Oleg Dulin

This makes Eclipse Galileo run faster

I observed that the new version of Eclipse appears to occasionally underperform (to put it lightly) and just sit there consuming 25% of the CPU cycles. The following Eclipse startup parameters appear to have helped:

-vmargs -Xverify:none -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:PermSize=20M -XX:MaxNewSize=32M -XX:NewSize=32M -Xmx256m -Xms256m

Eclipse.org home.

What IT Leaders Can Learn From Google's Staffing Problems | The Accidental IT Leader

Here is another interesting article from "The Accidental IT Leader" -- Google is having staffing problems ? Is this an opportunity or an ominous sign ?

What IT Leaders Can Learn From Google's Staffing Problems | The Accidental IT Leader.

If you could go to work for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems

The Accidental IT Leader: How Can A Manager Manage IT Workers When There Is No Company Loyalty?

"The Accidental IT Leader" writes:

Welcome to the 21st Century where all IT workers now view themselves as temporary workers. The constant cycles of downsizing and outsourcing have made even the most committed workers view their jobs as being not so much as a career, but rather as a temporary pit-stop.

I can't help but think about the underlying theme of my career since graduating from college in 2000:

• In 2000 I felt a full-time job at IBM Research was pretty much guaranteed to me. I worked my way through college at IBM and had a great relationship with my management there. So, even my boss at IBM was disappointed when he found out he can't hire me after all because IBM froze hiring in the research division as the dot-com bubble burst.
• The manager at a pure-play consulting firm that hired me quit after I was there for about a month.
• The dot-com I went to work for afterwards went out of business within 6 months of my starting there in 2001.
• I had more managers than the number of years I worked.
• I had the best sense of my career path when I worked, ironically, as an independent consultant on an hourly basis. I felt in charge of my career -- the better the impression my customer had of me, the greater my chances were of landing more business with them or their contacts.

With this experience do I have a reason to believe in company loyalty ? I don't think so. I don't go to company end-of-the-year parties, I avoid making friendships with other employees. I do maintain a network outside of my company and I keep up with my skills. I leave the most minimum set of personal items at the office. When I work I do my best but I try not to expect any career development. Perhaps, I need some time to get out of this holding pattern  -- but it is not easy.

Links:

• How Can A Manager Manage IT Workers When There Is No Company Loyalty? | The Accidental IT Leader.
• What Price Company Loyalty?

The "EMACS" room on a cruise ship ?

Look at the picture of "Camp Carnival" and click "View Larger". It says "EMACS" on the wall. I am not aware of any definition of the word EMACS other than the best text editor ever.

Carnival Miracle Cruise Ship, Carnival Miracle Reviews - Carnival Cruise Lines.

Happy father's day

I am having a flu-infested father's day this year. But it is the events like this that make me realise what is important in my life.

My 2.5 year old daughter goes to a daycare. Surprisingly, she didn't get sick since February. With nothing else to worry about I started worrying about my career development again. That was until last week when she caught a flu.

Lucky for us, my wife works in a public school and the school year is over. So I had to stay home with our daughter for a few days and then next week my wife can take over. I took our little girl to the doctor, took care of her, and of course as I anticipated this weekend I came down with a flu.

My daughter is being really cute about it.  Yesterday, she covered me with a blanket on the couch, brought me a pillow and TV remote. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. While my wife was out getting me Tamiflu I couldn't entertain our toddler -- so I offered her to watch 3 cartoons instead of her usual two 5-minute Scholastic cartoons. She said, "That's ok, daddy, if it makes you feel better I will only watch two" followed by "Can you please get better so you can play with me?"

I feel a bit better today. Tamiflu is kicking in and the fever is not as high anymore. I still feel like crap, but my family taking care of me is the best father's day present I could get.

Rewriting horrible code

I had a fortune (or misfortune) this week to tackle some old code. A feature written about 4-5 years ago by a developer who is no longer with the company needed to be revived and brought up to date.

The developer who originally wrote the code came to Java from VB, PowerBuilder or something of that sort. He worked in the environment where there was one GUI event loop for the entire application and you had to lay things out on the screen pixel-by-pixel. Needless to say his Java code looks very similar -- 1000 line long if/else/if/else/if/else clauses, Swing panels laid out pixel-by-pixel, etc.

I had to add a few buttons to one of the panels he has written and I found it literally nauseating to look at that code. In order for me to add a button I would have had to figure out his pixel-by-pixel layout, move things around, recalculate the coordinates, and find the right place in the 1000-line long if/else clause.

That had to change. I wasn't about to lower myself to the level of such incompetence. In Java you don't need to lay things out pixel-by-pixel, and you can have action listeners for each component and let Swing handle the event loop. We haven't been in the C GUI world for at least a decade now. So, I rolled up my sleeves and redid the whole nine yards using Box layout and proper ActionListeners.

The moral of this story is that just because the code is already written and is in production doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be rewritten. Poorly written code is impossible to maintain and only contributes to errors and increases costs.

Shipping Windows 7 with multiple browsers is a dumb idea

I don't like IE. I use Firefox. It is my personal choice and I couldn't care less if my computer came with a browser preinstalled. I really don't.

Opera needs to come to terms with their niche market. Demanding that Windows 7 is shipped with multiple browsers is an idea that won't work in the interests of the end users. It will make an already horrible and over-complicated operating system even more awful.

Opera says Microsoft EU browser offer not enough | Technology | Reuters.

Opera said that if Microsoft's plan would be the final outcome it would have no impact on Internet Explorer's dominant role. "Then we would be very disappointed. That means Microsoft's dominant position will continue," Wium Lie said, adding operating systems should be sold with several browsers -- giving consumers the choice -- not with no browsers at all.

It is better to delegate

I am learning a lot from being a parent. My 2.5 year old daughter is insisting on dressing by herself, among all the other things she wants to do by herself. She is getting better but she is still awkward at it. It takes her five times as long to get dressed by herself, she gets frustrated, she puts shoes on the wrong feet and starts over again, but she tries really hard again and again. She gets very upset at even the slightest offers of help. When she is done she is extremely excited and proud of herself.

In IT we do the same thing. At least I do. I strive to always use the latest technologies and do as much as I can by myself -- as if to prove a point to myself and the rest of the world that I can. But now I am beginning to realize that this excessive eagerness to always use the latest technologies and be the greatest software engineer on the market may very well be a sign of professional insecurity.

I am not as bad as I used to be in the early days of my career when I did everything I could to outdo my peers. If nothing else, as an adult and as a parent I understand that I can only handle so much workload and fit so much into my brain. Sometimes it is better to delegate.

"The Trusted Advisor" by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford

When we first start our as software engineers we rise in our careers mainly based on our technical excellence. A few years into our careers there comes a point where we must progress from a role of a technician to something more meaningful. In other words, we have to progress from "boy genius" to "trusted advisor."

"The Trusted Advisor" by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford is a bout developing the people skills noone taught us at school -- how to present your ideas, how to earn trust of your clients, etc.

While the book is mainly aimed at independent consultants the same rules apply to those of us working for the Man. Your employer is your client no matter what the payment terms are.

Link: The Trusted Advisor.

Google makes it easier to integrate with their services

While we are on the subject of Google, check this out:

Google Web Elements brings Google’s greatest hits to your site » VentureBeat.

Google launched a new feature called Google Web Elements today at its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. The new tool, available starting today, allows web publishers to easily add Google content, from news feeds to calendars to maps, with a simple cut and paste. While the search giant has made these APIs available in the past, Elements makes them understandable and accesible for non-developers and other layman users.