06.23.07
Posted in Coding at 11:51 pm by David Kellogg
Terry Chay made an interesting point about Yahoo management. It appears the Yahoo techie has it bad. But the Yahoo engineer looks down on the Ebay manager. The Ebay manager only belittles the Ebay engineer, but that’s the end of the line. There is nothing lower than an Ebay engineer. I’m not talking talent. That’s just the way the world is.
Ebay makes gobs of money. God bless them. Making money covers up all sorts of engineering and managerial problems. Google is a good example. Internally Google is a mess, but they have two products that work. That raises its managers’ score.
This is all too confusing. The whole process of superiority needs to be formalized. Here is an accurate hierarchy of who pecks whom in Silicon Valley. It has little to do with grunt engineering talent, only grisly managerial cluelessness.
This SBU chart is inspired by Luke.
As you can see clearly by the chart, Facebook engineers are managed by superior beings. Yahoo is in the middle of the pack, only because there are much stranger places to work. Ebay (excluding Paypal) is unfortunately the butt of all jokes. Just say “train”, and the Valley engineer will chuckle. Train you ask?
A train contains a fixed number of seats. An engineer has the privilege to sit in one of these seats. At some point, the eBay train will leave the station. Your train might leave at 3 am. You as an eBay engineer must stay up until 3 am to check in your working code to CVS. But the 2 am engineer already broke your libraries, so you must stay up until dawn to fix his problems. The train is so efficient that toolies must throw their bodies under the cogs of the Juggernaut to please the managerial gods.
Apple could not make the list due to secrecy. I only met one Apple employee who would divulge what he did. He works for Safari, which means, if you look in the upper-right-hand corner of your browser, he works for Google.
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06.19.07
Posted in POW at 2:15 am by David Kellogg
Just four weeks after reaching 20,000 downloads we passed another myriad mark. Early this morning, the 30,000th download occurred.
It seems there are more than a few takers for this Javascript server.
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06.05.07
Posted in POW at 8:24 am by David Kellogg
After encouragement from Herb and Scott, I jumped straight into embedded heaven with my first USB-drive Pow server. I found a 2 GB USB drive for $17 at Microcenter next to the AMC theater. There’s no bubble packaging, no shiny skin. You just pull them out of a candy jar at the register. It’s slower than my hard drive, but no matter, it costs only .85 cents per MB.
To assure a truly hard-drive independent server, I needed to load the Moz Profiles directory, the /pow root directory and the server app itself onto the USB drive. In the application.ini file, I changed the executable variable from “xulrunner” to “xulrunner -profile /Volumes/FIREBRAND/Profiles”. I loaded a Windows and Mac version of Pow for use anywhere. I copied my prefs.js file, because the Mac XULRunner appears unable to save to this file.
Now that all of this is done, I have a beautiful server app worthy of taking on any library or lab computer. The best part is when I run the server, I can unplug the USB stick, but the server still runs. Now that is pure hacking glory.
Dave
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06.04.07
Posted in POW at 8:39 am by David Kellogg
Pow 0.1.3 is available.
This is one of the most important
releases yet. It gets better and better. It is also the smallest
download yet. What other software package gets smaller and better over
time? Here are my release notes.
This version adds stability and bug fixes.
* Standalone server support
* Firebug support
* Auto-restart of server after window close
* startup.sjs file auto-created for new installs
* Saving to subdirectory fixed
* Changed mime-types to binary by default
* Added many binary mime-types
* Added loopback-only option
* Fixed root directory problem
* Fixed XML download problem
* Smallest download size ever 99K -> 89K -> 73K -> 63K
The standalone server on port 6673 offers Firebug support through
Firefox. The Mac standalone version is at http://davidkellogg.com/pub/Pow%200.1.3.dmg
Scott can post the PC version address. Linux users can download
http://davidkellogg.com/pub/pow-xr.xpi and a nightly at
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/nightly/latest-trunk/
and follow the instructions at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner_1.8.0.4_Release_Notes
Dave
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