David J. Sokol

Science is a verb now!

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:25:12 -0500

Science is a verb now!

Year End Statistics Roundup

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:49:00 -0500

This year was pretty awesome. It was my first full year as a real employee, I started contributing to my 401k, and for a brief period, I had my credit cards entirely paid off. I had a girlfriend, I started taking better care of myself, and I now have a semi-decorated apartment. Downsides: my car drastically declined in value, pushing my net worth down 15% of year end of 2008. Lets take a look at the numbers:

2009 (Numerically)

I performed 2,643 pushups, an infinite increase over the previous year.
I finished 7,160 crunches, another near-infinite increase over the previous year.
I completed 101 games of bowling; I raised my average from a 120 something to a 160-something, a 33% increase.
I was an average of 6 minutes late for work. Sadly this totals for 23 hours of missed morning work. Good thing I stay late. My goal for next year is to reduce this number to a 3-minutes-late average.
I weigh an average 184 pounds in the morning, 186 in the evening. I apparently carry about 2 pounds of easily removed water weight.
I drank a total of 346 days out of 365. In other terms, I spent 94.87% of my days last year imbibing at least one alcoholic beverage. Increased contact with family could not be mathematically correlated due to measuring techniques.
I lived in 3 different apartments in two different cities.
I had a real girlfriend for 5 months, a length that hasn’t been equaled since 2005.

Overall, I think I did pretty well. For this year, I would give myself an awesomeness of:

73.0551458% Average (C)

This is score is composed of:

Drinking – 40%
Financial Security – 20%
Fitness – 20%
Having a Girlfriend – 20%
Fudge Factor – 10% (I rated myself a 2 out of a possible 10)

Plans for 2010

These statistics, of course, only serve as a baseline. For the next year, I have different goals and different aspirations, and my awesomeness will be computed based on the following factors:

Drinking – 16.67%
Awesomeness - 33% (variable factor, 10 point self-assessment)
Girlfriend – 16.67%
Fitness – 16.67%
Professionalism – 16.67%

Using these weight factors, I hope to bring my awesomeness to around 80-85%. I’m not going to aim for the top just yet, I just want to be better than average.

Happy New Year.

I Crack Me Up

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:49:27 -0500

Try
  frm.Tag = lt
  frm.RefreshCharts(lt)
Catch
  ' do nothing; this operation was just a gesture of kindness anyways.
End Try

Concerning the Lexus LTA

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:57:44 -0500

me: i want that car
me: real bad
James: amazing shit
me: only $350k
James: thats all!
me: ain't no thang
me: i'll ring up the homies and get them to put in extra shifts on my corners
me: gotta expand that trap son
James: oh i hear ya
James: i expect my dudes to get that for me for christmas... they saw my tweet, they know what that means.. time to hustle harder
me: time to hustle harder or you're gonna hafta regulate on `em
me: just one of those things you ain't gotta say, ya feel me?
James: oh i know
James: game recognize game, and you looking mighty mirror image right now

"I Drive a Dodge Stratus!"

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:47:52 -0500

I love my car. The engine warning labels are written in Japanese. It is incredibly well engineered. It gets good miles per gallon. It has a keyless RFID system. It can determine its own location globally to within ten feet. It has power windows and can get radio signals from fucking space.

Daylight savings time, however, escapes its grasp.

Twitter Lists: Ready for Abuse

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:19:23 -0400

me: oh man, twitter lists.
me: http://twitter.com/dsokol/lames
James: doesnt work for me
me: awww
me: man
me: get on that
James: IM trying
me: (ps it's a list of just you, named 'lames')
me: lolololol
James: figured that
me: man
me: that's gonna be great
me: cause you can arbitarily name lists and add people
me: i could have a list named 'Dick Lickers' and BAM
me: everybody goes in

Cooking

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:11:00 -0400

Upsides of Cooking Sausage & Maceroni and Cheese with Same Lid:

Awesomness
Maceroni Tastes like Sausage
Feeling good because you’re saving water and resources like those goddamn hippies told you to.

Downsides:

None

This Showcases My Conversation Skills

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:36:00 -0400

me: if you're that bored, i've got an article on software estimation that needs writing
James: oh word!
James: yeah lemme get to that
me: yeah
me: formula is
me: Estimate = Min x -Max + Min + ScaleFactor x Max
me: ScaleFactor being between 0 and infinity (but probably around 0.7)
me: basically centers around this distribution:
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_(continuous)
me: which has unique properties that allow the inverse CDF input to be greater then 1!
James: i was gonna blog about good rap thats out
me: that'd probably be better then my boring shit
me: at least someone would read that.
me: "oh man numbers THBBT"
me: (but my technique allows you to easily use stratified latin hypercube sampling for determining the best estimation time!)
me: (or straight monte carlo if you want to run more trials!)
me: yeah
me: you can see why i've been just ITCHING to write about it so hardcore
James: for sure
James: totally passionate about it
me: it's gonna be extra boring
me: yeah
me: because i'm going to trash joel's theory of software estimation and debunk betaPERT as ineffectual as it doesn't handle small increments well
me: not to mention i'ts completely biased against the 'most likely' which is probably wrong.
me: i have the most boring life ever.
James: i stopped reading what you typed a while ago
James: lemme know when you're back on that rap talk

An Excellent Rebuttal of Paul Graham

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:07:00 -0400

I saw this a few years ago, but I’m re-reading it because it’s good. Also Paul Graham is kinda meh. It was written in response to Hackers and Painters, which was decent at best. A sample, from dabblers and blowhards:

The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports (“Management secrets of Gengis Khan”, the “Lexus and the Olive Tree”) that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.

Lines like that make a great post.

Fixing Rocketfish Bluetooth Keyboard on Vista/Win7 x64

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:26:28 -0400

When I originally upgraded to Vista and Windows 7, I could not get my Rocketfish Bluetooth keyboard to connect. This was incredibly annoying as the keyboard decently expensive (~$100) and pretty nice. I ended up reverting back to the crummiest cheapest $3 keyboard I could buy at Microcenter, and it sucked. Eventually, I grew sick of it and spent today figuring out how to make my Rocketfish keyboard work. After going through the usual bluetooth device connection wizard and making it hang, I ran across this thread on technet. Buried past all of the double-posts from MSFT employees was this gem, by KAMOTEQ:

When you go to add a device, right click on the keyboard icon and click on properties. in the services tab check the box that says Drivers for keyboard, mice, etc (HID). The keyboard will install automatically.

This fixed up my keyboard super-fast and everything is wonderful. I just wanted to repost it because it’s hard to find (buried in a Technet thread) and I know other people will be looking for the fix.

My Own Personal λ

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:13:28 -0400

I updated my main website, dsokol.com with an approximate update frequency. This λ value is the exacted number of updates per day, sampled from the last one year period. Given that my blog has had eight or so updates, over the past 365 days, my future frequency is calculated to be 0.02192. (λ = 8 / 365)

This is not an accurate prediction of frequency, as data for the past 11 of 12 months is missing. In reality, it should be sampled as (8 x 12) / 365, which gives λ = 0.2630 . This is a more accurate model for my blog posting frequency. The same goes for my github frequency, which has only been gathered for the last week or so. My twitter, reddit, stack overflow, zune profile and resume are all accurate, though the reddit number is a lot of guess work.

These λ values should be supplemented with a confidence figure; I’m more confident that my zune and twitter frequencies are around the given λ then my blog or github status. If I were to build a model to simulate my next year of internet activity (which I plan to do, after another month of data is gathered), the lack of background data for these two data series will have to be accounted for.

Why did I even post frequency? I believe it shows certain parts of my character you wouldn’t otherwise see. The fact that my resume is updated very infrequently (λ = 0.00274) shows that I’m pretty happy with my job and not looking. I listen to a lot of music. I’m a pretty steady poster on twitter (unless i spammed certain days, a weakness in my analysis), and I’m decently active in a few communities specific to programming. More importantly, it shows you where to find the most up to date me, which is what the end goal.

Show Me Your Desktop

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:53:03 -0400

Last week, @shanselman started a tag stream on twitter called #showmeyourdesktop. He seemed to be somewhat miffed that everyone he knew had nice, clean desktops with a pretty background image and very few icons. About 10 submissions in, I decided to post my own work desktop, which you can see in a prior post.

This is apparently not how must programmer desktops look. At all, period, ever. From the photostream, it would appear that programmers put a high emphasis on an empty desktop and pretty background pictures, either nature or architecture. I personally never ran a desktop background until Vista, and that was the default because I was too lazy to change it. (The WinXP one immediately got axed after changing the theme to ‘Classic Windows’.) The same goes with Windows 7, which I run at home. I simply don’t understand why everyone has pretty high-resolution, memory intensive images for their background.

It is my firm belief that if you see your desktop, you’re doing it wrong. And by ‘it’, I mean your basic task workflow. Now a large number of programmers who posted images might never see their desktop; they just Win+Ded it down for the sake of the chat. Why is everything so clean?

My desktop is cluttered with mostly temporary objects. My typical workflow:

QA files a bug. I get an email.
I read the bug through Quality Center (a horrid piece of shit program, btw)
I notice it’s with our Excel Import functionality. They provide a file.
I download the file to the quickest place I can access: my desktop.
I start our application, hit import, and navigate to the easiest place to find: my desktop.
I import the file. It fails. Crap.
I fix the bug.
I notice their test case doesn’t cover a few other boundary conditions that I just introduced. I open the excel file by Win+D and grabbing the latest file, which in is in the far bottom right.
I make the changes.
Start our app again to reimport. Open -> Desktop -> Select file.
Hooray! Everything is fixed. I go back into QC to log my new test cases, sing the ActiveX to attach the file. Easiest place to get to? My Desktop.

Repeat for a few dozen bugs, and you get a lot of crap on your desktop. And it doesn’t bother me. They’re all throw-away files that are logged in other systems. The code changes are made are logged in source-safe and the test-case is logged in quality center. The mess that is my desktop never goes into any of these systems; it’s simply just a temporary storage heap.

Why would I use my desktop for anything else? It’s simply part of a tool (a computer/OS) that I use to do my job. I do believe in taking pride in ones toolset (sharpening the saw, so to speak), but this seems to be a bit like the glowing see-through PC cases everyone grew out of after freshmen year. You’re cool and all, but I’m going to be more impressed with what you do with your tools then what they look like.

I made a graph. I make a lot of graphs.

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:22:47 -0400

I made a graph. I make a lot of graphs.

#showmeyourdesktop

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:10:58 -0400

#showmeyourdesktop

"When trying to make a point involving business never interject your own politics."

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:49:00 -0400

“When trying to make a point involving business never interject your own politics.”

- Me

Things Every Programmer Must Do

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:25:09 -0400

Go Hard

A programmer without passion is pretty much useless. As this poster quotes, Productivity Stems From Passion. (Scroll down, the website sucks for product linking.) If you don’t have passion for your creations, you’re pretty much doomed. Notice that I didn’t say code or design; products are the lifeblood of any developer. Thousands of lines of source or amazing designs are useless if they aren’t, well, used in projects. If you are not passionate about the end result of your work, you’re going to end up writing an uninspired invoice system that barely allows printing without an annoying dialog box.

Put in Work

There are too many sources to quote, but programmers who don’t program are essentially useless. You must create, and you must code. Writing a solution reveals the subtle logic flaws in your implementation and forces you to think deeper about the problem. I’m not endorsing going out there and coding something up cowboy style, but there is a point when the only thing that can be done is code. Great programmers write a lot of code. Practice makes perfect.

Rep Your Set

In this sense, “set” is essentially your community or project. This doesn’t essentially mean that you need to run out and start religious wars about your chosen technology stack (LAMP [linux, apache, mysql, php], WINS [windows, iis, .net, sql server]), but to be proud of the software you produce. Products without developer pride are counter-productive; if you aren’t proud of what you’re doing, take a step back and re-evaluate your solution or design. You can only code a lie for so long.

So the Zune Uses IE6 for Mobile

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:34:00 -0400

PM: Alright team, we've been handed down an edict to use IE6 for mobile as the Zune's browser.
Developers: Fuck IE6, that shits garbage.
PM: Well, we have a very specific release date and we want to make sure we don't delay this.
Developers: We originally had a stiff release date and wrote our own WPF variant and it worked wonderfully!
PM: We did let you do that, and it looked pretty slick.
Developers: So let us write our own browser, we can get it done on time!
PM: We also let you write your own date calculation code.
Developers: IE6 it is :(

New Computer Part I

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:35:32 -0400

I recently built a new computer. My previous machine was garbage (destroyed by Vista and my choice of super-cheap computer parts) and doing even the most minor disk or cpu intensive activities sucked. To deal with the situation, I just shifted to doing most of my work at Work, and just did simple web browsing and chatting at home. I finally got frustrated with the six-minute bootup time and purchased the parts to build a new machine.

My new computer is decently high end, especially compared to previous models. When you build computers in college, everything is based solely on price. An extra gig of RAM for $40? Not happening. Having this real job helped out quite a bit, and I was able to put something together for around $800. This (to me) seemed to be a bit pricy, so I lied a little to myself to justify the cost: Well, if I get a new PC, I’ll code at home more, write more, and generally be a more awesome person. Okay, I lied a lot.

Intel Q9400S 65W (which was 35% of the cost, actually.)

WD Raptor 74GB

2x 4GB DDR2 SDRAM

ASUS p5N7A-VM LGA 775 Motherboard

Antec Mini P180 Black Steel MicroATX Mini Tower

Antec Earthwatts 380W PSU

XFX GeForce 7300GT (Salvaged from old PC)

3 19” LCDs (Already had)

1 52” Samsung TV (Also already had)

Assembly was a lot more difficult then I imagined. The last computer case I bought was in high school (2003), and the last computer I built was in 2006. The cases for do-it-yourself PCs are a lot more advanced now, and I didn’t understand a lot of how to put the new case together. There was a seperate power supply area and paths for running cables behind the motherboard. Reading the manual (which was translated poorly) cleared up my problems, and once everything was up and running, i decided to install Windows XP x64. Almost all of my hardware installed fine, except my second graphics card and the HDMI conneciton to the 52” Samsung.

Thats where the troubles began.

Please Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:04:00 -0400

My name is David Sokol. I am a Software Developer in the finance industry. I focus mainly on risk management and developing excellent software solutions. This site and it’s related content does not reflect the views of my employer.

The format of this site is a daily update containing hopefully decent content. Content will either be technical (.NET, Finance, Software Development theory, etc.), personal writings, or somewhere in between. I’m trying to take a Raymond Chen format of posting. Shorter, more regular posts and a queue of backlogged entries. I’ve been writing for almost two months now, so I have a fair amount of entries to keep things fresh.

My goal for this is threefold: an outlet for my poor creative side (writing), growth of my personal brand (aka David J. Sokol, aka DJ So-cool, aka jer, aka Louis Rich), and sharing my knowledge of computers and software development. Hopefully by posting about my life, my programming, and my actions, I’ll hit the top part of Maslow’s hierarchy.