2008 Resolutions

Making resolutions is tradition on New Year's Eve.... evaluate areas you'd like to improve (or new skills you'd like to acquire), and set goals to improve in those areas. Here are two work-related resolutions I'm going to focus on entering 2008.

Make JCAPS Usable

If you've been following my posts, you're aware that I've been frustrated with Sun's JCAPS product. The tool is simply not ready for prime time and it's hurting my productivity. In addition to the problems I've already outlined, developing in JCAPS' eDesigner makes me "feel dirty". You need to go outside to tool to create modules of shared code (jars). This limitation makes it hard to implement classes that follow even the simplest design patterns or integrate with third party frameworks, like Spring. I feel myself falling into bad coding habits.

I'd like to find a compromise. What I'd like to do, is move my code out of the JCAPS JCD and into a separate web service that runs directly on the shared JCAPS application server. The JCD would call this module to do all the heavy lifting, then return to the JCAPS JCD. JCAPS would be used primarily for mapping TCP, MQ, or FTP requests to the web service.

Practice Agile Development

The past year introduced me to many new technologies and ways of thinking. Two I've been most excited about are Ruby and Agile Software Development. Since I'm currently not using either in my "real work", I'm going to use these tools to create a relatively simple and lightweight podcatcher. I'll outline my requirements, approach, and progress in the weeks to follow. I'll be using the Poppendieck's Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit as my guide to an Agile approach and the Rspec framework to define and test the behavior of the application. It should be fun and give me some great experience!

Happy New Year!

Vista Woes

I recently purchased a new laptop preloaded with Vista (Home Premium). Given the choice I'd have preferred to stay with XP, but I had more than enough hardware to support it, so I thought "what the heck". Now I feel like I'm in one of those Mac commercials. Here are some of the issues I'm facing.

• When I first booted up Vista, I made the mistake of setting what I intended to be my personal user ("Vinnie") as the Administrator. I was told this is not a good idea for security reasons so I renamed the Administrator account to "Admin" and created a new "regular" user reusing the "Vinnie" account name. On the surface everything appeared OK until I wanted to find the files associated with my account. There are user folders for "Vinnie" and "Vinnie2". The "Vinnie" folder corresponds to my Administrator account. The "Vinnie2" folder corresponds to my "regular" account. When I renamed my Administrator account, why didn't Vista also rename the user files associated with this user?!? Dumb and annoying. I made a mistake, shouldn't the software be able to help me recover?
  
• I have a fairly popular Sansa mp3 player. When I connect it to Vista, I cannot manage all the music on the player. Many of the folders and files are not visible for some reason. I can see all the files if I reconnect the player to an XP machine. I can also access the files in Vista if I manually type in the folder and file names . What gives? In frustration, I accidentally "bricked" my player trying to resolve this issue. I'm hoping I can get the player back in working order with Rockbox.
  
• On XP, I used Photoshop Elements to categorize my photos. Since Vista has a "Compatibility Mode" I was hopeful this wouldn't be a problem. (Insert manual buzzer here) Wrong!
  
• I sill haven't been able to read in my Photoshop catalog on Vista (again it reads in with no problem on a XP machine with a clean Photoshop install)
  
• The application has many odd display artifacts and Adobe Update causes the entire application to crash.
• Every time I start the application I get a message telling me that I do not have Administrator privileges and some functionality will not work correctly. There is no way to disable this message, and running as Administrator poses additional annoyances (see below).
  
• You can set up applications to run with Administrator privileges. Unfortunately every time you start the application you need to provide the Administrator credentials. Shouldn't there be a way to say:

  "Hey this application will not run how it's supposed to without Administrator privileges. I know this is not the ideal way to run, but there's no other way. I trust this program, so don't ask me for the cotton picking password everytime I need to run this app!"

• I've also noticed that when I need to provide Admin access to install an Application, those credentials carry over to when I start the Application, placing any user information into the "Administrator" user folder instead of my "regular" user folder. Am I now running as the Administrator? Shouldn't the Administrator credentials only be needed approve the application install? What a joke! (This behavior goes away if I log out, then log in again.)

Apple is winning over the "average PC user", because their products simply work. I never hear an Apple (or iPod or iPhone) user complain of the problems I'm facing with my Vista PC or mp3 player, or cell phone. And again, it's why they can charge a premium for their products. For Apple it's not about the number of functions, it about the functionality.