your source for all things dan: 08/2007

Saturday, August 25, 2007

revelation

Zero's SVN repository is now accessible to everyone. As promised.

Friday, August 24, 2007

focus

Bridgid and I don't have many conflicts, but one of the things that forces us to compromise is the fact that we both match well-known gender stereotypes when it comes to our work habits and attention spans. This can be amusing and frustrating at the same time.

For those of you who never made it through Psych 101 and don't work for a company that requires lots of diversity training, allow me to summarize: men are incredibly single-minded and perform well on tasks that require deep concentration, long hours, and not talking to anyone; women are excellent multi-taskers who are most productive when they are faced with disparate tasks that exercise social as well as academic skills. This is why you meet so many male programmers and female marketing executives. There are exceptions, but in my experience this stereotype is more accurate than most[1].

In fact, in the case of me and Bridgid, it is incredibly accurate. Bridgid is a biochemist who gives cancer to fish and does experiments on "genes". The fact that she's a geek would lead you to believe that she is an exception to the female stereotype, and in many ways, she is; however, when it comes to multi-tasking and the desire to work on disparate tasks, she is a perfect match. Bridgid can switch contexts almost immediately and not lose a step. Her need for long-term scheduling is limited to her need to set up multi-day experiments in such a way that she can balance her classes with her time in lab.

I am a different animal. I exhibit classic programmer behavior when I'm at work, and it's even more obvious after work, when there are no meetings to distract me. I like to block off hours of time for one project, one feature, or one set of related bugs. I save big-ticket items for days when I work from home so that any communication that I have with other people is routed through email or IM, which allows me to manage it in the same way that I manage my list of tasks. Even when I'm working on a feature that touches code shared by multiple people and requires lots of questions and communication, at some point I will buckle down and write code by myself, with no distractions to knock down the house of cards I am building in my head.

Context switches can kill hours of my day if they are timed right: three consecutive meetings with thirty minutes in between each means that I lose an hour because I can't start anything significant before I'm pulled into the next meeting. The flip side of this is that, once I am working on something, I find it very hard to put it down. I wish that I had Bridgid's ability to let things go when a context switch happens; instead, it takes upwards of an hour for the thoughts surrounding whatever it is I'm working on to leave my brain. Of course, sometimes the delay is caused by thoughts about co-worker frustration or bureaucracy, but I think that is more understandable to the average person. Thinking about Ant's classloading behavior on the way to dinner is not.

The reverse of this behavior is interesting. A large project may require many days of intense concentration and occasional t-shirt re-use on my part, but when I'm done[2], I am suddenly aware of all of the great things that are happening around me. Things to do. Fun to be had. My non-programming intensity is as strong as my programming intensity, but the two cannot coincide. This can be very confusing for Bridgid and other female humans.

I try to temper this conflict by keeping an a personal schedule that extends at least two and usually three weeks in advance, identifying those times when I will be able to work consecutive days on larger problems without forgetting to eat or talk to my girlfriend; the other days become targets for meetings, smaller bugs, and tedious work that will not leave me distracted at the end of the day. This need for order and preservation means that I am constantly scheduling, with the ability to remake two weeks of plans in ten to fifteen minutes. Frequent re-ordering means that no "to do list" software is fast enough or natural enough for me; whether it's Microsoft Outlook or some Web 2.0 app with Atom feeds and rounded corners, I always come back to a plain text file on my desktop. I don't have time for calendar widgets and status markers. When something is re-scheduled, I cut and paste it. When it's done, I delete it. At the end of each day, I open todo.txt one last time, delete the current day's entry, Ctrl-S, Alt-F4, and turn off my monitor.

On that note, Fri PM (8/24) - blog post is complete. It's time for a trip to Fujisan. With my lady.

[1] I'm sure you've already thought of a few co-workers who completely defy these stereotypes. Good for you. I'm telling my story anyway.

[2] Where done means that it works on someone else's machine and I've found most of the edge cases.

Labels: culture, narcissism, programming

apachecon

So I'm going to ApacheCon. Just for a day. I'd like to be there for the whole conference as a presenter and an attendee, but a) ApacheCon hates me, and b) all of the sessions I want to attend are on one day, so it's hard to justify a longer trip.

While I'm attending, I'll be hearing talks from Grandmaster REST and the Simplification Band about how REST is the Silver Bullet and how Web 2.0 is changing the future before it happens; you know, the usual fare. My goals are to get a more in-depth look at some of Zero's competition and to find out what makes programmers the most productive on their REST-oriented projects. Assuming the wireless connection isn't too flaky, I hope to live-blog the event for the benefit of my co-workers.

I also hope that I don't get carjacked while driving through Atlanta.

Labels: apachecon, narcissism, zero

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

beggers

Beg The Question: To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question." This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word "question" in the phrase to refer to a literal question.

Sites like this play to my inner-stickler, which means that I find them irresistible. This one in particular reminds me of times during grad school where I'd be sitting in class, waiting for some amateur philosopher to finish his point about some technology-related issue that didn't deserve as long a monologue as he was giving it, when all of a sudden I would be jolted back into reality by said philosopher's repeated misuse of the English language and its more interesting phrases. Like most of the time I spend in airports, time spent listening to proud-yet-inaccurate college philosophers generates an incredibly loud, scornful rage... in my head.

External Dan: (calm, expressionless, silent)

Internal Dan: STOP SAYING BEGS THE QUESTION YOU ARE CLEARLY VERY PROUD OF YOUR LINGUISTIC DISCOVERY WHY COULDN'T YOU TAKE THE TWO MINUTES TO GOOGLE IT AND MAKE SURE YOU DON'T SOUND LIKE A FOOL VNI3POQE48IJEVGI3PDFN9KEQ1FNJD ANGER!!!

Anyway.

They also have cards that you can hand out to people on the street. The cause doesn't give me the same bold self-assurance as the one behind SHHH cards, but if I ever go back to grad school, I'll be sure to print off a sheet or two.

Labels: culture, narcissism

dims

Davanum Srinivas: It's been a wild ride since WS PMC inception in 2003 as the PMC chair. I'd like to step down from this role now.

Dims was one of the people that helped get me up and running in the Apache Web Services community, and it's unfortunate that he can't continue to be one of its official ambassadors forever. He answered my calls for help on a broad range of issues - from ASF rules and regulations to SVN administrivia - and he never gave me any grief for bugging him with stuff that wasn't in his job description. Despite the fact that we were eleven time zones apart, emails to Dims always received an immediate reply, which means he is either an ultra-productive engineering machine or severely overworked; my guess is the former, but WSO2 is still in startup mode, so you never know. Either way, a lot of IBM's open source work has flowed through him on its way to release, and I'd like to thank him for all of his help.

Labels: muse, narcissism

Thursday, August 16, 2007

faces

Each time I re-start my blog or re-design my site, I usually look over my old content and decide to throw it out. Despite my best intentions at the time, I always discover that my past writing is laden with ignorance and sullen tripe about Cindy Lou Girlfriend and the highs and lows she had inflicted upon me. No one wants to read that.

Since graduating from college, I've tried to keep my writing more interesting from the perspective of Future Dan, and I think I've done a decent job (not great, but decent). My last blog was mostly free of the aforementioned tragedies, but I didn't include it in my latest re-design because I was too lazy to refactor those posts whose content did not fit well with the new layout. It was just easier to start over. Fortunately, I saved a few of my favorite posts from that blog, and that brings us to today's post.

I don't want to waste a lot of posts (or even multiple posts) on old material, but I was reading an article the other day that related to an interesting topic that I had previously covered in great detail. The article was about a Carnegie Mellon research project that demonstrated success in patching incomplete or damaged images using a catalog of disparate image fragments found online; this news represents another step in the long journey towards accurate and accessible image search that does not rely on pre-existing metadata or titles[1]. Very cool stuff. It also has potential with regards to today's topic, which is the patterns of the human face and the way the brain processes those patterns.

Here is what I wrote a few years ago on the topic of facial patterns:

I think it would be really interesting if someone created an ontology of the human faces for each generation. It is my belief that there is a finite number of possible faces, and that, unlike snowflakes, we have a lot more look-a-likes than people care to admit. A comprehensive face catalog would tell us exactly how many unique faces are out there. I think that we would all be astonished at how small the number is.

Here's an experiment for you to try: gather a high school yearbook from a friend or family member that you did not go to school with, and look through the senior photos (which are always larger and more detailed). I guarantee that you will recognize numerous people despite the fact that you don't know them. You will find photos of people that look exactly like people you went to school with, met at a bar, etc; furthermore, you will find faces that you've seen on multiple people, in their exact form.

Straight-haired brunette, thin face, pale complexion, wears a little too much makeup, squints too much when she smiles, mouth is thin as a piece of paper. Square-faced, black hair with too much gel, clear blue eyes, chubby nose, has a grin that makes him seem uneasy. I'm telling you, the similarities are there. There are very few people in this country that I have not "met".

This does not mean that people who have popular faces are mundane or unattractive; if you do the yearbook experiment, you will find a lot of gorgeous people that happen to look just like some other gorgeous people you know. My hypotheses are simply that a) a significant percentage of the population has more twins than they could ever imagine, and b) this is the exact opposite of what most people believe.

And that brings me to my social circle. I don't think that I look like a significant number of other people, but then again, there is nothing very remarkable about my appearance. Mike, who agreed with my theory when I related it to him this afternoon, is also an uncommon face. Or not. It's not very likely that my small circle of friends has somehow escaped this phenomenon. This leads me to my final theory: c) even people with a twin in every city don't realize that they have a very common face.

The only time I see exceptions to my theories is when someone happens to look very similar to a current celebrity. I am guessing this is due to the fact that our brains are able to put a name to the famous face and more easily remember it during day-to-day life.

Now, what's really interesting is that the types of faces seem to change from generation to generation. My analysis might be skewed by different fashions, trends, etc., but it seems like facial patterns are limited to two decades or so. What I would like to see is an American face ontology for my generation; the real challenge would be providing a mechanism for efficient lookups. If that were possible, you could categorize any of your friends as, say, a #52, which is both amusing and scary at the same time.

Note the last paragraph: the real challenge would be providing a mechanism for efficient lookups. Well, science marches on. Projects like the one at Carnegie Mellon continue to chip away at the seemingly impossible task of finding images based on natural language descriptions or imperfect renderings (such as sketches, or photos of things that are only conceptually similar to what you are looking for). Within a few decades, we may be able to study the American facial spectrum without the manual and tedious processes I imagined when I wrote my original post. My only hope is that it will be used for good[2].

[1] For an example of some really innovative research in this area, check out Retrievr, which allows you to search images on Flickr by drawing sketches or uploading photos with similar content. Make sure you have JavaScript enabled when visiting the site.

[2] A more likely scenario: two days after such a project is announced, there will be a Firefox plugin that lets you stalk people you knew in high school and find out if they're single and miserable.

Labels: culture, narcissism

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

endorsement

RESTdoc is now part of Zero Core! You can read about it here; the latest code is here. Much thanks to Steve Ims for working with me to resolve all the little details and get this into /trunk.

Go banana!

Labels: narcissism, programming, zero

Thursday, August 9, 2007

rolling

My forum post about RESTdoc generated a lot of great ideas, almost all of which have been implemented in my RESTdoc SVN branch. I think the latest UI is pretty slick (considering it was made by a programmer, anyway), and integrating the test forms with the REST tables should help us lower the learning curve for those new to Zero's REST conventions. I've uploaded some screenshots of the latest RESTdoc UI and would appreciate any feedback related to making it prettier or more intuitive.

I have a few more features to complete and IE-related bugs to work around, but I've already opened a feature request in the bug database. I suppose I should also add some documentation to the wiki; it would be tragic irony if people had trouble using a documentation tool because it was poorly documented.

Labels: narcissism, programming, zero

anguish

Pat Mueller: I suppose I must not have gotten around to telling Dan my horror stories of using WSDL in the early, early days of Jazz. The low point was when it once took me two working days to get the code working again, after we made some slight changes to the WSDL.

I'll see your WSDL ruined my week and raise you a WSDL caused me extreme pain that could only be soothed by setting my skin on fire and never reading a WSDL document again. I understand the pain associated with WSDL-oriented tools and code generation, but my experience creating those tools was just as difficult. During the first six months of working on the project would become Muse 2.0, the other IBMers that I was working with started asking for client code generation features; I was working well over sixty hours a week at this point, and as important as code generation is for WS-* programmers, I had other things to worry about, like implementing all 9,087 pages of WS-RF. I finally managed to throw something together one weekend, and while it wasn't pretty, it got the job done (for a while).

Eventually, Muse grew and tooling was added, and we needed more code generation support than my weekend side project could provide. Andrew Eberbach started working on a Muse-oriented version of WSDL2Java[1] that actually had a design behind it and, as a result, was much more flexible for both Muse developers and Muse users. During the creation of WSDL2Java, I found myself spending a lot of time trying to transfer my knowledge on the nuances (nuisances?) of WSDL 1.1 and their affect on Java-based service implementations. When I first started at IBM, I had only a cursory knowledge of WSDL, but after two years, I knew what I was doing and had the scars to show for it; unlike many skills (which seem easy once you have them), reading and writing WSDL documents was something that I never got over, and that made it all the more difficult to encourage new students. By the time Muse 2.0 was released, I could read WSDL documents that were thousands (thousands) of lines long and find obscure syntactical or semantic problems in a minute or two... but it never seemed easy.

Never.

The worst part was, even as Andrew picked up my unwritten, unofficial WSDL knowledge and took ownership of our command line tools, it didn't free me from the tyranny of port types, bindings, and <xsd:any/>. As author of Muse's WS-resource deployment and request-processing engines, I had to read WSDL documents at runtime to determine how SOAP requests and WS-Addressing data should be mapped to WS-resource instances and Java method calls[2]. Keeping the WSDL assumptions consistent between tools and engines was tough when I was the only author, so you can imagine what it was like when it was split between two people, one of whom had not yet come to terms with the unstoppable, day-ruining force that was WSDL 1.1.

I really thought that I had a point when I started this rant, but now that I'm nearing the end of it, I can see that I don't. Pat's comment just triggered a flashback and it was either vent through my blog or sit in the corner with spiders crawling over my skin. Whew. Crisis averted.

[1] I believe the first instance of a tool named WSDL2Java was released as part of Apache Axis, but every web services framework I've ever seen has its own implementation of this concept. Muse was no different.

[2] This requirement was put in place in order to avoid another JAX-RPC mapping file disaster.

Labels: muse, narcissism, programming

who

dan jemiolo

where

cary

elsewhere

recently

less recently

07/200708/200709/2007

history

I guess we should start with kindergarten. My parents enrolled me in a local Catholic school despite the fact that we a) had no money and b) weren't Catholic. It was a very tumultuous time in my life. My teacher was the meanest I would have until my sophomore year of college, when a stubborn Korean man tried to teach me formal languages and automata using only six words of English. While I was in kindergarten, I met a beautiful little blonde girl named Erica whom I adored for the entire year. She always seemed kind of interested in me, but I could never get her to commit to anything.

Every so often, our teacher would stop giving us condescending lectures about our relative intelligence and read to us. One day, she brought in a new book, Danny and the Dinosaur, and I fell in love with it before she had finished reading. I asked if I could borrow the book, and she agreed to lend it to me for a few days.

I took the book home and I never brought it back.

It never occurred to me to ask for my own copy of the book. At some point, I decided that if I mentioned the book to my parents, they would put the pieces together and figure out that I had already stolen it. I hid the book under my mattress so no one would find it; every so often I would sneak it out to read it, but it would never sit beside the many other dinosaur books that lined my bookshelf. I was a fugitive.

And I still couldn't get the girl, so I was a heart-broken fugitive. Erica and I would always end up playing with Mike Verville, and he would suck up all of her attention. Mike happened to be my best friend, so I couldn't bad-mouth him, but it seemed like Erica would fawn over him for even the slightest thing; I was a clear second place.

My only respite came from the other members of my class, who had no academic prospects at all (at least, that's what our teacher told them). When we read Stone Soup in class, the teacher decided it would be fun if we actually made stone soup; everyone brought in supplies, and we made a fairly bland chicken soup. Unfortunately, one kid (Philip) managed to get his part wrong; this was pretty hard to do, since the book described stone soup as a bunch of random stuff thrown into water. The teacher pointed this out to the rest of the class and chewed him out.

Stone soup may seem trivial compared to reading and arithmetic, but kids are very impressionable at that age, and you can't let them slip up. If you don't get stone soup right, you won't be able to pass the SSAT (Standard Soup Achievement Test), and if you don't pass that, then you won't get into the smart kids' reading group in first grade, and then you'll never make the honor roll, and then you will fail out of school and spend the rest of your life working at Dollar General, blowing all of your money on Keno and cheap European cigars.

At the end of kindergarten, I had learned three things:

Adults should not be trusted.
Uniforms were uncomfortable.
Girls will only pay attention to you if you ignore them.

The next twenty years served to more or less confirm all of this, so I'm just going to gloss over them:

I grew up in Rhode Island. There were five Dunkin' Donuts within a mile of my home. My town was filled with people who, at any given moment, were working at a strip mall or spending money at a strip mall. After almost two decades of eating donuts and buying things we didn't need, my friends and I graduated from high school. Diploma in hand, I moved to New York so I could learn about computers and develop a caffeine addiction.

By the time I was halfway through college, I had grown tired of the Northeast lifestyle. Too hectic, too greedy, too frustrating. Too damn cold. I moved to North Carolina after graduation, and it makes me happy. There are more trees here.

I currently work for a big, blue company, where I spend my days building air castles with imaginary Legos. It's a lot of sitting and typing. Sometimes just sitting, if I have a lot of meetings on my calendar.

When reading this blog, please keep in mind that I am but a lowly programmer, and nothing I say here reflects on the attitudes, decisions, or future plans of the other people working for my employer. You should not put stock in anything I say (literally), nor should you assume that corporate executives are reading this blog and making decisions based on my input. If I were that important, I wouldn't be sitting here typing to you people.