Crouching tiger, coding monkey

In addition to the Macbook Pro where I do all my daily work I have a Dell workstation that for the last couple of years has been running Window 2003 Server. Over the course of the last few months he’s started flaking out on me, to the point where I was never really sure what I was going to get when I used it.

To be fair, it really isn’t the right hardware for Windows 2003. (For instance the hard drive has always run like a pig because it really isn’t a server machine.) But I kept having this feeling that whenever I would turn my back the screensaver would switch over to a giant middle finger pointing at me.

I could never catch him in the act though. Each time I spun around and yelled “Ah ha! Now I’ve got you!” all I would see would a picture of some forest or a planet or something. I’ve gotta admit, while his performance was barely better than some of those losers on American Idol he was a wily one.

Anyhow, the time had come to start anew so I nuked Windows 2003 and put on, yep you guessed, Windows Vista.

A blog wouldn’t be a blog without moaning and complaining so here, I’ll get this out of my system fast:

1. When an install sits on 27% for about a half hour, that’s not good. Luckily I had some outside confirmation that this kind of thing would happen. I think the exact words were “Yeah, it takes freaking forever to install.”

2. Those little security dialog warning popup do-dad’s are pretty annoying, but not because they happen all the time. What’s crazy is the whole screen going black except for this little dialog. As someone who remembers the old Linux days of “Don’t mess with the refresh rate lest your monitor will burst into flames” having a screen go instantly black is a jarring experience.

3. The thing talks to you like HAL from 2001. No seriously, I came into work and noticed this little icon on the login screen:

My first thought was, “What does that do? Let’s click it without thinking through my actions to find out.” Why is it software tends to turn off the higher level reasoning in your brain? I mean, if someone walked up to me and asked, “Does this look infected?” you can take it to the bank that I’m not going to go in for a closer look. Yet an unknown button that could do anything from making me a bacon sandwich to ending all life as we know it gets clicked with nary a thought.

Turns out if you click it Vista starts talking to you in the name of accessibility. To bad they didn’t spring for James Earl Jones to do the voice over instead of some psycho killer computer voice.

But, all that being said, here’s the thing…

I find that I actually LIKE Windows Vista.

Now, before everyone falls all to pieces on me let me explain. My biggest beef with XP was that whenever I would switch back and forth from the Mac to Windows it felt like I was taking a step backwards. The XP interface wasn’t as nice, things seemed to be kind of dull in comparison to shininess of OS X. With Vista’s Aero Glass interface that feeling that I’m taking a step back to something more primitive kind of goes away. (But not completely, I mean it is still Windows right? Snark. Woo hoo! I’ve still got it baby!)

Now, I’m not saying that I prefer Vista over OS X, let’s not start talking crazy here. But, the new eye candy certainly helps. Of course all this could really mean is that I have brain of a chimpanzee and that I would be enamored by anything reflective.

*Eyes reader suspiciously*

First monkey comment and I swear I’ll fling poop at you. Wait, oh crap. (Ha! Ba dum ching!)

There are a number of good software blogs that I read but there are two that always catch my attention when I see an update scroll through on the RSS feed.

Steve Yegge from Google.

Wil Shipley from Delicious Monster.

They really can’t be more different professionally. Steve works at a mega giant software company while Wil is more or less a one man show who works from a coffee house. Where they are similar though is that they have no fear whatsoever to say anything, no matter how controversial.

Oh, and they are pretty darn funny too. Well, as funny as software guys can be.

Steve’s latest post about the “Next Big Language” did have a laugh out section. I’ll quote for those not wanting to read the whole thing…

Back when I was in the Navy, just out of boot camp, an otherwise entirely forgettable petty officer first class instructor of ours offered us, unasked and free of charge, his sage advice on how to pick up women at a bar: “Go ugly early.” With this declaration, he had made it clear that he and I thought rather differently about certain things in life. But I had to hand it to him: here was a man of conviction. He didn’t care what other people thought of him, or for that matter, what he thought of himself. He had defined his philosophy and he was sticking with it.

And in a sense, he taught me a valuable lesson, although it’s not the one he probably thought he was teaching me. I’ll pass it on to you, unasked and free of charge. If you want to spare yourself a lot of angst in deciding which programming language to use, then I recommend this simple rule: Go ugly early. C++ will go out with you in a heartbeat.

Tee hee hee.

*Sigh*

It’s funny because it’s true.

That then lead me to have a discussion with a couple of different people and we came up with a quick two question survey. I’d be curious to get everyone’s answers to it and rather than muck around with WordPress to get a little button widget thingie just leave your answers as a comment.

1. On a scale of one to five, with one being “Bjarne is the greatest human to have ever lived, well second greatest if you count the guy that invented the burrito” (i.e. I like it) and five being “It’s teh suck,” (i.e. I hate it) how would you rate how much you like C++?

2. What programming language would like to learn more about/use more?

I’ll even start it off.

Question 1: I’d say 3, although I have 4 type leanings.
Question 2: I find Ruby on Rails kind of interesting so I’ll probably go with that.

I’ve also never used Lisp and I hear its great but I’m a little worried it will end up like Guinness.

That’s going to require some explanation.

When I was in college I drank beer. A number of my friends were huge Guinness fans but try as I might to like it I simply hated it. Maybe there’s some weird chemical reaction between me and the beer or it’s some kind of cruel cosmic joke but I just can’t stand the stuff. I’m kinda concerned that I would take to Lisp the same way. (i.e. I’d find it so distasteful that I’d have a Perl chaser. Ugh. I know no good would come from that.)

So there we go, now answer away. It doesn’t hurt and we’ve sterilized the commenting section so the risk of infection is pretty low.

So it’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been trying to come up with an excuse and I keep waffling between “I’m a total slacker” and “I’ve been working like mad.” Let’s go with the latter and it keep it just between us.

Loads of work is being done here at the mothership. If you concentrate real hard you can almost hear the typing of the new software being written. Wait, I can hear the typing, but that’s because I’m here. You’ll just have to pretend. I’d tell you what all goodies are in store (and there are some good goodies) but that would ruin the suspense. It would be kind of like writing a detective story like this…

The rain had been coming in buckets for days, which was thoughtful of it from a container standpoint but it was hell on the head. Each question asked lead to three more and each answer left you more confused. Oh, and by the way, the butler did it.

See? It just wouldn’t work.

But enough of this, it’s time to get back to the real work. More updates will be coming, I promise. Well, mostly. I hope. Maybe.