Open Space Offices

Well, I was changing my mind about whether open space offices are good or bad few times already.

But now as I tried this, that and that my opinion established into solid idea.

Open space in no way helps to gain the pick of productivity. You can argue with this but I don’t give a fuck to this.

I am not about to state that each employee (developer) should take its own room. That’s would not be productive as well.

Small rooms for small teams seems to be the best.

But separate room seems the best choice for me personally. Just I am able to do the most during a day.

For those not able to use their brain efficiently I will use figurative language: working in an open space is like living in a hostel. Wanna work in open space ? – sell your house and go live in the hostel.

YoDay Application

The very first version of my site: http://your-day.appspot.com/home.jsp

It’s like a Twitter but pictorial.

You can log in there with your gmail account.

Current set of features is very basic now:

- search for users (search by “Alex” to find me)
- follow/unfollow a user
- simple statistics
- filling your timeline

I will work on it further on but it is really interesting to know your feedback.

It looks like this:

Ah, and please use FF browser for now since I have not yet tested it under anything else. Myabe it works under IE/Chrome/etc. as well, just don’t know

Any feedback in comments would be great to have.

Stupid Funny HTML Thing: “option” tag’s “selected” attribute usage

I do know that the HTML is no longer interesting for the major half of the developers but still sometimes you need to use it. Yesterday I’ve encountered one thing that after reading specs made me laugh a lot. I’m talking about “selected” attribute of the “option” tag.
In any programming language (any general language for logical people) normal usage of attributes that are meant by their nature to bee boolean is having 2 possible values to be set: true or false.

“selected” attribute in HTML is a bit different To not write a lot here is a receipt:

Specifies that this option will be pre-selected when the user first loads the page.

This is a boolean attribute. If the attribute is present, its value must either be the empty string or a value that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the attribute's canonical name, with no leading or trailing whitespace (i.e. either selected or selected="selected").

Possible values:

    * [Empty string]
    * selected

So you either specify

<option value="fuck" selected="selected">it</option>

if you want this option to be selected or you should miss the attribute at all. I think this should have been a joke from the dude who created this ))

UPDATE:

I would not post this if this inconvenience did not impact the thing I am doing. It imapcts so I decided to write a little JSP custom tag that fixes the problem in a nice way:

@SuppressWarnings("serial")
public class OptionsTag extends TagSupport {

	public void setDataProvider(List value)
	{
		this.dataProvider = value;
	}

	public void setItemToSelect(DataItem value)
	{
		this.itemToSelect = value;
	}

	public int doStartTag()
	{
		try
		{
			JspWriter out = pageContext.getOut();
			String selected;
			for(DataItem item: dataProvider)
			{
				if (itemToSelect != null)
				{
					selected = itemToSelect.isEqual(item)?"selected='selected'":"";
				}
				else
				{
					selected = "";
				}
				out.println("" + item.getName() + "");
			}
		}
		catch (IOException ioe)
		{
			ioe.printStackTrace();
		}
		return Tag.SKIP_BODY;
	}

	private List dataProvider;
	private DataItem itemToSelect;
}

The usage of the tag in JSPs is straightforward:

<c:if test=”<%=activityCategories!=null%>”>
<select name=”categoryId”>
<components:options dataProvider=”<%=activityCategories%>” itemToSelect=”<%=currentActivityCategory%>”/>
</select>
</c:if>

Emotions

Наскільки сильно людина може зрадіти чомусь гарному?

[5:53:06 PM] Bubusik says: такий….слой шоколадного тіста….крем…слой ванільного…крем….ванільного…..крем….крем….вишні…крем…..слой ванільного…крем…..слой шоколадного…..шоколадний крем…кокоссс
[5:53:10 PM] Bubusik says: няяяяяяям)

 

Аж самому захотілось схавати кусочок ))))

Two Good Movies

Last week I’ve watched 2 movies that are must for every person to see.

Maybe I would not post on this but today there is nothing to do in the city, everyone is scared to go out and get ill, so I have some spare time. Why not?

The first one is Shrink with Kevin Spacey. This actor never gets a chance to make you disappointed. Serious movie with a lot of hemp, jokes and happy endings. Especially I liked the character of Dallas Roberts.

The second movie I have seen already few years ago but refreshing it in my mind was at least the same interesting as watching for the first time. It’s a “Being John Malkovich”. This masterpiece is all about people’s hidden desires and how they drive our lives.

If you don’t know what to do – go get these movies and enjoy.

Do You Really Need To Be 8 Hours In The Office?

This Dilbert strip

unproductive time

made me think for a little on questions like

• what is productive and unproductive time?
• how long should you work everyday?
• should you keep to the rules like working day start/end hours?
• are you an example for others?
• should you screw your subordinates up if they are not being at their desks precisely from X am till Y am?

I have a very short answer for such questions: IT DOESN’T MATTER WHEN YOU COME TO THE OFFICE AND WHEN YOU GO HOME. UNTIL YOU PERFORM EQUALLY/BETTER THAN OTHERS NO ONE CAN POINT THIS TO YOU. IF SOMEONE DOES – TELL HIM “FUCK YOU”

We are not living to work, we are working to learn and have fun, to create. Let people working in fastfoods/banks/receptions/etc. be a slaves which should spend 8 hours every day believing this is very beneficially for the society. Good people should try to manage their life to spend as less time on routines as possible and to leave as much time for learning new things as they can.

How Coffee Impacts Your Body

Yesterday the subject of my post was 10 Commandments for Bloggers and one of commandments was to write something that can be interesting for many people. As a cup of just prepared coffee was steaming at my table I decided to investigate and share some information about coffee’s impact on our bodies. This should be interesting to a crowd of coffee drinkers I know.

I can’t count how many cups of coffee I’ve consumed in my life but I am pretty sure the number would be quite impressive so it may be better not to count at all.
No matter how it is prepared the essence of the coffee is the caffeine substance:

This substance is well described in this Wikipedia article so I will add here only some extra info.
First of all, caffeine is widespread in nature, there are ~ 60 plants containing caffeine in different amounts. The reason for plants to employ some caffeine is not that they want to stay alert at nights , they need it for protection against cerrtain insects. So in the world of plants caffeine is a protective measure, a killing tool.

One of interesting facts is a relationship between smoking and drinking coffee. Smoking decreases the half-life of caffeine in the body. Not surprisingly smokers usually consume much more coffee.

A comparatively minor effect of caffeine is increase of lipolysis rate. For people with excessive weight this may sound like very good thing but the effect is minor in its value.

The primary effect of the caffeine resides in the plane of neurotransmitters and their role in our central nervous system. This mechanism is always a base of any drug impact mechanism.
Caffeine is the adenosine receptors antagonist.  What this means in simple language is: in every tissue of a human body there is always some amount of adenosine sensitive receptors. Central nervous system continuously releases some amount of adenosine to regulate certain parameters of your body and those receptors react on this. This is well-tuned mechanism which is knocked out by a cup of coffee.
Caffeine molecules bind to receptors and normal adenosine molecules are no longer able to communicate the message they were released into the blood stream for.
A concrete example: suppose for some reasons your blood pressure has increased. Your brain has detected this and is trying to dilate blood vessels by releasing some adenosine into the bloodstream. But an hour before you have drunk a cup of coffee and half of your receptors are already busy with caffeine molecules So you body needs to produce more adenosine than normally required to reach the needed effect.

This is only a half of the problem. The other side, like with any other drug, is phenomenon of tolerance. A week of moderate coffee consumption can establish almost full tolerance to caffeine. This means that your body adapts to the antagonist effect of caffeine. How it that possible? Very simple: your body develops more adenosine receptors to achieve higher sensitivity.

This could be so-so ok if not well-known drug withdrawal effect: once you stop drinking coffee its adenosine inhibitory effect stops as well and it appears that there are too much adenosine receptors in your body. And again your body needs to adapt by some means because messages communicated by adenosine are taken “too seriously” this time

The conclusion is trivia: be careful with coffee. The logic tells to stop drinking it at all but coffee is deeply rooted in culture, society, customs, etc. so it’s not that easy to be pragmatic here.

Every person chooses the health model differently, not always optimally. After processing all this info I will think more to decide should I continue drinking coffee.

Take care.

Ten Commandments of a Dutifull Bloger

I’ve been thinking few minutes if there was a Bible for bloggers then what commandments it would give to those millions of people who polish each day their keyboards writing piles and piles of different posts…

If I was a blogers God I would give them the following rules:

1. Connectivity. Try to keep your posts connected by hyperlinks. You may add a phrase like “In my previous post bla bla bla” so there is a good chance the person reading that page will click and read your previous post. The net effect may be quite impressive.
2. Your post better contain some pictures, preferably with a bit of humor. Humor should be everywhere even if you write about disasters or diseases. Only sick people hate humor, the remaining 99% love it much. Remember when you were a child and you read your last book … you liked much more books with pictures, right?
3. Use good tags. Almost all blogging services provide you with some tagging abilities. Just use it with a good mind.
4. Reply to comments. That would be your mortal sin if some people interested with your post left some comments and you ignore them.
5. Read others people blogs and comment on them.
6. Promote your posts (blog) by linking it from twitter, your personal site, your company site, wherever it may fit.
7. Bring value. Your posts should be valuable to potential people out there. If you only write things like “today is rainy, I hate such weather” then your blog is shit, honestly, better go and find some friends or job. Try to have at least part of some meaningful posts on specific themes that could be valued by others.
8. If you write on a certain subject provide references to other good posts/sources/etc. on that subject. Remember a simple rule: everything you do to others they will do to you.
9. Try to express as less subjective opinions as possible especially if such opinions are aggressive/rude/etc.
10. Regularity. You should blog regular, without long pauses.

May you have a popular blog. C u.

Quality

Almost in any technology a developer use there are some “context” objects where you can put some values using methods like “context.setAttribute(key, value)”.

If I needed to qualify some developer’s work qaulity I would check if he clears up those attributes from the context when they are not needed anymore. I am sure 80% of developers do not bother with this.

Maldives ephemeral isles

Have read a short story about problems people living in the Maldives have at the moment.

The article is here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4329314.html?page=5

The funny thing which makes me laugh:

The effects of these disasters were compounded by the mining of the coral reefs that surround the islands, which has made them highly susceptible to sea erosion.

Fuckers destroy the nature, the nature destroys the fuckers ))