Disqus - Latest Comments for mccv

Re: Things that are easier in Scala vol. 2

mccv — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:23:54 -0000

Not sure on the exact question... all of the Java ones are checked exceptions. Scala doesn't force you to catch them, so I didn't. Realistically there should by a try block somewhere to handle Thrift and Cassandra errors.

Re: Running Scala specs tests in Maven with JUnit 4

mccv — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:01:50 -0000

Excellent, that would be quite a bit nicer. Having the object/class pair is a bit clunky... Overall the framework is very nice though.

Re: Correspondence Is Making A Comeback

mccv — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:07:26 -0000

I'm not a pro, but play a few instruments pretty competently. The technique for Guitar Hero is definitely different, but there are some fundamentals that I think *do* transfer to playing real instruments. Sense of rhythm, being forced to play in time with accompaniment, left/right hand coordination, and general finger dexterity are all basic things that I'd be willing to bet do carry over. I'd be really interested to see somebody take two groups of inexperienced guitar players, one with Guitar Hero experience and one without, and see how each progresses on picking up guitar over a 6-12 month time span.

Re: Restricted Stock vs Options When We Are "Under Water"

mccv — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:55:22 -0000

It definitely affected our company. Right now we're in sort of a transition period... but whereas two years ago you only got restricted stock if you were a director+ (in an engineering company), now you get some restricted/some options if you receive an above average grant. It's been almost universally well received by the people who get it. Fred is right on re: the psychological difference.

One nasty side effect of underwater options is that they create a long-term demotivator. We have people with options granted in 2000 that are still underwater, and it's a constant reminder that things aren't what they used to be. In many cases it's also a reminder that people had six or seven figure paydays that they missed.

Re: Scala Lift Off - Static Companion to Ruby?

mccv — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:59:55 -0000

Thanks Randal, that's another language (and framework) that's been in my queue for a while. I'll poke around a bit.

To clarify though, my issues with rails aren't in handling long running jobs initiated by a web request, it's the scheduled stuff that runs outside of the web request chain. In our case we need to check a mailbox frequently, as people can email content to the site. This will dump stuff to the database that people can see in the browser, but it shouldn't ever have to deal with an HTTP request.

Re: Twittering A Hedge Fund Event

mccv — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:18:06 -0000

this is actually something we've started a project around. I think there's a fundamental difference between systems like twitter that are centered on the individual's point of view (and by extension *their* friends, *their* network), and systems that are centered on on the point of view of an "event".

Take the Web 2.0 Expo. I'm not friends with even 1% of the people there, nor do I want to be. But for the duration of that event I'm interested in hearing what they have to say, finding out what they're up to, and maybe hanging out after hours.

You could add this to twitter, but honestly I think it takes away from the simplicity of that medium. It also presumes a single medium to get data into this event stream... whereas doing it as an external aggregator allows you to pull in data from Jaiku, RSS, Twitter, Jott, or whatever.

Re: System and Organizational Scaling - Continuations

mccv — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:21:40 -0000

Ergh, of course http://www.themcwongs.com/mcblog/2008/04/system...

Re: System and Organizational Scaling - Continuations

mccv — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:37:35 -0000

I threw up a quick counterpoint on the enterprise challenges here http://continuations.wenger.us/post/33100418... it's been pretty well received internally. Thanks for the provocation of thought Albert!

Re: Gasoline Pandering - Continuations

mccv — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:42:26 -0000

It's interesting that certain users already get a pretty hefty tax break on fuel. See http://www.irs.gov/publications/p510/ch02.html#.... I know growing up that a lot of farmers had tanks on their property that they used for farm equiment, and got fuel at a very significant discount. Extending this credit to people who depend on fuel for their livelihood makes some sense.

At the end of the day the high fuel prices should curtail consumption. The amazing thing is that at this point they're not. It's really a testament to the way the U.S. culture and infrastructure are intertwined. Outside the urban centers it's really difficult to avoid driving a lot.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

mccv — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:55:03 -0000

I do, but to be clear, I don't think using twitter as it exists today is viable in an enterprise setting. Being internally transparent is perceived as good. Using a twitter-like solution outside the firewall would be shot down immediately... Hence the market for social enterprise software.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

mccv — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:56:35 -0000

It's funny, your recent post on twitter bots (lotd) got me thinking about twitter in the entrerprise. We have 160 people working on projects that eventually need to integrate into a customer facing product. Just keeping tabs on who is doing what is painful. Outside our immediate group we have another 30k employees. Most of them may as well be working at another company from an information sharing perspective.

We have blogs, forums and Wikis (we actually ave Jive's ClearSpace deployed), but I think an internal Twitter + Tweetscan would be extremely useful.

Re: System and Organizational Scaling - Continuations

mccv — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:46:17 -0000

I think the challenge here is that eventually somebody will want to add a horizontal layer that encompasses multiple vertical slices. Usually this is some higher order app... twittervision is a good example. As long as twittervision takes the vertical slices as fixed (i.e. they can't easily influence product direction) this is good, and I agree, you can scale much more easily.

However in larger organizations it's usually these high order products that generate the revenue, and you get the situation flipped. If twittervision was able to heavily influence the direction of Google maps, Twitter, OpenID, etc. you'd end up with the same mess you usually do in fortune 500 dev shops. Features demanded from the verticals before they're ready, resulting in high-stress and unpredictable development timelines.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

mccv — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:41:45 -0000

@whitneymcn - small clarification on the Twitter API calls/day limit. Post operations (which I assume means direct messages) don't count against the limit. It's entirely feasible to build largeish scale applications using just the HTTP interface, but they're not going to be realtime. By the time you add autofollowing you're probably down to a 5 minute refresh cycle.

Re: Anatomy Of A Twitter Bot

mccv — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:03:48 -0000

I actually used code posted here http://dominiek.com/articles/2008/2/15/how-to-b... to add more real time support to one of our apps. The pros: it uses the Jabber interface so you can handle tweets realtime. The downside: as we found out this week, the stability of Twitter's Jabber interface isn't exactly the same as its HTTP interface... and unlike the Perl example, if your service or Twitter's service is down you don't get things queued up, they just poof.