So here I was wondering why the hell I don't have a portfolio up even after 2 years ? and suddenly it struck me three times, almost like three speedy pats hitting my back simultaneously, the words "and you'll be like a *stealth* programmer for us". Yes, I recall clearly about 3 clients of mine saying this to me. So what is a "stealth programmer" anyways ? Simple observation reveals that people who wear masks of different companies (some big names like Apple Inc.) are constantly looking for resources. Reliable and efficient resources. People who not only work just so that they earn their kitchen money, but also because they are passionate about what they do. These people are hired by these companies with a promise (technically known as NDAs : non-disclosure-agreements) that they must not reveal their identity and they must not do anything with the code outside their boundaries, may them be virtual or physical, and code them their ideas.

All this commotion about design patterns followed by great frameworks to address them, in most cases, were designed and developed by the "stealth" breed. Authors of languages like Python (Guido Van Rossum) and Ruby (Yukihiro Matsimuto) were stealth programmers. Heck, Linus Torvald had a "stealth" status when developing the Linux kernel. It was this species that lay the foundations of the "open source" community.

Friends, the Stealth virus has officially hit Pakistan. Me, my friends, and a number of "senior" people I know are living examples. And this virus continues to claim people here, as the awareness grows. And I don't think that I'm referring to "free lancers" here. It's a big term, a super class that encompasses "stealth" programmers too.

And it's about time that this "stealth" community should be consolidated in one place. Because most of these people are best of the best in their fields and passionate therefore well motivated. Several companies in the U.S. made use of this breed in the 80s including Apple Inc. and these companies really owe their success to these people indeed. Entrepenuers here can take a hint

1. I didn't have much difficulty in landing a client

2. I wouldn't be that judgemental about the guy, but he did one thing that I still don't understand why. He tried to tell me that $2000 a month is a good salary in the U.S. of A. Naturally, I wasn't that dumb to take his word for it. Coz, most of us live in the U.S. virtually. But I chose not to challenge his false claim.

3. So he did succeed in bringing down my rate, which frankly I did just for the heck of it to try the system out. And of course, I told him that once "we are good" with each other, it was going to go up to my desired mark. I sort of wanted to prove my worth to him.

4. When I started working is when I noticed that I worked about 9 hours and the system logged about 6 or 7. It was eating 2 hours straight ! - so I investigated.

5. Viola ! ... turns out, the oDesk's system calculates your performance based on your "keystrokes" ! ... HOW SMART IS THAT ?

6. Anyhow, I tried to talk to my client, who by the way claimed to be a programmer himself. The guy said, "if the system says you worked 6 hours, you worked 6 hours". I don't know, why he was trying to be an a`hole but at that point I lost all interest. I mean, I am in this line of work because I love doing it, not entirely because of money. So naturally, I asked him to spare me the pain.

So in essence, oDesk's system of performance recording is good, BUT only for jobs like data entry etc. Would you imagine that this guy had me "write" down my brainstorming sessions !! ??? .... how the F*** can you write and brainstorm at the same time ? - if you can, then you have a gift ... really ... you do ! In entirety the experience was really annoying for me. After that, since I had a bad experience associated with oDesk, I didn't bother to look back. And thank God I didn't have to either.

Here is what I ask: ** How can you indulge in CREATIVE THINKING / PROCESS when you know that this time won't be accounted for ? ** so in these regards, oDesk is pathetic ! Heck, check the comments of this post and you'll know how oDesk is **bad** for many buyers too. And futhermore, you can go knock yourself out with this google search.

I won't get myself in the "oDesk haters" category ... BUT ... I would consider my self in "prefer to boycott oDesk" kind. Because if I ever pick up a client on oDesk, I would seriously either BILL him based on different milestones OR make sure that we both trust each other so that I can put in offline time and he would authorize it and won't stiff me. Still, day by day I hear about new improvements on how to *track* the employee. And these guys are really pushing it so much that it really sounds more like slavery, or "eslavery" to be exact. (well said by "O Rover" there)

Common sense demands you don't get lost in all the **goodies** marketed by such companies. These guys promise definite pay to the employees and the supposed "power" to the very insecure employers out there so that they could check their eSlave from as many angles as possible. In the end this creates an environment of distrust if you plan to work with more creative individuals. Because the more creative ones WILL take their time to THINK before acting and more importantly they need their space!

It would be highly unlikely to get an intuitive, extendable app unless there is sufficient trust between the employee and the employer. On the other hand, if the programmer drops out in the middle of the project, the employer still has to pay him / her WITHOUT having their work done. And based on these facts I can never agree that oDesk has brought any innovation and / or revolutionized the way of working. They are just using your insecurities to the best of their own interests.

To balance the sarcasm above, I can only do but one thing, and that is to advise anyone planning out on doing business on oDesk to beware, don't get traped in their warp zone of false promises, but lay out your concerns on the table with the client and try to educate him / her that you both are better off trusting each other more rather than the system. Because seriously, the system will make both of you feel like smart asses and un-decievable. Not true in the real world.

Darn ! now I'm confused ... what to make of this ? ... am I a *perfectionist* ? or just too weak to keep myself from the knocking on forbidden doors ? - blast ! since I hold a good opinion about myself so I'm showing the latter two fingers up ! Hell ! ... come to think of it ... "knocking on forbidden doors" is something I've been doing for quite a while and I enjoy it too

I also notice one other thing. Most "legacy" type coders tend to keep stuff a bit tightly coupled. Whereas I'm always looking for loose coupling. Don't get me wrong on this, I do make use of tight coupling sometimes but it's governed by special circumstances. The whole idea is to make things re-usable, and my idea of re-usable is not just in one application but all.

Since I am ranting on the subject, so I'd like to voice it out clearly today. Though I am not a regular reader of debuggable but I find my self agreeing to most things with these guys. For instance, looking at an example code, one can really sneak into the thinking patterns of the author. I wish I could lay my finger on it, but I wish I could find some sort of metrics that should at least give me 80 ~ 90% correct results of my hypothesis. So far, I do know this (and I'm sure most seniors would agree in the field) that there are two generic classes of people. One who acutally think in terms of **patterns** and others who display traits of **linear** thinking. Linear thinking is good for an abstract approach to solve problems and it gets most jobs done. But in an efficient way ? ... I would disagree on this. This is because I have witnessed a handful of projects failing due to this. Not to forget that most cases were with developers on CodeIgniter ... but these are not the shortcomings of the framework, but because it's non-mvc-strict policy is abused by most programmers. Infact, I've seen developers running towards CodeIgniter just because it's ok with a hack here and a hack there. Heck! I've seen usage of SQL statements in CakePHP's VIEWS ! ... YES ! ... VIEWS !! ... boy was that a sight ! and dear god I don't want to see that again. I won't name, but it was from the students of a school here in Lahore people are so fond of (kind of a status symbol - arrogant bastards they are indeed). So I see this as a culmination of the typical "just get it done" plus "linear thinking" analogy. I just hope we could escape it's evils.

Alright ... so my question still hangs ... am I a perfectionist ? - Well ... I'd say "yeh sort of" - I mean the obsessive compulsive behavior is there, but not to the extent of his level.

Take a look at this snapshot of Karan Johar's weblog taken on June 25th, 2008

And here is a snapshot of Snook's blog, take on June 25th, 2008

See the shocking similarity ? - The design elements are almost the same. Frankly, the designer on Karan Johar's weblog wasn't even "creative" enough to add some cool colors to make it look better. This is really sad. Jonathan Snook has a weblog presence since as long as I can remember.

I really don't have a bias but the truth is, people like Jonathan Snook are an inspiration for me and I am sure for most of the young emerging free lance web developers.  Heck! even Indian movies are copy pastes of good Hollywood movies. Don't they have PRIDE in what they do? I'm sure Karan Johar doesn't even know that his weblog was a copy paste of another and not "just another" guy's weblog, but Jonathan Snook's weblog who is in fact followed by thousands of people in the web development industry. Snook is a mentor of quite a few people like me so obviously this did "shiver me timbers" to write this post.

If these guys take Pride in their work they will never do such a thing. I just can't digest the idea of a media famed person doing something like this ? (or in this case someone doing this TO him) It's true that his show "Coffee with Karan" didn't capture people like me in it's audience ever. But here is a fact: People in the U.S of A and Europe find it hard to differentiate between Pakistanis and Indians because the way we speak / dress and all that - it's quite similar. Anything we do, or they do, pretty much sums up for both of us in the web dev industry. Although there are significant differences between us and our cultures along with "significant" similarities, but one never knows unless he has been in contact with either of us for some time. Anyhow, my verdict of this situation is simple: I am still dying to see some "creative" web designers from India. Any One ? Please .... any one ? .... or all you guys were forced out of India as the Industry got taken over by cheap skates ? Who am I kidding, this seems to be happening over here too but hasn't reached to this extent yet. And I pray it doesn't too.

Karan - although I am not a fan of yours but .... your weblog's design is going to put your "international" web presence in danger. If in a million chances you see this post, DUDE ! get a REAL deisgner !

Although one thing I am still concerned about is the built in pagination. It's brilliant no doubt but still I can't control the model bindings when paginating any model. I observed the code and found out that it instantiates a new instance of the model when paginating it, so even if I set the bindings to persistent, it has no effect as they are not persistent with the new object. Anyhow, a post on this matter is in the pipeline, I still need some more information to actually formally voice the issue on cake's trac. Currently I have a workaround that's working really good for me. Let's just say that I wanted more than "paginate" function to be specified within a model, and I got it

Here what I have noted so far and I think I would definitely be updating this post to add more stuff as I go along finding more facets.


1. Times of day:

Well, believe it or not but I have noticed quite a relationship between times of the day and my ability to think up a software design and code speed. For one, my best thinking timings are early in the morning, like really early. As early as 05:00 a.m. to 08:00 a.m.
During this time I noted that I can jot down / diagram / visualize many more modules / objects than I can during the whole day. Also, when I hit the sack, that's the time when I get to really see algorithms at work. Some of the best solutions have come to my mind during my "approaching to sleep" state.
Now as for the code speed, that's at it's peak from 08:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ~ 01:00 p.m. again provided I know exactly what I need to do.

2. Coding in Time Pockets

For my self, I noted that I code at my top speed in regular 3 hour intervals, i.e. Code for 3 hours continuously, take a break for an hour or 20 minutes (just to relax my mind a bit or filling more fuel in the mind tank) and then start coding again.
However during 08:00 a.m. ~ 12:30 p.m. I don't need to take a break at all so it's straight 4.5 hours of coding only!

3. Emotional State

Well, I make sure that I DO NOT read the paper at all before starting work. I attended a seminar once in which the speaker (a renowned personality on the subject of mind sciences) told us that most people after reading the morning paper, find themselves stuck in more traffic jams. They find more bumps on the road and amazingly they don't enjoy their coffee / tea even though it's brewed fresh!
I gotta say I was a bit skeptic about it and had forgotten the notion completely. But during my observation, it suddenly struck me when I realized for my self how important your emotional state is for you to perform better. Those moments kinda flashed before my eyes, much like you see in a Hollywood movie - Ok now that's weird!
Sorry, kinda got de-tracked. So obviously the happier you are the best you would perform. I'd even say that apart from being in a healthy happy state of mind, you need to be really inspired also to produce even more quality work.
A friend of mine who is a very cool graphic designer, was telling me yesterday when we were hangin out, that he needs to be inspired to produce some good stuff. Well, that might be one of the reasons why he worships csszengarden (shhh! he don't know he worships it, and wouldn't accept it either, although we {his friends} know that he does and doesn't know it - so let's just keep this between you and me :P)
How to achieve a happy state of mind ? - I aint even a novice at this at all, but I got a few suggestions:

1. A $300 per hour shrink can work
2. Dope can be much as good, provided you know you won't be found in some drain pipe afterwards - but thats a crapy idea anyways
3. Music ! - that could be great inspiration too
4. Hypnotize yourself ! - show 2 fingers up to the world when you are working (I've found this one more helpful than others)
5. Just identify which positive emotion

In the end you are your best judge in this matter so don't hang around scratchin your balls thinking in loops "what to do now huh ? ... duhhhh" ... just do it!
Identify which positive emotion drives you the most, concentrate on it and use it to reach that desired level of motivation. I mean, having said positive, I am not ruling out anger. Like this is the kind of emotion counter-strike gamers use a lot

4. Time Yourself!

Yup! that's the only kick in the nuts you could ever be thankful about! - If you like any sports, or even StarWars, you'd wanna have this confidence. Make you feel like Master Yoda or your favorite sports star (or even a team). This could really give you more confidence in terming yourself as a rock star, a master or whatever mambo jambo.
Ok, about what I felt? - well, to be honest, when I started it, made me feel more like the training sessions you see in all Rocky movies - preparing for the big fight. It even adds in motivation for you to stay focused, avoid distractions in order to get a good score.
I'd leave it up to you, the many ways you can be creative in using this virtue for your benefits.
But here's what I experimented: I asked a friend of mine who is a team-lead in a respectable firm here to try it out on his team. Well, according to him, the results were great! - He told me that his team was having more fun while their efficiency was increasing. In the end he says, "It's like that movie, 'Searching for Bobby Fischer', the youngest soul to be a chess champion".
Tip: I recently started using PostTask.com - and I gotta say, this can be a very handy tool for timing your tasks. Although I want some more variables I can set and control to actually help me time myself correctly, but this app is surely the closest coolest app I could find for this purpose.

Ah ... Finally! I get the pics for our latest "addition" in the family. This guy is really really NAUGHTY. Heck!, my bro had to HOLD him TIGHT for me to take his pics. He has a very wicked look on his face too, and he aint afraid of anything either ... not good if you'd ask me when it comes to disciplining the creature. Also, as usual, we couldn't agree on a name so we had to again go for a weird ass name, just like as in the case of Guggoo Cat. So he's "called" TINKOO by every one. May be the word was unconsciously picked by everyone as it adds a dash of "wicked" with "innocence" or "cuteness" etc.

There are 2 parts you have to take care of, one for the component and the other for the helper. Here is a generic example for the Post model,

/** function index () in your Posts controller **/
$this->paginate['Post'] = array(
'limit'=> 20,
'order'=> "Model.field ASC", // for example i.e.
'fields'=> array(
'Post.id',
'Post.name', //.....
),
'url'=> array(
'controller'=> 'Posts', // could be $this->name
'action'=> 'index', // could be $this->action
'created'=> '02-02-2008',
'active'=> 1, // ... modelField/Value pairs you'd like to set as filters
)
);
$posts = $this->paginate(
'Post',
array(
         "Post.created = '02-02-2008' AND Post.active = 1"
      )
);
$this->set('posts', $posts);
$this->set('paginationUrl', array('url'=>$this->paginate['Post']['url']));

This will let the component do the math and calculate how many rows are being returned. Since pagination component executes a simple "findAll()", so it will treat all modelField / Value pairs it finds in the URL key as search criteria i.e. conditions just like you'd specify conditions as array in any "findAll()" call.

To keep or switch between the modelField / Value pairs throughout the pages, you can pass these as URL parameters. So your URL should look kind of like this:

http://yourhost/cake_root/controller/action/page:2/modelField:value/modelField:value/ ....

Now for the pagination helper, we'd use $paginationUrl array that we set for our view:

/** after rendering all posts **/
pr($posts);   /* or you can use Cake's built in function to display the $posts array  */
echo $paginator->prev("<< Prev", array("url"=>$paginationUrl));
echo $paginator->numbers(array("url"=>$paginationUrl));
echo $paginator->next("Next >>", array('url'=>$paginationUrl));

And that's it, now the paginator links would render your given modelField / Value pair. But there is or "was" a downside about it that my db fields would be seen via the URL. For example, the URL for the above action would be like this:

root/controller/action/page:2/created:02-02-2008/active:1

and that was unacceptable for me, so I created a masking scheme for my field / value pairs. May be I'd make a component out of it, but that won't be as generic as you'd still have to pass the Masks / Fields pairs as an array.

Ahh !! so what about unbinding associated models ? ... well ... what I do is that I use the cool unbindAll function by Othman Ouihibi. I've been using it since CakePHP 1.1 days. But there's a behavior that supports this functionality too on the Bakery, pretty cool. So I just unbindAll models except the ones I need before every paginate call in my controller and that does the trick. Any suggestions / comments would be highly appreciated.

This article was originally made by collecting information from the comments here, so I'd strongly advise anyone who wants to know advance paging to read that article.

HAPPY BAKING !!!

Believe me you would have seen a smirk on my face if it were Musharraf (the self proclaimed ruler of my country - the bastard) instead of Benazir. Let me tell you that I disagreed with Ms. Bhutto's agenda because it was too westernized, but I was hoping she would find out if she was elected and I did not like her as a leader of Pakistan too. But nonetheless she had a very strong vote bank and if there was any man with true leadership qualities was her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Although he did have drawbacks too. But then again, he was hanged by a dictator. Who are these people ? Don't they have any respect for the civilians ? And I'm bewildered when I see the west supporting Musharraf when they themselves proclaim to be the beacons of democracy. It's truly hypocratic.

The place where Ms. Bhutto was assassinated is like the head quarter of all the intelligence agencies.  Then how on earth something like this could happen ? I don't believe in Voodoo or shit like the number 13 being unlucky but the facts point out that that is a favourite place for the government to assasinate civilian leaders.

This dictatorship shit must end once and for all, and our army should keep it in their pants, they don't have to use it on the very people they are supposed to protect. There should be a pact between the people Pakistan and the army that whatever happens, they should not take part in the local administration, it's not their job. I don't know when they'd learn. History speaks for itself of what has happened to dictators, from Hitler to Zia-ul-haq. I have so much rage against them as they suppress the masses and get hold of the SCUM of society to come up and govern. Because they just can't rely on people with a conscious. Our government says that it has strengthened the economy of Pakistan - BULLSHIT! all they have done is more chaos. We would have been a better state if these bastards would have let the civil government complete it's term. They fail to understand that democratic process is slow but permanent. And now the generals in our army should take a hint, we as a nation loath them for their actions and mourn today in grief - army chiefs / generals / core commanders --> SHAME ON YOU! for your guy has let Pakistan down. If you have even a tiny dot of "ghairat" in you then you would keep your faces towards the border and NOT towards the president's house in Islamabad. I am aware of the fact that it's like a small group of powerful people in the army doing this and that not all of our brothers are involved.

May Allah almighty give peace to our people and bless the state of Pakistan with a true leadership of the people that would take our country booming.

P.S. My feet are sore and my eyes weep, for I have come a long way and got miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep :'(

was trying this:

<li onclick="myFunction( { listObject:this, customOption: 1 } )" > List text bla bla </li>

Now this above code worked in FireFox flawless ! but IE started giving me problems. More specifically, I wanted to highlight the li item and call another script via AJAX for which I needed the value for my customOption. But hell no ! Professor IE says the world goes round my way and the WebStandardsProject would keeping on feeling my shoe in their backside ! BLEKH ! - so I cooked up this workaround. Its fail safe:

<li onclick="this.prototype.customOption = 1; myFunction(this);">List text bla bla</li>

Now this is pretty cool. You can add any property or even a function using the "prototype" global function. It would really help if you read a bit more about it here these netscape guys were the creators of the JavaScript in the first place and this handbook here is pretty cool.

There is a downside to this workaround however, imagine there are many options, your code will SUCK! - I hope these evils are undone in IE 7 and other versions to come. However I'm still wondering why does IE not take "{ propertyName1: value, propertyName2: value, ..... }" model as arguments properly ... anybody out there has a clue let me know ! - I'd really appreciate your comments.