Developer's wife - Or how do they stand us?

First of all we would like to begin with 2 apologies. The first one is sent to all women developers out there. The points are valid to your husband as well. The second apology is to all women out there. We are really not sociological experts or pretend to be. This post is written from the experience and view point of 2 male programmers.

So how does your work as a software developer affects your relationship? Developing requires a different set of skills from other professions and makes you adopt some unusual behaviors. This influences your relationship in strange ways.

Working together on the family PC - Or how do I always get into trouble?

Working together on the family PC...Well, you and your wife operate the PC a bit differently. I don't see my wife opening the command line to copy files. Surprisingly, I didn't receive any positive feedback when I brought up my fabulous idea to install a double boot on our family PC so WE can enjoy the new UNIX based media center. Things can get hairy, especially when we need to accomplish a very routine assignment. I remember the nightmare called "Picking up Photos from the Wedding". Filtering best wedding photos (300 out of 2000, WOW that photographer really overdid it), while my wife only used the mouse really killed me there. 

"How was your day honey?" - Or "You never tell me about what you actually do"

Communication. That's the key word in relationship, isn't it? Well, you come back home and your wife ask, "How was your day?"  A laconic answer will get you into trouble. On the other hand, I don't think she will be interested in the new search engine you recently integrated. So what's left to talk about? Office gossip. You really can't have enough of that.

Delving into the PC after work hours - Or why did I start with this media center?

Developers are technical fellows per-se. As such, they read tech blogs, install open source code on their family PC, adopt sophisticated media centers, and try to stretch out the limit of technology when possible. The problems with such assignments is that it takes a long time, you try them at home and not at work, and you are drawn into them with no warnings. You don't know what you are getting yourself into. You read a blog post telling you there is a new streamer for your PS3. You say - I'll give it a try. You find yourself configuring your router while you have guests sitting in your living room with your wife. How many times your wife suddenly woke you up with "Did you hear what I was saying? Can you stop with the computer? I am talking to you and you are stuck to the screen". Developers are capable of sitting 10-12 hours a day in front of a computer. A simple "Let me just check the latest headlines at WIRED", could lead to 3 hours of PC time at home, trying to hack to the neighbor's Wi-Fi with the new Mozilla plug-in, just for the fun of it.

Zombie mode - Or normal people are able to conduct a conversation at 20:00 o'clock

Our job requires tremendous brain effort and almost zero physical effort. After such a long day you go into what we call the "zombie mode". You come back home. You are in the "zombie mode". It is hard for you to...well, to communicate. Yes dear wife. This has nothing to do with us being distance or snobs. We simply processed too much information for one day and we need some time to reset. I am sure at some point in the future this phenomena will be more documented but until then... please be patient. 

Tech Support - Or Why can't you be more supportive?

It's true. Most people we know assume the years we spent at the University, the books we read and the software we developed must have prepared us to help them use Word. The problem is that when your wife is on the other side of the line you have to answer. So you find yourself wondering in the middle of the office trying to teach her to send a fax from your home computer.

Buying Gadgets - Or don't say I am not spoiling you enough...

"You know how much technology can improve our life. So why did you get upset when I go and buy the new laser directed, Bluetooth controlled, vacuum cleaner?" Yes. We love technology and sometimes we buy cool top of the line gadgets that we can live without. But at least you take comfort in the fact that we never spend money on clothes...

Cleaning house - Or why is there a new tool-bar here?

You open up the browser. There are three new shining tool-bars installed. How did they get there? When you install a new software you overcome all those annoying traps to install junk on your PC. However, your wife doesn't. She will tap the next button like crazy, leaving no tool-bar behind. Developers are usually pedant, control freaks when it comes to our machines. Cleaning up after your wife becomes a daily chore.

Small breaks - Or "I am really working here"

Anyone who ever worked from home knows it. You tell your wife you are really working. She takes a look at the screen and finds you in Reddit (again). "I thought you were working", she says. "I am", you answer (but you still get the long face). Developers need those small 30 seconds breaks. We are working, but we need to lift our head over the water to catch a breath.


To sum things up, we would like to dedicate this post to our beloved wives, and wish all you developers out there prosperous relationships.

Windows XP and Windows 2003 command-line string limitation

Came across a very weird phenomena that I'd like to share. It took me a while to pin point the problem, so I thought I might shed some light to save others the time. To make a long story short...In our company we use ant scripts in a continuous build process. If the process fails, people get really mad. So, last week I failed the build...a moment before a big delivery...

So, as I said, we use ant to compile our java projects, and have one project that compiles all the other java projects. Before my commit I checked that everything compiled fine on my machine, and then committed the code to our svn which triggers an automatic build process on our continuous build machines. Guess what? It failed. So, what went wrong? How can it compile on one platform and not on the other. I checked the Java revision, and update them to match. Would it then compile? No. I then checked the ant version and matched them (1.8). Would it then compile? No. However, I knew that the builder and my machine run different OS (2003 vs 7). The biggest problem was that the error message was quite ambiguous, and it failed in different locations at each build process. So, first an foremost, run ant -verbose to make life easier. I then got a stack trace which helped me to understand the error better. I then googled the stack-trace, and got a hint here, which referenced me to this support entry on Microsoft. To summarize:

On computers running Microsoft Windows XP or later, the maximum length of the string that you can use at the command prompt is 8191 characters. On computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.0, the maximum length of the string that you can use at the command prompt is 2047 characters. See here.

So what was the problem? We compiled the projects by using:

...
<path id="lib.class.path">
        <fileset dir="${deploy.dir}" includes="*.jar"/>
</path>
...
 <javac...>
            ...
            <classpath refid="lib.class.path"/>
            ...
</javac>
...

This will create a command line that will eventually include all jar files in the deploy directory concatenated as a string explicitly. As a result  we overloaded this command line and passed the string length limitation, which led to compilation errors.

How can this be solved? Simply by removing the fileset property and the using the pathelement property:

...
<path id="lib.class.path">
        <pathelement path="${deploy.dir}/*"/>
</path>
...
 <javac...>
            ...
            <classpath refid="lib.class.path"/>
            ...
</javac>
...

This will create a shorter command line with only the class-path variable and all jar files implicitly will be referenced. That's it - hope it will help

Save Time With Eclipse External Tools Configuration

You probably know the feeling. You are sitting next to your colleague in his working station, waiting for your question to be answered. However, he is in charge of the keyboard and you are only an observer. You simply can't comprehend why instead of creating a shortcut in the folder view, he is again navigating all the way from the Desktop to the ProgramData directory, without using auto-complete. 

This example illustrates how we often see people work inefficiently while performing small technical tasks dozens of times a day. This could be a simple thing, such as navigating to a specific location on the computer. However, if you consider the number of times this is performed a day (and the agony on the face of the person sitting next to you waiting for an answer)...well you get the idea. Performing this weary tasks daily can also lead to frustration and discontentment.

Since developers usually perform what can be considered small technical tasks dozens of times a day, this is especially critical. Since most of us use IDE's as our main tool, I would like you to consider the "External Tools Configuration" in Eclipse. This is an unappreciated and not widely used feature which provides a mechanism to run tools that are not part of the IDE. How can this be helpful? For example, let's say that you want to quickly open a file for edit specifically in Notepad++, or jump to the folder of the file you are currently editing, or even open a console directly in a specific directory.

Creating a new external tool 

The External Tools Configuration is located right next to the Run\Debug buttons (In red).

Click on the drop down menu -> External Tools Configuration. You can now create a new tool. Right click on the left Program menu, and click new. This will open the configuration screen for your new tool. Let's go over the 3 examples mentioned above:

• Open a file for edit specifically in Notepad++
• Open the folder of the file you are currently editing
• Open a console directly in a specific directory

So...if you are seeing this mechanism for the first time, I hope this post will save you time. If you already use it - fill free to add here your created tools and shortcuts.