The Left Side of the Moon

Too Cool

I had a meeting with a company I do quite a bit of work for lately, lets just say they buy and sell used machine parts. I've built them online applications that allows vendors from all over the country to sell them parts. Today I was able to tour their warehouse where they're receiving these parts and sorting them for re-sale or scrap. These parts are all invoiced online and marked with UPC tags generated and printed from the application I built for them. At the moment, they're still typing the codes into a computer to log them, but they're planning to be able to do this with scanning guns before long. It's amazing to see the reality of the whole system actually working, to see my tags on the parts in these orders. Very cool.

Problems, Errors, and WTF

I am a geek. I know this. I'm at peace with it. I bought a book to read in the car on the way to PA - Coldfusion 8 Advanced Applications. Nothing says geek like that when it comes to a nice vacation read, not even Gone with the Wind, which, yes, I've been informed, has been made into a movie.

I've been building web applications for years now, and along with new development, much of my job is supporting and enhancing the systems I've already built. Some of them are quite large. I get calls and emails all the time about problems with the system. At least half the time, it's not even a problem it's user error. I spent an hour the other day tracking a problem of data that was supposedly not getting imported into a system, only to come to the conclusion that someone on the other end was deleting it after it imported. Now, that's frustrating, and things like that happen all the time. Problem is, I don't know if it's a real issue or not until I spend an hour or so tracking and investigating it. Like the print problem we're having in one application, where sometimes the font shrinks down so small you can't read it. I haven't tracked it down to a particular browser, page size, or any consistency. I'm baffled. It may just be a bug. Not my bug, the language's bug. I'm not sure there's a damn thing I can do about it. We're planning on upgrading them to a new server, with the latest software, etc. That might do it.

Today, I fixed an issue with an automated email application, resolved a perplexing data type mis-match error when comparing two strings (completely useless and incorrect error message), and still haven't rectified the bizarre jrun 500 error in a data export. The export's been running almost a year. I'm assuming it has to be a server issue. Some space or permissions problem. But as Scarlet would say, "I can't possibly think about that now. I'll go crazy if I do. I'll think about it tomorrow."

And while I was working on all this craziness today, Outlook decided to flip the hell out on my brand-spanking-new computer. I'm trying to watch the data export in Firefox and Outlook keeps popping up. I keep minimizing it. It keeps popping up again. I close it. It opens back up again. I go to the task manager and shut Outlook down. It opens back up again. WTF, Microsoft. Seriously, W - T - F. I could use IE without getting interrupted, but not FF. Someone at Microsoft is pointing and lauging. I can hear you! You suck! I'll use FF if I damn well please. You will not be the boss of me. Rebooting corrected this, but that should NOT have been necessary.

Sometimes in complex applications and shopping carts, data gets lost. We're pretty good at tracking this. I have websites set to email me when users generate errors. There are error logs we can check if someone has experienced problems. Usually, there's a trail if you look hard enough for it. But the internet can be a crazy and mysterious place. Sometimes I feel like it's half voodoo. I have had people ask me, when I've tried to explain possible causes for their problems, if I was on drugs. No people. I'm not on drugs, and I'm not putting you on. Web browsers are not the web developers friend. Strange and unforeseeable shit can happen out there. And seeing that there's always new upgrades, new versions, new patches, new standards - you can never know it all. It's not just me. Dell lost my order for my brand-spanking-new computer. I printed the confirmation/specs. They had notta. I tried to renew my car registration online with the DMV. Entered in all my info, car insurance info, only to receive an error message - twice. I used snail mail to renew it.

One of the problems I've been having is with a browser coming through listed as Mozilla 8.0. Mozilla was originally Netscape and is now Firefox. Netscape is basically obsolete. FF is at version 4.0. WTF is Mozilla 8.0?

Anyway, you can tell work has gotten to me today. See, and you thought I didn't work at all, you silly gooses. No, I blog so as not to lose my mind while I'm dealing with all these crazy problems and geeky stuff.

And soon I get to go to the movies with the girls. Maybe even drinks after the movies! Yeah, a wild night for me! Holy hell internet, sienora baby. I've had my fill of you today. Go annoy someone else.

Spam, Spam and More Spam

No, this post is not about canned meat. It's about spam email, the bane of many an email providers existence, the source of constant irritation to all of us who use it. Spam accounts for somewhere between 70%-90% of all email. It fluctuates a great deal from day to day. You can read more about it here, if you're so inclined.

We use an email filtering company called Postini for our email, to keep as much of the junk, porn, and viruses out of the email we deliver to our clients as possible. But there's just no way to catch it all, and the spammers are getting more and more devious all the time. Lately we've been having problems with spammers high-jacking domain names and using associated emails to spoof from, essentially using someone else's email address to spam. These users call up complaining because as the spam goes out, inevitably some of the email addresses are not valid and the email gets bounced back to the sending address. So now all of the sudden you start seeing tons of messages getting bounced back to you because someone else is using your address to send spam. There's not much we can do about this. It's almost like getting your credit card stolen except without the financial headache. You could cancel the account if you want, but that's extremely inconvenient if you're using it for professional purposes. Or you can wait for it to stop, because what the spammers tend to do is high-jack the addresses for a few days to a week and then move onto the next guy.

In our office, we consider email as fundamentally broken. When 90% is crap no one wants, it's a serious problem. We spend over $6,000 a year to have our customers' email filtered and we're only a small company. We're constantly taking calls from irritated or irate customers who are still seeing graphic porn or other offensive, inappropriate, and unwanted advertisements in their email box. Not to mention the time spent helping to resolve email issues, block holes in the network spammers have found, adding extra scripting to contact forms to prevent spammers and crawlers from sending spam through them, the cost of the bandwidth necessary to handle all of this email, even though most of it's junk. Spending time on the phone getting Yahoo or AOL or Google to accept email from our servers again because they've blocked us because someone's been spamming through us somehow. It's truly a disaster.

How do we fix it? No one seems to have answer. So we just keep trying to improve our system for blocking the spam before it gets delivered, paying thousands of dollars to handle the volume of traffic created by all the junk. And there's really no end or solution in sight.

The Big Career Change

Hating your job is not a fun position to be in. Once I decided my days in the teaching field were numbered, I had no idea what my next career move was going to be. I seriously considered getting a MS in Library Science and becoming a librarian, but as much as I love books, that just didn't seem like the right place for me. But that started me thinking, becoming a librarian actually required a science degree, and a lot of computer courses. The World Wide Web was really just getting started when I graduated high school in 1993. Our computer programming class took place on old Radio Shack computers in PASCAL. I managed to get all the way through college using a computer mainly to word process only. I was barely capable of emailing and rarely researched online. My first big exposure to the internet was once I started teaching and encountered the big technology push at the high schools.

The school I worked at had two computer labs - one Mac and one PC, and the library also was equipped with 25 PC's. My students not only used the computer labs to type their essays and reports, they also used them for research, creating Power Point presentations, and even building web pages. All of this I needed to help them do as part of my job as their English Teacher. And while I had utterly no experience doing any of this, I found I took to it like a duck to water. I didn't need training to navigate the web, or help students determine which sites were reputable to use as sources of documentation. I found Power Point intuitive and had no problem helping students when they became stuck, or pretended to become stuck. The kids who ventured into building websites, well, there I became a bit lost. But those kids didn't need my help and were all too willing to teach me all about it. And so it didn't take too long for me to decide that the WWW, and not the classroom, was where I belonged. While it may appear at first glance that the career jump I made was a large one and that there is no linear transition between an English Teacher and a Website Programmer, it turns out that that's not an entirely valid assumption. Being an English Teacher lead me to my current career. It's almost as if I needed to be there in order to get where I was going.

For me, there's a great deal of similarity between the world of writing and the world of coding. They're both about languages that require valid arguments, logical structure and proper syntax. I think that this is part of the reason that my two strongest subjects were always English and Math. History and Science were just not my thing, which I know is a bit odd, because as the stereotype goes - you tend either to do better in English and History or Math and Science. Not that my grades were always great in Math, because they weren't. My highest grades were always in English and then it tended to be a toss up between which class I had a better or easier teacher in. But when it came to all the standardized testing, I always scored way better in Math than I did in English. Which as a teenager, I really didn't understand because I didn't do exceptionally well in Math at school, and English, the subject I loved and excelled at, I didn't test that well in. But what I discovered as I got older is, my real strength, where I always score top of the charts, is in logic - and that's why I scored well in Math on the standardized tests.

Logic is not going to help you memorize names and dates in History, or the phylums, classes, species and periodic table in Science. I hated rote memorization. I liked reading and writing and expressing myself.  And while I've never loved Math, and wouldn't want it to be a part of my daily job, I certainly have some capability (though I'm not sure I have the capability to pass Calculus at the moment).

I find myself with an unusual background in my current career. I enjoy it and it suits me, but I am not your typical geek programmer. I haven't been doing this since the internet existed, I am not a gamer, I am not trying to come up with the next billion dollar idea (MySpace, E-Bay, Amazon, Google), I do not custom build computers for fun, or spend my free time hacking. Sometimes I feel like I'm really not enough of a geek for my field, but then building web applications and websites isn't ALL about the coding either.  There is also a certain amount of artistic ability and project management involved. And having the ability to communicate and use the English language effectively, well that always tends to be a bonus.

And what I find myself spending most of my time doing, is problem solving. How do I achieve the outcome my client is looking for? Where is the bug that is crashing my application? Where have I gone wrong in my syntax? What is the error in my logic that is causing erroneous results? So I have found a job that puts my logic skills to good use, that constantly challenges me in new ways, where I'm always learning something new. It so beats teaching Romeo and Juliet for the ten-thousandth time.

 

FYI

I know I'm not the only one who gets tired of answering the same question repeatedly. I have just been asked this question for the umpteenth time by a client.

"Also in this screen I was wondering why some of the fields are white and some are tan colored."

When you go to a form page and some of the fields appear as yellow or tan, that means these fields are recognized by your browser as field names that you have entered data into previously. So fields which are commonly named phone, email, address, city, etc. - the browser can auto-complete them for you if you have filled such fields out before. Even if you filled them out on another website.

You may not care, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Just to be sure that you don't ask me in the future.

The Job, The Magic, The Headache

Saying your a web developer these days can mean just about anything. Any one with a computer and Front Page or Dreamweaver can slap together a website. I'm not one of those people. It's an interesting job because it encompasses so many different knowledge bases and specialties and requires you to have exactly none of those skills.

In order to put together a website you need to have some graphic skills. You need to be creative, have an eye for color and balance and flair for design. You must know how to use Photoshop, Fireworks, ImageReady and/or Illustrator. Many clients like the bells and whistles. You need to know Flash and how to create animations. You must have some knowledge of video and how to get that on a website. Almost every company these days is looking for more than just a pretty site, they want functionality. If they're not looking for a shopping cart to sell their goods and process their orders, then they want an online intranet system. Something their employees or contractors can login to from anywhere and input data. They want that data to interface with their internal databases and import and export the data from the web server to their internal network. They want to automate these imports and exports so they don't have to be run by hand. They want a company that answers the phone when they reach a crisis and they want their website updated yesterday. They want to update their website with no knowledge of html and you need to be able to explain to them in plain English how you're going to make all this happen. This task is particularly difficult when you have to explain what a domain name is and how to re-fresh a web page in their browser.

As you might well imagine the graphic, programming, networking and communications skills are not often found in one package. While I have at times had to do a little of all these things, I am by nature a programmer. I handle data. I specialize in programming in ColdFusion and build custom systems. I enjoy what I do. Most people eyes glaze over when I start to talk about it, but to have a huge application launch and start to run nationally is quite amazing. I love problem solving and de-bugging errors. I like to listen to the clients needs and feel my brain start to churn out ways that I can acheive what they want. I take what starts off as a mere wish, need or desire and make it a reality. On more than one occasion I've been referred to as a magician.

But today, my head hurts and I'm feeling overwhelmed. There is simply so much to know and I wish I knew more. My Photoshop skills could be more adept. I wish I had mastery of Javascript and SQL instead of needing to look stuff up all the time. I would love the opportunity to learn Oracle. I'm still getting accostommed to our new Plesk server and phpMyAdmin database interface. I'm hoping we purchase a copy of ColdFusion 8 soon, it seems to have some really cool new features. We have many clients requesting image options that are going to be built into this new version. But yet this will be a whole new realm of learning, questions, incompatibility and new features to learn. In the mean time I am so busy with the myriad of projects I am working on that range from sports and yoga, to automotive supplies and realty companies, marketing firms and hospitals that I am just trying to keep my head above water.