Duffblog 2.0

Looking at Steve Muench's blog with its screenshot of JDeveloper 11g production makes me feel a little bit proud of what we built. Somehow I left Oracle with the feeling that I hadn't been very productive for a while, but seeing what Steve posted reminded me that the team really poured a lot of stuff into 11g.  Just visually from the screenshot, you can see the new look and feel I implemented based on a design from our talented visual design team. It got a lot of flak (experience is teaching me that fear or dislike of change is a very common trait), but apart from being unbelievably blue, I think it's quite attractive.  Also shown in the screenshot is quick search (which, honestly, we always referred to internally as "Google-like search". Hehe). This was something I wanted and so hacked together on a lazy afternoon without any kind of design or project plan while we were supposed to be in bug fixing mode. Despite its birth, it somehow made it into the final product…

I was pretty comfortable, and definitely not bored in my old job. Had a lot of stuff to do. The trouble though with saying in the same role for a very long time is that it's really hard to find time, reason, or energy to step outside your main job responsibilities a little bit and learn something new. I must have encountered a gazillion technologies and products that I really wanted to get a chance to play with but never did. I wasn't sure when I quit my job at Oracle that working at Google would be any different necessarily. I felt like I'd probably swap my old batch of responsibilities for a new batch of responsibilities, and it would kind of be similar (but hopefully more fun). One thing I somehow failed to realize was that the really great thing about changing jobs is that it gives you that rare chance to really stretch a bit and learn something new. So in my three months at Google so far, I've been able to get to know some fun new stuff. And instead of just re…

Ah... this brings back memories: Feel motivated yet? (via: http://thebode.blogspot.com/2006/07/demotivation.html)

Warning: herein lie spoilers! Somewhat surprised to see Shirley Manson, Scottish lead singer of rock band Garbage show up in the second season premier of Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night. Bit of a "holy crap, that's Shirley Manson" double take when the scene opened on her as an evil CEO who actually turns out to be a T-1000 model terminator (T-1000 is the gloopy, liquid metal model that Robert Patrick played so well in Terminator 2) hell bent on bringing about the Rise of the Machines. Haven't quite figured out yet whether she's a good actor or not... She certainly came across as kind of cold, dominating, fearsome, and a little stiff. At first, I thought her acting was a bit iffy, but the reveal that she's actually a T-1000 sort of changed my perception a bit. Was really nice hearing a genuine Scottish accent on US network television too. Scottish actors don't get to play the Bad Guy (or Lass) in TV sci fi nearly often enough.…

My first two weeks are over, now I'm taking a quick bout of unpaid leave to take Cindy to Paris and Barcelona. She's never been to europe - and even though I'm from Europe, it's a big place and I've never really spent much time in those two cities. We're also going to spend some time with my parents in the south east of Spain. Cindy swears that I've put on weight in the mere two weeks since I joined google on account of the free food. This is an assertion which I stringently deny, alas to no avail. I try to convince myself that all of the cycling between buildings (or walking in the fairly regular no-available-bikes scenario) is burning off enough calories to make up for the additional input. I may or may not be kidding myself. I've been using the convenient excuse that, since it takes some period of time after initial employment before registering for the gym is possible, working out and getting rid of the extra pounds is something I can put off until…

I made the Big Switch from Windows to Linux at work several years ago, and never really looked back. For whatever reason, our version control system and builds are always about twice as fast on Linux compared to Windows. I'm also much more comfortable in a UNIX-y shell / scripting environment than I am in Windows Command Prompt, probably because of hours spent in various computer labs at university when I really should have been doing something more fun (like drinking beer). As well as the raw productivity gain from the faster environment, I also customized my environment a great deal to minimize keypresses. For example, where most other people in my team might type something like this: cd $ADE_VIEW_ROOT/jdevadf/modules/ide/src/oracle/ide ade co -nc Ide.java MainWindow.java cd `pwd` emacs Ide.java MainWindow.java cd $ADE_VIEW_ROOT/jdevadf make release I type: m ide/src/oracle/ide co Ide.java MainWindow.java emacs Ide.java MainWindow.java jdevadf mrel Doesn't seem like m…

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