Chan's Personal Blog

Yes, I know I'm behind in posting my photos, but my goal is to post all of my 2008 photos before the year is finished. In either case, here's some photos from the Yahoo! SearchMonkey launch party back in May. This is the first launch party that I've attended where it featured a project that I was working on. Enjoy the photos, and I also have included an accompany sound track if you'd like. (I was too lazy to build my own Flash slideshow with music).






For more information, you can check out the Yahoo Search Blog entry entitled, "The Party May Be Over, But the Monkeying Has Just Begun", and as a bonus, they have a photo of me on there as well. For the geeks, you can check out http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/.

This was all over the news today, a meteorite entered the atmosphere over Albertan airspace, and the video footage is amazing. The entire night sky is lit up by the meteorite.

Forty-two is how many minutes I spent dealing with technical support today, which is probably forty minutes too long. It all started when my internet connection decided to die three days ago, and it never came back to life. Clearly, there was something wrong with the actual internet wiring, and not some user error on my end. So, before I called tech support, I already knew the root of the problem, and I needed them to send a technician to take a look.

I call up my internet provider today to get my line fixed, and I'm greeted by a glorified voice mail system. The system reads out a bunch of menu items, and I work my way through the hoops. What was annoying was that some the system asks me to actually say out loud some of my options, and the computer has troubles recognizing what I'm actually saying. Five minutes after jumping through automated hoops, I'm routed to a guy named John in India.

John starts with pleasantries and annoying chit chat like how I am doing. Privately, I wanted my internet connection fixed instead of wasting time talking about the weather. He goes through his script and asks what my problem is, what my account number is, etc. This is annoying because I already provided all this information in the automated voice message system before talking to John. I tell him exactly what is wrong, but he insists on going through normal troubleshooting procedure. I play along even though I know a lot of his questions he's asking is not even remotely close to what's wrong. He exhausts all of his questions and transfers me to level 2 tech support. Huzzah, I leveled up.

I'm then routed to a guy named Adam who's based in the US. He asks the same basic questions again, like how many lights do you see on your modem. I insist on telling him, the INTERNET LIGHT IS BLINKING RED, I'M SEEING 100% PACKET LOSS there's something wrong with the line. He gets me to repeat newbie steps like unplugging the modem, and all that stuff. We go through more troubleshooting. Finally he decided to run a line test, and discovers that the internet signal is not even reaching my modem. There appears to be something wrong with the physical connection. We're going to have to promote you to level 3 tech support.

Rinse and repeat, and they conclude that they have to send a technician over to check the internet lines, which is what I told them initially. I was on the phone for 42 minutes before they would dispatch a technician.

I really wish there was a way for people with legitimate computer backgrounds, who know what they're doing, to enter a secret code or something when calling tech support. That code would tell tech support that the customer knows what they're talking about, so skip all the newbie troubleshooting questions, and go straight to solving the problem they present.

Under my secret code initiative, this is how the ideal tech support conversation should go:

Automated Voice System Hello, if you want to hear the following message in English, press 1. If you...
Chan: Punches in 1337
Tech Support: Hello Mr. Chan, your access code has been authenticated, and we see that you're someone skilled with computers, how can I help you?
Chan: Hi, my internet connection has been down for days, and there's something wrong with the physical line as I'm seeing 100% packet loss. Please send a technician to repair the line.
Tech Support: Alright Mr. Chan, we'll have someone over as soon as possible. Have I resolved the issue you were calling about?
Chan: Yes.
Tech Support: Goodbye.
END TRANSMISSION

Elapsed time: 1 minute.

Through my journey as a programmer, I've seen quite a lot of ugly programming code. I have sampled ugly code from academia, where newbie/junior programmers try to solve problems in a very hacky and ugly way. In industry, I have seen websites that I can hack and break in about 2 minutes.

In either case, a while back, I saw a project fail so epically and brilliantly, that it has infact lowered my expectations of programmers. Viewer discretion is advised to my non-geek audience, I'm going to be switching my dialect to nerdspeak, so if you don't understand it, I advise you come back another day. For your viewing pleasure, I have uploaded some pictures that you can check out in my Flickr feed.

So this guy had been working on this critical project for about two months. However, the longer the project went, the buggier the program became. This is usually a bad sign because bug reports should actually start to go down as a project approaches completion.

Some of his team members complained that the code was overly complex, but he balked at the assertion, and just thought that his team members didn't have the same programming experience as he did.

When the alarm bells started going off that the project was no where near finished, and it was getting buggier by the day, management decided to step in to figure out what was going on. A fairly senior programmer stepped in to review the code to see what was wrong.