Everything In Between

I heard a crazy thing today.

There is an expectation of overtime in [the technology] industry. I don’t think anyone’s surprised by that.

Um, I’m surprised by that. That’s why they call it overtime. It’s over(what is expected)time. Otherwise it would just be called moretime or something that doesn’t imply the fact that a particular measurement has been exceeded.

Of course, I’m not really surprised by that. I have been facing this expectation ever since I began working at 16, and since then I have been working some “overtime” hours, most of them unpaid. Surprised? No. Incredulous? Yes.

It strikes me as particularly insane to let my lack of surprise for such a thing turn into complacency, as the vast majority of people I have always shared office space with have seemed to do. Some go so far as to volunteer overtime hours, which always leaves me with a puzzled look on my face.

One of the primary issues for me is to have some choice in the matter. Flexibility is freeing (even if it has to be legislated), and enhances productiveness by increasing a worker’s efficiency. An expectation of overtime (or anything) is accompanied with an implicit ultimatim: do X or else Y. This is even more evident when other people volunteer X and I don’t, and it creates an environment that culturally strengthens the expectation of X. There’s a phrase for this: it’s called peer pressure.

American workers are indoctrinated with a system of reward: “work hard—play hard.” This is not really so bad, it models the reality of many situations quite realistically (i.e., not everything is perfect or enjoyable all the time), and it’s generally a good if simplistic approach to a holistic life.

Until you realize that this work culture places more importance on work than on play. This is a Bad Thing. The reason this is so bad is because it informs every decision employers (and to my astonishment, many employees) make: that they should always sacrifice “play” in favor of “work” because the latter is percieved as more important.

Now, I realize to most of my colleagues and fellow white-collar Americans I am probably being written off as a lazy slob right about now, and I suppose there’s little avoiding that. However, if that is what you are doing I will challenge you to consider the following question: If work is so much more important than play, why the incredibly passionate concerns over quality of life, or fulfillment, or happiness, or personal satisfaction? Are you happy with your job? Does it provide for you these things you say you seek?

If so, I envy you, as do the massively overwhelming majority of other employed people. The sad truth is that for most people, many of whom don’t even know what it is they want (myself included to some degree), expectations of work being more important to me than, well, the rest of me, are absurd.

I am not saying that working jobs you don’t really want frees you of the comittments you made to tasks you have, if you have made such comittments. What I am saying is that the (ridiculous) expecation of work being more important doesn’t change those comittments. In other words, if I have a full-time job, I should be working whatever the definition of “full-time,” which in New York City is 40 hours per week. Working one minute over those 40 hours is, and should always be expected to be, optional.

Right now, that isn’t really the case, and it’s unfortunate because the rather arbitrary dogma of the 9-5 for every conceivable working environment set forth by Henry Ford in the early 1900′s is rapidly becoming ever more inappropriate to today’s working conditions. As the New Zealand Herald article I linked to above says:

“If employers were able to vary their working hours, and work more often from home, there would be real social, environmental as well as economic benefits,” Ms Kedgley said.

I sincerely believe this is true, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s such a foreign concept to most people. Even the people who talk about “work-life balance” often talk about it in a way that shows they clearly separate the idea of work from the idea of life. Instead, I think work should be viewed not as a “necessary evil” that just happens to be a part of life, but rather that people need to be enabled to find the ways that makes working, y’know, work for them.

Succeeding in that can only cause Good Things to happen for everyone.

If you are wondering why it seems that everyone today is so defensive, you need look no further than your own television set, or newspaper. Bruce Schneier says it best: stop the war on different. And, going hand-in-hand with that slogan: refuse to be terrorized.

Huzzah! Google (finally) updated GMail for free IMAP support. However, their setup instructions for Apple Mail stop short of actually completeing the configuration in a way that makes using GMail’s IMAP service feel seamless. Sure, everything will work fine, but how do you archive a message?

The answer is tricky: you have to drag the message into your “[GMail]/All Mail” folder way down hidden inside the nested list of IMAP mailboxes on the left-hand side of the Mail Viewer window. That’s hardly as easy as pushing GMail’s “Archive” button. So, if you really want to get the most of your GMail over IMAP in Apple Mail experience, you have to do all of the following:

1. First, of course enable IMAP for your account.
2. Second, follow all of Google’s instructions on their own configuration for Apple Mail page.
3. Next, set your account’s Mailbox Preferences in Mail to never delete email automatically and to store all messages of all types on GMail’s servers, as shown in the screenshot below:
   

   When this is done, close the Preferences window and save your changes.

4. Finally, these last few steps involve telling Apple Mail which GMail folders should be used for which purpose, such as your drafting folder, your sent mail folder, and so on. This is how you will map Apple Mail-native commands like “Delete” to GMail-native commands like “Archive.” To complete this process, perform the following steps:
   • Expand your GMail IMAP account in the list of mailboxes and also expand your “[GMail]” folder. You’ll see a third list of folders that include “All Mail,” “Drafts,” “Sent Mail,” “Spam,” “Starred,” and “Trash.”
   • Select the “Drafts” folder, and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Drafts from the menu bar.
   • Select the “Sent Mail” folder and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Sent from the menu bar.
   • Select the “Spam” folder and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Junk from the menu bar.
   • You’ve now mapped Drafts, Sent, and Junk to the proper GMail mailboxes, but still have Apple’s notion of the Trash mailbox. You can map this in one of two ways. Either you can map it to the “Trash” folder in which case you when you delete a message in Apple Mail you will also delete it from GMail, or you can map it to the “All Mail” folder in which case when you a delete a message in Apple Mail you will archive it in GMail. The choice is up to you.

That’s all. Now you have a much more Apple-like GMail over IMAP experience.

Update: Google have now added a support article in their GMail help that documents Google’s recommended GMail client settings for best performance. These are helpful supplemental tips for getting the most out of your Apple Mail-as-GMail-IMAP client.

There is always a ton of discussion about the business of programming by programmers and project managers alike. Of course, there are always (at least) two sides of this coin: the programmer and the client. For employed developers (such as myself), the client is typically also the employer, and this creates a situation that is extremely treacherous. A similar situation exists for system administrators—I know, I’ve been in that situation, too.

It’s frustrating that people’s lack of understanding about the various computer industries leads to situations that affect so many innocent bystanders. The fact that computer programmers and sysadmins (in the US) are currently considered ineligible for overtime pay because “all they do is implement someone else’s desires”, even though every computer professional knows how much independent thought and judgement is required in their everyday jobs to produce a quality result, is a classic example of this. (How sad is it that we actually have a “classic” example, by the way?)

In a recent post by Greg Jorgensen over at the Typical Programmer blog, Greg cites Joel Spolsky (programmer extraordinaire), as saying that working ’til midnight is a sure-fire way to get software projects to fail. However, while this is certainly sound reasoning as far as I can tell, what’s even more frustrating to me than being made to work long hours is having my desires for learning and skill development brushed off and made less important than the project deadlines.

Joel says that the first thing you can do to destroy the hope of a successful software project is to hire mediocre programmers, instead of the best ones. Greg makes the good point that we were all mediocre programmers once. How did we get better? Greg says,

The best way to use the people on the team and to help them gain experience is to have them work together as much as possible. Even without keyboard sharing it’s better to have programmers mentor and learn from each other than to let each carve out a domain no one else understands.

And indeed, search the job listings on any career search board and you’ll see companies trying to sell themselves to you in exactly that fashion. But once you’re hired, it’s often a very, very different tune. Suddenly your interests in skill development take a back seat to project deadlines, tight schedules, and more work. This is all, of course, understandable to some degree, but as an all-encompassing truism that provides no wiggle room, I can’t tolerate it.

What irritates me even further is that companies and recruiters only seem to seek the already-skilled. I may be fortunate to be on this list for some skills and so am thankfully not living on the street, but I know better than most that I am not a world-class programmer or an exceptional system administrator. Frankly, I think I am a mile wide and an inch deep in most of the things that I know. Thus, it is irritating that this isn’t seen as a skill when, in fact, it is the one thing that has given me the most success: my speciality is being a generalist, and my ability to learn new technologies’s baseline quickly is what’s enabled me to hold so many different kinds of tech jobs.

And why have I held so many different kinds of tech jobs? Because not a single job I’ve ever held has actually encouraged me (except on my own time, as opposed to on the company’s dime) to broaden my skill set. Frankly, broadening my skill set is why I like to work. And having employees who like to work seems like it would be good for business.

So why is skills development only paid lip service by every company I’ve ever worked for?

Things that are absolutely nuts:

• Net Neutrality is finally a completely obvious good thing, as opposed to just the sort of obvious good thing it used to be. (Of course, that issue isn’t really about Net Neutrality, but it’s at least tangentially related, which makes this bullshit an order of magnitude less bullshitty than what usually happens.)
• Verizon’s greed knows “unlimited” bounds.
• If we can’t impeach Bush, we can sue him, right? Yeah, that’s how we solve things in States.

In completely unrelated news, maybe here’s why I’m such a pessimist.

• This story of air pollution from leaded fuel sources being linked to violent behavior is eerily similar to the Reapers of Joss Whedon’s Serenity.
• GMail gets IMAP (finally!).
• I really am not that all different; I’m just ahead of my time. From the article:
  

  “Young people aren’t choosing computer science majors because they take technology for granted — it’s something to use not something to make a career. “By and large, this generation is very fluent with technology and with a networked world,” according to James Ware, executive producer at The Work Design Collaborative LLC, a Berkeley, Calif., consortium exploring workplace values and the future of the workforce. That future may be in managing technology, which requires skills today’s college students don’t have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up. One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance.”

  (Emphasis added.)

This is already horribly old news, and by old I mean several days ago since that’s about as fast as it takes technology news to grow old, but Apple is releasing Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” at the end of this month. Apple is calling this release a “major upgrade,” and indeed Apple has rarely made its users wait so long between operating system releases as they have done between Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) and Leopard. So, I’m already excited.

But then today I was glossing over Apple’s featured features list and I got even more excited. There are the usual, largely meaningless, fluff updates that are nice for Joe Schmo or his mother, but that power users simply don’t care about, like the new iChat support for animated buddy icons, but the list is also chock-full of really cool, really useful features.

What’s interesting is that a good deal of these features aren’t really new features at all. For instance, if you knew how to manipulate the NetInfo database on your Mac, you could already share any folder via Apple’s “Personal File Sharing” feature. (Here’s a Mac OS X Hints hint explaining how to do it.) In Leopard, however, Apple claims that this functionality is now integrated straight into a folder’s Get Info… window. If it works as smoothly as Apple claims, this is finally going to bring Mac OS X (client) into decent competition with Windows XP Professional in terms of GUI-level power-user features.

However, while all of these features are really cool, here’s a list of the ten geekiest features I will probably absolutely love, for one reason or another.

• Ruby on Rails, out of the box — The hot thing in web development right now is Ruby on Rails. Macs have already been the best personal desktop and web development platform because they have built-in support for the Apache web server and a host of other features, but now they will come with a ready-to-roll installation of Ruby on Rails, sporting Mongrel and (better yet) Capistrano! Specifically with the addition of Capistrano, which is terribly undersold as simply a Ruby on Rails deployment platform, these UNIX-y “toolbox” items are bound to make Macs that much more useful right out of the box.
• Safari’s full history search — As their recent public partnerships with Google have shown, Apple is very clearly invested in search technologies. Spotlight gets a huge number of improvements in Leopard, but none which I think are going to be more useful to more people than this one: spotlight searches on the full text of each web page in your visited history list. That’s just awesome. Also awesome: using spotlight as a calculator and as a dictionary, which also shows just how Google-like Apple is trying to be. (Google also lets you ask it arithmetic questions and a dictionary.)
• Wikipedia articles in Dictionary.app — I love Wikipedia because it’s one of the fastest ways to get (relatively) reliable information quickly. Now that Dictionary.app has built-in integration with Wikipedia, imagine the possibilities for getting that knowledge instant-gratification craving fixed. Apple has not yet announced this capability, but I can easily envision a scenario where all Cocoa text fields are instantly “wikified” (with text that matches Wikipedia articles highlighted) much in the same way that current Cocoa text fields allow you to right-click on a misspelled word and have it corrected by Dictionary.app.
• Application-based firewall — In classic Apple fashion, functionality that was previously available via third-party additions is now available from Apple itself. In this case, I have to wonder how well Apple’s updates to its firewall will obviate the need for Little Snitch, which is basically an application-based firewall, too, and a good one at that.
• Built-in guest log-in account — If you’re as paranoid about security as I am, you’ve already created a special, limited-access user on your system (called Guest or Visitor or whatever) and whenever friends are over, you tell them to use that account instead of your own. Now in Leopard, Apple has gone through the trouble of setting this up for us already. A small change that is going to have a big impact.
• Scriptable System Preferences & applications — With AppleScript, you can automate the things your computer does with scripts, as long as those things are “scriptable.” In previous versions of Mac OS X, huge gaping holes of what things shipped by Apple were scriptable existed, causing me (personally) some really annoying headaches. AppleScript GUI scripting helped me get around many of those roadblocks, but now it seems Apple is finally filling in some of the most notorious gaps in this functionality with scriptable System Preferences. Yay!
• Automator workflow variables — Automator brings the power of AppleScript I just mentioned to more people with a completely graphic programming environment. There is no need to open up a text document and write AppleScript code because Automator lets you create a script (called a Workflow in Automator jargon) using your mouse by dragging and dropping actions into the order you want them to be performed. It’s very slick, but until now it’s been very limited. With Leopard, Apple is beefing up Automator so that it includes things like variables, basic programmatic capability that was sorely lacking before. (Also majorly cool: a command-line utility to access Automator!)
• Finder.app’s path bar — Every serious Mac user knows that the Finder needs a lot of help. Now, it’s getting some. Something the Windows Explorer has had forever (as had every desktop environment for Linux, of course) is a visual cue to show you where in your filesystem tree a given folder is located when you are viewing said folder. Now the Finder gains this capability (though Apple’s description implies that it’s going to be off by default) with what Apple is calling a “Path Bar”. Finally!
• Cocoa and scripting bridges — Even though no one really seems to know about it, it has long been possible for languages other than AppleScript to do things like send Apple Events to Mac OS X applications. Specifically, Ruby and JavaScript, two of the most well-known web development languages in existence, can already do this with a single ScriptingAddition (OSAX). But now Apple is making this functionality a central feature and fully extending it to their Objective-C (and Cocoa) language and applications such as Xcode and Interface Builder. This means people like me will have a shallower learning curve before we’re able to create full-fledged, native Mac OS X applications. Now that’s exciting!
• Xcode 3 refactoring — This is something you kind of have to see to believe. I got the opportunity to see it demoed at Apple’s Leopard Tech Talks last year and I was really excited by it. With the new Xcode, Apple’s development IDE, you can do away with find-and-replace searches for things like renaming functions because Xcode understands what parts of your code are what structures and, when you tell it to “change the function named myFunction to myNewFunction,” it’ll only find-and-replace function names instead of every instance of the string “myFunction.” That’s pretty big, and if it were available for more languages, it’s almost enough to make me ditch vim.

So there you have it. Ten features you might not have already known about that are some of the most promising features I can see in Leopard. And I didn’t even get into Wide-Area Bonjour, which could make services like DynDNS or No-IP a thing of the past (and which I still want to learn more about), or the new Terminal application (finally with tabs!), or even the multiple user certificates for S/MIME encrypted email.

Note: One of the least known security features available on Mac OS X is also possibly one of the best, and the simplest. Evidently, all Intel-based Macs are shipped with the XD (aka. NX, aka. DEP) bit turned on—and thankfully there doesn’t seem to be any way for users to turn it off. However, this isn’t a silver bullet and if you want to learn why you should check out this excellent Anandtech article: A Bit About the NX Bit.

The government’s admission:

Millions of dollars that are supposed to fight terror are actually going to the very worst kind of pork barrel programs. Meanwhile, many real homeland security needs – like those in New York City – remain unmet.

Unfortuantely, this is usually what happens in any large organization. Money is budgeted, then siphoned off for supposedly useful purposes. The problem is that the people doing the grant-giving for certain purposes don’t know the first thing about what is needed to fulfill that need. The result is the worst of human nature: people apply for “free money” in the name of the grant-giver’s ideals.

See the report (PDF).

When I first saw this video showing Windows XP booting off an Intel iMac, I was really excited. Of course, Sara’s reaction was far more realistic:

I don’t see why it’s cool that an annoying program works on a good machine.

There’s a new book out today. It’s called Wireless Networking in the Developing World, and it’s available for free downloads online. I’ve already snatched my copy.

Even though it was written with the intention of making wireless telecommunications infrastructure more readily accessible to developing nations by means of educating implementors, I’ve already found it to be a useful reference and excellent learning tool to get a strong grounding on the considerations of setting up any wireless network. It starts you off with a grounding in radio physics, and then quickly goes through the stages of network design: the physical network infrastructure and the logical collision domains. It even has good advice on how to secure the network you create.

This book will be useful for everyone who wants to build their own wireless network that is more complicated than a simple home router. I can also see this guide being extremely handy for those managing and planning community wireless “hotspots” since its focus is on low-cost, yet effective, infrastructure. With the U.S. severely lagging behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband internet access, community wireless projects can breathe new life into local economies just as effectively in America as they can overseas.

Books like this that make it easy for individuals and other organizations to inexpensively maintain wireless telecommunications infrastructure is a welcome addition to the fight for better Internet access across the globe.