Technology Optimism

At the time of massive cutoffs, transition of positions to low-cost centers and the sour smell of pessimism in the air -- I feel the spirit of Technology Optimism.

During the good times, the finest people with the brilliant ideas are sucked into the big corporations, tempted by nice salaries and all other perks. In many cases what they do in such positions is to work hard on projects that are later being shutdown. Let's admit, the big corporations are good at raising the money and selling the product, but when it comes to innovation, best innovative trick is to find the right startup to acquire. And this goes also for great innovative companies like google (GoogleMaps, GoogleVoice and many more are based on external acquisitions, see Wikipedia - List of acquisitions by Google).

There is a great advantage in a crisis, being a tool in reforming the market back to an efficient structure. We need more innovation and much more efficient companies.

Many brilliant people who have been back into the market lately are fed up working for giant dinosaurs, and start working on their own new startups. It may be hard at this point to raise the initial capital, but these startups are thin and efficient. And in a year or two we will start seeing the results with new technology domains that we couldn't imagine before.

When a bug makes you crazy

This week I was sitting on one of those bugs which almost make you scream. Something is wrong, but you cannot find what creates this f-word behavior.

I was working on some web page example for some Taglib framework, but the page insisted on having an extra element that I didn't create. And when picked using FireFox, it pointed at a node in the XHTML that I'm definitely not rendering...

Step 1
Nothing in the code should make this happen. First suspicion is that I'm running an old instance, so I'm running a clean+compile and restarting the server, then when this doesn't change anything I'm adding a printout just to make sure. The new printout appears. Damn! I'm running the code that I'm looking at, but nothing there seems to be responsible for this result.

Step 2
I know that in order to debug I need a theory. But I cannot raise any theory, as clearly the result that I see is not something that is in the code... So I start playing (though I know it's not the methodic way for debugging, but I'm trying to play methodically). I find all places where I render this kind of element that is being rudely added where not belonged and I mark them each with a unique id. The id appears. Now I can identify the exact place that is responsible for this behavior, but I can't understand why it happens. An XHTML tag is added in a place in the document that surely I'm not printing.

Step 3
It took me some time. Maybe too much time. But I understand now that FireFox tree view of the page is cheating me... The element that FF is presenting at a certain place on the tree cannot be there. I'm not printing it there. Suddenly a strike hits me: GET BACK TO THE BASICS. Instead of using FireFox to locate for me the wicked node, let's view the source of the page. How simple and basic, though yet I spent about an hour before thinking about this simple thing.
And indeed, when viewing the page source I see that the problem is that I'm opening some HTML tag somewhere and not closing it, but FF closes it for me way beyond this point, creating a very strange node that I didn't create. In the treeview of the page FF presented a tag with a start and an end, while I accidentatlly opened a tag at some point and didn't close it. Now it's much easier to see the problem. And I also note that indeed FF showed that there are errors on page, with this error listed.

Moral

1. When the tool you debug with shows something that you cannot explain, go back to the basics: tcpdump, sniffer, printouts. The debug tool may be misleading you!
   Believe only to bits and bytes, not to any fancy tool.
2. If you are working on a Web page, first look at the "errors on page", if you always insist on first fixing these you will save valuable time.
3. When a bug makes you crazy look him in his eyes, tell him that you will beat him. Don't show any weakness signs as these bastards know well how to recognize such signs.