This weekend, I was doing a bunch of digging into how to use some of the open source ORM (Object Relational Mapping) packages out there. That process of technical research follows a pretty predictable pattern:

• do a few Google searches
• open the best results into a bunch of tabs
• read the info
• come up with a few, more detailed questions
• repeat

As that loop progresses, the questions I end up asking Google get more and more specific. By the time I've been digging for an hour or 2, the bulk of the results are starting to come from forums, mailing lists and other discussions of the technology in question.

That's when one of my pet peeves rears its head. You put a fairly detailed question into Google, get a page from a forum where someone asked your EXACT question (including most of the nuance for your specific needs) and, after a few people saying they don't know how or aren't sure, the original questioner pops back in and says, "Nevermind, I figured it out".

And that's it. Nothing else.

Particularly gnarly questions yield more than one such incident. Even worse, there are often 5 or 6 people just as frustrated, asking this person exactly HOW they figured it out. 

To me, this is an online etiquette and/or karma thing. If you go asking other people to explain how to do something, and you figure it out on your own, telling them "Nevermind" is just the first step. It is now your responsibility to explain back to the forum/mailing list/etc. what you did to figure it out. 

Sure, your solution might not work for everyone who will stumble across the discussion, but it's a whole lot better than being mocked by someone saying they *have* the answer, but haven't shared it.

Photo: Dan Zen

I make a swing past a bunch of sites like Freshmeat, C Sharp Source, CodeProject, Codeplex and Sourceforge
every week or 2, looking for new and updated C# (and PHP, etc) projects and libraries that are up to interesting stuff.

One article on CodeProject today caught my eye. The article is entitled: Generate Complete Web 2.0 Applications in Minutes. That sentiment is all over the software development industry. The Microsoft Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 launch last week showed the attitude at several different points.

Basically, it boils down to excitement at the ability to quickly build "applications" with little more than a wizard. That exact sentiment was expressed to me multiple times at a consulting company I worked with for a while. The person in question believed that if we just used one of these magical tools, our projects would go from a couple of hundred hours down to a single day.

The problem with this whole approach to software development is not that the tools themselves aren't great or that they promise something they don't deliver. It's that they're asking a question that doesn't matter in the context it's getting asked.

That's because neither I nor any software developer that I know is collecting a paycheck or getting an invoice paid for "building applications". At least, that's not what the payment is in exchange for in economic terms. Rather, I am getting paid for *solving problems*.

And, the thing about getting paid to solve problems and magic tools that make some kinds of problems easier to solve this year than last year (which is what most of these tools actually do) is that that just changes the problems that people pay for.

When tools that do easy CRUD generation or data entry applications show up in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that software developers magically get to use those tools to only work 2 hours a week and then coast for the rest. It just changes the kinds of problems that earn developers money.

I love this chain of progress. That's because it lets me solve ever-increasingly difficult problems with the same effort. That's very cool. However, it doesn't promise easy street and it bothers me when that's what's implied by this whole attitude.

Every Sunday morning, give or take a few, for the past couple of years, I have breakfast with my good friend Aaron (who I met 20 years ago in junior high). It's always an interesting conversation that covers lots of topics.

This morning, I came away with more notes than average, so I thought I'd share some of the stuff we talked about.

A lot of the conversation revolved around Aaron's master's thesis/project: Complexity Machine 1. He's doing some really interesting stuff that deals with the intersection of emergent behavior, simulated flocking behavior, generative architecture and computer science. Complexity Machine 1 is the software that's the result of his research, where he's asking:

My question to those of you who are willing to explore is: how can you imagine this software could be used to create architecture? Consider it a kind of speculative Rorschach test. Perhaps you don't consider it useful at all, or feel it needs some some vital piece of functionality before it's useful.

Along the way, Aaron mentioned that he'd picked up a copy of Seed Magazine (due to an article related to his research) and found it to be a really decent magazine. When I got home, I hit the website and think I might subscribe.

At one point, the conversation turned to non-textbook books that help in the understanding of how computers work. I mentioned that I think that anyone with an interest in the workings of computers should read the novel: The Diamond Age.

He seconded that recommendation and also through out The Advent of the Algorithm from David Berlinski as worth reading along with Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. Both were critical to his actual "getting" the topics.

I mentioned that I had a copy of The Turing Omnibus sitting on my shelf that I've been wanting to get a chance to dig into.

On my way to drop him off back at home, the topic of my quest to find a better way to create presentations that are destined for online distribution rather than live presentation.

Powerpoint, Keynote, S5 and others all frustrate me in some way and what I really want is something that makes it much easier to focus on the content of the presentation and still generate something that fits with the aesthetic that Presentation Zen is pointing toward.

Aaron mentioned that he'd messed with Quartz Composer, Soundslides and Quicktime for what I described. And, of course, with most of his thesis research being done in Processing, he sees some serious promise for a nice presentation system.

Ever since someone gave me an overview of RESTful web development in the same week that someone else gave me an overview of the Atompub protocol, I've been hooked on the idea.

I've tinkered around with starting implementations of both a client and a server on my own ever since. Part of that activity was because there weren't very many tools that supported Atompub. That actually makes doing that kind of development a pain.

That's because you're trying to do both ends of a client-server implementation without having either side ready to work. It's always much easier to work on one end of such a system when the other end is already in place.

While there have been tools for testing Atompub servers, some early servers, etc. out there, but most required quit a bit of yak shaving before you could work on the other side.

Fortunately, that's starting to change. While I still am pursuing my own implementations, I now have adequate implementations to work with on both sides: Windows Live Writer on the client side and Wordpress on the server.

One of the things I'm aiming for in working with this whole chain of tools is a central repository of content that I create: notes, bookmarks, articles, documents, images, etc. all in one place. From there, the content can be pushed out to the various sites I want it on.

Anyway, one of the things that I wanted to do as part of this was to get a copy of all of the content from this site as individual Atom documents. This would give me a large test set of posts that reflect my own real usage.

So, I wrote a bare minimum export to get all ~900 posts. One of the secondary reasons I wanted to use this is that this site's installation of Wordpress is chronically messed up.

Accordingly, a real implementation should actually query the service for the list of posts instead of just looping through the list. For whatever reason, this site's setup, that didn't work, hence the for(i) loop. But, that means some 404 errors in the middle from deleted posts.

Regardless, in just a few lines of C# code, I had a nice directory containing all of my posts. The code follows.

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Somewhere, at this very moment, in an IT department or team of programmers, someone is planning a scheduled task. That task should run in "off" hours, when no one is around. The immediate suggestion that pops up is MIDNIGHT. There is no debate, no questioning of it and the task is scheduled for midnight.

Unfortunately, in many environments, this scenario is repeated a couple of times a month. I say unfortunate because the original reason for running these kinds of jobs overnight in the first place is that batch jobs that consume computing resources shouldn't interfere with regular daytime work activities. However, when *everything* gets scheduled at midnight (and in many shops, that actually ends up happening), all you've done is shift the bottleneck to the middle of the night.

I've worked in environments where the bunched up batch jobs all scheduled at midnight thrashed the hard drive and CPU all night and are often still running at 9 or 10am the next day.

When we changed the scheduling to stagger them out a bit, from 10pm through 6am, the total burden on the server dropped dramatically and we actually dropped the overall time spent running these jobs just by being more careful about scheduling.

So, if you happen to be in that meeting today and someone says "midnight", please, just check to see what else is running at midnight and consider a different time slot.