Juixe Techknow

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe.

Software Development

• Say no to consultant code. No to complacent code. No to sloppy and crappy code. No to cut and past code.
• Developing a machine learning algorithm so we don’t have to learn anymore.
• Hacking, art or science!?
• Great hacking weather… Well most weather is great hacking weather as long as your computer don’t overheat.
• What would an autonomous algorithm do?
• Sex, drugs, and hacking.
• You don’t go on Hacker News to show off your project, act arrogant that it’s a closed network, and not expect someone to hack a clone.
• Nothing worse than setting a test to run overnight only to have a Windows update restart your computer in the middle of the test/night.
• Refactor with conviction.
• Building on assumptions is like building on quicksand.
• When in doubt, step through it in a debugger.

Team Leadership

• Every problem is an opportunity in the rough.
• Mo’ money, mo’ problems. Mo’ problems, mo’ opportunity.
• Ask the right questions is better than making the wrong assumptions.
• Everything is mental, even when it’s physical.
• Being successful means you are only a mistake away from not.
• Don’t use the fact you don’t know a fact as a reason for not knowing it.
• Just because a team member knows one thing does not excuse the rest of the team from learning for themselves and knowing it too.
• A team is composed of a group of individuals, but a group of individuals is not a team.

Product Placement

• Google used to be a search engine and return search results now it wants to be an answer engine and return you the answer.
• What do you call a Pinterest user? Pinner? Pinhead?
• Facebook IPO: it’s complicated.
• How hard is it to add filters to Flickr’s iPhone app?
• These @calottery lotto ticket should have a QR code so that I can quickly scan to see if I’m a winner.
• The Google of today is the sort of operation that Sergey and Larry originally set out to disrupt.
• Somewhere some evil genius is building a super computer out of a cluster of The New iPad.
• AT&T is in the phone business, so of course when you call customer support they will always have you call someone else who transfers you that gives you a different number that redials…

Quote

• P.S. GitHub sorry, I was bored. — Egor Homakov, the guy that hacked GitHub
• I have never seen someone try so hard for attention while looking so atrocious at the same time. -Anna Wintour on Nicki Minaj
• I would give my life for her but she also wants me to do the dishes. – Hellboy

Questions

• Are you killing time or is time killing you?
• Do The Simpsons pay royalties for basing their episodes on popular movies?
• Why do single people love cats?
• Why is it that sometimes when you don’t do a thing people notice, but when you do they don’t?
• Which would you prefer, an iPad with a keyboard or a net book?
• If you could only attain one thing which would you choose, money, happiness, or longevity?

Randumb

• Fear is free but it will cost you opportunities.
• Ideas are cheap, but originality will cost you.
• Hot sauce makes everything better.
• The odds of you being a loser are better than you winning the lottery.
• There are people I follow on Twitter that I would never follow in real life, who I would rather push of a cliff in real life.
• Complainers are worse than haters.
• College is not for the uber successful.
• future obituary: died of chili cheese fries.
• “Really? Really?” Is the new “Oh My God”
• The term “gateway drug” doesn’t make sense, if you are already doing a drug, you are already past the gateway for drugs.
• Power drinks are the new gateway drugs.
• Power drinks are making me fat and jittery.
• All advice is relative, especially advice from a relative.
• Life is a journey not a destination, death in the other hand seems like the destination.

When working with legacy code, there is a big difference between a developer trying to add or fix a feature and getting it to work and another developer trying and giving up only to recommend a complete rewrite. From my experience, the one main reason why any person suggest a complete rewrite of an existing application or feature that works for a large install base is only because they don’t understand it. I would be suspicious of any engineer or developer if he or she recommends to rewrite any large portion of a existing appellation just because because they don’t understand it.

Rules to code by…

• No consultant code.
• No complacent code.
• No crappy and sloppy code.
• No cut and past code.

There is an interesting story about a Pintrest users that deleted her account after the social blogging platform changed it’s Terms of Service. Essentially, as stated in the article, Pinterest users are legally responsible for what the pin (post) and repine (re-post). Only under a limited number of circumstances can someone use copyrighted material without express written permission from the copyright holder…

Copyrighted work can only be used without permission when someone is criticizing it, commenting on it, reporting on it, teaching about it, or conducting research.

Fair use of copyrighted material, as described above, seemed reasonable in a physical world. But in a digital world where people first express themselves in social networking sites, I believe fair use of copyrighted material should include retweeting, liking, plus one-ing, rebloging, and sharing as these imply some level of commenting on the work by the the original poster and her network of friends and followers.

The good news for Pinterest is that most users don’t read, understand, or care about the Terms of Service.

I Accept, Terms of Service, deleteyourself.com

I was trying to install a Ruby gem and it keep failing. I keep getting the following error when installing a gem.

ERROR: http://gems.datamapper.org does not appear to be a repository
ERROR: could not find gem thin locally or in a repository

Because of the above error I couldn’t install a gem or even update my gem system.

I certainly don’t remember ever adding gems.datamapper.org as a gem source repository but now it is causing errors in my system. You can list all of your current gem source repositories by entering the following from your command prompt.

gem source

You may see a few gem sources possibly including repositories from rubyforge.org, rubyonrails.org, and github.com. In addition to these gems source, the problematic gems.datamapper.org was also listed in my system.

To remove the problematic source, gems.datamapper.org, enter the following command from the command prompt.

gem source -r http://gems.datamapper.org

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe.

Software Development

• Kids lunch snacks sound like Java interfaces, Uncrustables and Lunchables.
• 99% of software is hardcoded defaults.
• Software will shape the future.
• I don’t count lines of code.
• Code less, debug even less.
• Every few years JavaScript goes through a renewed renaissance.
• Sometimes life does not compute. #dividebyzeroerror

Team Leadership

• Success is a dish best served with champagne.
• Don’t let circumstance beyond your control control you.
• Just because it’s widely accepted that Steve Jobs was difficult to work with and a genius doesnt mean you have to be difficult to work with.
• Negativity is like cholesterol, to much of it can kill you.
• Most important lesson in my life: Learn to appreciate what you have and do not agonize about what you don’t.
• Corporate titles mean nothing, that is why I put Chief Creative Business Developer Principal Program Scientist on my business card.
• The biggest lesson one can learn is to listen.
• The universe doesn’t hate you, it doesn’t even know you exist.
• Try harder. Do better. Go further. Think Bigger.
• Forget stopping to smell the flowers, I stop to reach for the stars.

Product Placement

• I’m going to start a search engine for ego searches and call it egoogle.
• Google is a giant keyword router in the cloud.
• Android uses food related codenames for its different versions, such as ice cream sandwhich. I hear next release will be named leftovers.
• Why is Gingerbread still the most popular/common version of Android In new phones? It’s like two releases behind latest version.
• I think it is safe to say that G+ is a successful flop. I would compare it more to MySpace than Facebook.
• Missing Feature: I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kindle reader would allow you to tweet a quote right from an eBook.
• If Apple would design single family homes it would cost over $1 million and only be 800 sq/ft but I would want one really bad.
• iPhone or iMole: whatever data or contact or image you have on your iPhone some hacker, service, API, law enforcement, or app will access.
• In today’s day and age, no person should be executed for tweeting and no person should have to go to jail for downloading a song.
• Blue Ivy Carter sounds more like a brand name of vodka or energy drink put out by Jay-Z than the name of his kid.

Cash Angels

• Who needs $3 million to run a WordPress-powered tech blog? At these valuations my blog is definitely worth $10 million.
• Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are modern day alchemists turning virtual goods into real cold hard cash, IPOs into billions.
• A frothy market is a tasty market.
• The future is in crowd financing.
• It’s raining stock options in Silicon Valley. #makeitrain
• All the people of Palo Alto rejoice at news of Facebook IPO, in a few months their rents will go up 30%.
• To much Facebook IPO analysis on my feed. If you aren’t a preferred investor you ain’t making money.
• 1. _________. 2. $#%#%$*(&. 3. ?????? 4. Profit.

Question

• Can software refactor the world?
• How can people wave their constitutional rights be agreeing to a terms of service they didn’t read or understand?
• Breyer’s or Dreyer’s?
• Who will be the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of 3D printing?
• Forget “where’s the beef,” where’s the 100 Mbps broadband?
• Who is Waldo?
• If corporations are people does it mean a man can marry a corporation?

Equations

• Principles > Politics
• Generous > Gorgeous
• Cheddar > Chatter
• Worrier < Warrior
• Sex On Fire > Heart On Fire