What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... another milestone: management has divided out my projects to pairs of people - ten groups in all. Amazing. Twenty people. Wow. I know there's no need for the doubling up, but it's the enterprise thing to do, and it's what the management team seems to be going for. Good for them. Wonderful.

These days I'm answering a few questions... distributing a bit of the hardware that's in my cube to the people that are taking over the projects. Answering a few detailed questions about how to build and run the app. It's stuff that I've covered in the de-briefing talks, but I understand that they weren't really listening because they hadn't gotten their assignments until all the talks were done.

I find myself wishing for the day to be over. For next week to be over. When I was struggling with this place, and I was convinced that I was going to be here for a long time, things were bad. And I tried very hard to make the best of them. But now that I'm a lame duck developer, I find I'm getting even less respect, and that makes it even harder.

After all, I didn't have to give two weeks notice. I didn't have to give 9 months notice in the sense that I wasn't happy and looking. They waited until the last minute, and then when they know I'm a short-timer, they treat me even more dreadfully than before. I find myself wishing they'd just ask me to leave. That would be nice.

It's sad, it really is, because unlike those times that you've heard a person burning their bridges with an employer by not giving sufficient notice or not documenting things, or being a jerk, etc. This time it's the Company that is doing this to the person - that would be me. I feel sad because of this. I have worked here for over seven and a half years, and the best I can muster in leaving is this?

What it's crystalized is the knowledge in my head that this was the right move, and it's better to be taking it now than waiting another year... or even another week. It's time to go.

Well... it came today and so I left work a little early (3:00 pm) after the last of the meetings and went home to do the conversion. The unboxing was impressive, as always. The set-up started very uneventfully, and then I ran into those things that I keep forgetting about - the docs I have in /Developer/Java that I probably need to move to my home directory if I want to make this a smoother transition next time, and then the amazing fact that all the developer tools (Xcode, etc.) are not copied.

I can understand that, in a sense, but in a larger sense, it's amazingly obvious that they should be copied over. After all, /usr/local/ gets copied - and that's not even visible to the average user. The Developer Tools are something that needs to be copied. Period. No excuses.

Fonts. Fonts are another thing that aren't copied over. Thank goodness that I keep the fonts around for a while, or else I'd have a pickle of a time getting them to install in short order. Let's face it - I have until about 8:15 pm to get this all done for tomorrow or else I'm taking the old notebook back to work, and I'll have to repeat this over again this weekend.

But I got them installed. I had to re-install Safari 4 Beta - but that's completely understandable. I then had to deal with setting up a few preferences on Terminal.app, and Xcode, and then it was looking pretty much normal. Sure, the display size is great, and at the same time messes up the layouts I've been using on the older MacBook Pro, but that's something I can get used to. I just need to work with it for a few days to come to the best layout of the different Spaces.

On the whole, it was a good time. Stressful for a while, but I got it all done in an evening and now I can make sure it's all OK, and then convert the old laptop into a new Kids Computer for the living room. That is going to make things a lot cleaner in the living room and will also provide a nice speed bump from the Mac Mini that's been there for quite a while.

As part of migrating from my old MacBook Pro to the new one I got today, I did an 'svn update' on the CorePlot repo - just to see if anything had changed since I'd put in that fix for the Core Animation NSDecimal encoding issue. I was surprised, and a little saddened by what I saw.

Virtually all the changes I'd made were gone. All the comments - Gone. The files looked exactly like the skeleton files I'd seen in the project. I had no idea that's what Drew thought was done. I didn't. Not even close.

Drew's checkin comment was pretty insightful:

Reduced the interface of new CPPlotRange class to make it 'minimal but complete'. Also removed a lot of commentary in the class, which wasn't really necessary, and just made understanding the class more difficult.

Removed the function 'CPMakePlotRange'. It was a quasi-initializer for the old struct, and has been superseded by a class method.

While I understand the comment minimal but complete, I don't think that's what Apple does on it's - init methods. There are a ton of them taking all different kinds of (relevant) data types: double, NSDecimal, NSDecimalNumber - all were valid in this case, but Drew has decided that only the NSDecimal one was needed.

Furthermore, I don't agree at all with his assessment of the comments. I'm clearly a comment-focused person. I live it every single day of my professional life. But it seems that Drew is of the belief that code should be simple enough to be self-documenting, and that's something I simply cannot work with.

So it makes me sad to say that I have no further desire to work with, or even use the CorePlot framework. I respect Drew's ability to do what he wants, but he's going to lead it down the path of a poorly documented pile of junk in a few years. I'd rather stick with commercial and live with the licensing issues and costs. In the end, Drew isn't going to take any real responsibility for the code, and yet he's completely unwilling to see the value of good, solid, commenting.

Too bad.

Well... today has been nothing but meetings about the systems I've worked on. It's been difficult, as I've said, and they have not been universally pleasant, but at least they are over. No more of them.

Starting tomorrow, and for the next five days, there may be little one-on-one meetings about this or that, but it's not going to be the kid of meetings I've had. Hopefully, they will be more focused on goals, and I'll be able to ask them if they've read the docs I've left, and if not, instruct them to do so for future generations.

I can say this is not a "fun" time... but it's necessary. I'll be gone in another week, and there will be nothing they can say I should have done before leaving that I didn't do. Necessary.

Hey... I know I'm on the way out here. Just over six days left. People are going to be getting testy. Some will get nervous and anxious about the "what ifs" of me leaving. That's certainly understandable. I was more than a little worried when Jeremy left, but I also understood that it wasn't he that was the problem. He did what most would do - wrote up what he had and then it was up to me to get it working. That's just the way things are.

But it seems that's not universally the case in this place.

For the last several meetings I've been getting an increasing sense of animosity from the people that I'm doing this favor for. Let's face it, I could have left with less notice, or not had as much written down, or not had all the web sites for each project detailing all the workings - no one else has this level of documentation, and I've never seen anyone sit through three days of de-briefings.

And still... I get the grief.

I'm stunned. Maybe it's something that's been building up, I have no idea. Maybe it's because I've gotten no response from most of the IT management on my leaving - no "Hey, heard you were going, sorry to loose you". Nothing. It's just professionalism... common courtesy... it's not burning your bridges. But that's not happened. Oh well... I'm remembering all this very carefully as it's one of the reasons I had decided to leave. It's confirmed in this week that things are not all happy and chummy here. They are quite adversarial.

But I only have six and a half more days and I'm gone. God Bless CTC.

Well... I'm getting ready for the new MacBook Pro, and when it arrives and I get everything settled in to it's proper spot, I'll probably download the Safari 4 Beta and try it out. There are a lot of things to like in the new version, and there are a few things that some folks have said are a going to take a little bit of time to get used to. Fair enough.

But there's also a ton of hidden preferences to make things look like Safari 3, and if this is a little too different then these hidden preferences can make it a bit more palatable. Just not going to do it until I get the new laptop - too many changes.

UPDATE: I caved... There were a few really neat things, and the download allows for an uninstall, so I'm safe. I'll keep it on my box and have a go with it. So far, I like the tabs in the title bar, but I can see why some would not.

The OmniGroup are now giving away four of their lesser-developed applications, and of these, one is something I've wanted to have for a while - OmniObjectMeter. Back in the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP days, OmniObjectMeter was the tool for finding object leaks. And on the Mac, that's about the only memory issue you should run into. So having it is a real feather in your cap. But it was expensive for as often as I needed it. Now that's not the issue any longer.

If you are having issues with memory allocation in Mac OS X - get it. Trust me, it's worth the time.

The group at 280 North are getting very close to what I've been looking for in a web development framework with Atlas. The idea is essentially Interface Builder for the web. You can drag and drop components onto a window, wire things up, and it all works. Of course, it's still nib-ware, so to speak, if you want to create new objects it's going to require code, and the code required for a serious web site might still be a considerable bit of coding, but for the user interface, it's about perfect.

It's what I've wanted since Apple ditched WebObjects, and if we're lucky, Apple will give these guys a bucket of money and have them work on this as the next WebObjects front-end system. I would still love to have the back-end be Java or ObjC and be able to be written with Xcode, as that's my favorite environment, but I'd understand if it needed to be something else.

But what a deal that would be. State management in Java or ObjC and Atlas as the GUI builder. That would be an impressive bit of work. Can't wait to see where it leads.

Well, it's going to be an interesting week as I have a bunch of meetings with the folks here to try and give them as much knowledge as possible in the remaining eight days I have at the Shop. It's back-to-back meetings and tons of questions. Luckily, I've written so much down in the time I've been here, there's little they can ask for that I haven't already written down. But there have been a few little things that I've consolidated into a document for them. Seems only fair.

What amazes me about the transfer process is that there seems to be a decision at this point not to assign an individual for each system. I can understand the logic in having broad coverage of all the systems, but human beings are pretty easy to figure out - if they aren't going to be responsible for something, and they are busy with other work, the optional stuff is going to get dropped.

Maybe it's going to be different after I leave and someone decides that things need to be looked after in more detailed manner. Maybe they'll let me show all the systems to all the people and then they can decide what best fits where. I sure hope so.

I've voiced my concerns that if no one picks this up, when a problem does occur - and they do - eventually, there won't be anyone with even the bare knowledge to start digging into the cause. It's my fear, and now that I've expressed it, I'm done. No need to keep beating the issue. The decision has been made.

Well... the Blender folks have once again released a new version of the interesting 3D modeling software. I know I need to take time to learn to use this thing, but I just haven't had the time yet to do it. But I keep getting the updates so that when I do have the time, I've got the latest version to work with.