Stupid waste of time - code comment formatting

I'm pretty pissed off. I was ranted at today over something that I find stupid and a waste of my time - the formatting of code comments. We use eclipse and use the code formatter and "save actions" so people don't have to waste their time doing something that the IDE can do for them automatically. The behaviour in question is that the person would spend (apparently) a lot of time formatting their comment with indents and when the save actions would kick in they would lose all of this formatting.

I typically use the // style of comments, even for multiline comments. Why? Because it's easy with ctrl-shift-c. Boom, it's done. The other person insists that they use the /* */ style comments. Why? Because that's what they've done for 15 years. And they told me that there was nothing that I can say to change their mind. I, and the other 40 developers, had to change how we do things. Quoting years of doing something a given way as a reason for continuing to do it is a really shitty reason. It's a wonder how we as a species ever moved out of the trees or caves.

Now, I was pretty ticked at this point. Why? A number of reasons, but # 1 being that they didn't even want to discuss things. It was black and white in their head. End of story. Full stop. (I don't think that they actually said this, but that's what it felt like.) Aside: if someone says "end of story, full stop" it usually means that they are 1) a jackass and 2) wrong.

The best part about the whole thing? Perhaps the only good thing actually: I learned something new about java today. I learned that if you do slash star dash like: /*- NOTICE THE DASH! */ it will keep the indents. Who knew you were supposed to write java code like that? Apparently Sun / Oracle.

So, here I am probably like 10 hours later still pissed off. Still wasting my time thinking about it. Which pisses me off. Loop.

I love helping people, but gods people help yourselves first. It's fine to come to with a problem. Ideally come with proposed solutions. Come to rant, but not to rant at me. But don't come to me with a closed mind. I can't fix that.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

Well it's been (almost) a whole year. Been barfed on, peed on, pooped on (I think, but I think that I've repressed that memory). Been smiled at. Laughed with. Punched in the eye. Made to look at things totally differently - mostly from the floor level. Had a blast.

It's been a very good year.

It's like a very long cat...

I love analogies. I usually explain concepts using them. I find them fun. Today at work I listened to someone a handful of levels above me say that "We will move to IPv6. For the upgrade we just have to add more numbers to the IP address". My instant reaction was one of ridicule. Then I paused. And then I thought that it was a good enough analogy for the level that person needs to speak at. Of course it's way more complicated than that, both the concept, tech, and the transition. But if the problem is we're running out of addresses globally, we need to move to something with more addresses. Like 10 digit dialing for phones from the 7 digit.

It's still not as good as the quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Is the simplistic explanation almost nothing like the problem and solution? Yes. Is it good enough for the current purposes? Yes as well. Sometimes you have to dumb it down until there is no cat.

I've got 99 inconveniences but a baby ain't one

This last 12 months has been very difficult for a lot of people that I know: friends, family, acquaintances or even friends of friends (and thus my friends are going through a difficult "support role"). It's been hard for a lot of people.

When I think about our problems they pale compared to the things that these people are going through. So much so that I realized that I don't have problems, but inconveniences. Hell, I don't even have 99 of them. I find it helps keep my blood pressure down when I think about that. It makes me feel lucky. It makes me want to reach out to the people that we know to give a helping hand. Some times we can't even do that, but we can be there to listen. It might not be enough, but it's something.

In the times in between I'll just continue to play in our tent.

Java dark arts

Even though I've been using java for a long time now, it still astounds me that there is so much that I don't know. Some of it feels like dark arts to me - the kind of thing that would raise mental red flags if I saw a co-worker doing it.

Like for instance, today I learned (or relearned?) that you can write a custom annotation processor in java. It doesn't seem too useful until you get to part 3 where they do compile time code generation using velocity as the templating engine. This is the kind of thing that's really neat; I hope I never need to know it; but I try to commit it to memory because I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be called in at some point to help someone that thought that this "oh golly that's really neat" and now they've mucked up their project six ways to Sunday.

Why can't people just make things as simple as possible, but not simpler?

Need vs Want

It's weird struggling with a simple concept: need vs want. And not just physical consumer stuff either, but like "Do I need to be a better photographer, or just want it?" Once you figure out need vs want you can prioritize all kinds of things. "Do I need that second cookie, or just want it?".

The hard part is that "need" is usually stuff that you don't want to do, like change the car into snow tires or do the dishes, while "want" is something fun or interesting like reading a good book. Well, those are examples for me. Maybe you're really into changing tires. I'm not.

I find it difficult to categorize tasks or stuff because, if you're being honest with yourself, you realize that a lot of stuff that you were planning on doing was just a "want" and has now taken a back seat to the needs. Which sucks. No one wants to spend their time doing unfun stuff. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read my book about spaceships.