Ben McGraw’s Egometry

If hurricanes always rotate in the same direction, how does a telephone work?

Tobias

Holy fuck

I’ve never thought of it that way

Ben

…what ?

Experiments!

Split Tests are a very powerful way to determine if a thing you are doing is in your best interest or not. If you aren’t familiar with A/B tests, the very high level is that you show half of your users one thing, half another thing, and you compare the results of each set of users.

Humanity

One of the more mundane, human problems you can run into as an engineer is tiredness. Tunnel vision sets in, and you focus on specific tasks. If you’re solving a complex math problem, you make an arithmetic error. If you’re a coder not using TDD, often you’re running into syntax errors or the like.

These things happen.

Process

At IMVU, we deploy code fifty times a day. The code you just wrote goes out to the production cluster without waiting for QE people to sign off on it, or for your manager to approve it.

Engineering under TDD acts like a blanket to shield you from a lot of problems. You know from the get-go if you broke something in a more interesting way (assuming said interesting way was protected by a test). The tests exist to protect you before you get near the production systems. A failed test on your buildbot is a good thing, because that’s a broken thing your customers never had to deal with. As someone who had jobs where he was tacitly encouraged to code untested fixes on the fly on the production machines in other jobs, this is a godlike boon.

However, things go wrong, and sandboxes and production environments still can disagree! This is why the final step of pushing code live to a production server is always, always, always verify your change manually out in the live website.

And if it’s not verified (or if your change breaks things in very unexpected ways, causing die spikes or high database load or the such), to revert to a previous known good state and investigate further.

Moral

Now that all of the background for tonight is set up, I’ll skip the actual stupidity, and jump straight to the conclusion:

When testing a feature wrapped in a spiffy-keen augmentation of an experiment system live, please remember to take into account that you have a 50% chance to land in the “nothing happens” side of the experiment. This will probably save you a lot of trouble.

It was a pleasant surprise when I looked up to see a wonderful forest around me. I’d just been staring at this one tree over here.

The other kind of Restful

The fun part is my team’s Quality Engineer, who was familiar with this feature and had tested it in production live before, was also up working. He didn’t catch the obvious either, because it was so obvious.

Say a human has a 10% chance of making a mistake/forgetting something obvious. Say he’s got a pairing partner with the same ratio. Assuming an ideal world, you’ve reduced your net error ratio to 1% by having another dude on the case with you. Yay pairing!

If both dudes are tired, their error rates go up, and even pairing, you still have a higher chance of fucking something up. Boo tired!

…Perhaps there’s a better moral than the one listed above hidden in here?

So, I’ve been digging through a few watchmen videos from a few places, and there’s one thing in common:

They all have survival horror video game ads in front.

Watchmen is an award-winning comic book of the same vintage as The Dark Knight Returns and Maus. These are the books that gave birth to the term Graphic Novel.

And the advertisers associate slasher games with it?

I suppose the movie is targeted at a young male demographic because it’s a superhero flick, but the source material doesn’t really seem to lend itself to being fully appreciated by the set.

On the other hand, who doesn’t love zombies?

In other news, this is egometry’s 100th post. And there were 100 words in this post before this footnote (quite unplanned).

Tim has the wireless card in his room, I assume.

Dare I blog upon my iPhone?

When I got my treo 700 a few years ago, I was pleased. A phone I could write programs for and connect to the Internet with! But soon I would find that coding for the treo was a chore, and while there were some good apps, it’s overall crashiness turned me sour.

I was sad that the irc app was modal (if a call or sms came in, there goes my conversation), but the AIM was kindly persistent. I was annoyed by the lack of options with the camera, at how obfuscated the process to install java was, and how often the phone just hung seemingly frozen for half a minute.

Now I have an iphone. Programming for it turns out to be a pain (Xcode is pretty but inconvenient, obj-c is weird…), the irc apps are still modal, as is the AIM. The camera is slow as dirt whereas the treo was responsive and could take video! There’s no option to run java apps at all on the iPhone, and the device often likes to freeze up for upwards of half a minute.

The treo also could be used as a USB modem, providing evdo to my laptop avoiding situations where one might have to tap repeatedly on a glass screen to make good on blogligations.

It also had buttons to actually press which I could type incrediballt fast upon and would not try to correct me if I ever wanted to say duck.

..Duck you, iPhone.

It also had an sd card slot, just like everything else I pwn.

And it could motherfickinf copy and paste! Can you believe it?

And it wasn’t madeof glass! By the end of my two year contract it was dinged all to shut from uncountable drunken fumbling, but the screen was perfect and it was in solid working order.

…and yet somehow, I wouldn’t go back.

I don’t want the iPhone either, mindyou. I doubt I want the g-1, either.

I just want a smartphone that doesn’t fucking suck.

WHAT? Fucking?!?! You’ll let that through? Duck you, iphone.

At IMVU, we use a suite of testrunners and enhancements that sit on top of a core of Simpletest. It’s a pretty sweet suite, filled with all sorts of fancy doodads, gewgaws, and the most lovely selenium fixture you ever did see. Convenience pours out of it’s every pore, as put there by scores of engineers over literally pairs of years.

However, we haven’t spent the time yet to pretty the ol’ girl up for public consumption (which we totally should), so I decided to just use the basic core of SimpleTest while developing (as a personal project) the third iteration of the verge 2d game engine’s website (wip).

I didn’t know what I got myself into.

Here’s some hard-earned knowledge I wrestled from the core of this beasty. These simple statements represent hours of shouting, grunting, and crying defiantly into the rain-filled sky daring a cruel god to strike me down.

SimpleTest Lessons

1. assertFieldById() and assertFieldByName() do not work on html input elements which are improperly placed outside of <form> tags.

2. There do not appear to be out-of-the-box accessors for field values. I had to code up my own getFieldById().

3. If an element has an id, but not a name, it’s value will be inaccessible.

This list is not exhaustive

Learn these lessons, fair reader, so that you may not stub thy code-toe upon SimpleTest! And one day maybe we’ll get around to releasing IMVU’s Sweet Suite of Not-So-Simpletest.

Kevin
Meh.

Kevin
Nothing illegal about it.

Kevin
Slightly immoral, perhaps, but what ISN’T these days.

Kevin
…Other than feeding the poor.

Benjamin
I feed the poor to other, less poor people.

(Sick still. Doused in NyQuil.)

nude
adj. nud·er, nud·est
1. Having no clothing; naked.

HOW CAN SOMEONE BE NUDER OR NUDEST? Isn’t “No clothing” a goddamn boolean state?

A nude person is nuder than a non-nude person. If he is the only nude person, he is also the nudest.

Pair Programming

I like pair programming¹.

However, long gone are the days where pairing benefits me personally to a great degree, educationally. These days my pair programming mainly keeps me on-task and away from the dread onset of Nerd ADD, which is itself a Good Thing.

Being the clear Junior in a pair is generally my preferred position; I get to pair with someone who knows a field better than I do and devour their precious knowledge while (hopefully) providing a service to them by keeping them on task and helping to further cement and/or renew their understanding of the subject by taking a teaching role.

A good start into
a huge world.

Pair Administration

However, when it comes to being a unix administrator, or even a unix shell user, whenever I pair with a peer² or better I learn new things. And I’ve been a unix user for over ten years and a (admittedly casual) server administrator for over 5 now.

Most commonly, these new pieces of unix and/or shell knowledge come from being the shotgun in a pair programming situation: The driver does some small bit of shell magic, I pull the breaks and ask them to explain what these new, wonderful shenanigans are. Sometimes they’re little things like using !a in bash to repeat the most recent command starting with ‘a’. Sometimes they’re the inner workings of a unix system like editing a fstab.

Some things are necessary to manipulating a unix system. Turns out a lot of what you may personally take for granted isn’t actually in that category.

I’ve seen the same song and dance by observing others as well. Someone does some ‘voodoo’, and the other asks what they did. Knowledge is shared. It seems that unix administration is a lot like living in Manhattan; Local residents will often speak in a secret code exchanging Cartesian coordinates with each other proving that yes, they live here and, hey, maybe you’d appreciate the bagels at this intersection!

Experience Matters!

The important thing to realize here, though, is the strides I see personally in pairing with administration are completely local³. When I was a younger programmer, these information-exchange dances happened multiple times daily. I’ve just become too jaded to see them in my day-to-day operations, because they’re (usually) part of the standard mode of operations. Anything wildly different from my current problems and/or skill sets in software engineer that I hear generally gets discarded as irrelevant to my needs now. However, when I hear something similarly esoteric in a subject I am less close to, I’m all ears: This tidbit sounds interesting, and I should devote my brain to it.

Context is important. The obvious can seem awesome from a certain point of view, and the awesome can seem obvious!

Always Two There Are…

When you pair, there’s generally a tutor/tutee dynamic going on. The more unknown there is, the more “magical” it feels, and the more you appreciate sopping up all that new delicious knowledge. The closer you get to putting your magical 10,000th hour into something, the fewer ‘new’ things you see (or recognize as pertinent).

The important thing, it turns out, is not to dwell on the magical learning revelation sensation. Being the bottom of a pair may feel more “learny”, but being the top is no less good for you. As opposed to “learny” you get “cementy”, “practicey”, and “teachey”.

And sometimes you get to learn a thing or two, too.

That pairing can work for things other than programming shouldn’t surprise anyone, and the fact that pair programming is effective should not be controversial. Pairing is, essentially, a single teacher to single student situation. A master and an apprentice, who can switch roles at a moment’s notice.

I was in the doctor’s office today, and just as a Hobbit Hole means Comfort, a doctor’s office means Waiting.

So I pulled out my trusty iPhone looking for some diversion. After catching up on my Twitter feed, I looked around hungrily for something new. I scanned through the games section and tried to buy the Square-Enix iPhone Game only to be told to go bugger off because it was over 10mb in size and I wasn’t on a wifi network.

Balls.

So I went through what apps I had locally, and decided to give the paint app I’d downloaded months ago a fair shakedown. I wasn’t too impressed with it in the past, but I didn’t spend more than a minute trying. And now I had all the time in the world… or at least in the office.

Unfortunately, my initial assessment was correct: MS Paint puts this app to shame.

Scribble’s UI

Colors

In Scribble, you have a finite set of 11 color options. You cannot change them. And while I often will fight the fight of “very limited color palettes create superior art“, the limited color palettes I speak of aren’t 11 colors, and those colors aren’t straight out of the cheapest pack of crayons you can get.

It is not very much to ask that, at the least, palette slots be changeable. Even though there’s no default color picker widget in the iPhone’s api, there are sliders, and there is a handy-dandy keyboard/textfield interface in which you could type hex codes.

Tools

The tools provided are: smallish circle pen, medium circle pen, and large circle pen. And that’s it. No undo, no 1-pixel-size pen, no zoom, no anything other than three pens. While I admire simplicity in design, this goes beyond that. The tools you are given are limited without the ability to zoom in/out and undo mistakes. Without any sort of fine control, this app goes from having a variety of simple image editing/creation uses to being a simple finger-painting toy.

In the gallery below you will see a few examples showing the limitations of the program. The image with dots shows the three pen sizes. The image with large, drawn circles shows the limitations of the interface in picking up on quick movements (note how the circles are very polygonal). The images with logic gates drawn on them illustrates the inability to have much fine-grain control at all, and where a lack of undo/zoom really gets in the way of scribbling down some technical notes.

…Not that most people would really want to draw logic gates for back-of-the-napkin type scribbles, but I needed to draw something and no you may not have all of my extra-awesome secret plans.

Input/Output

One of the better design choices was to save to the Camera Roll, allowing all of your camera-picture-using apps to interface with your hastily drawn pieces of digital refridgerator art. Another nice bit of fun is that it allows you to load a picture from your camera roll as a base for you to scribble upon. This means you could snap a pic with the camera and draw crude cartoon bubbles with a very short word in it over your blokes, or (more likely) disembodied cocks jizzing all over them.

And, really, right there is the killer feature for Scribble.

In the below gallery I took the high road and painted over a picture of my best gal on my couch in a psuedo 80′s pop-deco style. The effect is only halfway there, though since the UI elements prevent me from getting the bottom of the picture covered.

UI

The ui consists of several buttons that cover over the drawing area, and cannot be dismissed. You can get a good gander at it up above in the pineapple picture.

Conclusion

It sorta sucks, but you get what you pay for; This app is free.

If you want to scribble dicks and show them to people furtively at meetings, it will meet your every need and more!

If you want to scribble dicks upon pictures of people you know, this is your horse.

Otherwise, keep on trucking, sailor. Personally, I’m waiting for Deluxe Paint 2e to come to the iPhone…

1776, The Musical

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two become a law firm, and three or more become a congress.

I have become known to many as the gayest heterosexual male history has ever known; In fact, several of my good friends are still waiting for me to cease this whole “womanizing” thing and finally come out of the closet.

The fact that I love musicals doesn’t help my case much.

One of my very favorite musicals is 1776, which is a creative/humorous retelling of the debate leading up to the declaration of independence.

1776 features John Adams as the irate underdog trying to rally a lethargic congress to get off it’s ass and declare war openly (a war which was already well underway, just not sanctioned officially). Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are the supporting leads, Franklin being the comic relief and wise sage character rolled into one, and Jefferson being the also-protagonist foil to Adams (Adams keeps browbeating Jefferson even though they are allies in cause.)

There’s so much about this musical I’m totally gay for. There are founding fathers acting lewd (mostly Franklin) and drunk (mostly Stephen Hopkins of Rogue Island). There are biting exchanges of insults between the opposing camps, usually with a really wonderful current of mutual respect (excepting for Mr. Adams. Poor Johnny.) There are empassioned appeals to freedom and personal responsibility and a genuine sense of real patriotism (ah, but for the days when we fought for things that weren’t just good, but made sense.)

And there are also silly rhymes and catchy innuendo-laden tunes.

In the original Broadway production, John Adams was played by William Daniels (who you probably know better as Mr. Feeny, from Boy Meets World, or the voice of KITT in the original Knight Rider). In a much more recent 1997 revival of the play, Brent Spiner (who you probably know better as Lt. Commander Data) played the role. Awesome, but second string, actors playing the man who would become the first awesome, but second string, US president.

Oh, and there’s a song about slavery. Stay classy, 1776!

Through the wonders of the internet, I’ve found a listing of all upcoming venues where it’ll be playing! Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be an RSS-enabled listing, so I’ll have to feed it into my ancient page-pinging system to keep tabs on promising, nearby productions.