Behind the Curtain at TCG

Too Clever?

In many weakly-typed languages, such as Javascript and PHP, you might find code that takes some ambiguous value and coerces it into a straightforward boolean like so:

$boolean = (boolean) $mixed;

But what about this radically shorter alternative?

$boolean = !!$mixed;

Both rely on the typecasting features of the underlying language, but the latter does the job in with two characters, while the former takes six or more.

Is this second construct strange to you?  Not to me, not anymore.  I find it spare and quite quite clear, but perhaps I’m just used to it after using it so long I can’t even remember where I first saw it (or whether I possibly even invented discovered it on my own).

What other quirky coding do you find delightful... or infuriating?

The Beautiful Ternary

I am a fan of the ternary operator. Yes, it’s alien the first time you meet it, but wow, talk about getting things done! In a single line you can succinctly express a test and two options, making for truly compact yet clear assignments, for example:

var answer = ( condition ? optionOne : optionTwo );

But what if things are a little more complicated? Imagine alternatives involving really long snippets of code or nested options. These could be troubling with inline ternaries, leading to very long lines and complex statements difficult to apprehend at a glance.

But here comes convention to save the day! Consider this interesting use of spaces to visually lay out a ternary statement that would otherwise make for a very long line:

var product = (   determineProductClass( p1 )
                ? configureProductOne( p2, p3, p4, p5 )
                : configureProductTwo( p2, p3 ) );

Putting the three elements of the ternary on three separate lines is pretty common, but adding two spaces to the front of the first element and putting the operators at the front of the latter two lines is less common, I think. The effect, though, is to vertically align the three operands of the ternary, which to me makes the whole thing much more readable and easier to understand, especially if you think of the initial parenthesis and the extra spaces as a signal meaning “here comes a conditional.”

And here the same spacing convention goes wild to illustrate (literally!) a small set of nested options (which could go at least a few layers deeper easily without losing clarity):

var charge = (   product.isShippable()
               ? flatRateShippingCharge +
                 (   product.isOversized()
                   ? oversizedShippingSurcharge
                   : 0 ) // No surcharge for most products!
               : 0 ); // Digital product - no shipping!

Reminds me of the crazy comma first idea (but I’ll leave the tabs-versus-spaces elephant in the room). What do you think? Too weird... or actually helpful?

Every Project Needs a Cat ... or Why CMMI Works For Me

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Earlier this month, TCG was re-confirmed as a CMMI Level 2 organization. Many people look at the CMMI documentation and think that it is a lot of overhead, but that's not the way I see it.  To me, CMMI is like keeping a cat in the kitchen.  

I'm not in any way saying that programmers, designers, testers, or managers are lazy mice that only work when the cat is away.  I'm lucky enough to work with people who are smart, motivated and want to do a great job.  In fact, everyone I work with not only wants to do a great job, but they know exactly what they need to do to make a project succeed in the long term.  

It's the "long term" bit that sometimes becomes a problem. Every project has deadlines and every team gets in a crunch now and again. What does a good development team do that situation? The best they can. But when you are down in the weeds you are lucky to see the upcoming mile stone.  You surely aren't thinking about the 5th or 6th milestone down the lane. Even a good team will sometimes deviate a bit from what they know are best practices if it means satisfying a client today.  You can always pay it back later, right?  Right?  Well...

My experience says that when things get tight, taking short cuts to meet today's goal just messes things up worse for tomorrow. Skipping a step you know to be good for the long term health of a project won't be good for the long term health of the project. Sure, that last statement seems obvious, but we've all been in meetings where someone says "well, since the deadline is this week I think we better just..."

So, back to the proverbial cat:  Having a defined and documented process that spells out the best process for your team is great. Having someone check up on folks to make sure they are following the process is even better. That's the cat right there. You will make the hard choice and do what is right because now you have to.  You can't sweep it under the rug.  

If you have stuck with me this far, you are surely thinking of that one time where you would have lost a $10 million project if you had to stick to the letter of every policy.  I agree, there are times when you have to bend a little to keep from snapping in half.  A good CMMI compatible policy will have enough flexibility to get you out of a jam.  It will typically involve presenting a good case for a waiver and getting sign off from "the management."  Not usually too hard if the alternative is wasting time/money or crashing a key project.  

So if you are looking at CMMI, don't see it as a busy work generator or a dusty binder of stuffy rules. It's not either of those things. CMMI is a framework that let's you define the process that is right for your team and then help you follow it. If anyone isn't following it, the cat will catch them sooner or later and fix the problem.

Adrianne Fielding New NGMA Executive Director

 

Adrianne Fielding is taking over as Executive Director of the National Grants Management Association. She comes from Thompson Publishing, where she was Grants Managing Editor, steering some 30 of their products. Adrianne was a member of the NGMA board and knows the organization well. Prior to that, she was a grants consultant for Booz Allen. Her deep roots in the grants community will allow NGMA to continue its fine work. Adrianne replaces Debra Stafford, who announced in early February that she was leaving.

Web Accessibility Pays Off in Spades ... or Why You Shouldn't Count on JavaScript

Every web designer tries to make their sites as usable, understandable, and beautiful as possible.  Web accessibility is the practice of ensuring that you site is equally usable and understandable for all people, including the disabled.  It may not be obvious, but many of the web accessibility best practices will help you create a a site that is actually better for all users, not just those people we generally think of as disabled.  

Consider a very common disability that doesn't usually jump to mind when you say "disabled": color blindness.  About 7% of men and .4% of women in the united states have some form of color blindness. Because of this, it is not a great idea to use color alone to signal some special functionality on a web page. But "color sighted" users shouldn't have a problem, right?  Well, not every monitor is properly calibrated and on some low cost LCD monitors your users may have trouble distinguishing colors that are plainly different on your screen.  Even high contrast colors may not show up in black and white printouts of your site.

Setting aside color blindness, let's look at the much more serious case of total blindness.  In the early days of website development, i.e. the 1990's, vision impaired users employed screen reading software to translate web pages to spoken language.  These early readers did not support JavaScript.  Consequently, one component of web accessibility has traditionally been to make sure your site will work without JavaScript.  That has change recently though.  A 2010 survy of screen reader users shows that the vast majority of screen reader users have JavaScript enabled.  So, no need to worry about that anymore....right?  Well, not so fast.

If you rely heavily on JavaScript with no fallback, it is very easy for a small bug somewhere in your code to disable your entire site.  This very thing happened to Gawker Media in 2011 and put a number of top ranking web sites offline for a few hours.  JavaScript dependent sites can fail miserably leaving you with a blank page that isn't always easy to debug.  If you plan from the start to have a non-JavaScript fall back for all key functionality, you won't have this problem.

This week I spent some time going through NITRC.org to make sure we didn't have any obvious accessibility issues. During the investigation I did find some select lists using for sorting reports which required JavaScript to run properly. Users without JavaScript (for whatever reason) would not be able to sort of filter the reports.  Not a huge problem, but it is easily fixed:

<select name="xxx" onchange="this.form.submit();">
    <option>A</option>
    <option>B</option>
</select> 
<input type=submit value="go" class="hide-with-javascript" />
<script>$(".hide-with-javascript").css("display","none");</script>'

It is a very simple change and "regular" users who have JavaScript enabled won't even see the added button because the JQuery script snippet will hide it.

Another web accessibility best practice is providing "Alt" tags for images.  The Alt tag provides a text description of the image. Originally this was used so that screen readers could describe the image to a blind user. Now these Alt tags provide valuable meta information to search engines trying to connect users with your content. Doing this consistently can push your site higher in Google's search results.

The recent push towards mobile web sites ties in well with the accessibility concept also.  What might work fine on a 21" monitor with a good mouse does not usually work on a 4 inch smart phone screen. Web accessibility recommends using large "click targets" to support users with impaired motor skills. But keep in mind that large targets will help all your users when they are tying to get something done on your web site using a phone or tablet.  Especially if they have to poke at the tiny screen with their finger on a bouncing commuter train.

If you are interested in learning more about Web Accessibility guidelines at the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative site.

Protect Yourself Against Surprise Cloud Hosting Fees

There are lots of great things about hosting a web site or service in the cloud, but price stability is not one of them.  There are numerous ways a small project can get hit with a bill that is many times more than you would expect for the month.  Here are just a few scenarios:

• Your web site goes viral and suddenly you are getting thousands of downloads of your hosted content. Not a big deal if you have a static website, but if you have some large files that are being downloaded, you can burn through bandwidth rather quickly.  A 50MB file is only $.006 per download, but 50,000 downloads will cost you $300.
• Some of your custom code goes wild and starts making excessive data transfers in/out of your availability zone.  Or to a lesser extent, just starts burning through I/O operations.
• You accidentally start an AMI with extra charges above the usual per hour rate.  For example, right now a Large Windows instance is $0.46 an hour, but a Large Windows Instance with SQL Server is $1.06 per hour.  That's an extra $432 a month you might not notice until you get your statement.  Other AMIs could potentially have a larger markup too.
• Your site is compromised and very bad people start using it as an open FTP site.  Amazon has a huge pipe to the public Internet and you could end up paying download fees for 10,000 copies of a HD movie hosted on your server.  This would cost you thousands of dollars and it is the one I'm most worried about personally!

The thing that seems strange to me is that Amazon has yet to put in a publicly available kill switch or even an alert system for crazy cost spikes.  People have been asking for on the forums frequently since 2009.  On the plus side, I have found some info in a post on the BitNami Blog that Premium Support customers can use the Cloud Watch service to monitor charges, but it doesn't look as simple as it should be, and it's not available to the 'little guys.'  Regular users can setup free Cloud Watch alarms based on certain metrics like Bandwidth or EBS reads, but not on the actual charges you are incurring. 

So, what to do?  You could give up on the cloud for small hosting projects and stick with a fixed cost VPS provider. Or, if your site works with the right technology you could use a cloud provider like Heroku that gives you a fixed cost and a soft bandwidth limit of 2TB.  Or for people who trust in their OCD, you could manually check your billing summary page every day. None of these are great solutions if you want want Amazon is offering.

There is one web service I've used personally called Cost Alarm.  It does exactly what I want, monitors your overall AWS bill and sends an email messages when your charges reach whatever level you specify.  I use my mobile carrier's email to SMS gateway so I will get a text message should there be a problem. 

Cost Alarm is still in beta test so it is free for now.  When the service does go live, the proposed cost is about $5 a month for a each AWS account monitored, which I think is reasonable.  I have ran some test cases and found that it does exactly what is advertised.  I wish that Amazon never created  a situation where a site like Cost Alarm was necessary.  It is really a feature that should have been baked into AWS from the start.  Given the situation though, I hope that Cost Alarm does well and keeps offering this necessary service.

 

Debuging Dynamic JavaScript

I have always been a fan of integrated debuggers.  They really help me think about tricky bits of code and verify that my solution is correct.  While testing my code I like to use a debugger to watch all my variables and boolean conditions.  Sometimes during a walk through like this I will see some problem with a variable value that isn't manifesting to the user with any of my chosen test cases but could occur in the real world.

With JavaScript becoming a larger and larger part of my code base it's not as easy to do this.  There are some great tools that help with debugging JavaScript, and my go-to tool is FireBug.  It seems to do nearly everything for client side debugging: DOM inspection, source viewing, line by line JavaScript debugging, etc.   90% of the time it does what I need. 

There is one place that I have had trouble though:  Finding what bit of random JavaScript has been dynamically bound to the DOM.  Often the code that binds an anonymous function to some element wasn't even loaded with the page but was pulled in later due to a dynamic condition.  I am very happy to have found a tool to help with this: Visual Event.  It works by highlighting on the screen all the elements that have JavaScript bindings. When you hover over the element you can even see the code that is bound to it.

Here is what it looks like when I run it against the front page of NITRC:

If you run into some code using a lot of client side JavaScript magic, give it a try and see what you think.

SmartCEO Recognizes TCG Management Team

TCG’s president, Dan Turner, and the TCG executive management team are featured in two articles in the March issue of SmartCEO magazine. TCG’s management team is featured as one of the best senior leadership teams in Washington, DC, and is a winner of the publication’s 2012 Washington Smart CXO Awards in the Executive Management Team category, while Dan participated in the recurring “CEOForum: Interviews” column, where he was interviewed along with six other CEOs about the hiring and interview strategies that have helped make their companies successful. To read the full press release, click here.

Are you having problems with VirtualBox giving out of memory errors?

In a previous post I described how I use Virtual Machines while doing software development.   A few weeks ago I started getting memory errors when I launched a VM without closing down any other VM I had running.  Specifically, I would get a VERR_EM_NO_MEMORY error with a result code of 0x80004005.  I had never seen anything like this before and assumed that after I rebooted my computer I would see it again.  Unfortunately, it did not go away.

Running a single VM at a time isn't much of a hardship, so I didn't jump on this problem right away.  Eventually I did some research though, and it took some digging to find any relevant information. Since I had trouble finding information on the problem, I thought I would document what I found in a way that search engines could easily index: a blog post.  That way anyone else who is having a similar problem is more likely to find the solution.

Here is a link to a VirtualBox bug report on the issue.  The short story is that this problem can be resolved by killing the Google Crash Handler process.  Once I did that, I was able to start up numerous VMs as usual. 

It turns out that, for me at least, the Google Crash Manager is being launched by Chrome.  I found a related Chrome issue report.  This page explains that you can prevent the Crash Manager from running when you start Chrome in the first place.  Here are the steps:

• Hit the wrench button to the right of the address bar to pull up the Chrome menu.
• Choose Options from the menu.
• Choose "Under the Hood" from the left hand menu.
• Find the check box in the Privacy section that says "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google" and un-check that.

I expected the problem to be resolved before I had a chance to blog about it, but so far I am still seeing it.

Online Grants Manual Part of Maryland's Grants Library

The Maryland Governor's Grants Office has put its grants managers' manual on its website along with other resources that applicants and administrators might need. One link on the site, for instance. lets businesses download a document that contains  finance programs for which they may be eligible. Another allows citizens to track grants in their communities. This kind of proactive effort can not only help information seekers, it puts data directly in the hands of the public.