whitespace csharp klonecpp plsql whois css latex postgresql winbatch cuesheet lb povray xbasic d ldif powerbuilder xml dcl lisp powershell xorg_conf dcpu16 llvm proftpd xpp dcs locobasic progress yaml delphi logtalk prolog z80 diff lolcode properties zxbasic div lotusformulas providex dos lotusscript purebasic
Then it's time to check it all into GitHub and then pull it down on the servers and see how it goes.
After the pulls were done, all was well, and things are looking very nice. Success!
This morning the Google Chrome Team upped the major version number to 23.0.1243.2 with a pretty decent set of release notes. The inclusion of the V8 3.13.1.0 javascript engine, and updating WebKit to 537.6 are both really nice.
I was wondering if the least-significant updates of late meant that we'd be seeing this, but I really thought they'd just hit a plateau. Guess not, and that's great.
I can say that the refresh of a page is amazing. Very nice, and this release just keeps moving the bar up. It's nice to see forward progress on Chrome.
Today the big news from Facebook is their new iOS app, and it's speed. Well… given the speed of the old one, Safari would have been as fast, so I can't see how they could make it any slower. But, as much as I dislike Facebook, the guys that wrote this app knew what they were doing.
It's an amazing update. Really. The speed of updates and scrolling is what you'd expect from a nice iPhone app. It's smooth, easy, and doesn't have the horrible lags and fits and stalls that the previous version had.
I have to admit… it's a significant update. Hats off to those developers.
I just got an email from our project manager about a demo he's set up for the COO. The email included a response from the COO about the significance and importance of this project, and how it'll play into the long-term plans for this place. It's pretty scary to think of.
So all of a sudden, I'm feeling that same pressure to perform that I have felt for 16 yrs in Finance. It's the first real demo with this level of visibility since I've joined The Shop, and while it might be ho hum for a lot of the guys, for me, it's the "first impression" this guy is going to have of me and my additions to the team. It's not life-or-death, but it's important, and I want it to go well.
So I'm a little nervous… So many things to get finished and in place for the demo… it's not like we'll have time to run through it before time, it'll be wing-it all the way.
Yikes!