I have witnessed all five today.

PHP also has a global function, register_shutdown_function, that takes a callback argument.  This callback gets loaded onto a stack and called once the script is about to finish processing.  You could use this in a similar fashion to ensure that all the housekeeping tasks are taken care of at the end of a script.  But, here’s the gotcha.  

PHP5 not only changed the way that objects work but also where they stand in the grand lifecycle of a PHP script.  Even if you’re using PHP4 style objects on the PHP5 interpreter, object destructors are called AFTER the functions in the shutdown stack, meaning that you can pass class methods to the shutdown stack and they will be executed normally.  In the PHP4 interpreter, objects are deallocated before the shutdown functions are called.  Meaning that if you have references to any PHP object in them, that function will not be called (nor as I found out, will you get an error informing you of such).  Why are people still using PHP4 again?

UPDATE:

This actually has to do with registering the shutdown function in the object’s constructor, and the state at which it was pushed onto the stack.  Evidently herein lies the difference between the interpreters.

That happens so often that I don’t know that many people sit back and think about it.  For me, high school, tours and the ends of tours have all been such transitions.  For a long time, I was locked in the same place and routine with the same group of people.  You become close to some of them, and then that particular experience ends and it seems like everyone just kind of moves on.  It’s so strange, it’s so temporal.  And the more experience you get, the more you realize that it happens, and you can sit there and watch it all occur.  

Transitions are inevitable.  We all move between different social spheres and different parts of our lives.  There are always people we’ll miss, and the occasional person we’ll keep in contact with.  I know can hate on UMBC quite a bit, and my experience there has not generally been rosy.  But I think I’ll miss it in the end.  

I learned this fact being friends with school teachers.  In many school districts, teachers are given official email addresses, and parents are able to contact teachers this way with concerns they may have about their children.  In itself, this is pretty innocuous, and may even seem like a good idea, especially as schoolteachers and principals clamor about the lack of parental involvement.  Email, is, after all, a pretty convenient way to communicate.  But my experience has shown me that it’s more apt to bring out the sociopathy in people.  

If you look at all the ways people primary communicate, you can rate each one on a particular set of criteria:

1. Proximity.  Talking to someone face-to-face carries a whole different set of rules and consequences than calling someone on the phone does.  This also brings in questions of scope and how likely it is that the recipient will actually get the message.  
2. Statefullness.  Think of something like an instant message versus an email, whether or not timeliness is really a factor.   
3. Convenience.  The amount of effort that it takes to actually communicate.  

It might be simple just to rate each one on a scale of 1 -10, but it’s probably better to use something like -5 to +5.  Think about it this way, the more positive the number of each one is, the more apt you’re going to actually send your communication along, but if the value is negative, it will actually detract from the likelihood you’ll send it.  

Think about how this varies from situation to situation.  Sometimes you want to hear and have to manage the response from the opposite party, like deciding where to go for lunch, and sometimes you don’t.  The scale of each criterion really has to do with what you’re goals are in the course of the communication.  

Take the example of making a phone call to set up a reservation at a restaurant.  For proximity, the value is 0, since calling or another means will get you the same result as going in person.  In other words it’s a non-factor.  Statefullness gets a positive 5, since time is crucial for setting up the reservation.  Convenience gets maybe a 2.   While you don’t have to leave your house, calling on the phone might not be the simplest thing.  Maybe you have to deal with a trainee on the other end who will mess up the time or the name.  Or your name is difficult to pronounce, so you know you’ll have to go through and spell it four or five times over.  The overall value for calling in a phone reservation gets a 7.  

Think now if you were able to handle this through some kind of online reservation system.  You don’t have to worry about spelling your name, or even actually speaking to a person.  Provided you know that the message is received in a timely fashion (the statefullness stays at 5) you’ll probably be pretty apt to use it, hence the success of online based ordering for Papa John’s and Dominos.  Convenience jumps to a 3 or a 4, bumping the total to 8 or 9.  

Now say that calling in the reservation forced you navigate some mind-bendingly complex series of phone trees in order to get to a point that you can actually place the reservation.  Convenience drops to -1, or maybe it’s so bad that it drops to -5, the number drops to 0 and it’s not even worth the trouble to go to the restaurant.  

Merlin talks about the venting scenario.  All you’re looking for is to tell someone what you think.  You want to talk at them rather than have a back-and-forth.  You need something that’s immediate, distant, and convenient.  The convenience factor is what separates email from everything else.  Talking to someone face to face doesn’t work because it’s too proximal and gives someone the chance to defend themselves.  It’s inconvenient to go out of your way to meet them.  The phone is more convenient but the proximity still allows them to respond.  

Email provides this annoyingly efficient channel to vent, and I think the main factor is convenience.  You have this very fast, direct channel from your stream of consciousness to the work area of another person.  You get this power to invade their space without even being there or allowing them the chance to respond.  You get to sneak in, speak your mind, and leave, without any real interaction.  

Merlin makes the point that the inherent qualities of the system lend it to being abused.  That because it’s cheap and abundant that it’s more opened up to people who will abuse it.  People lacking a sense of etiquette.  Sociopaths.  I think that it needs to be narrowed down on that sliding spectrum of proximity vs. convenience vs. statefullness.  It’s not because it’s cheap or abundant, but more that it’s abundant and convenient and timely and doesn’t require that direct contact like a phone or meeting would.  It’s not that sociopaths prefer email.  I find that it allows people the temptation to easily engage in sociopathic behavior.  

Found via Dvorak.org

I got the RAM last week and installed it.  Now I knew that Windows would not natively support all of the memory, four gigabytes worth, but I expected that Linux would.  I have it set up to dual boot, but I use Linux primarily, and with enough memory, I can do everything I need to do with inside VirtualBox.  I was pretty dismayed to find that Ubuntu also didn’t recognize the four gigs of memory.  

Turn to google.  I am running the 32 bit version of Ubuntu, and even though the processor in my machine is fully capable of running 64-bit code, the designers of the original Core Duo chip decided to disable this ability.  Now a 32 bit operating system can address of maximum of 2^32 bytes of memory, with is 4 gigs, but some of that gets reserved for addressing devices on the PCI bus.  

In light of this, and for a long time, Intel (and AMD) have been including the capability to address more by adding 4 bits to the CPU for addressing.  The width is now 2^36, or 64 gigabytes worth.  However, the operating system must be aware of this in order to take advantage of it.  The desktop version of Ubuntu, I come to find out, is not compiled with this ability by default.  No problem, however, I can recompile linux as well as anyone.  

However, after recompiling the kernel (and the grub bootloader, as someone on the ubuntu forums suggested), I still am unable to see all four gigabytes of memory in my computer.  The bios recognizes it, but none of the Ubuntu kernels do (desktop, server, and my custom build).  

I’m actively looking for a way to get my money’s worth out of the memory, and I’ll post it here when I find the solution.  In the meantime, if anyone has successfully gotten it working and would like to share, I’d be much obliged.  

I went out with my mom for lunch today at the Double T on National Pike.  To my utter amazement there were a group of white supremacists who were on the way out, dressed in full “White Power” Neo-Nazi garb.  The one guy had a red shirt with a prominent, silk-screened swastika on the front.  

I’m always amazed when I see such broad displays like that in public, and in the Baltimore area it’s rare that I do.  Sure, the occasional redneck will sport the Stars and Bars on his pick-up, but never something so obviously intended to offend everyone around them such as this display.  I was honestly amazed that the people at the Double T agreed to serve them.  It’s no secret that Baltimore has a very large African-American population, as was probably half the wait staff.  

Makes me want to drop them off in West Baltimore on a Friday night and see what happens.

Ever since posting a resume on Monster.com, I’ve been getting a lot of calls from recruiters for various technical related jobs in the Baltimore Area. This is the most recent.

Baltimore AirCoil

Without making anyone follow the link, here’s the logo for the company:

Fate maybe?

I tried to post the code, but it didn’t want to take in this template.

The inherent problem with the agile approach is the kind of developer that’s likely to be attracted to it.  The one who doesn’t like to do a lot of work, doesn’t like to document, and really just likes to write a lot of code.

Now, as a software developer, there’s nothing wrong with being lazy.  Why worry about pointer math and explicit memory management if you can have a garbage collector do it for you?  Why go through the hassle of creating value objects for your model if you can have an ORM take care of those details?  In fact, computer science students are taught from the ground up to NOT reinvent the wheel unless you have a damn compelling reason to do so.  Software sort of builds on itself in this way.

However, the laid-back mentality that applies well to the actual programming doesn’t lend itself well to the actual business of creating software, ie, the software engineering field, where engineering is application of math, physics, biology, insert-ology-word-here to solve some problem.  Where development of the code can rely on other code, the development of the overall solution still requires that everyone involved does the legwork to make sure you’re actually building the right software.

So far, in my admittedly limited development career, I’ve always worked in an environment that went with an agile approach, or at least claimed to.  In a situation where it’s a small work place, say one or two people, the level of accountability required really isn’t that high.  It’s me and another guy, and if there’s some kind of question involving the design of a project then I just walk down the hall and talk to him about it.

But once there’s more people in the mix, say 4 or more, and you have multiple people working on a project, the process, agile or not needs to thought about more.  In this sort of situation, you might have more than one project going on at once, and everyone is working on some subset of problem (the engineering of the solution).  Now there’s probably someone who’s the project manager, and he needs to communicate requirements and design to the other people on the team.  If everyone’s in the same office at the same time this might work, but in my experience it’s not.  The system breaks down.  People don’t know/understand the scope of what’s going on.  There are components that need to be integrated with others and there isn’t an email to be found that has the detail of how each thing works.  Frustration ensues, deadlines get pushed back, and ultimately, while the project might not be a failure the product isn’t what it could have been.

The point is, that the agile approach isn’t bad.  I still prefer it to a waterfall style approach where you’re stuck in a rigid process that’s inflexible and requires a ton of other artifacts aside from the actual code.  The problem with the agile approach is that you actually have to take it seriously as a process, not just a way to avoid writing extra docs.  If you call yourself agile you still need to gather requirements accurately, you need to keep the customer close at hand, and you absolutely need to be rapidly prototyping and be getting constant feedback from the customer.  You need to be doing lots of user testing.  In essence, you need to many many many releases.  The goal shouldn’t be to shoot for version 1.0, instead you should shoot for every point release until 1.0.  Version 0.1 should be a reality and it should be looked over with the same scrutiny as you plan to do for the final release.  The point is that you can’t call yourself agile unless you really are being agile.