Instead of:

if ( foo.equals( "some static string" ) ){...}

or...

if ( foo != null && foo.equals( "some static string" ) ){...}

use:

if ( "some static string".equals( foo ) ){...}

Is anyone tired of repeatedly clicking on the annoying Track Changes buttons in Microsoft Word? I know I was, so I created some keyboard shortcuts to help save some of my time and sanity.

Inciting Incident

Today I was merging some changes in a very large Microsoft Word document (which didn’t have track changes turned on). To do this, I opened up the BASE MS Word document (the document where the changes were originally made from) and then used the Compare and Merge Documents… functionality (located under the Tools Menu) to compare it to the document that had the new changes.

The result of the above produces a merged document with Track Changes turned on; however, the bad part is that it had a couple hundred changes that I had to manually review for accuracy. Moreover, I had to accept the changes that were correct, and fix the ones that weren’t; therefore, I couldn’t just accept all the changes at once.

This made me a sad panda because that meant I had to click the “Next Change” and then “Accept Selected Changes” or “Reject Selected Changes” buttons over and over. However, then I remembered that keyboard shortcuts were meant to simplify these types of problems.

SIDE NOTE: Now here’s Billy Mays to talk about Keyboard Shortcuts…

Teh Shortcutz

The keyboard shortcuts that I chose to map were much like the Emacs keyboard shortcuts during a string replacement. Here is the map of the Microsoft Word commands and the keyboards I mapped:

• AcceptAllChangesInDoc
  • CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + !
• AcceptChangesSelected
  • CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + SPACE
• RejectChangesSelected
  • CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + DEL
• NextChangeOrComment
  • CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + n
• PreviousChangeOrComment
  • CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + p

You will find these MS Word commands to bind to in the Customize Keyboard dialog box.

Teh Methodz

To bind keyboard shortcuts to the Track Changes commands, do the following steps:

1.) Select the tiny arrow at the end of the Reviewing Toolbar, click Add or Remove Buttons and select Customize…

2.) Select the Keyboard… button at the bottom of the dialog box

3.) Select the Tools category and find the command you want to bind (@see the list in the previous section)

4.) Once you have selected the command you want to bind (#1 in the figure below), put your cursor in the shortcut key area and type the combination of keys you want to use to invoke that command (#2 in the figure below) and click Assign (#3 in  the figure below).

5.) Notice that the command now has your specified key in the list of Current keys, and hit Close

6.) Pat yourself on the back. You now have a way to easily navigate any tracked changes!

Advanced Mode

I then decided that I was still pressing too many buttons, and I wanted to make it function even more like the Emacs replacements.

In Emacs, when you hit SPACE in a replacement, it replaces the curent occurrance automagically goes to the next occurrence.

Well, I then made the MS Word Macro that emulates the Emacs functionality…

Sub AcceptChangeAndViewNext()
    ' This next line to disregard errors
    On Error Resume Next
    WordBasic.AcceptChangesSelected
    WordBasic.NextChangeOrComment
End Sub

Just create the macro using the above code, and go to the Keyboard customization dialog box, and instead of selecting ‘Tools’ from the categories list, select the Macros category and pick the AcceptChangeAndViewNext macro and bind it to your favorite keyboard shortcut.

Iz got sum windoze malwarez on mine linucks.

They added the feature in labs and posted the article on the Gmail blog.

Luckily, they made Gmail Tasks a non-intrusive component to the UI (unlike a Gmail gadget which makes Gmail’s left column extremely long); it uses a Gmail chat window frame.

I don’t think that RTM (Remember the Milk) is going to be too happy.

Tasks vs. RTM in Gmail

The first iteration of Gmail Tasks has a lot of cool features like:

• Tabbed/grouped tasks
• Task due dates
• Task notes
• Manage multiple lists
• Intra-Gmail keyboard shortcuts
• Turn emails into tasks
• Not a gadget!

No gadget here!

Clicking “Tasks” brings up this dialog.

Unfortunately, it’s lacking a lot of features that I hope will come along with time like:

• Colored tasks
• Some kind of reminder (popup/email/audible)
• Integration with Gcalendar
• Creation timestamp (in addition to due date)
• Less bugs…

Right now, RTM has many, many more features:

• Everything that Tasks does
• Twitter integration
• Shared tasks
• Reminders
• Colored tasks
• Lots of other integrations

So as far as feature comparison of product vs. product, of course RTM wins!

However, I believe that in a Gmail context, most users don’t need the full power of RTM. Personally, I just want a fairly simple task list, and Tasks satiates my needs.

RTM provides 2 Gmail integration points: a Firefox extension and a gadget URL.

The Firefox extension is really nice, but its a Firefox extension. Like Opera? Need IE? Like Safari? Too bad. Many corporate/gov’t locations don’t support or allow FF, so you are stuck with the gadget, which makes your left column a skyscraper.

Your Choice…

So many times in the technical realm you hear people (or at least hear about them) say things that make you want to stick a spoon in your ear.

Well we put together a list of some “guidelines” we’ve found from personal experiences we’ve witnessed:

Some “Guidelines”

1. Don’t use words that you don’t understand.
2. Don’t describe your team’s software, which you don’t have any idea of how it’s made, to the client as “spaghetti code”.
3. Don’t call the help desk and tell them that the internet was uninstalled.
4. Do take some time to research problems before you talk about them to a technical fellow.
5. Don’t call the product team and tell them the system accounts are gone when you actually locked your account via multiple incorrect password attempts.
6. Don’t say that your Java class “implements the inheritance”.
7. Don’t tell anyone else that you caused an ID-10-T error.
   
8. Do say things in simple terms that you and your non-technical audience can understand.
9. Don’t flirt with the administrative assistant by talking about your problem with red-black trees.
   
10. Don’t say that your C# class is more efficient because it only has 3 functions (linky)
11. Don’t show up to an interview for a software engineering position and say that a compiler “compiles things”.
    
12. Do check your computer is plugged in before you tell someone it’s dead.
13. Don’t argue about a programming book that you’ve never read.
14. Don’t tell your boss that you’re quitting before you’ve received the former offer letter from the new company.
    
15. Don’t say you forgot everything at your first job interview out of college.
16. Don’t use the words “doodad”, “doohickey”, “doojigger”, “gubbins”, “thing”, “thingamabob”, “thingamajig”, “thingummy”, “whatchamacallit” or “whatsis” when describing a software component that you’ve created.
    

These are just some personal “guidelines” I’ve seen or dealt with. What are some you’ve experienced?

The List

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler is the author of several notable CS books; his most notable book is Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (currently reading this at the moment). The articles on his blog are interesting and thought provoking.

• Martin’s blog [ RSS ]

ThoughtBlogs

ThoughtBlogs is the aggregation of articles from tons of ThoughtWorks‘ employees (consulting company). It’s worth looking at because they hire some pretty smart people; Martin Fowler is their chief scientist.

• ThoughtBlogs [ RSS ]

Tim Berners-Lee
For those of you who don’t know, Tim Berners-Lee was the first person to successfully establish an connection between an HTTP client and server (he invented the intarwebz), and now serves as director of the W3C.

** Be advised; this doesn’t get updated very often.

• Tim’s blog @ DIG [ RSS ]

Ivar Jacobson

Ivar was one of the 3 developers (along with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh) who developed and defined UML and the Rational Unified Process. He maintains a blog that has some interesting articles.

• Ivar’s blog [ RSS ]

Grady Booch

Grady Booch was one of the other “3 Amigos” (listed above) to develop UML and the RUP. He now works at IBM Research as chief scientist of the Software Engineering group.

**At the time of writing this post, his website seems to be down. Google’s cache shows that the last cached version was on Nov. 20, 2008. Hopefully he gets it fixed soon!

• Booch’s blog [ RSS ]

Mark Russinovich

Mark is a technical fellow at Microsoft in the research group; he was co-creator of Sysinternals when it was usurped into MS. He updates at a decent rate and his articles are pretty long.

• Mark’s blog [ RSS ]

Raymond Chen

Raymond is a well known developer for Microsoft’s Windows Shell team. The writing style for his blog and book, both titled The Old New Thing, is very witty and funny; it’s a pretty good read.

• Raymond’s blog [ RSS ]

Jakob Nielson

Jakob is a leading web usability consultant; he writes usability articles for his website, useit.com. The site contains some really interesting articles on usability and human-computer interaction. For example, read his article on the “F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content“.

His site isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t really follow his own guidelines; nevertheless, the articles are worth reading. Unfortunately, Jakob missed the boat on RSS feeds, so you can only subscribe via his mailing list.

• Useit.com’s Alertbox

Seth Godin

This is not really a CS blog at all; however, I did include this for SEO and internet marketing. Many consider Seth Godin to be a genius at marketing. You can see some of his talks online that he’s done at various businesses and events: @ Google, @ Gel 2006, @ TED, @ 2008 Inbound Marketing Summit, and a presentation on his book, Tribes.

• Seth’s blog [ RSS ]

Google Blog’s

Google has a whole slew of blogs for their products and some other topics they like to cover. Some of them are good, and some of them are just product update articles; therefore, I listed the ones that I thought contained the most interesting articles.

• Google Research Blog [ RSS ]
• Google Testing Blog [ RSS ]

Google Employees

• Mark Chu-Carroll’s blog [ RSS ] via Christopher Roach
• Steve Yegge’s blog [ RSS ]

IBM’s developerWorks Sites

The IBM developerWorks sites contain some pretty useful information about the respective topics they cover. The IBM employees in those groups write the articles for the sites and many of the articles are worth reading.

• Architecture [ RSS ]
• Web services [ RSS ]
• Web development [ RSS ]
• Java [ RSS ]
• Linux [ RSS ]

You can find IBM employee blogs and the rest of IBM’s feeds

• developerWorks’ other RSS feeds

Something Missing? Sucked? Good?

Do you think something’s missing from this list? Let me know, so I can update it.

Did this list suck? Let me know (in the constructive way) how to fix it.

Was this list Good? Rate the article and leave a comment?

Confirmed! Mark your calendars! January 16, 2009 9:00 PM CST.

until…

again.

Well, I figured it’s about time to ask everyone out there what their opinion is; I would like to put together a collection of the comments and opinions from everyone out there and put them together as a coherent set of ideas in a follow up post.

An Apology

Okay, my last post, “What a Resume Should NOT Look Like“, was meant to be more of a piece of humor; however, it wasn’t taken like that at all.

I ended up taking a verbal beating for my About page instead, which I well deserved. The fact of the matter is that I can’t put crap out there on the internet tubes. I apologize. I was lazy and careless, and I deserve all of the flak.

I modeled the About page off of this template, which was, apparently, the wrong decision.

Resume Questions

Here just a few questions that I could come up with:

• What should it look like?
  • Plain? Fancy? What fonts? Arrangement? Etc?
• What format should it follow?
  • What content? Sections? Cover Sheet? Etc?
• What level of detail should be included?
  • Languages? APIs? Concepts? Certifications? Etc?
• How long should it be?
  • 1 page? 2 page? 400 page hardcover?
• What types of things are important?

Other things to think about and consider:

• Automatic searching of resumes for 1st round. Do you include as much info as possible, which you can speak honestly and intelligently about, on the resume to make the cut?
• Some places like short resumes (minimalism). Let them ask the questions?
• Change up the design? Make your resume stand out?

You Speak!!!

I am asking you to seriously think about the answers to the above questions and any other ideas/questions out there that I might have missed.

I am asking you to leave a comment or idea. Please, I believe that everyone would benefit from a popular ideal of SE resumes.

Hiring managers, architects, developers, team leads, program managers, technical fellows, professors… whatever your skill set, I’d like to hear from you!

A Follow Up

Once I have enough comments and ideas, I will post the summed suggestions and some example resumes that you can vote on.

Once the voting is done, I can put together some final guidelines that we all can agree on.

So get involved!

Commenting Guidelines

• Please don’t just rant. If you are going to rant, make sure you equally provide a solution to your rant. It takes no effort to complain;however, it does take a little more gray matter to solve.
• Take a minute to search through comments and the ideas posted already. Don’t rehash the past…

I’ll give you a little taste…

… While we were on the farm, my grandparents, mother, and I would take two weeks out of the summer to go on family vacations. I can still remember my first trip out of Florida. It was to the state of Florida. My first grade year we went to the grand canyon, my first grade teacher rode down it on a mule. My first grade teacher was Mrs. Maphles. I was the brightest in my class when it came to math and numbers…

Read It (pdf) and Weep

Names, companies and locations (proper nouns) have been changed for privacy!!!

What are Your Comments?

Last week, I learned that WordPress doesn’t ship with a default robots.txt.

• this is the default file that search engine crawlers parse to see what resources and URL patterns that it allowed and not allowed to crawl; it’s step 1 in every search engine optimization (SEO) guide.

I guess I just stupidly assumed that it was included in WP. Anyways, I thought it to be fair to tell everyone that if you are using WordPress and you care how your site shows up in search results, you should generate a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml.

Robots.txt?

Know that it’s important for search engines. Read this:

• http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

** NOTE: Not all web crawlers are guaranteed to read example.com/robots.txt; it serves as a guideline.

I Feel Dumb…

I feel like an idiot, and I should. The other day I just happened to search for “engfers” on Google, and the result that came back was my site with an indented sub-result that was some error from a file in the WP-Super-Cache plugin. I thought to myself, why is the plugins/ directory being crawled?

Needless to say, I shortly thereafter found Google’s Webmaster Tools to help rectify my situation. It’s a pretty nice web-app that allows you to remove content from Google’s search (which I then used).

I also noticed that the webmaster tools had sections for analyzing your robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Well, I was surprised to find out that this site didn’t have a robots.txt.

Most of you are probably think that I’m an idiot because that’s SEO 101. Well yes, it is; however, I didn’t realize that WordPress doesn’t ship with a default robots.txt! Don’t ask me why I didn’t see that before because I don’t know. Nevertheless, I think WP should ship with a robots.txt that AT LEAST eliminates  plugins/ and wp-include/ from being crawled.

Our Shiny, New robots.txt

There seems to be a billion and one SEO blogs out there; however, I was looking for resources for a robots.txt optimized for WordPress.

I found a couple of articles and examples at askapache.com and an example from the WordPress.org Codex.

The final version of our robots.txt (http://www.engfers.com/robots.txt) was pulled from the WordPress Codex page.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Internet Archiver Wayback Machine
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

# Sitemap
Sitemap: http://www.engfers.com/sitemap.xml

**NOTE: This file must to be at the ROOT of your web server!

Final Note: sitemap.xml

The big-daddy search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc use your site’s sitemap.xml (example.com/sitemap.xml) to make it easier crawl your website. It’s also a very important point of SEO; just do a bit of searching on it.

The final line in our robots.txt points to the sitemap:

Sitemap: http://www.engfers.com/sitemap.xml

For WordPress, use a plugin like the Google Sitemap Generator, to have it automacially generate the sitemap for you.

+1 = Moreover, It will automatically regenerate the sitemap.xml when you publish or edit a new article or page. =)