This is one of those seemingly simple concepts that never really gets elaborated. Usually a student learning Java for the first time is told. “Write the following:”
public class Person
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
“Don’t ask why, just do it.” Because of that, I’ve heard this question more than a few times in the last couple years.
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If you found this site via some sort of Google search, you’re probably looking for answers. I won’t get to that now, but I will warn you that I don’t have them. If you’re a friend or colleague of mine you will have let out at bit of a laugh and settled into your chair with every intent of hating what I’m about to write. Well, I’m glad.

In industrial technology applications we often see projects and ideas labelled with ideas that spark value to other techies.  Terms like ‘robust”, ‘quality’, ‘efficient’, and, to a lesser degree, ‘boffo’. Far less often do we see technology simply described in terms of ease of use.  In fact, I would say it’s downright rare to hear of any steam-powered, hard-left engineers bringing up usability or learning curve when drafting a system designs or applications. Just like football players are interested in beer chugging and cheerleaders, I guess engineers into database normalization and load-balancers.

So what happens when you take that out of the equation? What happens when you take away the pomp and circumstance, when you lose the beer and the cheerleaders? Well, then you have football  or,  in this case, engineering. Take away the sex appeal of massive, scalable availability and mind-boggling complexity; what are you left with? It’s not frequent, sure, but it happens eventually. You’ve got problem solving, pure and simple. Simple calculations, exercises, tasks, and duties.  Sometimes football players have practice, they run drills, lift weights, and sell pizza coupons. Well it’s no different for engineers.

Enter Microsoft Access.

I’m serious, although this is quite a leap (move with me here, I’m trying to keep this short). Access has never, in its entire existence as a RDBMS, won any championship football games, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great tool. It’s the football practice dummy and the barbell and the coupon book, but all of this for engineers. Just like them, we’ve got to do the boss’ laundry and earn our keep. We architect the big solutions, sure, but what about the little stuff? What about the parts inventory for the warehouse? What about the customer contact that the boss does once a week and notes in his journal? There’s also that email list that you share information on, but people keep asking the same questions every year or so and nobody keeps any of the information recorded anywhere? What about office supply orders that Debbie does once a week? It’s all little stuff.

Three times, in three different positions, I’ve used Access (or other simple data management tools) to bridge a gap or improve a process that was being done poorly or not-at-all.  Each of these times it’s been a task that I volunteered for, and each time I’ve received more recognition than all of my ‘big picture’ work combined. I didn’t choose Access because it’s fast or robust or sexy (as it is clearly none of these things), but it is definitely quick and easy and portable, not to mention the availability across most corporate IT spaces. It’s not designed to track Walmart’s inventory, but it does get the job done.  After all, who cares about an 18% performance increase on the security log queries when I have this nifty iPhone app that lets me keep track of what I eat every day? Okay, maybe that’s silly, but it’s all little stuff. And the reason it makes a difference is because it effects people.

I’m a proud Access developer. It’s not my day job, and I’m glad for that, but it’s an amazing tool. I pledge to volunteer my services to help improve the processes and daily work of people on whom I rely. I’m also going to use it as a ‘gateway database’; I’ll use it to get into American homes and get kids and adults to try harder stuff like MySQL, Linq, Rails, and Hibernate. But for Dad’s big list of home electronic serial numbers, Timmy’s baseball card collection, and small project CRM…well, I’m on board. Who knows? Maybe even the Microsoft or the EPA will use it.

*Remember: a good developer is an active developer. Please stop engineering for engineering’s sake; it’s not healthy. Put your skills to some good use and fix something or teach someone (or vice-versa).

Sometimes it’s good to have a moment of reflection and take stock of your position in life. I’ve heard that it is when you are at your busiest moments when you need to stop, if only for a moment, and consider all the things in your life. Well, I’m busy. Too busy, in fact, to look at all the things in my life, so I’ll just hit a few of recent technology moves that I’ve made. (Read on…)

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I was recently visited by a friend who is also an IT professional. Some time during the visit, I casually made the recommendation that programmers should take a drafting course. I was a bit surprised to receive a contradictory opinion, but it was well received and has forced me to further justify my position in my own mind.

My case is rather simple; (more…)

Has this ever happened to you?

Hey, I have this thing you have to see! I’ll send ti via email, it’s 10MBs.
No wait, my email service can’t handle anything that size. It’ll have to go a different way.
Okay, I’ll send it over the IM client. Wait, it says you’re using a different client than me.
Yeah, I’m using Pidgin (read: stupid Pidgin, seeming all helpful)
Okay, log into Skype and I’ll send it as a file.
Okay. Wait why is it only going at 500 bytes a second?!?!? Are you running Windows 3.2? (read: or Linux, har har, but seriously why do Skype file transfers blow?)
Man, I’m going to have to upload it to my FTP server and send you a link. It’ll be faster. Click, click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,click,clickity-clickity-click. Okay, here’s the link.
Man…..that sucked so bad.

I can imagine you, the reader, sitting in your seat and sobbing into a pillow at this point, “Yes, yes I was there….I had to send him a burnnn….a burrnnn…a burned cd!!!” Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad.

So in my own way I fixed it for myself. ShareItNow is a python script that you drag files onto and it will automatically upload said files to the FTP site of your choice and give you a URL to give to your friends and family. It’s simple, but it’s not bad. You do need Python, an FTP server, and a Webserver, but that’s what I have so too bad if you don’t.

Just edit the script to change the value of your server location, credentials, and a web folder the server points to and you will be golden. Once you drag a file or files onto the script it will ask you if each file is binary before uploading. Once it’s done with an upload it will print you a URL that you can use and go on to repeat the process for any additional files.

One last thing, to make Python scripts “Droppable” (meaning you can drag-and-drop a file onto a script to get some magical result) you need to enable a little switch in the registry. I added a .reg file to the project zip using the code in a tutorial on how to make droppable Pyscripts. The funny thing is that this guy wanted to do the same thing I did, but he didn’t share his code. Great minds think alike, I guess.

But I share my code  (Download ShareItNow)   ;D

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With the Thanksgiving break finally upon me I now realize that I need to be a better behaved blogger. The nice thing about having the blog on my website is that I’m pretty committed to keeping it going despite my occasional/frequent droughts.

It’s been busy for me at school and elsewhere. I’ve started regaining my social life in the midst of my more intense studying aspects in the hopes of finally becoming the well-rounded individual. Also, I’ve finally returned to the developer stage with some interesting projects.

I’ve pretty much abandoned my trivial web projects in favor of a few more serious research and other projects in Python and C++. This is the third time I’ve been programming in C++ and the first real exposure to Python. It’s been fun dealing with interface/facade ideas in these languages instead of using the familiar Java concepts. It’s also interesting to try plugging in these tools into some fun new libraries.

I must say that I don’t despise C++ as I used to. It’s really not much different from Java except for the exaggerated power you feel from managing your own memory.  When I switched over the first time I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt with the lack of the amazing Java library and documentation, but you can overcome that.  The code can obviously be much more elegant at times as the magical pointer garbage can be pretty interesting. The biggest concern is that your code doesn’t start looking like something written by Escher.

Python is fun and different, but I’m not sure that I’m used to it yet. When working with C++ and Python at the same time you start to realize how uncomfortable that void of high level management is. I really have no idea how long it’s going to take me to get really comfortable with the language. You know what I’m talking about; there’s that point where you feel like you’re working on a code assembly line and the code colors and connecting shapes are all in arm’s reach.

The current situation with Python is a lot like that episode of Futurama where Bender is floating through space. A small species of people form on his body and evolve into a fully civilized species and he plays god for a little while. Then he screws up and causes a nuclear war, killing off his little world.  He then meets up with a god-like galaxy and they start talking and figuring stuff out. I think I just encountered god after playing around and blowing up my own mini-universe. Soon I should a good approach for creating life, but right now the options are just blowing my mind.

I’ll keep you up to date and I hope to have some descriptions of my tools and projects soon. Until then, I guess I hope that you’re staying healthy and looking forward to a happy Thanksgiving.

I love coding in text editors because I don’t have to think about all the extra stuff. That’s not to say that I don’t love code completion and auto-generation tools, but it’s nice to sit down with just just you, a cup of hot apple cider, and ASCII. There’s no better tool for this than Notepad++, in my opinion.

It boast an expansive built in syntax-higlighting library and great tools for automating some of your frequented commands. But a major problem, aside from the inability to do multi-line regex stuff, is the way comments are set up. I found out that I love the fact that it shrinks them, but I hate that it uses a non-monospaced font. But you can fix it, and fast.

First open up your %APP_DATA%/Notepad++/stylers.xml file in Notepad++. The APP_DATA variable usually points to your ‘Documents and Settings/youruser/Application Data’ folder, but I could be wrong. Then do a find and replace to find “Comic Sans MS” and replace it with “”. That’s right, nothing.  Save and restart Notepad++ and you are ready to rock.

Thanks to Nathan for pointing this out to me. I’m fairly confident that he doesn’t even know I have a website. The only place I don’t talk about it, annoyingly, is at work.