Posted by Skrud at Friday, March 30th 2007 at 10:03am
The organization of the ImagineCup competition is just shy of appalling. I’m sure it can’t be easy to organize a massive software design competition on an international scale, but still – some things are just plain weird.
It started out innocently enough: Microsoft will book the flight for you, and the hotel, and give you a credit card upon check-in with a $125 limit that you can use for food and taxi to/from the airport.
The semi-finals for North America are being held simultaneously in four different cities. All the Canadian semi-finalists are to compete in Toronto, tomorrow. So here I am, checked in at my hotel. My flight came in around 8:35am. It left Montreal around 7:30am. I was at the airport around 6:30am. I woke up at 5:30am. I went to bed at 4:30am. I got home last night around 3:30am….
I don’t know why my flight was booked at 7:30am, and not – say – 5 in the afternoon. At the time I confirmed the booking, I was under the naive assumption that they would group people together by school and/or starting location and we would all be on the same flight.
Nope. All the other Concordians are on separate flights. Mine is the only one that was ungodly early.
Arriving at Pearson Airport around 8:30am, I got my baggage and hopped into a cab to the hotel. $50 later … and here I am.
So I check in at the hotel, and the front desk clerk says “You are sharing your room with another person …”. That’s okay. I was kind of expecting that. Why would Microsoft book 150 single-occupancy rooms? That makes no sense. Surely, I thought, Microsoft wouldn’t be so vacant as to expect geeks to share a room with a random stranger that they have never met, and would instead lump together people from the same school or city…. I give Microsoft too much credit. I don’t know who Lucas is, but he’s not here yet and I’m kind of weirded out by the lack of tact on the organizers part.
Oh yeah, and the front desk didn’t have any welcome packages, track jackets, credit cards, lanyards, or anything else that I was told they would have for me when I checked in. So they called the Microsoft bookers, and they didn’t know anything about the welcome packages, either. “Maybe you’ll get it when you register,” they said. Knowing when and where to register was something that was supposed to be in the welcome package …
And finally, even though this is an older one, Microsoft requires that you bring your own laptop in order to compete. This in itself is pretty strange, since usually the computer that you use is a controlled variable. They apparently will provide computers for people that don’t have one… but anyway… My laptop is a PowerBook. That is, an Apple PowerBook with a PowerPC processor. I couldn’t run Windows on this even if I wanted to. (Virtual PC is unusable.) No Parallels. No Boot Camp. Some kind friends offered to let me borrow their MacBook Pros, but I declined. First of all, I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s laptop, and secondly – I prefer being a shit disturber.
What I do have is TextMate and Mono. Now all I’ve got to do is memorize the .NET API and I’ll be set. (We’re allowed internet access during the competition, but MSDN is notoriously annoying to navigate.) Plus, if I perform reasonably well, then it’ll just be embarrassing for the people using Visual Studio.
I just got an e-mail from the organizing lady saying that the welcome bags haven’t arrived yet, there was some confusion but it’s sorted out now. ;)
Things to do today:
- Take a nap (and hope Lucas doesn’t barge in and wake me).
- Write a SOEN 337 assignment.
- Party.
Tags: events, geek, imaginecup, microsoft, rants, tech | 2 comments
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, September 28th 2006 at 7:35pm
I saw Megadeth last night for the third time. It was an awesome show, because Megadeth is just so badass live.
But all day today people have been coming up to me and saying “I hear that’s what the Dawson guy was listening to before he went and shot everyone.” And that just pisses me off. By the end of the day I didn’t even feel like engaging anyone in conversation anymore and just said “Yeah, maybe I’ll shoot some place up, too.” Clearly, everyone who listens to Megadeth is obviously a serial killer to be. Until now, I’ve been pretty pleased with the mass media’s slew of articles warning against the stereotyping of goths and metalheads and various other subcultures. Unfortunately it seems people are much quicker to typecast than they are to sympathize.
After Columbine happened, for my remaining years of high school was constantly associated with the “trenchcoat mafia”. Because I wore black, had long hair and listened to heavy metal. (I’ve never worn a trenchcoat in my life). People used to stop me in the halls and point and be “what you’re gonna shoot up the place?”. It was basically adding insult to my already injured feelings of high school. Even in CEGEP, one of our economics profs looked at me in the first class and said “Hey, man in black! You don’t have a gun on you do you?”. I don’t care if he was kidding (it didn’t really sound like it). It’s not fucking funny.
The Megadeth song in question is none other than A Tout Le Monde, which coincidentally has part of its chorus sung in French. Before playing the song, Dave Mustaine told the audience how he heard about the Dawson shootings. You can read most of the speech in today’s Gazette but this is the part that counts:
Megadeth has a special relationship with Montreal, and we were pissed off. This is one of the most metal cities in the whole continent. That guy wasn’t worthy of being a Megadeth fan. For those of you who are living, this is your song. For those who are hurt, getter better soon. For those who were lost, we hope you’re looking down from heaven. He’ll be burning in hell for a long time.
Megadeth does have a special relationship with Montreal. They will play A Tout Le Monde every single show, even if they don’t play it on the rest of the tour. Here is just about the only city on the continent where every single person in the audience will sing along to the French part of the chorus, which goes:
A tout le monde
A tous mes amis
Je vous aime
Je dois partir
These are the last words
I’ll ever speak
Now set me free…
Out of context, people often assume that the song is a suicide note. That’s not at all what it is. From an interview in 1994, the year the song was released, Dave said:
It’s not a suicide song. What it is, it’s, you, it’s when people have a loved one that dies and they end on a bad note, you know, they wish that they could say something to them. So this is an opportunity for the deceased to say something before they go. And it was my impression of what I would like to say to people, if I had say, 3 seconds to do so in life before I died I’d say to the entire world, to all my friends, I love you all, and now I must go. These are the last words I’ll ever speak, and they’ll set me free. I don’t need to say I’m sorry, I don’t have to say I’m going to miss you, or I’ll wait for ya. You know, I’ll just say I loved you all, good, bad and different, I loved you all.
I’m always angry when people take some of my favourite songs, styles and things and lump them together as some great evil symbol because of what one idiot did. There are easily hundreds of thousands of people who listen to Megadeth in North America alone. Do all of them go on murderous rampages? Hell no. I bet they play “violent videogames,” too. For the elventy billionth time:
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION
Do you really need a giant spaghetti monster to tell you that the decrease in the population of pirates is due to the general rise in temperatures over the last hundred years?
It’s just like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer starts the “Bear Patrol” to keep bears from roaming Springfield, and Lisa exclaims “but that’s just like saying that this rock keeps tigers away”!
People weren’t pointing their fingers at violent video games and heavy metal after the Polytechnique massacre happened. And no, it’s not different just because he was targeting “feminists”.
There are certainly other factors involved in these people’s lives other than the music they listen to. If all the things you’ve been hearing about Kimveer Gill and the Columbine massacre are true, then I would be a prime candidate for going haywire around the city with a gun because I listen to heavy metal, I play violent video games and I was picked on in high school.
Did you know I was suspended for a few days from high school pending psychiatric evaluation after Columbine happened? Maybe I’ll tell the story in detail sometime.
So please, next time you see a metalhead, goth, or otherwise subculturish person, think twice before you label them as a killer. They’re probably just as freaked out about everything as you are, and they’re the ones that are stuck with the unfortunate stigma.
Tags: music, news, rants | 4 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, September 26th 2006 at 9:35pm
Here is a question that’s been boggling my mind at least throughout the summer. I was reminded of it last night when I discovered that All That Remains, the supporting group for last night’s Dragonforce concert, has a female bassist.
Where are all the female musicians?
Specifically, I’m talking about rock and popular music, not classical or orchestra music. There are plenty of female singers; enough so that femme-fronted rock groups form a subgenre of their own, a lot of them are fantastic bands, too. There are also a number of all-girl bands, however more often than not an all-girl rock band is more gimmick / marketing than anything else, like Kittie or Live.on.release.
Avril Lavigne doesn’t count. We all know she’s a record label-manufactured “artist” who doesn’t actually write her own songs, and while she’s holding a guitar in some of her videos, I don’t think she ever actually plays it. So she falls under the “singers” category.
Until last night, I thought the only girl in rock was Melissa Auf der Maur, and that covers both Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins. Maybe Courtney Love too, even though she’s more of a “singer”. We can add D’arcy Wretzky to the list, since she was the bass player that Melissa replaced in the Pumpkins. And finally All That Remains’ Jeanne Sagan, too. So that’s four.
So seriously, where are the women? It’s not like the talent isn’t there, clearly, it is. You just don’t see it so often. And here I was thinking software was a mostly male-dominated field.
Can you think of any more female musicians (not singers)?
Tags: music, rants, rock | 5 comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, September 20th 2006 at 10:24am
Okay, this is the second to last time I blog about my job. I swear. The next time will be after it’s over.
In The Beginning…
When I started working here I roared through the training programs in one week instead of two. During the second week, I familiarized myself with Java’s Swing GUI library. I’ve never done any GUI programming before. By the end of the second week I was placed on a project that required me to focus a lot of energy and brainpower on designing a solution to a pretty complicated problem. The problem of course was compounded by the fact that my only window into the requirements was my supervisor, whom I had to interrogate in order to extract a precious few tiny nuggets of useful information.
Designing the architecture and framework were a very stimulating set of tasks. I was forced to call upon all the knowledge I learned in school and continously consult references on design patterns, methodology, best practices and anything else. I learned a ton of information and gained a lot of experience and I’m extremely proud of what I came up with. I think my superiors were pretty impressed, too.
The warning signs should have gone off in my head when I realized that, having been hired as a Java programmer, I didn’t have Java installed on my workstation. It took a week to get the form approved to download and install Java. And if I didn’t have Java, I certainly didn’t have any conceivable means of source control. It was even more of a hassle to get CVS set up. However they explained this to me by saying that I’m the only person that’s developing in our particular office. All the rest of the development is done – well, it’s classified. Apparently they have version control and Java over there.
I implemented my framework in Java, and in the process became extremely familiar with the Java standard library, which I had never really explored in depth. I’ve discovered some things that I really like about Java, namely the existence and organization of much of the library – and some things that I really hate. The implementation didn’t take long, but the bulk of my internship so far has been a cycle of designing -> implementing -> reviewing -> refactoring -> documenting. By now it’s a pretty robust and relatively well-designed piece of software.
For some reason, though, I’m the only person that works full time on this project. I think they expected me to finish this closer to the end of my contract, which is in December. If that’s the case, then I was a good four months ahead of schedule.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
That was three weeks ago. Since then it seems like they’ve been scrambling to try and find things for me to do, most of which involved simple, menial, quick little tweaks to the framework. I learned how to use Aspect Oriented Programming with AspectJ for a particular library, which was interesting and fun but didn’t even take me an entire work day. Granted, I still need more experience and practice with it, but in order to do that they need to give me more things to do that require me to apply it.
On the one hand I appreciate that they’re willing to listen to me and let me experiment with things like AspectJ, and leave it to me to provide a case for using it and show that it has benefits to programmers and productivity.
But now I’m out of things to do again. These past few weeks have basically consisted of me tracking down my supervisor (not necessarily an easy task) and demanding that he give me something to do. Invariably I’m awarded some easy, mind-numbing task – or a set of them – that won’t take me more than a couple of hours, after which I return to the hunt for my supervisor and demand more work. Repeat ad nauseum.
Generation Gap
Worst of all is that fact that I don’t feel like I belong here. That’s not to say I don’t like the people – there are a friendly bunch of relatively new employees that I enjoy hanging out with, and in general the people are friendly and nice – but that there’s no one that shares a common interest with me or even a passion for programming.
Most people, it seems, have decided that once they’ve graduated from university, they no longer need to learn anything. These are day-coders, people who know how to program only because it’s part of their jobs, not because it’s something they love to do. As a result, if someone started working here say, 8 years ago, then the last 8 years of improvements in software methodologies, processes and techniques are completely over their heads.
The biggest result of this problem is communication. Case in point: Design Patterns. Design Patterns alone aren’t necessarily anything new, fascinating or unique. They’re a set of idioms that people have been using in their software in order to solve certain common issues and problems. Design Patterns were around for a long, long time before they were called “Design Patterns”. But the biggest benefit of design patterns is precisely the fact that they give a name to the common design techniques that are used everywhere. Design Patterns are a vocabulary. In theory, one developer should be able to say to another “that’s just a Facade,” and the other developer will instantly understand the layout of the source code. You could name your classes something like “ReadyThingyState” and “BrokenThingyState” and a developer who knows the design patterns vocabular will instantly understand that you’re using the State Pattern.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. There’s only one other developer here that I’ve found who’s aware of anything that’s been used after the 1970’s – but he’s not working on my project.
Future Employment?
Needless to say, this entire experience has made me seriously reconsider the prospect of graduate studies. I’m beginning to worry that the entire software industry is littered with monotony and day coders. For my own sanity, I need to find a niche where I can retain my passion for software engineering and design, and be around people with similar passions.
My naïveté tells me that I might be able to find such a niche at Google. Joel Spolsky would have us believe that his company, Fog Creek, is a place like that. In fact, he’s scolded and railed against the way most companies conduct internships, describing more or less a utopia for passionate software engineers. (Unfortunately one needs “permanent legal right to work in the U.S.” before even applying for an internship there). Microsoft also has a reputation for treating its developers well, however there are mixed reports about that.
Maybe I’ll be happy at a small start up, with a concentrated group of passionate people.
Or maybe academia is the way to go for me.
Tags: internship, rants, school, work | 4 comments
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, September 14th 2006 at 1:04pm
I started writing this as a comment to Heather’s most recent post, if i go stark-raving mad but decided I’d post it here instead.
Heather wrote:
Okay…onwards to the actual point. After the shooting yesterday, the media has decided to find out about the shooter by accessing some of the stuff he posted online (you can access the CBC online article here):
In his profile on vampirefreaks.com, a website devoted to Goth culture, Gill called himself “Trench,” and wrote: “You will come to know him as the Angel of Death.”
“Work sucks … School sucks … Life sucks … What else can I say?” he wrote. “Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime.”
Now, quite obviously the guy was disturbed…i mean, he went on a shooting rampage, but this isn’t the first time that someone’s livejournal, wordpress, xanga or whatever other interface writings have been used to corroborate the media’s depiction of a killer. I wonder about this as a techinque…i can definitely see the sensational appeal, but how much does the average individual’s blog reflect their true thoughts?
The problem with the blog quotes that the media reported on is quite simply that they aren’t necessarily distinguishable from what any angsty teen would post on the internet. I’m pretty sure I used to write the same way when I was 16 and morbidly depressed. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found an uncannily similar anecdote buried whatever I used to scribble on in high school.
The only thing that makes it creepy is the fact that this guy did turn out to be a psycho killer. If he never went to Dawson yesterday and still wrote all that stuff, nobody would think anything of it. The posts are given “retroactive” creepiness.
Maybe the real warning sign was the fact that he was 25 years old and still writing like that.
And the worst part is that this kind of incident only provokes stereotypes related to gamers, music fans, goths and various other subcultures.
Maybe potential murderous rampagers are metal fans, but according to a study conducted recently, so are IT workers. So if you’re a metalhead, you might be a serial killer – but you might just be a computer programmer. Can you tell the difference?
It’s important that the media and general public in general realize that while violent games and movies and music might appeal to psychotic killer types, they also appeal to perfectly normal human beings who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Saying that someone went and shot up a school because he was influenced by some videogame is like saying he did it because he wears clothes. The “influence” was surely already there long before he picked up a controller.
Tags: news, rants | 4 comments
