My First Science Experiment

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking the other day about my first science “experiment”.

I was probably 4 years old at the time.  And I wanted to know if the TV basically did, what I now know would be referred to as “caching”.  Specifically, I wanted to know if I turned off the TV and turned it on fast enough if somehow the TV would “remember” the second or two of the episode that was aired while it was off and somehow play it back when the TV was turned back on.

I still remember the process.  It was obvious to me that the TV wasn’t going to remember very much (simple experience showed me that since I obviously couldn’t watch a show that was on an hour previous).  But, I figured if it was quick enough, perhaps somehow it was stored in the TV.

The problem though, was “how to tell?”  So I had to set up some conditions.  Basically it came down to watching enough TV to be able to guess what the next word would be in the sentence the actor or presenter was saying.

So once I determined how to do the experiment, I proceeded to sit in front of the TV and wait for a line of dialog where I figured I could safely guess the next word or two.  Then I’d flip the TV off and on.  I also tried changing the channel to see if that would affect things.

After a few tries, I was pretty much convinced that the TV wasn’t capable of caching anything.  I never could be sure though since I realized my guesses might be wrong.  But, my confidence was high enough that I concluded that when the TV was off, anything transmitted to me was lost.

So, at age 4 or so, I had somehow already figured out the scientific method and was engaging in science experiments.

That though has pretty much defined my life.  I have to remind folks, I received my BS from the School of Science at RPI, not the School of Engineering.

Scientist: It’s the way I roll.

 

White Ford Taurus

Posted on by
4

So, listening to the 24 hours of SQL Pass webinars. The current topic is “I Was Young and Didn’t Know Any Better” and the panelists are sharing war stories of mistakes they’ve made.

So far they all sound familiar.  So I thought I’d share one of mine.  Well technically not my mistake, but one that I adopted.

Many moons ago, I was advising a company that was involved in building websites for car dealerships.  One day they needed to do an update to the live data.  This was back in the days when all code and updates were cowboy updates.  Of course you ran the query on the live database the first time. You didn’t necessarily have a stating database or even as was later discovered, good backups.

Apparently a customer needed to update a car in their inventory.

UPDATE AUTO set cartype=’White Ford Taurus’

Nice, syntactically valid… and a disaster.  Ayup.  Suddenly every car in the database at every dealership was now a White Ford Taurus.

Ever since then we called that the “White Ford Taurus” problem.

Now, I might mock doing updates on live data, but sometimes its necessary.  I’m curious how others prevent their own “White Ford Taurus” problems.

Personally, I just now make EXTRA effort to make sure I have a WHERE clause.

But I also tend to almost always do it as:

BEGIN TRAN
UPDATE AUTO set cartype=’White Ford Taurus’
if @@rowcount<> 1 rollback tran else commit tran

Or sometimes I’ll simply hardcode the rollback tran, run it once, see what happens and then rerun it with a commit tran.

So, if rather than updating the 1 row I want, I find myself updating 1000s of rows, I’ll catch myself and be safe.

Sure, it’s not perfect, both it and using the WHERE clause require me to make sure I don’t forget them.  But the more ways to catch it, the better.

Obviously avoiding ad-hoc updates on live data is preferable, but when you can’t, be extra careful.  And of course make sure you have good backups. But that goes without saying.

 

 

Processes

Posted on by
Reply

It’s funny.  In my personal life, I’m a pretty casual person.  I don’t generally create grocery lists.  I don’t write detailed lists of things I need to get done.

That said I’m a HUGE fan of “process” when performing tasks that absolutely have to be done in a specific manner.  In my old job, I often had to do complex updates on web and databases servers with zero downtime.  In some cases, this is like replacing the engines on a 747 while it’s in flight. In cases like that I or my staff would create what we called a “CRP – Change Review Plan”. (I wanted to call them Change Review Analysis Plan, but I decided I didn’t want to take CRAP from anyone.)

Anyway,  a book I would highly recommend is The Checklist Manifesto. This delves into this concept far more than I can here.

However, one thing I learned years ago was when too much process actually can make things worse. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, of an incident during the servicing of the space shuttle many years ago.  In the VAB while it was being rotated from the horizontal position to the vertical for attachment to the ET, a loud klunk was heard from inside the engine compartment.  Now, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that a loud klunk is probably NOT supposed to happen during this procedure.

So, what had happened?  Had a procedure been violated?  Well, in reality yes.  On paper no.  In order to provide quality control, almost anything NASA touched when it was servicing a shuttle would get signed off on by at least one if not multiple people.  Supposedly there was a checklist that at least 5 people signed off on to ensure that all tools had been removed from the engine compartment.  Sure enough, that list had 5 signatures on it.  However, the tool, I believe a wrench, now sitting at the aft end of the shuttle proved otherwise.

More recently (like tonight) I was reminded of this as I sat in on a meeting. The meeting was at a local college student club and the purpose was to discuss the fact that some unauthorized people may have gained access to an area they were not allowed access to.  There was some good discussion of what had occurred and how to avoid it in the future.

At one point someone suggested, “How about a video cam or something so the folks sitting at the desk can check to make sure the room really is empty?”  That’s a nice high-tech solution. But it was honestly in search of a problem.  The real problem appears to be that the people at the desk weren’t doing their job properly in the first place: making sure doors are locked and checking proper IDs.  I pointed out, adding yet another task to their job description was unlikely to solve the root problem and was unlikely to have kept the unauthorized people out.

Ultimately, it looks like the approach the students will take is honestly, probably the simplest one: Asking to change the door lock so that the desk person isn’t responsible for locking it, but rather make it autolocking.  This way, when the last authorized person does leave, it is locked automatically.  No additional processes are required and in fact the existing ones are simplified and made more failsafe.  The door in question should now be locked when it should be, whether or not the desk person checks it as they are supposed to.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions really are the better ones.

 

 

Customer Service: “We aim to please.”

Posted on by
Reply

So, I’m sitting on the train today, when one half of the couple behind me returned from using the lavatory and remarked to her partner, “Don’t use the bathroom on the left.”  Apparently the previous user had been polite enough to put the seat up.  But not polite enough to actually aim.

All I could think was how nice it would be if the train had QuiCR on-board.  Within seconds she, or even myself having overheard the situation could have reported the issue and a ticket created.  That ticket could then either be handled immediately upon arrival at the destination, or perhaps in the meantime an email sent to the conductor so he could have closed the lavatory for the reminder of the trip; thus preventing any other unfortunate patrons from being exposed to those conditions. 

Quick feedback means a QuiCR response and a QuiCR response means a higher level of customer satisfaction. Think about it.

 

 

 

QuiCR

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been toying with an idea for a few months.  Ok.  I’ve been working on actively making it come to fruition.  Now I can announce the idea I’ve been working on: QuiCR.

With QuiCR, companies of all sizes will be able to get instant feedback and responses from their customers. There’s 84 million cell phone users out there, and via QuiCR, companies can leverage them and turn them into instant secret shoppers, or get their feedback, or have them report on maintenance issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Check it out out.  We’re still very early in the process, but I’m excited.

 

Deep Survival

Posted on by
Reply

I’m currently reading a book called “Deep Survival”.  It was recommend to me by a buddy from the NCRC.  For years I’ve been interested in disasters and accidents.  Not so much the gruesome details that some enjoy;  but rather what caused them and why some people survive.  Deep Survival is more about the latter.

Why is it a trained SEAL can drown on a river while an untrained woman can survive an airplane crash in the Amazon and make it out to civilization?

The author, Laurence Gonzales, goes into the psychology of survivors.  One weakness of course is he can’t interview or ask questions of those who didn’t survive.

That said, in one chapter, he talks about maps and our places in them.  He points out often when people are lost it’s because they’re too busy trying to make reality fit their map.  They’ll look at a lake on the map, not see it in reality and convince themselves that perhaps the lake has dried up.  Or that the peak they’re standing on is really “that one over there.”

It’s only when they accept their reality can they become unlost.

I have to agree with him.  I tell people I haven’t been lost in the woods (or any other place physically) since I was about 3.  I’ve simply been “mislocated” a few times.  Indeed, I once came off a peak in the Adirondaks and after hiking awhile looked around and realized I had no idea where I was.  I didn’t consider myself lost, simply mislocated.  A little map reading later and some orienteering and 30 minutes later I ended up in the correct parking lot.

So a lot of it comes down to “attitude”.  You may not be where you want to be, but if you have the right attitude, you’re not lost.  You’re simply someplace other than you expected to be.  In August when I lost my job, I wasn’t lost. I was simply someplace other than where I expected to be.

While it was a bit scary (I was the sole breadwinner for the family) it was also a relief.  I no longer had the weekly commute from Troy to Virginia.  I could do other things.  I finally had lots of extra time on my calendar. Ok sure, the lack of income was a bit of an issue, but by focusing on the other factors, it really wasn’t so bad.

About two months later I was on a train when inspiration for a new business struck me.  Yesterday I filed the paperwork in the state of New York to form QuiCR LLC.  Under lawyer’s orders I can’t tell you what it is yet.  But stay tuned, over the coming months I will.

Only by letting go of my map, and accepting reality, could I end up where I am now.  It’s still a bit scary, but it’s also very exciting.

Think in Russian

Posted on by
1

In the classic Cold War thriller, Firefox, Vietnam veteran Mitchell Gant has to steal the top-secret Soviet Union, titular plane.  Among its advanced features is that the systems are controlled by thought.  But only if he thinks in Russian.  This becomes a key plot factor in the climax of the film.

In my last post ; I remarked how many bad solutions I had found to sorting a SQLDataconnection Gridview.  Well I’m happy to say I solved my problem last night. (And as an aside, I will not be posting the solution at this time because while the solution itself is decent, I’m not sure the code is the best.)  Part of my solution was solved by “thinking in Russian”.

As I had mentioned, some of the so-called solutions to this problem that I had found on-line were pretty bad.  In one case the author apparently decided the easiest solution was to decipher the viewstate, extract out the information, sort it and stuff it back into the viewstate.  Now, as I’m writing this, I realize one advantage this has is that it removes a roundtrip from the web server to the database server.  But that’s about it.

I also saw a solution that involved passing the column name back to the code-behind and having that decide which of multiple stored procs to call.  I can’t say I favored this approach since it basically means a lot more maintenance if you ever say want to add a column to your Gridview (which turns out I decided afterwards I may want to do.)

Even worse, I’ve seen people propose things like building the select string on the fly and I can’t even begin to say how bad of an idea that is.

That said, the more I thought about it, the more I realized what the “right” solution was.  Rather than fighting the system, I had to think like the system.

So, after a side trip down to trying to use SqlDataAdapter, I went back to my first approach of using a SqlDataReader.  However, based on one example I saw, I decided to move this to a function of its own.  This, if nothing else resulted in cleaner code (since I was already calling the SQLDataReader in two places (see Rule of Three).  Once I did this, it was a little matter of figuring out how to bind the SqlDataReader to a Datatable and returning that.

Then I could bind the datatable directly to the GridView if I wanted to (which I do on the original Page_Load and Click_Submit OR I  could in the _Sorting event bind it to a local Datatable, sort that and then bind the resulting sorted Datatable to my Gridview.

Worked like a charm.  Well except for one little detail.  And this one I’m still not sure if it is a MSFT bug that lives on for backwards compatibility or I and MANY other developers are doing something wrong, but the GirdView incorrectly will always return “descending” for its sort direction.

So in this case the common (still not convinced it’s the RIGHT or BEST solution) is to stuff a variable in the Viewstate and read that back every time sorting is called and reverse it as needed.

Once I did that, I had working code that could sort my Gridview on the selected column that was clean, easily reproducible and made sense.

I’ve found with my forays into .NET Framework and VB programming that if my initial approach appears overly complicated or just plan wrong, it probably is.  So far in pretty much all cases, I’ve found that if I stop and try to “think in Russian” the solution will appear to me and is generally fairly straightforward and looks right.

Years ago when I studied Latin, I reached the point where I could read Latin natively.  I loved it. But part of the switch is being able to think in the structure of the language.  Not all languages use “SVO” (Subject-Verb-Object) order like English.   Latin, “SOV” (Subject-Object-Verb) order uses.  It takes some getting used to. But once you accept it, things get easier.

So I can’t fly a Mach 6 stealth aircraft, nor do I speak Russian, but I’m starting to think in VB. (Or is that I’m in VB starting to think?)

Goldstone has the Bird

Posted on by
Reply

One of my favorite web-comics is xkcd.  I was recently reminded of http://www.xkcd.com/978/.  I’m in the process of putting together a .NET 4.0 Framework based website using VB.  I have a very nice table thank you very much that is bound to a SQL Datasource in the code-behind.  Nice and slick.

Except, I want to make it sortable.  Should be as simple as setting AllowSorting=”True” and marking the columns I want sortable.  However, that doesn’t work when bound to a SQL Datasource.

No problem.  I’ll just Google it.  And there I find about a dozen answers.  And a third of them are just plain wrong (wrong enough even with my limited VB experience I can tell they are wrong), another third quote the wrong answers and the final third simply don’t work (and are so poorly commented in some cases I can’t even figure out what the original author was even attempting.)

And please, before you forward me a bunch of links in an effort to be helpful, don’t.  I’ve seen them.  Probably.

But it does lead to the general question.  How do you know what you read on the Internet is accurate? Even if it quotes a source, how do you know the source is accurate?

For years many people who followed the space program believed that “Goldstone has the bird” was a quote about Explorer 1, the first US satellite being picked up by the Goldstone tracking station, thus proving it had made orbit.  For years this was believed by many.  It is quoted in several reputable places, including the autobiography of someone who should have had first hand knowledge.

However, there is at least one little problem.  Goldstone hadn’t been built at the time.  So even the “original” source appears to have gotten it wrong.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/550/1 for more details.

Just give that a thought the next time you look something up on Wikipedia or another source to confirm your facts.

Employee Loyalty

Posted on by
Reply

I’m in the midst of trying to put together an idea for a new company.  This is something I’ve wanted to do for years.  The hardest part of course is coming up with the right idea.  I think I’ve got that.

But as equally important to me is building a company that I would be proud of and that will attract good employees and retain them.

Years ago, I was consulting at a local software company, performing their IT functions.  They were a large customer of mine so I spent a lot of time there, enough that I was almost like an employee.  Only I wasn’t treated as badly.

I recall one day sitting in a company meeting where the CEO and the CFO patiently explained to the employees why their expense checks would be paid as late as possible.  You see, it was better for the company’s balance sheet.  But don’t worry, the employees would get their money, eventually.  They then basically gave a morale speech that boiled down to, “We’re not sure why everyone is complaining, you should feel lucky to have a job!”

As a contractor I had a much easier way of making sure I got my money when it was due me.  I could simply stop working.  A quick call to the CFO would get me paid.

This late payment of employee expenses combined with other issues basically killed morale at the company.

At the same time, my wife was recruiting for another software company across town and one of my other customers was across the river.  Both were recruiting.  It was amazing how many people jumped ship from the first company to either of these two companies.

One day I was at the company across the river doing some consulting.  They had recently recruited a developer from the first company.  Earlier that day he had submitted an expense check.  Now, like any reasonable person, he would have been content waiting until the next payday or some other reasonable amount of time for his expense check.

Well later that day, I saw him walk out of the finance person’s office with his expense check in hand.

A single act bought his loyalty more than any pay raise or speech about morale could have.

I want to make sure my company (assuming it takes off) can treat its employees with the respect they deserve.

A Bright Idea and State of the Art

Posted on by
Reply

I think everyone likes to talk about “their first program”.  I suspect though it’ll become a less common topic with future generations, just like most kids don’t recall the first book they ever read.

My first program calculated things in Celsius if you provided the Fahrenheit temperature.

I was probably 11 when I helped write it.  It was stored on paper tape and ran on the local high school’s minicomputer (probably a PDP-9 but I honestly have no idea).

It wasn’t a long program, it was probably in FORTRAN.  Again, that is so long ago, I can’t recall the details.  And it wasn’t a very impressive program.  Heck, these days you can do it in a Windows CMD script as one line. (well two for clarity, SET F=212, SET /A (%F%-32)/9*5)

I wrote more complex programs in High School (by then had moved up to Turbo Pascal) and made my first money programming in FORTRAN while in college.

Things had improved from paper tape to floppy drives to hard drives.  Writing programs and debugging programs for the most part became faster. But generally anything more complex than basic input and output through the screen and keyboard was still tough to do and time-consuming.

About two weeks ago I had an idea for project.  I was on the road at the time and didn’t get a chance to sit down at my desktop until last week.  In less than 24 hours I had prototyped the idea and tested it.  The program involved a website, a database, doing some lookups, writing to the database and a bit more.  Even just 10-15 years ago it could have easily taken me 4 or 5 times as long to do something like that.

On Thanksgiving Day, my son wrote a program in a language called Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ that would take input, make it circle around then settle on the screen.  The more times you entered text the bigger the resulting “wordle” spiral would grow.  He wrote it that morning before our relatives showed up.  It took him maybe an hour or two, including debugging and overcoming some initial limitations.

He’s been writing programs in Scratch (and other languages) for years now.  I doubt he remembers his first program since writing programs now has become about as easy as using a computer.  I’m sure he doesn’t remember his first time using a computer like I do.  He writes programs at age 11 that in many ways are more complex than anything I wrote in my teens.

The state of the art has certainly changed and it’s made the world a better place all-around.  Languages and frameworks make developing faster and easier than ever before.

Though at times I’ll admit I miss the days of FORTRAN.