November 2007 Archives

I've been working with the fabulous DisplayShelf code from simplyscheming.com to try to make various types of browsers in Flex. Yesterday, I *just about* had it working to browse images from flickr, but I ran into the old 'checkpolicyfile' problem. Even though Flickr has been nice enough to put crossdomain.xml files on all their static servers, the DisplayShelf code needs to manipulate the image as a bitmap to make the groovy reflection underneath the picture.

I found places where people fixed this problem by changing LoadContext, and other places where people added trustContent to the Image, but I couldn't figure out how to make this work correctly in the context of DisplayShelf.

Fortunately, there in the code was a reference to someone I'd worked with a zillion years ago (ok, 13), and I pinged him to ask for help. He gave me the magic answer, which looks like this (you'll need to 'view source' to see it, I'm not sure how to get HTML-ish things to show up in MT).

Original DisplayShelf component in mxml:


New DisplayShelf component:



				

					

						

					

				

				

Seemed a little obscure, but it works and now my browser is happy.

Thanks to NJ for saving my sanity :-)

I have a friend who hearkens from the heartland of America, and is thus more schooled than I in the cosmic truths to be found on a farm. We were discussing the relative dimness of various farm animals, and he mentioned that sheep were pretty much the stupidest animals around. I asked why, and he said that a lamb, when confronted with a meadow full of tall grass, will eat through the grass, leaving a 1-lamb-wide path behind them. When the lamb is full, however, it is faced with a horrible situation. Walls of grass surround it on the front and the sides. After looking left and right in a panic, the lamb will start to bleat piteously, hoping for someone to rescue it from its plight, eventually sitting down to wait until it's hungry again so that it can extend the path further. I'm not sure how true the story is, but it makes for a compelling mental image.

I was having lunch with my friend Eugene yesterday, and we started talking about my last post on making space, and about the sheep analogy, and I realized that in fact the two are very related. I frequently find myself in a position where I am trying to solve a difficult problem. The more I push, the more the answer eludes me, but I have this underlying fear that if I break away and come back to the problem with fresh eyes, I'll lose the context I've worked so hard to achieve. The reality is that I'm just like the lamb. The answer I need will only be clear when I back up. The context I've built up is *broken*, which is why I'm not finding the answer.

I spent a lot of yesterday working like a lamb, pounding my head against a problem which turned out to be fairly simple to solve after I returned from lunch. Chastised by the universal forces, I meekly turned off the computer at 5 so that my brain cells could recharge before I tackle the next problem this morning.

... to mention that I now have red hair.

And now, back to the program.

So I've now been at my new job for about 2 months, and there's a major contrast between my last job and this job.

We'll start with the negatives because there aren't many. I'm a remote worker at a company that does most of its collaboration and communication in person, so I've had to work hard at staying in touch with the people at the office. It helps that I go down there at least once a month to touch base, and I'm getting to know the folks (and they me) so remote communication is more effective. Also, without anyone checking in with me every day it takes more discipline to buckle down on days when my motivator unit is broken. And I'm currently the only person on my 'team' which makes it a little hard to get traction. And I miss all my ex-coworkers.

Now, the positives. Unlike the company I came from, there is no drama here. Of course, it's replaced by its own special type of politics, of a grown-up type I'm somewhat unaccustomed to. Fortunately I seem to be negotiating these new waters fairly well, and the end result of this environment is that my job is much, much less stressful. Being the only remote worker also means that I'm almost never interrupted for anything, and my velocity when I'm writing code or reading documentation is generally quite high. And working somewhere that brainstorming is a valued activity has given me the opportunity to discover that in fact I'm good at thinking up ideas, when I have some time to do so.

All in all, the positives far outweigh the negatives, and I feel like I'm learning, contributing, and working in a positive environment. It's still hard to get out of the habit of feeling horribly guilty if I'm out of contact for a bit, but I'm slowly becoming more relaxed and just enjoying the work I'm doing. It seemed very odd to me, coming from a place of such urgency to a place that seems so much more laid back, but the folks at AMI have the space to think up cool stuff - without that space it's so much harder to let the magic happen.

I know that small startups have less space to allow their employees to stop and think and explore, but I wonder if sometimes the need to rush creates more need to rush, and squelches the innovative ideas best suited to an agile, entreprenurial company. I was reminded of this several times when working at Socialtext, when I stopped rushing around for a few days and as a result found the solutions to the problems that had been pestering me for weeks.

Companies need to create space for their employees, especially when the employees aren't good at doing so for themselves. People need to create space for themselves. All of us, all programmers, have found ourselves staring intently at the screen, the zone long past, trying to find the solution to a problem... and then flash on the solution as soon as we step away to feed ourselves and look at the sky. Make space for yourself, and try to help others around you find space for themselves as well.