Month / December 2005

by Joel Spolsky

Test Yourself

By the time I got to Penn for my first year of college, I thought I was already a pretty good programmer. Completely self-taught, I had written two major systems in Turbo Pascal … one of them was a complete inventory system for a small factory, while the other scheduled all the production at one of Israel’s largest bakeries.

It took me until the midterm exams to realize I wasn’t as smart as I thought. I completely screwed up some questions, because I still didn’t get pointers and I still didn’t get recursion.

Never one to hold a grudge, I share those midterm questions with you… see if you can do better than I did freshman year.

1a. (MIT-Scheme) Using the function

(define (accumulate combiner null-value l) 
   (if (null? l)
       null-value
       (combiner (car l)
                 (accumulate combiner
                             null-value
                             (cdr l)))))

Implement sum-of-squares, which calculates the sum of squares of a list, for example

(sum-of-squares '(1 2 3 4 5))

should evaluate to 55.

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

(define (sum-of-squares l)
   (accumulate (lambda (x y) (+ (* x x) y))
               0
               l))

1b. (JavaScript) OK, maybe Scheme is not your thing. This question is equivalent to 1a, in JavaScript.

Using the function

function accumulate(combiner, nullValue, l)
{
	if (l.length == 0)
		return nullValue;
	var first = l.shift();
	return combiner(first, accumulate(combiner, nullValue, l));
}

Implement sumOfSquares, which calculates the sum of squares of a list, for example

sumOfSquares([1,2,3,4,5])

should evaluate to 55.

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

function sumOfSquares(lst)
{
	return accumulate(function(x,y){return x*x+y}, 0, lst);
}

2. (ANSI C) Write a C program of the following form:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
   ???
}

such that, after compiling it, it can be executed as

% ./a.out could harold eat eight salami elephants

and it will print the first letter of every argument (in this case, “cheese”).

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  int i;
  for (i=1; i<argc; i++)
  {
    putchar(argv[i][0]);
  }
  putchar('\n');
  return 0;
}

3. (ANSI C) What is the output of the following C program?

#include <stdio.h>

char *fn(int i, char *s)
{
  while (i)
  {
    s++;
    i--;
  }

  return s;
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  int a = 2;
  static char c[] = "test";

  printf("%s\n", fn(a,c));

  return 0;
}

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

st (followed by a newline)

For more programming challenges, check out TopCoder.

by Joel Spolsky

Saporasaki

Joel on Software - In JapaneseThe Japanese version of Joel on Software (the book) is out! I want to thank Yasushi Aoki who translated it and Ohmsha, the publisher.

So far, the book is available in English, Italian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. I’m certain the Japanese translation will be excellent because Yasushi-san worked closely with me on many small points of translation and worked very hard to correctly translate all those weird cultural references and inside jokes I always put in my articles. The quality of the physical book is much nicer than the English original (why do they have such nice paper in Japan?)

One of my dad’s books on educational linguistics was translated to Japanese when I was a kid. I got a primer on Japanese and deciphered the cover, and was thrilled that our name in Japanese is usually pronounced sa-po-ra-sa-ki, which sounds like a cross between an alcoholic drink and a rad motorcycle.

UPDATE Paul Jensen emails: “As a student of linguistics and Japanese, I feel I should point out that your last name in Japanese is actually su-po-ru-su-ki. In Japanese, /u/ is generally silent following /s/, so your name would come out as [sporuski], which is pretty close to how it’s pronounced in English.”

by Joel Spolsky

Interesting Links

I can’t figure out who’s writing it, but Enplaned, a blog about commercial aviation, is one of the best blogs I’ve come across in a long time, full of insightful, in-depth articles about the airline industry.

RedditReddit is a website with a cute alien mascot, featuring user-submitted and user-rated links. If you’ve already seen the Aardvark’d movie you saw the developers of reddit, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.

TWiTI’ve subscribed and unsubscribed to a lot of Podcasts trying to keep entertained on the subway, and the bottom line is that there are only two I can tolerate on a regular basis: TWiT and VentureVoice. TWiT made me understand why Leo Laporte was so beloved on Tech TV, and John C. Dvorak will charm your socks off in his role as the cuddly curmudgeon, channeling Jerry Pournelle. VentureVoice gets great interviewees on topics close to my heart and does them with great journalistic values and high production quality… don’t miss the episodes on launching VideoEgg at Demo (#14 and #15).

I had to stop listening to the Gilmore Gang because the sound quality made it inaudible on the streets of New York. (Do they listen to their podcasts after they record them?) I had to stop listening to Adam Curry because all he does is talk about was how great podcasts are. Show us, Adam, don’t tell us. Adam Curry is one of the best DJs in the world, but his show is 10% great DJing, 60% crappy drivel about podcasting, and 30% late-night-infomercial-quality promos for podcasts about garden slugs, followed by Adam talking for 20 minutes about how great it is that there are podcasts about garden slugs. I unsubscribed, and spent the next two hours listening to Jason Robert Brown’s hilarious and uplifting I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You again and again and again.

by Joel Spolsky

Shipping Update

We discovered that 2 people working in tandem can ship an order every 12 seconds using the new system. So the actual labor costs are down to 24 seconds per order, in a process which requires literacy and two hands but little else. That gives us a throughput of 2400 orders per day before we have to build a parallel workstation… should last a while.

In an article called In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, written in 2001, I said, “[I]f you’ve ever had to outsource a critical business function, you realize that outsourcing is hell. Without direct control over customer service, you’re going to get nightmarishly bad customer service — the kind people write about in their weblogs when they tried to get someone, anyone, from some phone company to do even the most basic thing. If you outsource fulfillment, and your fulfillment partner has a different idea about what constitutes prompt delivery, your customers are not going to be happy, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because it took 3 months to find a fulfillment partner in the first place, and in fact, you won’t even know that your customers are unhappy, because they can’t talk to you, because you’ve set up an outsourced customer service center with the explicit aim of not listening to your own customers.”

by Joel Spolsky

How to Ship Anything

When we started selling the Aardvark DVDs on our website, we didn’t think it would be so hard to pack and ship them. First of all, we didn’t expect there would be so many, and we conveniently forgot some of the little problems like filling out customs forms which turned out to be big nightmares.

For the first batch that we shipped we did things in a very ad-hoc way. I used Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge feature to print many of the labels; for international orders I wrote a little Access application that filled out forms on the USPS web site, and so on.

The actual shipping turned out to be quite difficult. It was amazing how small ergonomic problems turn into huge headaches when you’re shipping thousands of orders to 60 different countries. For example, the customs form generated by the USPS web site needed to be signed. We had tons of these. We tried to “sign” them by running them through the laser printer again and printing a couple of signature images in the correct place. This worked OK on one printer, but every other printer in the office jammed up when you gave it paper that had already come out of a laser printer. Why is that? Eventually, of course, the printer which could print signatures ran out of toner. It was a Dell. Dell doesn’t let office products stores sell their toner. The only way to get toner was to order it from Dell and pay a lot of money for overnight delivery.

My estimate was that it took about three minutes of labor per order, and we only got it that low because we were batching them up. Worse, it took someone skilled in SQL queries and Mail Merge to create the labels.

Last weekend, I thought, there’s got to be an easier way. I spent some time researching tools on the Internet for making this stuff easier, and on Monday, I started building our new Super Duper Shipping System, aka FogShip, which took about three days to set up, program, and debug.

Here’s what the physical system looks like.

The whole process is controlled by a single computer running Microsoft Access. The shipping data itself lives in SQL Server.

Every day when you’re ready to ship things, you click on a button in Access which causes a stack of packing slips to print out. A typical packing slip is shown at right.

Why Microsoft Access? I was skeptical myself. I’ve never, ever used the Access “report” feature in my life; I always imagined it was intended for old-fashioned people who need to have their data printed out for some obscure reason and can’t fathom the idea of looking things up on a computer.

Well, it turns out that Access reports are perfect for generating packing slips. This is what they were born to do. Since the data is already in SQL Server, it took no more than a couple of hours to layout and design the report exactly the way I wanted it.

Two other things you’ll notice about our packing slips, learned from hard experience. First of all, instead of printing them on a standard-sized sheet of paper, I printed them on 5×8 cards. This has two big advantages. First, they fit into the envelopes we use for shipping most books, CD-ROMs, and DVDs without folding. This really makes a difference when you have a lot of shipping to do. Second, because the card stock is a little bit stiffer than paper, it’s easier to shove them into the envelope.

You’ll also notice the bar code printed in the top corner. There are many different schemes for printing barcodes, but if you’re printing your own barcodes, the easiest barcode system to use is something called Code 39. Other barcode systems want you to add a checksum at the end of the barcode and that means you have to write a little bit of code to calculate the checksum. But Code 39 embeds the the error correction protocol in each letter, which means that you can get a Code 39 font that works just like a font without writing any software.

When you’re ready to start shipping you grab a packing slip and scan it.

I didn’t really know which barcode scanner to buy, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find any online reviews of barcode scanners. I did find out that the kind of scanner I wanted was a USB keyboard wedge scanner. That means that it has a USB port, which makes connection simple, and it behaves exactly like a keyboard as far as your computer is concerned. I also found out that I wanted a laser scanner, not a CCD scanner, because it works at a distance. I ended up buying a Wasp WLS-9000 along with the stand which you can see in the picture. So far it’s been great.

Setting up the barcode reader was the easiest thing in the world. Plug it in to a USB port, and you’re done. It comes with a whole book of barcodes that you can scan to configure it to behave in many interesting ways, which you can throw away. Without any setup, when you scan a barcode, your scanner will type the letters that barcode represents on the keyboard and press Enter.

In FogShip, scanning the barcode launches a VBA process which does three things.

First, it marks the order as shipped in our online database, so the customer gets an email to let them know their order is on the way. Technically speaking, it would be more accurate to tell them their order shipped when the post office actually came by and picked up their order, but that enhancement will take more programming and will have to wait.

The second thing that happens when you scan the barcode is that it displays the information from the packing slip on a second large screen in a giant font. That way you can immediately shove the packing slip into the envelope… you don’t have to keep it around any more just to keep track of what you’re packing. This was a lesson learned from the first round of shipping, where we had to keep the packing slip outside the envelope until the last minute so that we would know what to pack and what the shipping method was; keeping the packing slip out until the last minute was just one more annoying thing that made the whole process less fluid.

Third, it prints a mailing label, and, for international orders, a customs slip.

To print USPS mailing labels with postage, you really only have three choices. You can use the USPS website (“Click ‘n’ Ship”), but that is designed for home users shipping one or two items. It is not designed to be automated and it always prints lots of instructions which you throw away. Since it relies on Adobe Acrobat Reader for the label, the process of printing is cumbersome and doesn’t work well unless you use expensive, full page 8.5 x 11 labels from a laser printer. Anyway, Click ‘n’ Ship is not the way to go.

The other two choices are Stamps.com and Endicia. Both of them have ways to programmatically print a label.

Endicia had a couple of advantages over Stamps.com for our application: it had a decent tool for laying out custom forms and labels exactly the way you wanted, and it had all the documentation on their website. Stamps.com required you to sign up for a developer program, so it took a while to get the documentation we needed, and we needed that thing yesterday, so we just went with Endicia.

Endicia’s system for printing labels couldn’t be easier. You create an XML file with all the shipping information and launch their app with the name of that XML file on the command line. It spits out a label and exits, creating a new XML file with tracking information and status information. The stamps.com system, as far as I know, is based on ActiveX, which would have worked fine for our application, too.

Now… let’s talk about spitting out a label. If you’re doing more than three or four labels a day, you’ll want a label printer, and if you want the whole process to go quickly, you’ll want a really fast label printer, not a laser printer that has to warm up. Everybody recommended Zebra which makes high-end, industrial strength label printers. We went with the Z4Mplus, which spits out a 4×6 label in less than a second. Not only that, it peels the label for you if you get the optional peeler (sign me UP!) This thing is really, really cool. And if you get Direct Thermal labels, you don’t need to buy a ribbon or ink or toner or anything… it sort of burns the print onto the label.

Next problem: customs forms for international orders. A customs form looks like this:

The green bit on the left is a sticky label which you peel off and stick to the envelope. The white part is just plain paper, attached via perforation. You have to fill out the whole thing with details like price, an exact description of the products, how much they weigh, and you have to sign both sides. Filling these things out is a pain in the butt.

The first trick was to find a printer that could print on 4″ x 7″ paper, the size of the customs forms, without messing up the sticky label part. It also had to be able to print pretty close to the edge of the page, it couldn’t depend on manually feeding each form, and it had to look good enough so that an image of the signature wouldn’t look too fake. It had to be fast at printing and not take a long time warming up, or it would slow down the process.

The printer we found which met all these criteria was the HP LaserJet 2420. We bought two of them (the other one prints the packing cards). It can hold about 100 blank forms in the envelope tray… it turned out that these forms are almost exactly the size of Monarch envelopes which is a standard format for most programs.

The setup software that comes with this printer is completely awful and crashed trying to install on a brand new Windows XP computer. It took several hours of fooling around with the drivers before this thing would print properly. In the meantime, it was printing, but super-slowly, and we couldn’t figure out why. I’m pretty shocked that in this day and age HP is still shipping printers that just can’t be set up by normal humans.

Back to Microsoft Access, where I created a report for the customs form. Using a ruler I carefully measured the position of each of the fields on the paper form and set up the Access report accordingly. It worked great, even producing a decent facsimile of a signature on the signature line!

The last step in the process is attaching any other flotsam, like Airmail or Priority Mail stickers.

And, tada! You’re done.

Shipping an international order now takes about 35 seconds, down from 3 minutes, and can be done by anyone, whether or not they have SQL and Mail Merge skills. Domestic orders are even faster since they don’t need customs forms. Most of all, it’s all really fun.

by Joel Spolsky

News

We have this big empty loft next door where we’re about to start construction on another eleven offices. In the meantime it’s serving as a temporary ping-pong room.

by Joel Spolsky

Fog Creek Goes to ETech

We gave all the Fog Creek programmers a choice of which conference to attend this spring, from a long list of about 12 conferences, and all of them wanted to go to ETech. So that’s where you’ll find us next March. It was incredibly interesting last year — most of the presentations, especially the ones that weren’t given by the sponsors, were great, but the best part was interacting with the interesting attendees.