Spurious Logic

The days when developers did this sort of stuff, or indeed, this are long gone.

I was going to intro that with a “Sadly” but to be honest it’s only sad for the management who exploited naive, passionate and gifted employees who “believed in the company”. Those hackers who produced work out of love of what they were making rather than for fair payment also allowed themselves to be exploited so it works both ways.

I think (hope?) that developers have become more business savvy. On one hand this is bad for companies because they are more aware of the value of what they’re producing and are less likely to be screwed over. It’s also good for companies because it means that they will focus on creating what is important to the company rather than their own pet project. (more…)

Lotus Notes I hate you so,
neither client nor server
always crashing, collecting data
can you just deliver email?

Between that and the bloody startup splash screen it’s such a turd of an app.

Add in my pc’s 10 minute delay after login (I think it’s retrieving the user settings from a remote server) and 5 minute spazz-out as antivirus rescans everything and I’m lucky if I can actually get working until 20 minutes after I’m in the office.

This is why I just set my PC to standby most week days. (which has had the weird effect of deleted items becoming un-deleted at random times… THANKS WINDOWS!)

Image from Flickr user rumpleteaser

As I’ve been adding images to the posts more and more I’ve usually used print screen to grab them from google maps or creative commons on flickr and the Irfanview to crop and resize them as required. I’ve been saving them all in .png.

I’m not sure why but the picture quality was always good and the image sizes were’t too large. But then recently I’ve been trying for larger and larger images in the posts (because they’re purty) and the sizes have ballooned.

In Irfanview there’s a menu option called save for web. I never bothered with it before as it requires you download a 5Meg plugin and I really couldn’t be bothered.

It shows you a comparison of how the picture looks now versus how it will look after compression with a choice of different file formats. My 400K picture of outer Mongolia dropped to 100K. The same with the stormy clouds over the hills of Murcia.

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One of my biggest problems as a developer is limiting the changes I make.

Initially, when you’re a junior developer you’re more focussed on learning how the system fits together, making sure your changes fix the defect and that you’re not breaking the build.

Once you get past that stage and you start to think that “Hey, I know this stuff and I have a pretty good idea what the client wants”, then you start spotting further improvements which would be a trivial code change but would improve the clients experience.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the strongest willpower so the Google Crome Nanny extension is a godsend for my productivity. The fact that whole swathes of time consuming web content isn’t available to me for specified times of the day means that I don’t even waste the time fighting not to browse.

I have a list of sites blocked at specified times (09:00 – 12:30, 14:00 to 16:00) which are fairly flexible. I add to that list as I find timesink sites. Yes this one is on that list.

Even if you do have very strong willpower, the best step is to remove the temptation. Where I’ve really noticed it is during compile/batch run time. That 30secs ~ 2mins where I literally have nothing to do and I think “I’ll just see what’s in Google reader”. 20mins later and I’ve completely lost my train of thought with the work that I was doing.

As an aside, that you don’t have to restart Chrome to install plugins is fantastic. I don’t get any annoying notifications that “3 of 10 extenstions have been upgraded” or “you are now running google chrome 1.0.1.18.B”. I don’t care about that stuff. I want a seamless experience and I trust my opensource browser to take care of itself without the handholding.

<edit>Actually the cutoff starts 13:30 to 16:00. Completed editing in Internet Explorer. Yest I know I can circumvent all of this by using a different browser but have you actually browsed the web with IE and no adblock. It’s not particularly fun and doesn’t last long.

So apart from the silly name duckduckgo.com is quite a nice little search engine that I’ve been using over the last few months. Apart from some very obscure stuff it’s been as good as Google (and where it can’t find anything it has a nice “Try Google” link).

The interface is nice; no separate pages, the results just load as you scroll down. Minimal ads, personalisable settings and a privacy guarantee on searches/results.

Using it today I found my way onto searchdotnet.com which is a dedicated .Net developer search engine. Seems to work so far.

You can’t rely on the ordering of a Dynamic SQL statement execution which can result in some hard to find bugs.

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So I’ve been working from home the last few days. That slightly sore shoulder from the ergonomic keyboard turned into full on muscle spasm which means I can’t really drive/need to take regular lie downs while working. No the irony is not lost on me. Especially as it’s the best waves in the last 3 months hitting the beaches right now and I can’t even go boogie boarding. My powerless rage knows no bounds.

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