Poonam Lall

Intellectual Property Theft?

2004-07-23T14:37:00Z

Looking through the OdeToCode weblogs for the past week, I noticed that we have been getting referrals to some articles from a site called SSWUG (SQL Server Wordwide Users Group). This is something I consider a good thing - we write articles for the developer community and feel good when other sites, blogs, newsgroups link to them. Out of curiosity however I browsed over to the SSWUG site to check them out and see in what context they were linking to our articles - http://www.sswug.com/see/19274 or http://www.sswug.org/see/19275

It seems that SSWUG is a membership site. To view the OdeToCode articles, you need not only to register on their site, but need to pay a membership fee. Does anyone else think this is unethical?

To lift an article from another website, without informing us, let alone asking, put up a teaser abstract, but to ‘Read this article…’, I need to register and pay a membership!!!!!! In this case Scott and I wrote these articles, and we choose to share them with the developer community – FREE. It’s our way of giving back, to this community.

It makes me wonder, how many o the 16556 Articles/Summary or 470 Scripts on this site have been “stolen“? How many other ‘reputable’ websites do this sort of thing? What is the difference between theft and what SSWUG is doing?

Outsourcing

2004-05-13T23:05:00Z

Off shoring – it never seems to go away from the news and now there are grass root organizations to protest the exporting of American jobs overseas. I have really mixed feelings about it.

Concern – I am an IT professional, and exporting my job overseas to people who can do it for much less is worrisome to say the least. I have bills to pay and a life style to support. I don’t get an exorbitant salary, off shoring has already hurt me. What I earn today is the same as what I earned in 2000. The IT bust together with IT jobs going overseas has had an impact on my economic well being.

Economic Good Sense – I do understand that in a global economy, businesses need to be as cost effective as possible to remain competitive. If you can buy products cheaper don’t you? Why should business be held to a different standard? Additionally Out sourcing provides businesses with a relatively painless mechanism to expand and shrink services and manpower based on their current need while freeing themselves emotionally from the rigors of ‘pink slipping’ their employees. As a consumer I have benefited from this practice – the 24 in TV I bought last year is cheaper then the 13 in one I bought in 1990, and I am sure the reason has a lot to do with the fact that it is made in Korea. How many of us have Japanese cars, and most of us will admit that ‘exporting American car manufacturing jobs’ overseas, not only made cars cheaper, but improved the quality of American cars.

Coming back to concern however, if I don’t have a job, I am not going to be able to afford a new car or TV, cheap or otherwise. And what is it that I am expected to do to support myself when my job no longer exists? The argument often made that low-paying and low-skilled jobs are being exported is misleading and disingenuous at minimum. I’m not sure I would consider programmers unskilled workers (by and large they have at minimum graduate degrees, a lot of them post-graduate degrees), and low-paid they may be compared to CEO pay scales, but compared to the average American worker, they are not. What is it that we should retrain ourselves to do? As I see it there are only two kinds of jobs which will not be outsourced, a job which requires physical proximity, this could be the restaurant waitress, the grocery store attendant, the garbage collector, the policeman the fireman and doctors (Unfortunately I think its too late for me to go through 7 years of Medical school now). Very hard to out source those jobs. The other job staying in the US, is that of people making the decision to out source jobs. I still haven’t heard of any CEO / CFO saying he could find a person in India or Mexico who could do his job at cents on the dollar.

Equally concerning to me is the level of hate / mistrust and racial abuses being hurled at countries where the out sourced jobs go. I am an Indian by birth; I have lived and worked in the US for 15 years. Yes I am very worried about my job, but the culture of hate worries me as much. Indians, Mexicans, Americans alike have the right to earn a decent wage, and in a global economy it stands to reason that we are all competing for the same jobs. Yes it does seem that ‘they’ have an unfair advantage, the cost of living in countries like Mexico and India is so much lower, that they can work for much lower wages. The economists tell us in 10 / 20... Years the cost of living in these countries will rise to the level where they will not have this 'unfair' edge any more – I'm just not sure how I am going to pay my bills till then.

As I said before I have very mixed feeling about out sourcing – the only thing I do know is that fear (and yes we are scared about losing our jobs) should never be a driving force for action.

Interviews

2004-02-25T03:59:00Z

Yesterday was interview day! We're looking for a junior developer, 1 or 2 years out of school, with a bit of experience / exposure to Microsoft Technologies. We use .NET, C# and SQL and I expect to have to train them some, (I'm not expecting a Chris Sells or Rory Byth to come walking through my door looking for a Jr. Developers job). A brief synopsis of my 3 candidates yesterday - all of them are CS graduates, and all have the required 1-2 years experience, and each one has spent the last year working in .NET (either VB or C#) and claims to be reasonably proficient in SQL.

Excerpts from the SQL Interview

Question : What's a clustered index?

Candidate 1 : A class what? Can you say that again?

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : Is that in SQL or in .NET?

Question : What's an index?

Candidate 1 : You put an index on a column like 'Customer Name' when you want to do a search on Customers. It makes the query run faster.

Me : Can you have more then 1 index on a table

C1 : I don’t think so but I'm not sure.

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : I don’t know, is that like a primary key?, that’s something you have to have on every table, but I haven't heard of indexes really.

Me : Didn’t you say you did a semester on Relational Databases in college?

C2 : Yes, but I'm pretty sure they didn’t cover indexes.

Question : Well you've been working with SQL Server for the past year, what did you do when queries performed badly?

Candidate 1 : Well we had one query which was slow, so we ran a batch job at night which aggregated the data and then ran the query on the aggregated data.

Candidate 2 : Our queries were fine, we never had a problem.

Candidate 3 : We had one query which was very inefficient, it was a directory list of all the employees. So we made Employee Name the Primary Key for our Employee Master instead of Employee Number.

A question on GROUP BY somehow got converted into an ORDER BY - I guess they both have 'BY' so that’s close enough. All three of them used embedded SQL in their code, and not stored procedures, on asking why, one said stored procedures were much harder to write, the other said he had a unrealistic deadline for the project and didn’t have the time to learn stored procedures and the third said his boss / mentor didn’t like them. There really was no point going any further with SQL, none of them knew what an index was.

Ok, I thought, so SQL wasn’t going well so, lets try programming languages. All of them had studied C++ and Java in college. Two worked on C# apps for the past year and one on a VB.Net app.

Question : What is the difference between a public, protected and private member in C#

Candidate 1 : A public member is accessible to everyone, a private within the class it belongs - I never used a protected one so I don’t know.

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : He knew it (thank god - I was ready to start crying)

Question : What's option explicit?

The VB candidate : You know I've seen it used in the application on which I was working and always wondered what it did. Can you tell me?

Question : So you've worked with both C# and C++, can you tell me some of the differences and if you like one over the other?

C# candidate 1 : I like C# more, its easier

Me : Why?

C1 : C++ does a lot of strange things, which C# doesn’t allow

Me : Could you elaborate?

C1 : Um - I read that some where

C# Candidate 2 : In C# I can drag and drop controls, in C++ I cant.

OK - no luck here either, So lets see what they know about ASP.NET or just ASP or just anything at all.

Question : So you've worked with ASP and ASP.NET, what are the differences, what you like or dislike about ASP.NET

Candidate 1 : Well its nice to separate the UI from the business logic so I like ASP.NET.

Me :(thinking - this is a reasonable answer - I don’t want to ask a follow-up question because he might blow it and I'd be very depressed)

Candidate 2 : Um…..

Candidate 3 : ASP.NET is nice, you can drag and drop everything, but its too big, it has too many libraries and no one can know all of them. I wish they had made it smaller.

Well it went on and on - by the end of the day I had a splitting headache and was truly depressed. Today, having had a day to reflect, I am angry as well.

What are universities teaching these days. I would have thought public, private, protected would be something covered in the first semester, probably first lecture of a c++ course. Even a databases 101 class should make at minimum a reference to indexes and what they are. Who are these people teaching and why are we allowing them to teach?

More disturbing, is these kids learnt nothing at their jobs either. They hadn't heard of Source Control, didn’t understand what I meant when asked about their CM processes, and the only testing they had heard of was unit testing - the application moved directly from their desktop into a production environment. Who are these people in charge of Software development and why are they in charge?

Why software developers have a bad reputation

2004-02-24T03:38:00Z

Its tax time again, which means that I am once again struggling with my various bank accounts, IRA's, 410k's. I expect to struggle with this, I'm no financial wizard and the tax laws were evidently written by people who were doped out of their collective minds. What I don’t expect to struggle with, is the downloading my accounts into MS-MONEY.

Believe me this has not been easy. Lets take American Express for example, I have an AMEX card, an IRA and I use their online bank. The card and brokerage account I can set up from within Money, the online bank requires me to log into my bank account and download a file which is subsequently imported in. In fact their online bank does not even exist in the list of Financial Institutions. Fidelity for some reason allows you to download their brokerage accounts into MS-Money or Quicken, but for some reason thinks you have no need to be able to download your 401K. My favorite however is Legg Mason. I couldn’t find any documentation on how to download my 401K into MS-Money but I did find this gem about Quicken on their FAQ

How do I set up and download my account into Quicken?

Click on Section Guide called TRANSACTION HISTORY. Once there you will have an option to "Download Transaction History File" and by selecting that option you can download your selected range of 401(k) account transactions to wherever you want.

You need to download and save it as a text file. Then you can open it in Excel, set the column parameters and then upload it into Quicken.

Quicken has accepted Excel files in the past as some of us have used Quicken before and as far as we know it should still do so. However, their specs might have changed. We will try to locate a copy of Quicken and check on that further.

What strikes me as being truly sad, is how easy it to write this code. Not doing it, or providing this half-baked solution which may or may not work 'cos we're just too damn lazy to find out' shows not only total disregard for the user, but a lack of pride in your work, and a lack of professionalism.

And we wonder why software developers have a bad reputation.

The News

2004-02-12T07:07:00Z

So today I decided I’d take a break from my normal routine of reading blogs, looking at code and such like. Thought I’d read the news instead, find out what was happening around me, get my finger on the pulse of the nation as it were. Based on todays experience I have decided to make reading the news a weekly feature - it is definately more entertaining and enlightening the what the mainstream media has been handing out namely Kobe Bryant Janet Jackson and Martha Stewart.

Lunch-time breast lifts?
Women can get lunch-time injections of Botox and various facial fillers, and now researchers in Sweden may have found a way to boost a woman's breast size during the lunch hour as well. In the near future, Rohrich says, injections of hyaluronic acid, a compound used to fill fine lines and wrinkles, could be used to do temporary breast enhancement. Peering into his crystal ball, Rohrich forecasted what else may be on the distant horizon, including grow-your-own breast implants. “We may one day make our own implants from our own fat where surgeons harvest fat via liposuction and stimulate it to grow," Rohrich says, "so it will be natural but to grow that amount of fat and grow it consistently may be years and years away."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3972625

Yellow Snow Leads To Arrest

Elko police arrested Roger Gray, 25, on the basis of yellow snow he left after relieving himself on the rooftop of a restaurant that had been burglarized. Investigators said the evidence produced enough DNA to link Gray to the scene.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040209/D80K1GIO0.html

American Airlines Pilot Suggests Passengers Discuss Christianity on Flight

An American Airlines pilot asked Christians on his flight to identify themselves and suggested the non-Christians discuss the faith with them, the airline said. The case was handed over to the airline's personnel department for an investigation, spokesman Tim Wagner said Sunday. "It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," he said earlier.

May not be appropriate????? I'm not sure whether the pilots remarks or the spokesmens were more inappropriate

Winning at any cost

Three livestock exhibitors at last year's Ohio State Fair have been disqualified for allegedly outfitting their Holstein cows with hairpieces. State Fair inspectors said the three glued or painted hair from another part of the animal or from another animal to create straighter backs on the cows and enhance their appearance in the show ring.

The Bride Wore Black Because the Groom Was Dead

NICE, France (Reuters) - A 35-year-old French woman has married her boyfriend 18 months after he was killed in a car accident. Christel Demichel, who wore black, was married Tuesday under a little-used law in the presence of friends and relatives at city hall in the southern city of Nice, local officials said. It would have been her husband Eric's 30th birthday. "Eric and I promised when he was alive that we would get married," she told French television. "Even though he is dead, I respect the values I shared with him, especially as his death was not his fault."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=573&e=7&u=/nm/20040211/od_nm/marriage_dc

Christel - I don't think its normally a dead persons fault that he is dead.

It’s a dog’s world

ED FALLS, Ohio - Dogs in this Cleveland suburb have something to bark about. OLMST City Council unanimously approved a law Tuesday requiring doghouses to be waterproof and lined with bedding that resists dampness. The houses also must be equipped with self-closing doors or flaps.

Removed from the final law was a provision that required dog owners to bring their pets inside if the temperature dips below 20 degrees.

Men march demanding freedom to wear skirts

."We're not transvestites, homosexuals or cross-dressers," David Johnson told the New York Times for Sunday editions. "We don't want you to call us Jean or Sally. We're men - men who want the right to wear a skirt."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/02/08/offbeat.men.skirts.ap

Football seats mark man's grave

Paul Wellener's family found the perfect marker for his grave: two blue plastic seats from the Three Rivers Stadium auction. Wellener, a lifelong football fan and a Pittsburgh Steelers season ticket holder for 42 years, died unexpectedly on March 16. Wellener's son, Paul, and widow, Mary Ann, bought three pairs of stadium seats for $2,100 at an auction — and knew they had found the perfect gravestone.

Man receives death notice from Pentagon

General Peter Schoomaker has a message for the bureaucrats at the Pentagon -- he's not dead.

His untimely passing was news to the Army chief of staff -- until his notice arrived at his home in Tampa, Florida. His demise was certainly a surprise to his wife. But there is a reasonable explanation. Schoomaker came out of retirement to take the top Army job. So when his name was dropped from the retired officers payroll, Pentagon accountants figured it was for the usual reason -- death.

This confirms what I have long suspected, no one in the army knows what anyone else in the army is doing

Intoxicated drivers take note: Don't ask your 10-year-old daughter to drive you home.
Angela Michelle Brown, 37, was charged Monday with child endangerment and driving under the influence of alcohol after authorities said she got drunk and used her 10-year-old daughter as a designated driver.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-210designateddriver,0,2704745.story

My vote for the stupidest person

Why does everyone think they can be a Microsoft Developer?

2004-01-26T04:37:00Z

I work at a small startup – owned by a medical doctor who is also the CEO of the company. Leaving work one Friday evening, I noticed a book, ‘Learn SQL in a Weekend’ lying in his office. On Monday morning, he had evidently learnt enough SQL to let me know triggers were the answer to all our problems.

This got me thinking, why is it that everyone thinks they can be a developer. I don’t believe reading Gray’s Anatomy (abridged), qualifies me to give medical advice, or scanning through the Wall Street Journal is qualification enough to run a Fortune 500 company. Ok that might not be a great example – looking at the way some of them are run – I probably couldn’t do any worse – but I digress.

But getting back to the point – the perception seems to be, that writing software is not a profession, which requires intelligence, training or skill. Why is this?

The worst culprits are the authors of books with names like ‘Learn SQL in a weekend’, ‘C++ for dummies’ or ‘Learn C# in 21 days’. If you think you can learn SQL in a weekend, you shouldn’t be writing a book on SQL – you don’t know anything about it, and dummies cannot learn C++, they can become the president perhaps, but C++ requires basic intelligence. I don’t see a doctor writing a book about ‘Learn Brain Surgery in 21 days’ or a lawyer writing one called ‘Bar Exams for Dummies’. Doctors and lawyers and teachers and any other profession I can think of, will let you know how much work it took to acquire the skills they have.

A DBA I worked with in the past had obviously learnt SQL in a Weekend. We came close to losing our only client because he couldn’t differentiate a LEFT JOIN from a RIGHT JOIN or an INNER JOIN and for some reason felt a FULL OUTER JOIN would solve the problem. It took us 12 days to load data into the data mart we were building using his stored procedures. After we got our hands on his load script, we got it to load the data mart in under 6 hours. Why is it that any hack thinks its possible to be a MS-SQL DBA. I’ve never seen an accountant or school teacher or graphics designer one day decide to read ‘ORACLE in a weekend’ and become an ORACLE DBA.

PDA's Useful or Not

2004-01-24T03:46:00Z

About a year ago I felt pressured into buying a PDA. All my friends had them, even the ones who regularly call me up to ask me how to send email attachments. My colleagues at work, had them on their desks and would hot sync them with their computers at work and home and tell me how useful it was. At meetings, I would pull out my notepad to make notes, and every one else would pull out their PDA’s. Well to make a long story short, since I love gadgets, I had to get myself a PDA.

So now that it’s been a year since I had my Dell Axim, I thought it might be a good time to evaluate it , and see how much and for what I use it.

I have all the phone numbers and addresses of friends and family on my PDA, I hot synced it with my PC, but till date I have never looked up an address on my PDA, I haven’t felt the urge at a restaurant or at the grocery store when my computer isn’t handy to look up anyone’s address. As far a phone numbers are concerned, they are all on my cell phone. It seems kind of dumb to look them up on my PDA and then enter the number on the cell phone.

I did try entering notes, things to do, grocery lists on my PDA but I ran into a few snags with this.

1. The PDA hates my handwriting, I spent hours trying to teach it, but p’s become b’s and f’s become t’s and since I don’t seem to dot my 'i’s, they either show up as ‘e’ or ‘l’. On the plus side, its sometimes very interesting to look at what I’ve just written, not what I wanted to write - but then the same can be said about some of the code I write too.

2. The stylus (if you decide not to go the handwriting route) and the PDA keyboard are designed specifically to waste time and strain your eyes.

3. Grocery shopping is not much fun with a PDA in one hand, pushing a cart with the other, while putting my glasses on. After a few attempts, I reverted to making my lists using Outlook Notes and printing them out.

4. I thought I would use it to keep track of business appointments or social engagements. Since I’m always at work when business appointments are made and I find it so much easier to type it into outlook using a PC keyboard rather then the evil stylus, I tend to do that. Of course I hot sync it with my PDA so that incase Outlook forgot to remind me, my PDA would. And yes the social engagements, did I mention I’m a developer – I don’t have a social life.

This is not to say that I find PDA’s totally useless, remember those colleagues I mentioned, the ones who would ceremoniously pull out there PDA’s and pretend to take notes – well I discovered they were actually reading Internet articles they had downloaded – which I have discovered makes meetings a lot more pleasant.

Also if you download a few crucial maps of your area from Mappoint and hook up a GPS to your PDA, well you don’t have to buy a new car with a GPS system.

Since I am cheap however (probably obvious from the observation that a PDA + handheld GPS = new car with GPS), I need to get more for the $300+ I spent for this. I am trying to persuade my boss, that we should be developing software for the PDA. Not only would I get more use out of it, I might find it reason enough to carry it in my purse rather then have it look like a beautiful paperweight on my desk.

Murdering the English Language

2004-01-17T19:14:00Z

I recently received an email from an elderly aunt, which got me thinking about the state of the English language. The email was peppered with words like ‘u’ ‘yrself’ ‘hv’ ‘luv’ ‘wld’. This is a person in her 60’s, a college graduate, who speaks perfect English, and writes very well. In the days before she found email, I would get long newsy letters handwritten letters, which used sentence case, were grammatically correct, had no spelling mistakes and no abbreviations either.

Using abbreviations on messenger is understandable – I do it myself. Messenger is a form of conversation using a keyboard. Spoken language has always been more informal than the written word, and since it is instant communication, abbreviating words, to increase speed of communication makes sense.

Email however is an alternative to pen and paper. What is considered unacceptable in a letter is unacceptable in an email as well. It’s only the delivery mechanism for communication that has changed. I get emails however from clients, who evidently believe that using sentence case is optional, resumes from job seekers, who either haven’t heard about spell check or believe in creative spelling.

It’s easy to blame technology for all evils, but I believe the problem is more intrinsic. Take a look at our history , and the language with which thoughts and ideas were communicated

In the 18^th century there was

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

In the 19^th century we heard

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

In the 20^th

‘ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.’

And

‘I have a dream’

In the 21^st century what we are left with is

‘Lets roll