Eh

First thing I do after getting a new Ubuntu server running

#apt-get install vim -y

Not sure what its called, but the default vi install isn’t friends with putty and neither am I.

What’s in a title?

With my latest contract, I will be celebrating almost seven years ( 6 continuous years ) as a senior consultant.  I’m comfortable with that title for some very simple reasons:  I started my first business ( onsite tech. support ) when I was 13 then got bought out by a larger firm and became a junior partner at 16.  Then after moving from Florida to Philadelphia ( trust me, official records say Philadelphia is a city but it’s really a state of it’s own ) I started college and multiple companies.  I know the cardinal rule of business, which is to provide less for more but appear to be providing more for less ) regardless of domain.

As a consultant, your technical know how usually plays second fiddle to finding ways for your client’s to be profitable and self-sustaining.  Not to say that you can be technically inept but I’ve worked with a few consultants that were/are.  It doesn’t really matter what the most elegant choice is sometimes if its going to take to long to ensure your client keeps the initiative in their business domain.  That really sucks, but its the truth.

That said, both my clients and my consultancy agencies I’ve worked for have thrown all sorts of crazy titles at me.  Chief engineer, chief sys. admin, architect, senior engineer, lead engineer, software developer, etc.  I’ve been somewhat dumbfounded by the naming choices as the reality doesn’t always match the title.

During the interview for my recent client, when they asked what grade/title I felt I was at I told them I was a competent software engineer with full stack experience.  It would have been quicker to just say “I’m the mother fucking man” but I refuse to do that because all it takes is one little estoric piece of knowledge I don’t know about to blow that card house down.  Somehow we got into a monologue where I explained my opinion on titles:

Apprentice

What’s the difference between a POST & GET based form?   I don’t know how to setup a development workstation.   Of course I know SOAP but why do we have to use all this XML?  Why do I need to use a quicksort when this works? ( emergent bubble sort ).

I don’t know what you’re saying.

Journeymen

Caching is stupid, it gets in the way.  Why should we use that open source framework when we can write our own?  Documentation sucks and we don’t have enough time to implement unit-testing!  Yo dawg, I herd you like patterns so I put a singleton factory in your observer so that I can command pattern inject your dependancies…. uhm no, I’ve got no idea how to fix that bug, let me get back to you in a couple days ( turns out to be an entire week).   But we’re going to need all this extra complexity because I’m bored and figured will need it someday soon.

I don’t know how to implement that and won’t tell you that until I’ve fucked things all to hell.

Craftsmen

I think I can get that done in the needed timeframe.  I hate this language/framework/database but will bear down and get this done while looking for opportunities to make things better.  I refactored feature X to use a factory pattern and will make notes to try and reinforce that change elsewhere.  I’m hesistent to add more complexity here and realize this will be a problem in the future so I’m going to add a quick unit-test to ensure integrity.

Here is how I would implement that, what do you think?

Master

No I won’t/can’t implement that right now until we get the core features down.  Why don’t you like technology X,Y,Z and how can we compromise?  I appreciate your input and will take that into consideration.  Hey boss, check out what minion 12 accomplished, I think he/she/it has a bright future.   It’s unacceptable to modify the system tier framework to resolve your issue, asking the framework mailing list/group for advice/criticism and if they accept it then submit a path.

I will delivery these features in this time frame and if I can’t I will tell you why and a better target date.

Summary

I’ve been writing software since I was 7 or 8, I’ve made a couple million dollars in revenue writing software over a decade or two, and my clients have made several more million using that software.  I’ve worked with people with decades of “experience” but no practical knowledge and inversely people with literally a year or two of experience but are masters at their trade.  I remember working with a Ruby on Rails developer a couple years back who was a goddamn bad ass combat developer knocking out reliable code and pulling epic 90 hours weeks..he learned to program the year prior.  The conclusion is that I think titles are a bit of crap.  Sticking around long enough with a company and you’ll end up being the lead/chief/senior company minion by default.  OR have enough clients you half-assed through and you can claim the title of senior… but neither is an indicator of competence.

Deferreds for JQuery 1.5

Anyone familiar with async programming like Node.JS or Python’s twistd library will be familiar with deferreds. Its usually a simple nuisance to re-implement when needed, so it’s nice to hear that’s not an issue anymore with JQuery’s $.when & $.then methods

Really useful guide here

What does this mean?

Say you’ve got a compound action you want to complete. For example a user clicks on a leaf in a tree like directory
menu. Now you want to update both the menu to add any possible sub nodes of that leaf PLUS update a content panel and once its finished, maybe update the hash tag to the current page’s url.

   
  $.when( updateMenu(), updateContent() )
     .success( function(){
           console.log("Both menu & content panel have been updated!");
      })
     .fail( function(){
           console.log("Oh noes, we didn't finish... try again?");
      });

That’s pretty much the gist of deferreds in a nutshell. Furthermore it appears that the author of this fantastic addition to jQuery really grokked the concept of deferreds because you can chain one deferred result to multiple child deferred’s allowing for cascading events to fire in response to one event.

Return to canvas tag

Currently in between clients and waiting for the silent alpha of my delicious clone to wrap up….so its back to experiments with the canvas tag.

That means back to my unframework canvas library Ping. Some of the code still makes sense, but other bits are… well special. Currently there is an .ex object thats appended to the CanvasRenderingContext2D internal class and it works, but what I’m thinking of is re-working the code so that they’re added post-instantiation like a factory.


canvasMaker = function(elemId, options){
    var element = document.getElementById(elemId);
    var context = element.getContext("2d");
    //Here is where all the extension methods would be dynamically assigned to the 2d canvas instance
    wrappedContext = wrapContext(context);
    //Maybe add a singleton check around the bulk of this that keys on the elemId
    return wrappedContext;
}

The problem I’m trying to work around specifically is the need should ever arise to have n+1 managed tags on the same document. Currently there is so many hardwired references that it would be impossible to have the two cooperate without collisions and undesirable behavior.

Python pydoc module

Python documentation here

Example

$python -m pydoc pydoc

Talk about eating your own dogfood! This is exactly like using the help() function in the python command line interpreter… except accessible from your shell prompt…. but wait!

It’ gets better! Not only does it make julian fries ( may not for any implementation ) but it’s got a few versatile little secrets

$ python -m pydoc
pydoc - the Python documentation tool

pydoc.py  ...
    Show text documentation on something.   may be the name of a
    Python keyword, topic, function, module, or package, or a dotted
    reference to a class or function within a module or module in a
    package.  If  contains a '/', it is used as the path to a
    Python source file to document. If name is 'keywords', 'topics',
    or 'modules', a listing of these things is displayed.

pydoc.py -k 
    Search for a keyword in the synopsis lines of all available modules.

pydoc.py -p 
    Start an HTTP server on the given port on the local machine.

pydoc.py -g
    Pop up a graphical interface for finding and serving documentation.

pydoc.py -w  ...
    Write out the HTML documentation for a module to a file in the current
    directory.  If  contains a '/', it is treated as a filename; if
    it names a directory, documentation is written for all the contents.

Now the graphical interface isn’t anything to write home about, but the -p option provides a no thrills web interface to
almost everything accessible to your python interpreter. This can make it slightly easier to troll through foreign modules
looking for undocumented sub modules and classes… or having an accessible reference doc for properly managed modules

Python urllib

Python documentation here

Unfortunately there is little or no documentation on the command line properties of urllib but it does recognize everything that urllib can handle. So
python -m urllib http://website.com will grab the specified url and print to std out

Note FTP works as well but you need to follow the pattern ftp://user:password@website.com if authentication is required

Python module dis

Python documentation here

Example

python -m dis myFile.py provides an interesting look into a python file’s guts
I could easily imagine this being part of some sort of static time inspect system where dis sits at the front and a parse
walks down the output lines, turning the data into a dependency and symbol graph. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to provide anything more and is really just a test function most likely intended for unit-testing the python stdlib.

Python SimpleHTTPServer

When working on pure javascript applications ( canvas widgets & such ), I’ve found using the SimpleHTTPServer disgustingly useful as it serves the current working directly without much thrills.

Python documentation here

Usage

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8081 0.0.0.0
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8081 ...

Note that it’s not necessary to set the 2nd argument to 0.0.0.0 if you want the service to listen on all routes. It normally will by default listen on everything… just habit for me to always append that.

Another useful part of this server is that it servers an apache directory style listing of all file’s present unless there is a valid index file like index.htm present.

Python json.tool module

Python documentation here

Example usage: 

$ echo '{"json":"obj"}' | python -mjson.tool
{
    "json": "obj"
}
$ echo '{ 1.2:3.4}' | python -mjson.tool
Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 2)

All argument patterns are:

  • piped json string | python -m json.tool which syntax checks then outputs the results to stdout
  • python -m json.tool input_file.json which reads the path relative file and outputs the results
  • python -m json.tool input_file.json output_file.json only difference here is that the output is directed to the specified file

My thoughts, this could be part of some sort of data validation check, looking for corrupted json static files.

Example

$ echo '{"a":123, "foo":"bar" }' | python -m json.tool && echo "IS valid" || echo "Is not valid"
{
    "a": 123,
    "foo": "bar"
}
IS valid
$ echo '{"a"1:123, "foo":"bar" }' | python -m json.tool && echo "IS valid" || echo "Is not valid"
Expecting : delimiter: line 1 column 4 (char 4)
Is not valid

Python – batteries included

Inspired by this
AND here

I’m going to do my best to either write up some examples of how to use these or link to someone/somewhere else on the
internet where someone did a better job then my grammar handicapped self can

For those to lazy to click the above liniks, the list below is a semi-complete list of command line accessible modules
to perform utility work.

So python -m calendar prints out a pretty calendar of the year, much like the GNU linux cal command line function.

  • json.tool -> pretty prints JSON Examples
  • SimpleHTTPServer -> serve the current directory over HTTP on port 8080 Examples
  • quopri / uu / binhex / base64 -> encode / decode Quoted-Printable / UUEncoded content.
  • telnetlib -> ghetto telnet client
  • filecmp -> directory entry comparison tool
  • ftplib -> ghetto FTP client
  • smtpd -> SMTP proxy
  • timeit -> command line profiling interface. Very handy
  • calendar -> prints year calendar
  • urllib -> ghetto wget Example
  • zipfile -> ghetto info-zip
  • aifc -> dumps some info about the provided aiff file (if given two paths, also copies path1 to path2)
  • cgi -> dumps a bunch of information as HTML to stdout
  • CGIHTTPRequestHandler -> same as SimpleHTTPServer except via the CGIHTTPRequestHandler: it will executes scripts it recognizes as CGI, instead of just sending them over (has not survived the transition to Python 3)
  • compileall -> compiles a tree of Python files to bytecode, has a bunch of options. Does not compile to stripped files (pyo)
  • cProfiler -> runs the provided script file (argument) under cProfiler
  • dis -> disassembles a python script Example
  • doctest -> runs doctests on the provided files (which can be python scripts or doctest files)
  • encodings.rot_13 -> rot13 encodes stdin to stdout (has not survived the transition to Python 3)
  • fileinput -> some kind of ghetto pseudo-annotate. No idea what use that thing might be of
  • formatter -> reformats the provided file argument (or stdin) to stdout: 80c paragraphs &etc
  • gzip -> ghetto gzip (or gunzip with -d), can only compress and decompress, does not delete the archive file
  • htmllib -> strips HTML tags off of an HTML file
  • imaplib -> ghetto IMAP client
  • locale -> displays current locale information
  • mimify -> converts (mail) messages to and from MIME format
  • modulefinder -> lists the modules imported by the provided script argument, and their location
  • pdb scriptfile.py -> automatically enters PDB post-mortem mode if the script crashes
    platform, displays the platform string
  • poplib -> dumps a bunch of info on a POP mailbox
  • profile -> see cProfile
  • pstats -> opens a statistics browser (for profile files)
  • pydoc -> same as the pydoc command Example
  • sgmllib -> see htmllib (as far as I can tell)
  • shlex -> displays tokenization result of the provided file argument (one token per line prefixed with Token:)
  • SimpleXMLRPCServer -> XMLRPC server for power and addition
  • telnetlib -> telnet client
  • tokenize -> dumps tokenization result of a Python file
  • webbrowser -> opens provided URL in your default web browser (options: in a new window, in a new tab)
  • whichdb -> A helpful little tool to try and tell which DB-api driver to use on a specified DB file