Well I had a good game of underwater hockey tonight. I only got elbowed in the face once, my ankle skinned once and my elbow whacked against the pool bottom twice. Oh and I got my stick hand hit pretty hard. But the real gem was the turn out of good players. So each time I received the puck I was too busy fending off tackles, instead of making good ground. Scored a few goals, got some good passes in and generally had a good time.

A hybrid post where I plan to wonder through different idea spaces (compared to going off on tangents while trying to keep to a single idea).

Anyway I just finished listening to the latest audio interview on Roy Osherove’s blog between David Platt & Juval Lowy. I enjoyed this interview, and one of the highlights for me was Juval describing how intranet development should be done with smart clients not with web forms. This has been a pet peeve of mine since Microsoft started pushing .Net 1.0. A large focus of the technology drive was “every thing should be a web form” which to me missed the whole advantage of a sand boxed/managed environment that .Net/Java gave you. The idea of doing user interfaces in HTML (or what ever) and using lots of JavaScript to manage the user experience is awful. To me this represented an extension of JavaScript from what it was designed for, to the realm of “well it stretches that far.”

The coolest thing to me about Java (before .net) to me was the idea of applets. Sort of what ActiveX should have been but wasn’t. So when I heard about .Net I naturally thought of a pretty version of Java applets. Because you knew the UI widget set was going to be uniform with the user system. Anyway, one of the local companies I interview at >1 year ago, where so proud of building a .Net app for their remote users. The Engineer talked about web forms, and I sat there with him while he described writing more (and more needed) JavaScript to do the maths (scheduling of advertisements and cost modeling) on the client side to get “better performance” I just knew they didn’t get it, and I didn’t want to work there. It just seemed such a crime of developer’s time, and a really poor solution delivered to the customer.

Anyway there seems to be more support in .Net 2.0 for smart clients with things like ClickOnce for deployment management etc. It just seems strange to me that anyone would do anything different. When the application has a known/controlled install base, anything other than smart/thin client based development seems like proposing a substandard experience.

The other related thing is I had an interview at the local HP office yesterday. The building looked really nice, they had plenty of parking and quite a nice view, but no pool. The ~3+ hour interview was fun. I had to implement a piece of software that was meant to be a web form (ASP.Net) but I have no experience doing web forms so they changed it to win form. The task was to build a simple customer management app. But I had two hours to get through as much of the feature list. Gosh writing a slap dash app is so against the ideas of clean application development. After patterns like MVC, frameworks for smart clients and unit testing, been asked to slap it together actually seems like the most worthless of tests. The only value I can see from the test is how much domain knowledge the interviewee has. Things like clean abstraction, commenting, unified event handling, get thrown out the window. It was more stressful than the algorithm programming on TopCoder. I think asking me to talking them through a design of what I would have done would have added more value. It would show I knew how I’d tackle the task and the fundamentals of client UI design. This would appear to be of more value than weather or not I could slap together code that followed none of those principles in a tight time frame. Especially when afterwards we discussed how so little time is spent coding, and the projects are well managed through a structured development cycle.

David and Juval at the beginning of the audio interview where discussing about how this is how software should be engineered. I agree with this. Big systems need big process. My problem is I’m not the biggest fan of big process. I’m a fan boy of prototyping stuff. Solving the “but you can’t do it” type thing. The skunk work projects. Working thought task lists that are planned out a year ahead is not me.

The Coding Challenge is On!

I knew Mark couldn’t resist the lure of a programming challenge. I notice he didn’t link to his profile so I’ll to the honors for him: Shojun.

I was thinking about entering this SRM but decided 4am was just a little on the wrong side of the clock to start programming. The next SRM is on Wednesday at 1pm so I’ll be there with bells on.

I entered the Google Code Jam yesterday. I was pleased with my effort when after 50 minutes (of allocated 60) I had completed to two assigned problems. I was working on problem set #1 (room 7). I had a score or 502.75 point (out of 1000) and at 13 hours into the 24 hours period, I was ranked 46th for my problem set.

But my 750 point problem failed system testing, so my final score was 178.59, this put me in 266th (of 939 people, but 482= was the last place) position for the problem set. But my Google rank was 1359 which is better than my best Top Coder ranking.

Which reminds me that the night before I entered the Top Coder SRM 259, I was in division II after my poor Top Coder Open results. The three problems where easy to-do so I’m now back in division I (but only by 2 points), so I need to pull finger and do better in the next SRM. I got top score in the room I was in (#16) and I placed 11th (out of 273) for the division. So even though it was 11pm when I started and 1:30am when I went to bed, I was feeling good.

I went to a .Net User Group meeting last night. It was hosted at SunGard and Adam Cogan was the presenter. He gave a good talk about the features of SQL Reporting Services 2005, with a few side stories while the designer was busy “designing”. The Design tools were very slow at times, but he was running a beta version under virtual PC, so there is room for forgiveness. That mixed with I not sure how much work was been done behind the scenes.

But really what impressed me was how simple it was to click and drop it all together. I really like the Client report building, that feature would come in handy here at work.

All’n’all I really useful piece of software. For new development Business Objects must be packing them selves.

One of the good titbits was Adam explaining how he deploys database applications, and how he thinks it’s the application responsibility to set-up the server correctly. He showed how they laid the files out, and how the application did the checking and loading of .sql and .rpt files.

But the highlight of the evening was wining a free MSDN Polo Shirt.

I was just reading Charles Sterling’s blog about him trying underwater hockey, and it reminded me that I wanted to post about the joys of taking the sport back up. After not playing the game for ~3 years I’ve started playing again. The major problems with this I lost fitness, but I can remember what I used to be able of doing. So you’re on the bottom of the pool, trying to swim around somebody (who you later find out is turning 60 in December) and decide to turn on the turbo leg, but they cramp instead.

My legs have never been my best asset in the swimming pool, when I swim most of the propulsion is from the arms, but when your playing hockey with great big flippers on, it’s all about legs. So I’ve got quite use to having my legs cramp when at the bottom of a pool. The best solution is to “not panic”, and then followed by given in to death. Once you relax to the fact your going to die, I often find your legs relax enough that your can float to the surface to breath, thus actually avoiding the pre accepted fate. Then you need to get out of the pool and stretch.

In the case of a few weeks ago I was on the side of the pool lying on my back. Both my calf’s where in the cramped but not stinging state, but each time I tried sit up, they would explode in pain. It took about ten minutes before could get up to stretch. But besides that I love underwater hockey.

This morning Ryan emailed me some ideas for development projects with Google Desktop. I liked his ideas, and have been thinking of how it could be achieved. But my point is I went off to read the Google Desktop API and it seems like a really cool thing.

One cheeky idea I had was setting up the desktop on a server, then using the API to index your intranet, and then providing a search button that called back into the desktop API, thus getting Google search for your intranet on the cheap. More than likely breaking rules of the license, but just an idea.

But what really impressed me was the richness of the API and how you could use it as your universal storage for text based stuff. With the journal and contact type entries, you could write plug-ins for your normal apps, and use it as your master synchronization point.

I just went searching for Ryan’s web-site so I could link to him, so I loaded up the Plaxo website (which Ryan put me onto) and realised this is exactly what I had just been talking about. I really like Plaxo. Some friends have recommended Bebo, but after having tried Plaxo, Bebo just came across as ugly, and a very polluted UI.

My only gripe about Plaxo is that the user experience could be improved by using AJAX. The page that this is the most painful on is the contact list, where each click on the business and private card widgets causes a full page reload. Otherwise the page design is nice and clean.

We have just finished watching the Composite UI Application Block webcast from the August MSDN Webcast DVD (which could be a CD with its 180MB of data on it). I have to give big kudos to the patterns & practices team, it’s a really cool piece of work.

I’ve been struggling with idea of how to refactor the application we have here at work, with the compartmentalized MVC system, and support for plug-ins and how these would all tie together. Oh the joy of spending my home time dreaming up methods to improve my work efforts, or how I’d do it if I had to start again. Now I can stop trying to solve the problem, and wait to use the CAB when it’s released, and we move to .Net 2.0

I finished reading this book last weekend, I really enjoyed the story. It makes me want to learn more about the derivative markets, how options are priced and the modelling used to evaluate the effects of change.

Well I’m not going to get into the Elimination Rounds.
I was assigned VideoEncode and GridGame.

I spent ~30 minutes of my 60 solving a problem that was really just a bit of algebra. I solved it using binary search, when I just need to rearrange the variables to get a single line piece of code. I had the feeling this was the case, but the stress of the situation I was not trusting myself to solve the algebra faster than getting the binary search working. Net time I’ll have a better indicator. The binary search was required in the AutoLoan problem due to the value been search for had a compounding affect on the result. Whereas here there was no complex relationship.

The second problem was a simple min/max tree problem. Given a 4x4 board how many of the available moves will “win” if I only play perfectly. I had missed the guarantee you win and assuming you play perfectly bits. Not that I know how to solve this. But I went down the path of how many of the moves could I win.

So now I’ll stop trying the path of logic I had been working on after the event, and workout how to solve the problem correctly.

[Some time later]

Oh my, it really was quite simple once I stopped and thought about that at each turn the two players are trying to achieve different things. For our turn we just need to find one move that we win. For the opposition move they win if they find a path we don’t win. So simple now I understand what I was trying to achieve. Other the feeling silly for not know how to program this I now feel relax I worked out how to-do it.

I’ll be ready for next time.

[Just before publishing]

Well the results are in. I came 300th out of 374 in my problem set. Most those people came 317th equal for no score. This hammered my ranking, and I’m now down to 1050. Oh well, I surely can’t get much worse than this.