Cal Jacobson’s Blog

I’ve been trying very hard not to get worked up by the various details that have come out of the Internet Explorer 7 development team over the last year or so; maybe I just didn’t bother raising my expectations once I heard that CSS 2 and CSS 3 implementation wasn’t as high on their list of priorities as was, say, tabs.

Today’s post at the IE blog, however, sent me over the edge.

There will be two versions of IE 7 — something in itself that isn’t too surprising, since there were multiple flavors of IE 5.x (Mac, Win9x, WinXP/2000). Unfortunately, some market-mindful monkey has decided that they will be called different things: IE7 for Win2000/XP/2003 and IE7+ for Vista.

What’s the difference between the two, other than the operating systems? Obviously if it’s IE7+ then it has to be better, right? Wrong. Apparently features as “Protected Mode, Parental Controls and improved Network Diagnostics” qualify as the “plus”. You know, critical things that most folks like you and I will likely never use.

The big problem with this inane naming convention — and the crux of my problem with it — is that it merely sows confusion. Ever run into anybody who was baffled by the differences between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional or Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional? How about the dozen or so different flavors of Office?

Even more frustrating is the monkey wrench this throws into the usual convention web developers use to describe browser support. For instance, if my website works under Firefox versions 1.5 and later, I merely say that Firefox 1.5+ is supported. Same with IE5.5.

Now what? “This website supports Internet Explorer 7++”?

The IE7 dev team claims:

These [aforementioned] features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (“The version of IE7 in Vista” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily…)

Right. So instead of you guys dealing with a perceived naming issue internally, you’re going to force the rest of us on the planet to adopt a name that will help tout the superiority of your next OS product. Thanks.

Jeff Atwood has an interesting post today comparing programmers and chefs and how both need to work "clean" in order to avoid problems down the road.  I think it's a great analogy, I just wish coders were afforded the same respect and received feedback as quickly.  Maybe we need white jackets and silly, poofy hats?

About a month ago, I came into work one morning and found a 12-pack of Mountain Dew sitting on my desk. No note, no bill, just sweet caffinated yellow beverage. I eventually learned that it was courtesy of the PM, as a means to stay awake during a two-week crunch period prior to a client presentation.

I was thrilled, and every time I pulled a can out of that box over the next week I appreciated the gesture that had been made. I was a happy employee.

I compare this with another project I transitioned from about 8 months earlier — a pretty good team for a easygoing client but a nightmarish technical environment. I received a small award ($100 and a plaque) for my work on that project, and I was quite happy to get it. While I definitely appreciated the fact that somebody took the time (admittedly, 15 minutes) to put me in for an award, within a couple of days it had pretty much left my mind.

In both instances I got something for my effort: the latter was more generous but the former had a greater impact for me. Why?

Because my PM knew I liked Mountain Dew.

Isn't that stupid? Yet, it was an incredible motivator. That isn't to say the $100 didn't make me feel good about my work and the people I worked with, but hey…everybody likes money. If you take the time to find out what I like and use that in selecting some kind of incentive for me — no matter how trivial — I guarantee it will be far more effective than a company mug or a $25 gift certificate at the company store.

I refuse to believe that I'm an unusual case here, and this doesn't seem hard to understand. Why, then, does this seem so rare? If a subordinate likes baseball and you want to give him a cheap but more personalized "atta boy", pick up a pack of baseball cards and leave it on his desk. If they're a coffee afficianado, stop by Starbuck's one morning on the way to work and grab them something exotic. If they like animals, take five minutes at a Hallmark's and get them a thank-you card with an appropriate picture on the front.

The simple explanation for the rarity of this kind of thing would be that managers are assholes. Granted, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this: in the last 3 years I worked on two long-term projects and didn't get so much as a "thanks for all your work" from the leads despite the fact that I busted my ass and we made our deadlines. I'm sure you and your friends can supply plenty more anecdotes.

An incident similar to the one I mentioned at the begging of this post happened to me in 1992. I was in the Army at the time and we were part of a joint Army-Marines field exercise in hellishly hot Twentynine Palms, California. My squad was on the night shift, meaning that we worked during the freezing Mojave night and tried to sleep during the scorching Mojave day. When we moved our position, we had to sacrifice our down time to strike and pitch tents and drive vehicles. When we didn't move and could sleep through the heat, we were frequently awakened by F-16s flying low over our position.

Our company S-3, a Major by the name of Robert Beaver, took it upon himself one day to show up in our tent and drop off a case of ice-cold sodas as thanks for our hard work. My friends and I talked about that for the rest of the field exercise. And it was such a minor, yet effective incentive that I remember it today about 14 years later.

If something like that can take place in an organization that is as slow to change and rife with horrible management as the United States Army, then why isn't it taking place more often in supposedly agile and professionally-managed companies all throughout the IT industry?

I think the real reason is that for the most part in the IT industry, managers aren't crafted or nurtured or tutored but rather churned out by colleges, universities and PMI-certified organizations. Know how to use PowerPoint? Project? Word? Outlook? Outstanding, here's a team to manage.

Working smarter doesn't just mean compiling ROI reports and ensuring that everybody has an IM client installed; it means knowing your people and giving a damn about their job satisfaction. If you're a manager, take the Mountain Dew Challenge. If you've got a manager who has the potential to be a great manager, then forward this post on to them.

Postscript: Remember, everything in moderation. After three months of nonstop Dew, baseball cards, double-roasted Himalayan choco-tofu-lattes and cute pictures of kittens, this technique is going to get old. If you've got a superstar on your hands whom you have to reward, go with something like a company shirt as a type of bonus sorbet in order to alleviate creative incentive fatigue.

Although the underlying capability has existed for years, it seems that within the last 12-18 months there has been an explosion of new Javascript libraries and widgets designed to support really slick web application features. One of the slickest is Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar.

Lightbox JS (and Lightbox JS 2.0, the most recent and even more impressive incarnation) allows you to display large images in a web page without sacrificing real estate. Go give it a try to see what I’m talking about — it’ll be much easier to understand than an additional paragraph of my ramblings.

I thought the Lightbox capabilities would be a nice touch to an ASP.NET application I’m currently working on, so I set about trying to make a full-blown custom web control so I could just drag a Lightbox onto a page during design-time instead of mucking about in script. The end result was…satisfactory. I had a custom control that inherited from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl and could be sized and styled and dealt with all the Lightbox JS-related items (scripts, stylesheets, images) as Embedded Resources.

But it still seemed clunky. So I was quite happy to stumble across Lightbox.NET, a very similar control developed by Javier G. Lozano. You can find the source as well as additional comments about the differences between the two approaches here.

Update (7/10/07): Fixed URLs. Additionally, Lightbox.NET is now a project at CodePlex and may be found here.

If you’ve got a USB stick, you might want to check out PortableApps.com. While I’m still fuzzy about the need for a portable image editor, I use Portable Firefox every day and don’t have to worry about synchronizing my home and work bookmarks