What's it all about, Alfie?

I just saw a tweet and immediately started to giggle:

I hit the link and started reading. The changes are OK, but nothing substantial like keeping things open and allowing image sharing. Then, at the bottom of the article, they said:

We’ve made a bunch of other improvements to the app and many more are on the way. Thanks everyone for your great, constructive comments. We’re listening. We’ve also made the old version of Skitch available for those that want it. Stay tuned, our app to help you communicate and share your ideas visually is just getting started.

HA!

Evernote looked at the horrible ratings on the App Store, and they relented to leave the older version up. I immediately downloaded it on my MacBook Pro and it fixed all the configuration issues I've been trying to get around. This is excellent news!

Now, all I need is to set up a decent WebDAV server, or just leave it as FTP and I'm good to go. Also, I have CloudApp and that works as well.

Today my day started out with a rather early meeting for my work here at The Shop - 9:30 am, and it was about an interesting topic - the seasonal adjustment of the demand data we're using in our project. The problem is that the demand data is based on the previous 12-months historical sales data - all annualized. This means that boat tours should sell as well in July as December. Nope. So how to do this?

I'd already suggested in an email that we make a simple web app that allows the right people to add the important location and taxonomy data as well as a simple 12-month segmented graph (or even sliders or dials) so that the users could control the seasonality for their division and their sales reps. It makes sense - boats trips in Arizona are not down in December, so we need to really look at all the factors that might contribute to the seasonality of the demand.

Then we need to overlay this on the incoming demand and we're in business.

There's also the need for a manual demand entry screen where the users can input demand that they anticipate, and let them run with that. All sounds pretty decent. Very do-able.

But the proposal was that we base it on some Google Doc and parse out the data from a spreadsheet.

That's a horrible idea. I've had to do it so many times, and it always becomes a nightmare. The project manager thought it would be "easy" and "fast"… but all it really does is move the development effort from building the UI and data integrity checks to the data parsing and processing. There's no savings here. But Holy Cow! That was a 30 min meeting that took 90 min because this guy could not get the idea out of his head that this wasn't the way to do it.

I consider myself a decent communicator, but I've come to a loss with this guy. I think he's just not a good listener, but who knows. In any case, at the end of the 90 min meeting I was able to get some support from another developer manager and I think we're going to do the "Right Thing". But it was not easy.

Now I think I'm going to have to come up to speed on Rails, as I think we're going to build this in Rails, but at least it's going to be done Right.

Looks like we have a new version of Google Chrome dev this morning - 23.0.1271.10 with a sparse, but informative list of release notes. With this update, it appears they are about to jump to 24.x - but we'll have to wait and see. They may all be working on getting iOS Maps out 🙂

In any case, fixes for Flash are always good (I really dislike the implementation of the Flash interpreters I've seen from Adobe), and while I'm not a Windows 8 fan, it's nice to throw them a bone once and a while.

Today has been one of those days… it started out with some wonderful steel cut oatmeal at the cafeteria… I had no idea they had that! It was wonderful. But from there on, it was a steep descent downhill.

We are coming off the horrible morning and then trying to get a good number of features and fixes into the code for the afternoon release to production. I like to keep releasing something off master to production each day as that allows the users and project manager to see some visible progress each day. Big or small, it makes little difference to be able to point out the changes we have made based on their feedback and requests.

Often times, though, this means doing a lot of nasty work to follow up with people that dropped the ball (but doing so in a way to make them feel like they are doing you a favor), cleaning up problems and messes left by others, and all the little ick work that comes with software development.

Today has been that day for me.

I'm glad it's over.

On the up-side… we are releasing something far better than yesterday, and the really great ones never loose sight of the fact that it's all in the details.

This morning I've been fighting off a few things and while I'm doing better at being able to handle the slings and arrows these days, I was given a wonderful reminder from twitter:

In 100 years I won't be here. My kids won't either. Their kids? Probably, but that's only if they live well. There may not be a soul on this planet that remembers what I'm doing in this life, and that's OK.

Who was working in the machine shop (the high-tech equivalent of today) in GE's plant 100 years ago? No idea. He worked hard, tried to raise a family, be a good husband, and some did well, others not so much. But today, they are long forgotten.

Carpe Diem. 'Nuff said.

This morning I saw this on Daring Fireball, and it reminded me of the recent conversation I've had with a guy that contracted me to do some work for a Bank and said that it'd be worth $25k to him. So I did it. It took me about 2 weeks, but it was a lot of fun getting back into OS X coding that I didn't mind the time.

I actually made it more flexible than he/they needed. I could sync up and down data between multiple devices and it always makes sure to send minimal packets of information. It's not Rocket Science, but it's nice, and I'm really proud of it. I put it up on a private repo on GitHub and let him see it.

He wanted to use it for something else, and when he asked how much that was worth, I said: "$25k".

"What? You said it'd only take a weekend to make the customizations I asked for."

"Yes, but that's not the point… it's the value the code represents."

I just wish I'd had this quote from Picasso to reference him. I have it now.

"Five thousand dollars," the artist replied.

"B-b-but, what?" the woman sputtered. "How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!"

To which Picasso responded, "Madame, it took me my entire life."

I love it when I'm able to work with people that see the same Big Picture as I do. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's almost magical. The next best thing is to work with someone that can see some Big Picture - even if it's different from mine, and then we can hash out the differences and come to some accord with how to get to that endpoint.

Some of the most frustrating people to work with are those that simply are incapable of seeing the Big Picture. Maybe they don't think in those abstract terms. Maybe they don't think there is such a thing. Maybe they aren't looking at what's being done as much as how it's done. For whatever reason, I'm in the midst of trying to make someone see the Big Picture, and it's something that before too long, I'm just going to give up on.

This isn't a critique of the person… it's the old adage:

Don't try to teach a pig to sing - it only frustrates you and annoys the pig.

if a person isn't going to see what you want them to see - for whatever reason, then it's time to just stop and let them be the person they want to be. If they have the capability of seeing it, and just don't want to, then maybe, someday, they'll change their mind and come to you seeking out your advice then.

If they can't see it at all, you're annoying them, and if at some point in the future, they want to see try again, they will again seek you out, and try again.

But until then, it's just a problem - for you and for them. Better to accept them as they are and move on. No amount of cajoling, pleading, arguing is going to make an adult change their mind. They have to come to that decision themselves.

So I'm trying to convince myself that the right time to let go is now.

Right now.

This morning I spent all morning struggling with some production issues. The runs didn't complete, and I had to dig into the logs to find out why. Here, again, the way a lot of the Ruby devs function really hurts maintenance. This optimistic coding is something I've fought for a great number of years, and it seems that it's really systemic, or maybe endemic to the industry. People want to think "This works… and if it doesn't then it's not my fault". This might be true, but that doesn't make it right.

So first thing was figuring out what was wrong with the data. It seemed to be a data problem, so that's where I started digging. Pretty soon, I realized that the source of the data - Salesforce.com, wasn't returning the data - saying that the HTTP GET was invalid, but a POST was acceptable. I looked at the code, saw where we were doing GETs and figured out that we had the ability to do POSTs as well - changed them, retried, and still no good.

Got onto Campfire to explain the situation and try to find help. Clearly, something with Salesforce.com changed overnight and it was now no longer accepting the calls that were working yesterday.

After a lot of failed attempts, I was finally able to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with our code - that it was Salesforce.com that was simply refusing the API calls we had made yesterday. I was able to confirm this with one of our Salesforce support guys, and he thought he knew the problem, but not the solution. So off he went to figure it out.

In the end, Salesforce requires that when you deploy code, you have to manually recompile everything - or manually run all the tests to activate all the URLs in the code. Interesting.

Once that was fixed, the calls worked and everything was able to run. I finished the production runs at about 11:00 am.

What a morning.

Today I did a little digging on the idea of exporting a Google Visualization Table to CSV all in javascript. Face it - the table is already there… it's got the data… the trick is how to get it all up and going for the CSV export. Well… as it turns out, it's not all that hard. I was pretty surprised.

The core of it is really the Google Visualization DataTable. Since that's the core of most of the Visualizations, that's a great universal starting point. What we're really doing in the code is making a simple javascript method that will make a URI and encode it, such that when it's opened, it'll appear as a download to the browser and be kept as a file.

The first part is to save the DataTable when you render the Google Table on the page:

  // this is the Google DataTable we'll be creating each time
  var dtable = null;
 
  // This method looks at the selected data set and loads that into
  // a new table for the target div and redraws it.
  function render(tbl) {
    // save this data table for later
    dtable = tbl;
    // now create a Google Table and populate it with this data
    var dest = document.getElementById('table_div');
    var table = new google.visualization.Table(dest);
    table.draw(tbl, table_config);
  }

At this point, we have the DataTable, and then we can place the button anywhere on the page, I happened to place it, centered at the bottom of the page:

  <p align="center">
    <input type="button" id="toCSV" value="Click to download data as CSV"
     onclick="toCSV()" />
  </p>

So that when the user clicks on the button the following code will be run:

  // this downloads the current data table as a CSV file to the client
  function toCSV() {
    var data = dtable;
    var csvData = [];
    var tmpArr = [];
    var tmpStr = '';
    for (var i = 0; i < data.getNumberOfColumns(); i++) {
      // replace double-quotes with double-double quotes for CSV compatibility
      tmpStr = data.getColumnLabel(i).replace(/"/g, '""');
      tmpArr.push('"' + tmpStr + '"');
    }
    csvData.push(tmpArr);
    for (var i = 0; i < data.getNumberOfRows(); i++) {
      tmpArr = [];
      for (var j = 0; j < data.getNumberOfColumns(); j++) {
        switch(data.getColumnType(j)) {
          case 'string':
            // replace double-quotes with double-double quotes for CSV compat
            tmpStr = data.getValue(i, j).replace(/"/g, '""');
            tmpArr.push('"' + tmpStr + '"');
            break;
          case 'number':
            tmpArr.push(data.getValue(i, j));
            break;
          case 'boolean':
            tmpArr.push((data.getValue(i, j)) ? 'True' : 'False');
            break;
          case 'date':
            // decide what to do here, as there is no universal date format
            break;
          case 'datetime':
            // decide what to do here, as there is no universal date format
            break;
          case 'timeofday':
            // decide what to do here, as there is no universal date format
            break;
          default:
            // should never trigger
        }
      }
      csvData.push(tmpArr.join(','));
    }
    var output = csvData.join('\n');
    var uri = 'data:application/csv;charset=UTF-8,' + encodeURIComponent(output);
    window.open(uri);
  }

You can see the entire page here:

The downside of this is that the file will have an unusual name. On Mac OS X with Safari 6.0.1, it's "Unknown". On other platforms, I'm sure it's something nearly as odd and useless, but that's the name of the game. There's seemingly no way to get the name of the file in the URI or the window.open() method.

Still… I'm pretty pleased. We're looking at a 100% client-side, javascript solution to the CSV generation problem. That's pretty nice. If you look at the code, there's really very little that's exclusive to the Google DataTable - it's really just the means to get the headers, and the row and column data. We could have easily built this from any regular data source and made that work as well.

Sweet.

Well… I got to thinking this evening on the train ride home that getting Skitch 1.x working again might be nice. After all, I was able to use it on my work laptop and save an image to the Skitch.com servers, and that gave me hope. Well… honestly, it didn't hurt that the reviews for the latest version weren't looking too great on the Mac App Store:

…clearly, the vast majority of the people buying the app aren't buying the changes. So I thought Maybe they'll turn around? OK… so I'm a hopeful romantic.

In any case, I was able to fire up Skitch 1.x and then try to save something and it asked me if I wanted to use my Evernote account, or try the 'old school' login on my Skitch account. I put that in, and presto! I was logged in. As long as I don't go to the Preferences panel, I'm going to stay logged in. That's great news!

I'm still not going to get too attached to it - but maybe it's possible that Evernote is going to look at this feedback and see that they need to back off what they are doing.

At least that's what I'm hoping for…