Pencils Down

We have all been on projects where management decides to change resources, time and/or features of an ongoing project.  The old chestnut used to be these are the 3 things you have control over, pick 1.

Thinking about this I looked at what would need to happen if we changed one variable:

• If you reduced Resources then you would need more Time or less Features
• If you reduced Time then you would need more Resources or less Features
• If you increased Features then you would need more Time or more Resources

But thinking about this, changes in Resources usually make no difference in the short term.  Adding another developer does very little until the developer comes up to speed.  Depending on their expertise this can take a while.  So, what if we treated Resources as a constant?

We end up with a relationship like: Resources = Features over Time (R = F/T).  Sounds really pretty nice.  Kind of makes sense.  Can be looked at as a productivity measures, quality measure, etc… as well.  Again you don’t expect the productivity of your team or their quality level to change much in the short term.  Walking through the cases above we get relationships to still work.

I think this is a nice clear mathematical argument even the most demanding manager can understand.  Oh, you want to increase Features this late in the project.  That means we need more Time – see here…  Yes, we can increase our productivity, but not in the short term (phase) of this project.

As you may already know icefaces since it’s wrapping faces wrapping jsp wrapping html there is some loss of information, especially when things don’t go well.

In my case I was chasing down why a button click would sometimes work and other times do nothing at all.

After looking at various logging spam you can generate, I started looking into debugging tools in faces.  Desperation sometimes works!  Turns out there is a tag, h:messages, in faces that allows you to dump whatever faces exceptions are currently in the queue.  You just plunk the tag in the same div as the suspected culprit and voila, you get a nice message dump right next to the component.  For example,


<ice:panelGroup>
<ice:panelGroup styleClass="x">
<ice:commandButton id="okButton" type="submit" value="OK"
actionListener="#{z.popupOkButtonAction}" />
</ice:panelGroup>
<h:messages layout="table" showDetail="true" />
</ice:panelGroup>

BTW, in my case I got a list of class cast exception errors.  I had the getter/setter of the selected value of a selectOneItem typed as a SelectItem instead of a String.  Once I saw the errors the fixes were very clear.

A recent poll shows a Computer Engineering/Science being in the top 10 for starting and mid-career salary.  So, that’s good news – might still have a job for several more years.  The starting looks like $50,000+ and mid-career of about $100,000.  Still sounds good.

I know I am old, but when I went to college it was $3,000 a year and the starting salary was in the teens.  So, without any financial aid you were in the clear immediately.  I am not so sure it is still so obvious.

I start wondering about the cost of a bachelor’s degree these days and the associated financial aspects.  So, just focusing on the degree costs I am using a ballpark figure of $50,000 per your (tuition, board, books, travel, etc…) for 4 years.  Assume your parents saved something and can cut the number by half.  At the end of 4 years you would have a $100,000 loan.  Using a student loan calculator that comes to about $1,150 per month.

So, if we round up to $60,000 per year that means $5,000 per month gross.  Less about 1/3 for federal and state taxes leaves you at $3,300 per month.  Sounds good we have a little over $2,000 a month free.

That’s not enough to buy a condo or house in a city (especially where you would not have a down payment), so you are renting.  A good apartment runs about $1,000 a month.  Utilities, internet, etc.. probably tack on another $500 a month.  Now we are down to $500 free.

Oh, you want a car.  Nice toyota runs $300 a month.  Down to $200 month free.

You want to eat?

I think I was a little generous above, but not too far out of the picture.  Heaven forbid your parents don’t have $100,000 saved for you or you decide to get a Master’s degree or you have a girl friend or …

While programming away I failed to notice this occurring.  Last time I saw this Microsoft had the same problem getting corporations weened off of NT and trying to get them on 2000/XP.  In both cases (and probably others) the latest production mode o/s from MS is not useful (currently Vista).

I hate Vista.  I made the mistake of buying a machine running Vista (after the vendors stopped issuing new machines with XP).  It dies/stops at random locations and applications.  Unclear if network support is the reason cable modem needs to be reset weekly.  Plus a great printer I had (and I assume a large number of other devices) were not supported under Vista.

The difference this time round is the importance of security updates to Windows operating systems.  I am pretty sure I am getting at least monthly updates to my machine.  It is a real nuisance to attempt to deal with that amount of change on a production environment, but at least you have the choice and can queue up the changes.  If you are running XP in production you are completely at risk.  Even better hackers can just wait for a fix announcement from Microsoft and can quickly put out a nice hack that will NOT be fixed on XP.  Nice touch.

Google’s recent announcement of a ‘net neutrality’ agreement with Verizon is bothersome at best.  Having one of the largest content providers making an agreement with one of the largest data pipes is scary.  The wording of the agreement is meant to be as kind as possible, but it still gives you a bad feeling.  I expect most of the other content providers are in a really bad place right now, probably scrambling to make similar agreements with other channels.

I am concerned with long-term affects on other web sites.   A large part of my income for several years has been involved with writing applications that expect wide access to the Internet.  If for some reason the company involved didn’t get along with Google, what happens?  Do users find their site?  Do pages just timeout, esp when accessing some neato graphic or Flash/Flex page or download?

If things get bad enough does Google develop a ‘preferred’ developer/company list that limits who gets quality of service over the line?  How does a small company/developer compete to get on that list?

Reading the paper lately has been really depressing:

• Lance Armstrong accused of doping over a long period of time by teammate
• Mark Hurd not only plays with a c0ntractor, but attempts to hide the facts by adjusting documents

Both of these men have been heroes in my book.  Armstrong overcoming cancer to win the Tour de France several times.  Hurd taking the mess of HP/Compaq and turning it into a strong contender in the hardware space.  Neither easy or short-term feats.

I guess the realization that these guys (and others) are really just human and not supermen afterall is a sad day.  Who’s left?  My interest is in software or business in general.  Does Gates or Buffet really fit the bill of hero?  I always liked the idea of having heroes.  They give you something to aspire to.  Believing in yourself is nice.  Believing you could grow to become someone as great as one of your heroes is a whole new level.

I have recently been working on a project looking for memory leaks.  (BTW, I am extremely happy with the tools available in the JDK – jconsole, jmap, jhat).  While poking around at some changes we could make in our code I kept finding quite a few Hibernate objects hanging around.  One in particular was the number of logging objects (we log user actions in the db) that were in memory just for a login step.  Examining the code there was no apparent flaw.  Putting in some debugging statements showed a tremendous amount of logging objects being instantiated during the parent.getChildren() type of statement in the code that adds the logging event to the database table.

If you find the documentation somewhere (I have a personal nit that I think most of the Hibernate documentation is atrocious.  I can NEVER find what I am looking for) you will see that the lazy attribute for a set has three choices:

1. false
2. true (default)
3. extra

false means load the collection when the primary object is loaded.  I think everyone expected that.

true means wait until some code asks for a collection. Then load the entire set!  I don’t think most people expected that.

extra means return a Hibernate interceptor for the collection to the caller and only load individual members of the set when explicitly called for.  I think this is the one most people expect to have happen.

We have been running with Hibernate for over a year. Like everyone else we thought we were taking advantage of lazy loading of collections.  We have code all over the application that looks like:

Child child = new Child()

child.setParent(parent)

parent.getChildren().add(child)

session.flush()

Of particular note is the parent.getChildren statement.  This function call is intercepted by Hibernate and we thought would lazy load the collection.  Our mapping for the set in the Parent mapping had no setting for lazy, as the documentation says that lazy is on by default.

This means in our code where we just wanted to add a logging event we were loading the entire logging event table every time we added a record to the table!

We have changed all of our one-to-many sets to use extra.  So far we are guessing that the many-to-many sets will likely traverse every matching member so the default true setting is good.

Yes, I know, technically HQL doesn’t support derived tables or columns.  However, you can count on the underlying SQL to do some of the work for you.

For example if you needed to order by any of 3 columns in left joined tables, depending on whether the join worked or not you could do something like:

select distinct t1,
case when t2.t2Id is null
then
(case when t3.t3Id is null
then t1.orderingColumn
else t3.orderingColumn
end)
else t2.orderingColumn
end
from table1 t1
left join t1.t2s t2
left join t1.t3s t3
order by 2, t1.description

This builds on allowing case in the select clause (thereby giving you your pseudo-derived column) and the result order number (2) which falls directly back to the underlying SQL.

By Monica Hernandez

JACKSON, MS (WLBT) – A laptop scam has been running at the fairgrounds for the last week. And authorities say they’ve captured the men behind it.

Eddie Handford, 45, and Frank Hamilton,54, are each charged with two counts of trademark infringement and two counts of illegal sale of goods bearing counterfeit labels. Each count carries up to five years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

Hinds County officials said the men were trying to sell blocks of wood, covered in duct tape and bubble wrap, as laptops. They placed a Toshiba label on the duct tape, and another fake label had a price tag.

The men were also trying to pass off binders filled with paper as laptops.

“By the time you take it and get it home, you find you’ve purchased a block of wood, you may as well throw it in the fireplace. It’s no good,” said Lt. Jeffery Scott, public information officer with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department.

The men were captured Thursday, after they tried to sell the counterfeit goods to an off-duty state trooper, who took down their license plate number.

“This type of thing wouldn’t happen if people weren’t trying to get something for nothing. But it’s very dangerous because it takes a lot of money out of the pocket of the consumer,” said Lt. Scott.

Officials say no one actually bought the knock-off laptops.

The men were also trying to sell fake gold chains, a camcorder, an iPod, and porn.

http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=12900278

We are going through what should be a simple exercise to incorporate SSL connectivity to an Oracle database.  If you have not had the pleasure – please avoid this at all costs and let a Oracle DBA do the work.

Think back to late 1970’s IBM configuration files when you needed to change the O/S.  There are real corrollaries here.  You have to change all these (x.ora) config files manually and then use the secret handshake to be logged in as the oracle admin and use the special network configuration tool to see if you can really connect with the changes you just made.  Only then can you use some actual code to connect to the db.

On top of that is this wierd business about Oracle listeners.  There is the Oracle databases – which everyone understands.  But you need a set of Oracle listeners connected to a database in a specific pattern in order to actually access the database.  What a hack.

Even MySql can be configured in a much cleaner and clearer fashion.  How are they getting away with their pricing model?