Safe from the Losing Fight

Most of the interview is really dry, but there’s some good stuff in there.

My favorite quote:

“So, putting it simply, STL is the result of a bacterial infection.”

[Note: I should mention the joke here is on me. The strings were in fact in little endian format. I just don't know how to read a debugger.]

Its time for my geek humor corner. Technically this entire blog could be considered geek humor (sans the humor), but bear with me now. This is quite amusing, I assure you. Assuming, of course, you have a CS or EE degree and you are easily amused. I know for one that I fall into that catagory.

If you don’t, I’m sure its ok. God probably still loves you anyway.

Anyway, I’m working on porting a Mac/PowerPC application to Mac/Intel. As any geek worth his weight in Cheetos knows, that means dealing with big endian vs little endian issues. The problem I was looking at had to deal with strings of text. I’m looking at the string in the debugger, and everything looks fine. So I decide to actually to view the string as raw memory.

Well now. That’s funny. In a “that’s going to ruin my entire day” sort of way.

Silly me, here I was on a little-endian machine thinking I’d see little-endian string. But that’s where I’d be wrong. I was now staring at a big-endian string (a string literal built by the compiler, no less).

BUHAHAHAHAHHAHA!

I guess you had to be there.

My business partners and I were reviewing an NDA for a potential contract today. We were marveling at the dense prose used in it. I mean, the lawyers really earned their keep on this one. No one with a soul was going to understand it.

Anyway, that got us to thinking about NDA’s in general. I suggested that NDA’s should be written in a lighthearted poem format. My suggestion was:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Please work for us
But don’t tell anyone you knew

Its a good thing I’m an engineer.

The other guys tried, but they were even less successful than I was. I mean theirs didn’t even rhyme. psh. Whoever heard of a poem that didn’t rhyme?

After coming to the realization that we weren’t poets, we started talking about how much we should charge this sucker. I mean mark. I mean customer. Customer. Whatever.

Its always a delicate balance. If you charge too much, they assume you’re trying to rob them outright. But you charge too little, they assume you’re going to steal something on the way out. So you have aim for the price range that says “I’m probably not a thief.”

Regardless, I’m pretty excited about this. Its always good to have new suckers come in. I mean customers.

I’m getting old. Well, not right this minute. Its going to take a while. Like about a week. I think Sunday will work well for me.

As I get older, I’ve decided I’m going to become grumpy. Not because I have reason to, but just because it looks fun. I mean, what other reason would you have to beat innocent people with a walker? Or play with false teeth? Or lose all your hair? Or wear diapers? I tell you what, old people have it figured out.

Supposedly you get that “wisdom” thing too, but that doesn’t sound as entertaining. Besides, I had my wisdom teeth cut out, so I think I’m exempt.

Anyway, Elaine is going to be coming out to visit me for this momentous occasion. Its mainly momentous because I plan to wear pants that day, not for the birthday or anything. I’m pretty excited about it (Elaine visiting, not me wearing pants) but I’m a bit anxious a few of our activities.

We’re having lunch with some of her friends who live in the Dallas metroplex. They’re apparently geeks too, so we should get along fine. But meeting people is always interesting for me. Namely because I tend to clamp my mouth shut and try not to make any noise. I think my mind is too busy processing the new people and what they’re saying to come up with any original thoughts to say. The one time I was dumb enough to open my mouth in such a situation, I said something like “Weasels taste great stewed”. Or something equally captivating.

When I met Elaine’s parents for the first time, all I could do was grin nod my head stupidly like one of those bobble-head dolls. Oh well. Hopefully they thought I was just stoned out of my mind.

Afterwards I think we’re going to go check out the Fort Worth zoo. I keep have visions of me going in with Elaine, getting lost, and Elaine leaving with some chimp (other than me).

Chimp/Andy-Impersonator: Ooo-ooo-ahh-ahh!

Elaine: Oh wow, you look a lot better than usual. Did you get a haircut or something?

Chimp/Andy-Impersonator: AHH-AHH-AHH!

Elaine: Wow, you’re even more well spoken than usual.

She’d figure it out though when they got home and the chimp burned the stew. No one can burn stew like me. Water catches fire.

Did I mention that sometimes my thoughts aren’t human?

Its hard being a Mac guy. Even if you’re not an engineer you have to deal with no tech support, lack of Mac friendly services, and Windows users teasing you that Photoshop is the only game available on the Mac. psh. They always forget about Microsoft Excel.

So what’s different when you’re a Mac engineer on a cross platform product? A lot. Let me tell you, if you’re going to be a Mac user, you might as well be an engineer. Its that good.

First, IT is thrilled when you come around and line up to help you. Back when I first joined Macromedia they were just getting around to installing Airport networks. In addition to setting up the base stations they obviously had to get wireless cards for all the computers and get them installed. During that time I had one of the Pismo Powerbooks which required a somewhat involved procedure to get the Airport card installed. You had to pry up the keyboard, use a screwdriver to remove the harddrive, and then somehow wedge the darn thing into place without bending any of the pins. I’m pretty sure the packaged instructions also suggested sacrificing a squirrel to ensure it’d fit, but I wasn’t sure how I’d explain all the blood to facilities. I mean, it wasn’t Thursday.

When I first got my Airport card I was just going to install it myself until I realized what was involved. It also occurred to me that we had an IT guy whose sole job was to be “the Mac guy.” I’ll call him Dick, because it just seems appropriate. Dick didn’t work on PC’s or the network, he only worked on Macs. That was it; his sole purpose in life. I thought I could drop off the PowerBook to get the Airport card installed and continue doing “engineering things”[1]. I moseyed on down to Dick’s office and cheerfully asked if he’d install the Airport card for me. Without even looking up, he said “Most Mac users are more self reliant.”

Feel the love.

Oddly enough, Dick was one of the first people let go when the layoffs came. I don’t know why.

But don’t worry, the loving support of your corporate family doesn’t end there. As the sole Mac engineer[2] you get to be everybody’s mother. You get to clean up their messes in the Mac code when they didn’t feel like doing it right. This experience is heightened by it being like an Easter Egg hunt. They’re not going to tell you about their mistakes, you get to go look for them when the bug reports roll in. And no, rubbing their noses in the naughty code doesn’t improve the Windows engineers’ behavior. It only seems to encourage them.

However, the biggest gift your engineering brothers can give you is the opportunity to interact with the Mothership, and impress the smart people at Apple. When Apple releases a new version of Mac OS X sometimes existing versions of applications break. This is often because engineers were relying on undocumented or unsupported behavior. When Tiger was released I had the great fortune of finding one of those special “Easter Eggs” that one of my fellow engineers had thoughtfully left for me.

The easter egg was pretty simple. Mac OS X is now a version of Unix and uses the Unix path separator, “/”. In a previous life, the Mac had its very own path separator, “:”. The result is sometimes Mac OS X wants an old school Mac paths, but other times it insists on the new style Unix paths. In this case Dreamweaver was given a Unix path but needed a Mac path. The solution is simple: you give the Mac your Unix path and tell its a Unix path and ask for a Mac path back. Well, this was apparently beyond my fellow engineer, who was apparently convinced the correct way to handle the situation was to give the Mac his Unix path, but call it a Mac path, and ask for a Windows style path back. For reasons that probably baffled him, this didn’t do exactly what he wanted. So he wrote some special code to hack up the resulting path so it would work on his machine.

The problem here is that this was all in shipping code when Tiger came out. Management didn’t want to go back and re-release the previous version with this one bug fix for obvious reasons. The only solution they saw was to ask me to ask Apple to change their API’s to do something random instead of what they were documented to do. And let me tell you, Apple was thrilled to change their code. I ended up speaking with an Apple engineer about it:

Me: Hey, do you know that API that converts Unix paths into Mac paths?

Apple Engineer: You mean the one that’s so well designed and documented that a brain-dead chimp could figure it out?

Me: Um… yeah, that one. We… we need you to make that not do what it supposed to do.

Apple Engineer: ….

Me: Yeah, so a Windows engineer got into the code and…

Apple Engineer: Are you on crack?

Me: No, no, a Windows engineer wrote the code. They didn’t know what they were doing.

Apple Engineer: …right….

Me: Honest, I would never write code like that!

Apple Engineer: But you need an API to do the opposite of what its documented and designed to do?

Me: Right, right. But its not for me. Its for a Windows engineer.

Apple Engineer: ….

Me: ….

Apple Engineer: …

Me: Are you guys hiring?

Apple Engineer: click

Me: Hello?

I’m expecting a call from them any day now.

Being a Mac engineer means your fellow engineers will always keep you on your toes and have the upmost respect for you. I often had to update the Mac tools to get new features or improved support. This required the other engineers to upgrade the tools on their machines as well to maintain the ability to build the product. So after making the appropriate changes and checking them in, I’d send out an email with instructions. They were promptly ignored. Without fail, a few days later the following conversation would occur at least once:

Fellow Engineer: (Agitated, as if something’s wrong) Hey, did you know the Mac doesn’t build?

Me: hmm… well we had an automated build this morning and I just sync’d and built. Maybe its something on your machine?

Fellow Engineer: No, no. I reinstalled all the tools on my machine and did a clean sync. Something is definitely broken.

Me: OK, what errors are you getting?

Fellow Engineer: (Proceeds to describe the exact errors I outlined in my email that you would get if you didn’t upgrade)

Me: Did you follow the instructions in my email that I sent out?

Fellow Engineer: What email?

Me: The one titled “Follow these instructions if you ever want to build on the Mac again”.

Fellow Engineer: Oh….. was that important?

Me: If you want to build on the Mac, it is.

Fellow Engineer: Oh…. I’m pretty sure I deleted that immediately.

Me: (sighs) Do you want me to resend you those instructions?

Fellow Engineer: Well… I just have this Mac specific bug here. Maybe you could take it?

Me: I don’t know…

Fellow Engineer: Great! I’ll go assign it to you now!

Me: (mumbles obscenities)

Fortunately upper management is always there to offer guidance, like any good parent would. At one point we were getting unsubstantiated reports of performance problems. Upper management knew the best way to handle it was to ask Apple what the problem was. Being the naive engineer, I suggested that we might actually try to figure out what was allegedly slow and work on it. I was assured that wasn’t acceptable. We definitely needed to ask Apple what the problem was before we did anything. I’m not sure what my email was supposed to say. Maybe “Hi. We don’t have a clue. Do you have an app that fixes that?”

But in the end, its the customers that make it all worth while. They always have encouraging things to say. Like “Who wrote this? A trained squirrel? Hire a real Mac programmer!” It warms my heart. But without a doubt, I always enjoy the interaction with customers that I get on the beta lists. After spending months on a feature you have uplifting conversations like this:

Customer: This feature you just spent the past six months on sucks!

Me: Oh. Well what’s wrong with it?

Customer: It uses blue. Blue! What were you thinking?!?!

Me: Oh… ok. Um, what should have we used?

Customer: I don’t know! But not blue! You guys suck! I hate you!

Me: Well its just a preference. You can change it to whatever color you want.

Customer: But what about the newbies? huh? The blue is just going to confuse them and they’re not going to know how to change it!

Me: (sighs) OK. Write up a bug report and we’ll find something to change it to.

Customer: What?!?! I don’t have that sort of time!

Me: OK, OK. I’ll write it up.

Customer: Hey! The bug report doesn’t say exactly what I want it to!

Me: Well I had to write it up for you…

Customer: So? You guys don’t care about customers at all! I wouldn’t buy this with your money!

Me: …

Customer: I’m getting the software for free, right?

Me: (sighs) Yes.

Customer: Awesome!

Why would you ever want to do anything else?

[1] Its not my fault that doing “engineering things” sometimes looks like playing Quake.
[2] What? You think you’re going to get help? Didn’t you read the previous paragraph? “Most Mac users are more self reliant!”