Images of Boucherville

How to quickly and easily leverage your word processor to effectively write about tech tasks

We tech people have our own language.

Now I’m not talking about all that esoteric terminology and all those acronyms, though we have that too. “I tried pooling my SQL connections but ODBC doesn’t allow IP tunnelling.” Or “why should I be calm when my COM component can’t access my COM port?”

No. What I’m referring to here is basic rules of English grammar, syntax, punctuation, and vocabulary. We have our own rules.

To start with, we like to use T words; in particular, we have two T words that we use over and over again: “tools” and “tasks.” We sure like to talk about tools and tasks. When we talk about doing something, we don’t say “say you have to do something;” oh no – we say “say you have to perform some task.” And software applications are not software applications – they are “tools.” Tools and tasks, tools and tasks, tools and tasks. Use this tool to perform this task. Perform this task with this tool.

A word we don’t like to use is “use.” Oh no. why use “use” when “utilize” is so much longer? So we utilize “utilize:” “Utilize this task to perform this tool.”

But really even “utilize” is for sissies. The word real developers use is “leverage.” Of course we have no idea what it really means, so we use it as a synonym for “utilize.” Good: “Leverage your knowledge of VB to learn VB.NET.”
Better: “Leverage VB.NET to build robust tools.”
Best: “You can leverage this book to perform doorstopping tasks.”

We like to create ambiguous negatives. What’s an “ambiguous negative?” “The data is not compressed in order to save processing time.” You have no idea now whether the data is compressed or not.

We scramble up meanings: “The method does not return all the data you may need.” (If you are thinking about that, it should be “The method may not return all the data you need.”)

Sometimes we feel that we have too many sentences. “However” is the word that can fix that: “This tool is not very useful, however it still does many tasks.” We mix up singular and plural: “The company can always change their policies.” We mix up indicatives and participles just by using “as well as”: “The user can change their password, as well as changing his username.”

We lie, particularly about the ease and speed of performing difficult tasks. We like to say that things are quick and that they are easy, especially when they are slow and difficult. “You can quickly create an application that will save all the world’s rainforests.” “You can easily use multicast delegates to create events that are hooked into the operating system’s kernel mode.” Right.

We like to add extra prepositions, particularly “for.” “This allows for you to work quickly and easily.”

One thing we are particularly addicted to is splitting infinitives. Now in this we are not alone. But we do it more than anyone else does, and particularly unnecessarily. “You can leverage this tool to quickly and easily generate code.” We go out of our way, in fact, to look for unnecessary adverbs, lest an infinitive be left in peace: “This allows you to visually see the results.” “This tool performs the task that can quickly and easily allow for you to properly log errors.” Thank goodness. I’m so tired of tools that log errors improperly.

I could go on, however I am certain that this has all been written before. I am not stopping now because I am lazy – no need for me to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel. I can leverage my time more effectively to perform needed tasks…

Bill 101 Revisited

When I moved to this city in 2002 I had to learn my way around the subway system, which is called the Métro, after the underground in Paris. It was only my first or second time when I heard an announcement that sounded like this:

LsrvcertrdsrllgnvrtntrlsttnngrnntlsttnHnrBgrndsrvcrsmrdxhtrtvgntmnts.

The sound system wasn't the best in the world. And the fact that the announcement was in French didn't help me at all. There was no translation into English - this wasn't the airport.

Then and there, I made up my mind to learn French.

Four months later I bought a CD called "Transparent French," part of the Complete Language series. And I went to work. I learned how to talk to policemen (je ne parle pas français) and how to answer the phone: (voici quelqu'un qui parle français meiux que moi) and even how to order food in French (avez vous un menu en Anglais?)

The CD takes a conversational approach; learn full sentences. So it tells you how to ask "l'aeroport, est-il-loin d'ici?" and I got good at saying that. So every time I hopped into a cab I could ask how far the airport was, even if I was just going home. Cab drivers began to wonder about my strange obsession with the distance to the airport.

When I realized that I actually had to figure out what the words meant, I got my hands on a library book called "French" - can't help but love the title. Here's the blurb:

A book of self-instruction in French based on the work by Sir John Adams, M A.,
LL.D., completely revised and enlarged by Norman Scarlyn Wilson, M.A.

I could not help noticing the very English name of the author, and the publishing date of 1938. Still, a book is a book. And what I like about it is the structured approach - a bit of grammar, a bit of vocabulary, a bit of grammer, a bit of vocabulary. And the exercises were ok - translate from French to English, translate from English to French. I listen to the larks, j'écoute les allouettes, I noticed the sentry, he is at the castle, j'ai rémarqué la sentinelle, elle est dans le château (in French "she" can mean "he") .

So I went out all charged up, looking everywhere for sentries and larks and castles. But first person I encountered was a snot-nosed kid who looks at me and asks "tu alors?" Now what the heck is that supposed to mean? Doesn't make sense. He points to his wrist. It hits me. "Tu as l'heure?" Oh. Quinze et demi. 3:30. It's actually a quarter past noon. But in the book the exercise was quinze et demi. So anyone asks me the time, it's 3:30.

There was another problem. Other people wanted to borrow the book.

Back to the library it went. Later I found my own copy on Ebay. You can find anything on Ebay.
Finally in the spring of '06 I took the bull by the horns and signed up for a course at Concordia University. It's a 6 level course called Communication Oral. They put me in at level 2. I spent 4 hours every morning for 2 weeks in July 2006, speaking, listening to, reading, and writing French. The emphasis was on talking and listening. It was great fun. We did present, and passé compose. We did vocabulary - clothing, directions, weather. (neige = snow). How many different ways can you ask for coffee - puis-je avoir de café (can I have some coffee), je voudrais un tasse de café (I would like a cup of coffee).

"David can you come up with a suggestion?"

" Sure. Oubliez le café. Donnez moi une bière."

I took level 3 in the fall of '06 but I did it in the evening. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 6 till 9, for 10 weeks. I felt a bit over my head by the end (in fact by the beginning). But I hung in there.

Now I think about continuing. I think about studying at home. I think about getting someone from among my circle of acquaintances to sit with me for an hour a week and talk to me in French (heaven knows I know enough French speaking people).

But I think that little by little the fog is lifting. I was in the Métro last week, and I heard this:
Le service est retardé sur le ligne vert, entre la station angrnion et la station Honore-Beaugrand. Le service vas récommencer à dix-huit heures et vingt minutes.

It wasn't just the improvement in the sound system. Someone turned to me and said, did she say "LsrvcertrdsrllgnvrtntrlsttnngrnntlsttnHnrBgrndsrvcrsmrdxhtrtvgntmnts?"

Ventures In Cardboard

My favourite record cover of all time belongs to a 1967 Ventures album called $1,000,000.00 Weekend. The picture shows an enraptured woman listening to what looks like a slightly clunky white cell phone. It would have to have been a picture from the future, given that cell phones, as we now know them, didn't become widely available until almost 30 years later. Of course what she's listening to is a transistor radio - your grandparents' iPod; she doesn't even have an earphone.

I'm not sure what the appeal is; perhaps it's the time capsule aspect, without all the obvious psychedelic trappings, perhaps it's just her mascara.

I have a collection of Ventures albums - not everything they did, but most of their releases from 1960 until 1970. I don't know why, but the group fascinates me. Unlike so many instrumental groups of that era, they were a real group, with real members, with names. Ask me and I'll tell you - Bob Bogle, Nokie Edwards, Don Wilson, and Mel Taylor - that was the classic lineup, although Howie Johnson played drums on "Walk Don't Run". They put out albums with themes - country songs, surfing songs, songs to twist by, songs with colours in the title. Later they got into a kind of faux psychedelia, which sometimes sounds perilously close to the real thing.

It just fascinates me, that's all. I wonder what they were thinking when they recorded Ventures A Go Go in 1965, or Swamp Rock in 1969. What made them, in 1966, record an album of TV themes, with only three TV themes on it? I keep checking Amazon, but no luck. A "Story of the Ventures, as told by…" is long overdue.

And the covers - the covers are priceless. I've actually considered ditching the LPs and just keeping the covers. My favourites, apart from the one mentioned, are: (The) Ventures In Space showing a couple parked in an old roadster, overlooking the city down below at twilight, Golden Greats, showing a girl in a bikini, with way more weight on her midriff then would be allowed in today's anorexic world, The Ventures Play The Greatest Surfin' Hits Of All-Time, a later LP with a bikini clad model with not an ounce of fat within a hundred miles.

Musically they were too genuine for the supermarket budget rack, but not genuine enough for Rolling Stone. Judging by what's in the grooves, they were good axemen, but nobody puts Bob Bogle in the same category as Randy Bachman. They are barely a footnote in the history of rock music, notwithstanding the timeless appeal of "Walk Don't Run", the immortal bass run on "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue", the preternatural grunge of "Needles And Pins".

And after about 1970, they went from being a footnote to a footnote to a footnote.

And this notwithstanding the fact that the group is still around, with Wilson, Edwards and Bogle still on board. Drummer Mel Taylor died in 1996, and his son Leon is now playing in the band. And of course they have a web site.

But you can't judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a Ventures album by the model on the front. Everyone has his favourites and so do I. I am partial to The Fabulous Ventures, if for no other reason than that it has the aforementioned cover of "Needles And Pins", which I always thought would be a great theme for an oldies radio show. There are a couple of others that I especially get into, but my least favourite is $1,000,000.00 Weekend; the album is a collection of instrumental versions of popular hits of the day, like others they did, but this one is just kind of lifeless. Maybe the radio needed batteries…

Odd Technology

This is how the world has changed in the last five years or so.

Used to be, you could find book stores, clearance centres, sometimes random piles of books in supermarkets, and there would be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tech books. Often they were books listed at $70 or $80, but the software they were describing was a generation or two old, so they could be had for anywhere from $5 to $25.

And so I picked up books, tech books. I got books about Visual Basic, Java, Visual Interdev, even Dbase.

One of the books I got was called Network Programming With Visual J++. And I happen to be reading it these evenings. Now my son happened to see it, and he was just a bit incredulous. Visual J++, he asked, mockingly. Does anyone still use that? Did anyone ever use it?

Good question. Microsoft came out with Visual J++ around 1997. It was part of Visual Studio 97, which also included versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++. It was Microsoft’s implementation of Java. It was updated in 1999, as Visual J++ 6.0, part of Visual Studio 6.0

Now the idea behind Java was to create a programming language that would be platform independent. It was developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed to various companies, including Microsoft. To nobody’s surprise, right away Microsoft developed Windows specific object library called WFC, Windows Foundation Classes, which enabled developers to create applications that would only run on Windows. And to nobody’s surprise, Sun sued Microsoft for violations of the agreement.

I saw that agreement. Microsoft put it up on its web site. I thought they were smart doing that. It seemed to me that Microsoft was on solid ground. In due course they settled their litigation. But VJ++ was frozen at Java 1.1. None of the new features that came out in Java 2.0 made it to VJ++.

Amazingly, Visual J++ has been ported to the .NET platform, and renamed J#. And it is less popular than ever.

And so the question remains: what is/was it good for. The marketing seemed to be aimed at Java programmers, in an undoubtedly hopeless attempt to wean them over to Windows.

Well I found a use for it. I did. But it didn’t even work out. A few years ago I found myself with a Java API supplied by a trading partner. So I thought that rather than write a whole Java application, I would create a COM object in VJ++, then use the COM object in my own application. Great idea, but for some strange reason, a COM object written in VJ++ can’t access the API from a class file; it needs the actual source code. I imagine that’s a bug – it can’t possibly be by design because it surely makes no sense at all. And I couldn’t convince the tech department at my counterpart to give me its source code. So I wrote the Java app, not in VJ++ either.

But the book. I read books like this. Not every book I read is useful. In fact many aren’t. But this book, somewhat surprisingly given that it was published by Microsoft Press, is more about Java itself than anything else. Very little about anything specific to Visual J++. And because TCP/IP hasn’t changed much, the Java networking classes haven’t changed much. So the book is surprisingly relevant, if you do any Java programming, which I don’t, but knowledge never hurts.

All those cheap tech books have pretty much disappeared. I guess that’s a sign of the times. From now on I guess I’ll have to rely on the library for my supply of hopelessly outdated and irrelevant books…

My 13 year old daughter is learning to play the penny whistle.

She is only the latest member of my very unmusical family to pick up a musical instrument.

My son, who is now 20, got the ball rolling five years ago when my then-unmarried brother-in-law decided to divest himself of all his material possessions, and so he (my son) found himself the proud owner of, not one, but two guitars - one electric, one acoustic. And so he set out to learn to play - by himself, no lessons. I knew he succeeded a while later when he played a note-perfect rendition of Blackbird.

Now he sits in his room and works out Jimmy Page riffs (Like Over The Hills And Far Away) and tries to do Hendrix, but without the 60 ft stack of Marshall amps it just isn't the same.

Anyway my daughter was next - she is now 10, and about 2 years ago she took up the violin. She diligently went to her lessons, and practices at home, with only a bit of parental nagging involved, and actually figured out how to make music out of it Imagine the proud parents at the recital at École de Musique Vincent D'Indy, hearing her perform the second movement of Haydn's Symphony No 94 in G (which is essentially Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in a minor key).

Then in November of 2006, my wife took up the flute. It's something she wanted to do for years and years, but when she finally took the plunge, it was totally unplanned. We were out for dinner, and at the mall where the restaurant is we stopped in at a music store, and she started asking about flutes, and when we left, she had a rented flute in hand, and a six month contract for music lessons.

Now she has her own Yamaha flute purchased on EBay, and she takes lessons from not one, but two teachers, both of whom are accomplished jazz sax players.

And she practices and the house resonates with the sweet sound of flute.

So my son, the one who plays guitar, went down to Archambault, and bought a penny whistle. Well he actually bought two, one for himself, and one for his 7 year old sister. He bought one, with a book, to teach himself to read music; thus far his adventures with guitar have been playing by ear, and using something called "tabulature," which involves diagrams, but not actual musical notation. My 14 year old, though, got the same idea, and now she takes the book, and the instrument, and she practices and practices and practices. And the other night my 17 year old got so exasperated that she took the penny whistle away, and they had a big fight, which I was unlucky enough to miss, not being home at that exact moment, but I caught the aftermath, the one kid crying her head off, the other huffing and puffing. And she said Daddy she was playing for THREE HOURS. And I said, I don't care. She can play for 300 hours. And she said. NO SHE CAN'T. and I said yes she can. And she said no she can't. and I said….

Then yesterday the subject came up with Mom. And Mommy said it doesn't matter how much it bothers you. She can play as much as she wants. And I said hey, that's what I said.

So this is a family where musical efforts are respected. You want to practice? Practice. You can play the same song 5000 times is a row, and make the same mistakes every time. No matter. So what if I go to work humming Have You Seen The Muffin Man with three flat notes. I'm just jealous that I'm not the one playing anything, that's all…

The Bus Stop

I call him the “Look Straight Ahead Guy.” I call him that because he looks straight ahead.

Every morning at 7:51 I catch the number 80 at the Longueuil bus terminal. And every morning he’s there. There are three fold-out seats, with their backs up against the wall. The door outside where the bus stops is to the left. So the bus actually comes up behind those of us who are seated. And the Look Straight Ahead Guy always shows up wearing the same winter hat and the same sunglasses, even when it’s cloudy, and he makes himself comfortable, and he, well, he looks straight ahead. He doesn’t read a book or a newspaper, he doesn’t even listen to music. He just sits there until the bus comes and he looks straight ahead. He doesn’t move. There’s not much to see either. This is at the far end of aile G, and “aile” means “wing” in French, though in this context I guess it means “aisle” – no surprise. It’s a narrow hallway and there’s a window which reflects what’s behind, and it’s a window which reveals what’s in front, so one has a kind of hybrid view of what’s there and what’s somewhere else, and I wonder whether the Look Straight Ahead Guy thinks about that.

He doesn’t get on the bus. Presumably he gets on the 185 which comes a bit later. That’s not my problem, not at all. Because I get on the bus and I leave the Look Straight Ahead Guy behind, until the next morning. I get on the number 80, and I ride to Boucherville, where I work. The ride goes along the St. Lawrence River, with the city across, and there’s a great view of La Ronde, which is big amusement park, and Olympic Park, which is the stadium, and you can even see Mt. Royal. I don’t look much out the window though. Mostly I read. These days I’m reading From Here To Eternity among others. But if I look out the window it’s nice.

On the way home I also see some regulars. But I don’t really have names for them. I should, I think, but I don’t. There’s the very nice lady, and the guy with the goatee and pony tail. They talk to each other quite a bit so I wonder whether they work together. She appears to be quite a bit older than him. He could be 20, she could be 40. So I don’t think that they’re married or anything. And funnily enough, there are two other people that I see, maybe once or twice a week, a man and a woman, though not together, and the woman reminds of the very nice lady, and the man reminds me of the guy with the goatee and pony tail, though he is older, and maybe that’s odd, and maybe it isn’t.

The place where I work is on top of a CLSC, that’s like a medical clinic – well it is a medical clinic I guess – and it’s for seniors (“seigneurs” the sign says, though the dictionary I have doesn’t use that term for “senior”, it translates “seigneur” as “lord” – maybe it’s a Canadian term) – and that’s not relevant or anything. I’m waiting for the weather to warm up just a bit more, then I can go out and explore this neighbourhood, and I can report my findings.

Thing is I wouldn’t notice any of this stuff if all I ever did was look straight ahead. So I look right and left and up and down. I look back and I look forward. And I see more than just that one view of that reflective window.

I wonder whether the Look Straight Ahead Guy has a blog. Maybe I’ll ask him – if he ever turns his head tolook at me that is…