I like programming

Keri Hilson sings about the things she likes:

“I like just you and I touch at first sight,
And the world around us won’t stop turning
tonight, I like, I like [..] We’re caught in
this moment, I won’t let you go”

Maybe this “You”, is her computer? And she sits before it the whole night? I remember my first programs, and my first Apple II computer – love at first sight, or to be more precise, at first touch..

Dreams of a software developer

A software developer wants to work on something interesting, exciting, and important. He likes to work on cutting-edge stuff. He would like to create a world with only a 4 lines of code or build a universe with a single keystroke. The ultimate dream of a software developer (beside world domination) is independence: to earn so much money that you can do what you want. For example living on a sunny island writing only 4 lines of code a day (which are so brilliant and awesome that everybody else is nearly blinded), or owning a Sunseeker Yacht, which embodies speed, success and independence. Well, of course everybody would like to own a yacht, a villa and a luxury car. Unfortunately, not every software developer is automatically as rich as Bill Gates and Paul Allen. For the very rich, a big boat is the real sign of wealth, for example the Octopus, a cross breeding between a small aircraft carrier and an atomic double-hulled icebreaker, the megayacht of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. At 125 meters it is the biggest private vessel in the world, of course with landing pad for helicopters. It has a permanent crew of 60 people, contains a theater/cinema and a basketball court, two helicopters, an 18 meter landing craft and a private 10-person submarine. Well, I do not even own a canoe ;-)

To be the hero

Whenever the applications we have built are broken, we become application repairman. “Clink! Screw! Bend! Inflate!”, and suddenly you are the hero in your company again. You are something special: only you can repair the system. But if we go on an IT conference, we are surrounded by other super heroes. Some of them look strange, other smell strange, but each of them knows how to build and repair an application. And in a Krypton world filled with supermen, the real hero is the guy who can do the ordinary. On a conference, this is the guy who can entertain the audience, who can give talks which are not boring, who can make the others laugh. It depends on the context who is gonna be the hero. If everybody is able to repair a bicycle, a bicycle repairman would hardly be special.

Bulletproof

I wonder if she sings about bulletproof web design? Somehow I have got the feeling that she does not know the book from Dan Cederholm. Hmmh. At least she sings about messages and information. Nice song, anyway. I have heard it the first time driving in a BMW near Frankfurt on a German highway. We rented it at the airport. German engineering in perfection. You have got to try this once in your life: there is no speed limit on most of the German highways.

Bad Idea #23

How a bad day begins.. Unaware of Kitty’s current anger, the dog attempts to make a friendly tackle. Moments later, Rupert was scarred for life – mentally as well as physically. The fight was over before he knew what hit him.

moar funny pictures

Every Line of Code (Is A Child Of Mine)

Another nice cartoon from Oliver Widder: usually commenting out code does not lead to clean code, but sometimes we do it nevertheless. This explanation is nice: every line of code is a child of mine

C-Level Titles

You have heard of CEOs (chief executive officer), CTOs (chief technical officer), and CIOs (chief information officer). C-Level titles for jobs with high salaries. Dilbert has some more: CJO (chief janitorial officer) ..

.. CPO (chief people officer) and CACCO (chief artificial coffee creamer officer)

Ctrl-Alt-Del in Linux

Have you ever wondered what the Linux equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL in Windows is? Many Linux fans say in Linux an application cannot bring down the whole system. Well, it can. It happens rarely, but it does happen. Here is what you can do for example in Ubuntu, which uses Gnome:

• With Ctrl-Alt-BackSpace you can kill the whole X-Server Window System (or your GUI session) and return to the login prompt.
• If an app blocks the whole system, you can press Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or F2 through F6) to get a console and kill the evil process with ps aux or ps -e | grep program_name and kill -9. Finally go back to your display manager with ctl+alt+f7
• In Gnome, you can add the System Monitor to the Panel. When you click on one of the monitors (for processor, memory, network or harddisk), a graphical list of processes opens, similar to the Task Manager in Windows, and you can stop processes through the context menu.
• In Gnome you can also press Alt+F2, type in xkill, press enter, and kill the non-responding application. KDE is still different..

Is this so much better than the famous Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows? I am not sure.. Anyway, it looks like this is a very operating system specific feature. For Mac OS X, there is no ALT key, but you have an option key instead and two Command or Apple keys. Option-Command-Esc brings up a force-quit menu. You can also open the activity monitor (by opening Spotlight with the shortcut Command-spacebar and typing “act”).

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Problems are opportunities

Continuous Integration and Agile Development

Did you notice that Continuous Integration and Agile Development are similar? The principle of continuous integration means that members of a team integrate their work frequently, because merging is much easier to do frequently and small rather than rarely and large. Agile development means iterative development with many feedback rounds between customer and developer. The common thread is that frequent interaction reduces conflicts and prevents that things diverge too much from each other:

• frequent integration through merging avoids in Continuous Integration that different branches diverge too much from each other
• frequent feedback rounds and iterations in Agile Development avoid that expectation from the customer, specification from product manager and real product from developer diverge too much from each other

Could not connect to webserver

Powerful IDEs such as Eclipse or NetBeans are useful even for dynamic languages as Ruby, which don’t need to be compiled like Java or .NET applications. They offer all necessary functionalities, syntax highlighting, and debugging possibilities. Yet they also have drawbacks, sometimes they are quite slow: Eclipse seems to be very slow at large CSS files, while NetBeans constantly tries to scan all your projects. And sometimes their behavior is difficult to understand. For example, if you get the error message “Could not connect to webserver” in a NetBeans RubyOnRails project, then you might have a faulty plugin or gem. This is possible if you just have modified or edited it. Then you have to restart the server, and this does not work if you have introduced a fatal error. If the Rails application can not be started, then NetBeans does not display the correct error message. It simply says “Could not connect to webserver”. The reason can also be a missing or faulty gem which is required for your application, for example a broken rmagick gem after an OS update of Linux. In this case, examine the log in the output window (which can be opened in NetBeans with Ctrl-4) and install the required gem.

72 Virgins

Sometimes things are not always what they seem..

Lines of Code

Shakespeare’s sonnets have exactly 14 lines, his plays have usually around 2600 lines (Hamlet about 4000 lines). This is not that different from the few thousand lines of code a typical programmer writes for a unit, library or project, for example jQuery 1.2 and 1.3 have around 4000 LoC (jQuery 1.2.6: 3549 LoC, jQuery 1.3.2: 4376 LoC). It is well-known that progress and productivity cannot be measure in lines of code. Yet the order of magnitude is often quite similar in completely different projects and environments, because there is a limit what people can handle and produce.

The order of magnitude for the typical lines of code is as follows. A single programmer working a few days will usually produce some functions, methods and classes more or less rapidly, depending on his experience. If he is working a few months he will produce typically a few thousands lines of code. This is an amount a single person can still understand well, and it can still be customized and changed easily:

• function/method: 10 = 10^1 LoC/Method
• class: 100 = 10^2 LoC/Class
• library or small project: 1000 = 10^3 LoC/Project

A few programmers together working a few months will produce about 10^4 lines of code. This is an order of magnitude where it is becoming difficult for a single developer to understand and comprehend the complete code base if it is not well structured. According to DHH, Rails on Rails 2.3 has currently about 35.000 LoC (without tests and comments). A large framework requires about 10^5 lines of code. A complete operating system belongs to the largest software projects, it requires about 10^6 – 10^7 lines of code, Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and early Debian Versions for example are said to have around 50.000.000 lines of code or ~5GB of data:

• a small framework or large application: 10.000 = 10^4 LoC/Framework
• ide/framework: 100.000 = 10^5 LoC/Framework
• operating system: 10.000.000 = 10^7 LoC/OS

For comparison only, a human has around 30,000 genes (~3.1B base pairs ~ 1.5GB). Modern versions of Debian Linux have up to 280.000.000 lines of code, see here. This is a tremendous amount of code which a single programmer can hardly handle anymore.

Longing for World Domination

As a computer programmer or software developer, you long each day for world domination. To be precise, you stagger constantly between world domination (in German “Weltherrschaft”) and total powerlessness, between absolute might and complete plight, between omnipotence and complete impotence. One day you feel like a mighty emperor, and the next day you feel like a powerless subject. Here’s why:

In the world of your own software, you are the lawgiver with absolute power and undisputed authority. This means world domination: everything follows your command without the slightest kind of opposition or resistance. The programmer determines in detail what every object, every class and every function should do, step by step, in every possible situation and in every possible context.

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver…No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
(Joseph Weizenbaum)

The programmer and developer is the ultimate commander. Ideally he can create a whole application with only a few lines of code, he can create worlds with his fingertips. That’s the fun part. Yet despite all this power, and no matter how smart you are, as a programmer you will typically trying to understand what is going on most of the time. The problem is you usually use a lot of code from others – plugins, modules, units, libraries, frameworks – which you do not and can not understand completely. Even your own legacy code from the past is sometimes difficult to understand. Debugging foreign code is like walking around in a foreign city without a map. You don’t know how everything is connected, where the center is, or where everything leads to.

And there are always bugs around the corner waiting to be solved. Bugs belong to software like explosions to rockets. Rockets are based on controlled gas flow which results in explosions. Software is based on controlled program flow which results in features and bugs: there is saying that “the only difference between a bug and a feature is the documentation.” If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Because there are always code parts which he doesn’t understand or bugs which he is trying to solve, a programmer gets often completely stuck, and falls into total powerlessness, until he is able to find out what happened. For a programmer, it is extremely important to find out what happened: either by examining existing or newly created log files, or by debugging (that is by stepping through the code bit by bit). Once a bug has been identified and located by logging and debugging the code, it is often easy to remove it, and the programmer is ready to dominate the world again.

This is why programmers stagger constantly between world domination and total powerlessness. Programming is 20% world domination and 80% frustration. Unfortunately, the frustrating times prevail, but the world domination times compensate for everything.

(The Flickr photo is from the user Toni Villen)

Holidays

I am on holiday for the next weeks