Two Years

Wow, I can't believe that it's been 2 years already. Time flies along when you're not paying close enough attention. It's been a great 2 years though. I would not have thought that I would be here at all... it's strange how things work out some times. Awesome.

Happy Anniversary! :-D

Moving on

Well, today was my last day at a job that I have had for almost a year and a half (I'm transferring to a different but similar position). I'm a little sad and a little happy at the same time. The product that I am leaving I was involved from (almost) day one doing the coding, env. setup, user requirements, testing, testing, load testing, testing, feature development, testing, beta testing, user testing, release, bug fixing, bug tracking, testing, ... I could go on but I won't. :-P

I feel like it's my "baby" and I've seen it grow up till the first big release and be used on a daily basis as people's main tool. And that's big. It was time to move on though because even though we had a great relationship with our users and everyone, it felt like it was the "right time". I needed new challenges.

It still blows my mind how much I have learned in the last 17 months. It was a wonderful experience that I don't think that many people would ever get straight out of school. It's time to round out my skill set a bit more and find and overcome new challenges. I'm excited. ;-)

It has been done

As it was written, it is now done. Ah, the joys of owning your own hair cutting tools... ;-P

Funny money

I've been around coloured money for a while, but I was surprised by the Euro. Not that it's different colours or has a holographic strip, but that the bills are actually different sizes. Strange. The bigger the bill, the bigger the denomination. Not that I have seen a large sample to based that hypothesis on. I guess that's a good system for seeing impaired people. I just thought that was pretty cool.

*Shudder*

One of the fuggly-est sites that I have seen in a loooonnng time. Looks like something from '92... yikes.

Star Wars - RotS

The other day I went and saw Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith while waiting for crappy tire to switch a wheel for me (I couldn't get it off myself). Overall, a pretty good movie. Lots of action, lots of lightsabers, lots of great special effects. The thing that I liked best about it? How it tied everything together. Now it makes sense how and why Anakin fell from grace. The whole story line feels so complete now, it's great.

What didn't I like? Well, there were many times were it didn't flow as well as it should of. I kept on thinking "oh, they cut out another scene there". Hopefully when it comes out on dvd they will all the scenes that they cut out and it'll be a smoother film.

Another wonderful thing? Jar-Jar didn't speak. ;-)

Maintenance starts Day Zero

Something came to me the other day when thinking about software development. Developers usually want to work on "new development" rather than "maintenance". Maintenance is usually thought of as dealing with someone else's shit. But what is maintenance really? Isn't it just fixing bugs, adding features, making it run faster? What's new development? Isn't it just fixing bugs, adding features and making it run faster from the previous iteration? So what's the difference? I don't see any. I think that the difference is just perception of the problem.

It's a perception of new development that you can hack it till it works, toss it over the fence to someone else to maintain it and fix it. How do we fix that? Maintenance starts on Day Zero. You expect that at any time you are going to pass it along to someone else to maintain it, or you will be "stuck" with doing it yourself. That's one of the benefits of writing tests, specifically unit tests: you are always in "maintenance mode". If we can get rid of the idea of being able to hack and have someone else being responsible for it later; if everyone takes a long term view of software; I think that software over all would be in a lot better place than it has been in the past.

It's all coming off baby! Yay!

I have figured out what I am going to do with my beard while in Europe. Shave it off. You got that right. I've had the face fuzz for almost (or more???) than a year now. When I actually do it, I'll take a before and after shot and post it just for the fun of it. ;-)

New Nintendo

One of the things that I love about the old console games is just how much fun they are. What I would love if I got a new console would be to play all the old games that I love so much. Well, it looks like if I am in the market for a new console I'll be able to play those games with the Nintendo Revolution. Nice. ;-) I can't wait to be playing Dr. Mario on a console with 512 Mb of memory on a HD TV, neither of which I now have. One day it will be mine, oh yes... ;-P

Funny

Funny thing seen today on the walk to work:
A seeing eye dog with a sign on it that read "Do not pet me while I'm working". I guess every one has to keep a professional image. ;-)

Howdy partner!

How do you describe someone that you are living with? It's more than a girlfriend / boyfriend, but not a formal marriage. The term that I have heard used lately is partner. I've even heard someone refer to his wife as "my partner". Know what? I really like that term. I think that it's a good umbrella phrase for many different types of relationships while still being descriptive.

Yikes...

I guess even google can mess up, even with the best intentions.

Double click hell

Moving people into the "web world" from being used to a fat client can be "interesting". I don't think that paradigm shifts are ever easy. When you're on one side it's hard to see from outside. Most people that I know who use web applications only click links and buttons once. Some fat clients *cough* Notes *cough* require you to double click for just about everything. Trying to get people who are so used to double clicking to just click once can be hard. So hard.

Where this can prove problems if you have something like "delete record 55". If you are using IE for your browser, it can submit that to the server twice and if you don't guard against this your app will blow up, espically when it makes sense to for it to be an error. Stupid IE. Better browsers don't submit to the server until the page has finished reloading.

The hard part about this sort of thing is when you are testing and debugging your app, you might not even consider double clicking on links. I know I didn't. It's just not something that I would do. But it's going to be one of the first things that I try when getting a weird bug report. You can use something like a Synchronizer Token too... if I have any advice for any kind of workflow app, I'd use those everywhere. *sigh* Just venting...

05-05-05

I just noticed that today's date is 05-05-05...
[END random thought]

Textpad rocks

Long ago I gave up using Notepad for editing plain text. Pete showed me the wonderful tool TextPad which I've used ever since for non-heavy editing. It's fast, it's easy to add colour highlighting, it's just a great tool. Today makes me happy about it because I just found another very useful feature.

I've been going through apache server logs to trace the path of users. The log files have all the ip addresses mixed throughout in chronological order. However I want to look for one person (ip address) and see their path through that. I was using grep among other things to "process" the logs. However that's not needed if you just want to sort! If you hit F9 it comes up with a dialog where you can give prams to sort by (for us it was IP address then date). Zip! It was done. Very fast. Ahh... I love it when the tools I love give me more reason to like them. :-D