Sunday, May 31, 2009
The spirit of ted dzubia reached across space and time with an important message for me to share with the rest of the human race. If you're the kind of vacuous panty-waste who complains about a desktop application using 15 MB of memory then either go back to 1990 or kill yourself now.
I was reading a forum post recently where some asshat complained about a utility using 15 MB of memory. Now I'm no spring chicken - my first PC had 640 K of memory. I know you can squeeze a lot in to a few MB, and in some scenarios like on mobile and embedded devices 15 MB would be huge. But this was a windows desktop utility. In 2009 if an application using an extra 15 MB of system memory makes the slightest appreciable difference to you then you're either running on horribly old hardware, or you're using (or rather deluding yourself into thinking you're using) far too many applications at once. In either case this is YOUR problem, not a failing on the part of the application developer.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo was in the news last week after a keynote where he claimed he “changed Australia”. I found this quite interesting, as only last week-end I heard a story from someone at a social gathering. She was being charged for a service which she claimed she had never asked for and was disputing the claim. After several interactions with Telstra's escalation process she was told somewhat forcefully that they would not be refunding her money because they had a call recording on a particular date where her husband had asked for this service to be started. She found this most interesting since on the date they had nominated her husband had been dead for several weeks. Later she was called back by another representative of Telstra, who appologized and said that the dispute resolution service was outsourced, and the outsourcer was financially goaled on having disputes settled in Telstra's favour. I'll leave it up to you to decide if Sol changed Australia for the better or not.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
A few years ago a friend of mine was working on a small to medium intranet project for a large customer. About 6 months in to this little gambit he heard about a poison pen email one of the architects had sent to several of the project stakeholders (many of them non-technical) criticizing their use of Flex for the UI of the app. He then provided a laundry list of reasons why he considered this a very bad technology choice.
- His criticisms of Flex were mostly all technically wrong - like “Flex uses JDK 1.7, which isn't deployed to the SOE, and requires a direct connection to the mainframe at all times“
- He had been one of the principal architects on the project from the get go and had had ample opportunity to set the technical direction
- His means of distributing the criticism, as a scaremongering “we're doomed” rant to a non-technical audience without any “next steps” meant the team would be fighting fires for months to come
- They weren't using Flex anyway
While I don't want to ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't consider adding a CompleteFuckingSociopath “bit” to go along with the Bozo “bit”.
Friday, May 01, 2009
50% CPU and steady and upabated memory growth, without even a hint of UI showing...And blu was the whole reason I started using twitter...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
I saw this comment from Martin on Joel Spolsky's Business of Software forum, answering the question “How to appear bigger than you actually are as a microISV” and thought it was too funny not to re-post. Laughed until my eyes watered reading this list. Kudos to you, Martin.
>How do you appear larger than a single person company?
*Remove all prices from your website
*Require all sales to go through layers of sales reps and account mangers before being directed to an approved reseller.
*Remove all support
*Sell consultancy to fix any problems in the software
*Never return calls or emails except for canned response about how the inquiry is very important to you and is being looked into.
*Rename and rebrand yourself and your products repeatedly
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Last week's QMSDNUG presentation on building a project kiosk in WPF/Silverlight (it was mostly in WPF, but almost all of what I showed translates to SL also) was recorded in live meeting (thanks Jorke). If you've ever wanted to watch a video of me coding for about an hour or so here's your chance! Here are the slides in PDF, and the “final” sample app (with face recognition!).
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Microsoft with the help of and a few prominent community members have organized a WPF training day in a number of cities across Australia in the coming weeks. Paul Stovell and I will be conducting the Brisbane training and labs at Cliftons on Edward Street in the CBD on the 28th of March (a Saturday). The nominal $100 charitable donation will go to the Red Cross Victorian BushFire Appeal. Microsoft are providing pizza for lunch & Cliftons have also been kind enough to donate their training facilities at minimal cost. I'm hoping this will be a really great day, and the best part is that most of what you learn will translate directly to Silverlight too! We have only 40 slots so register your interest ASAP.
To register your interest email Paul: paul dot stovell at readify dot net
or myself: joseph at learnwpf dot com
We'll be trying to cover a lot of the core capabilties of WPF including...
- Creating layouts, compositions and templates
- Building custom controls
- Working with Styles and control templates (includes using Expression Blend to restyle)
- Using the Ribbon control to effortlessly create applications that are as familiar to your customers as Office 2007 (not to mention the Windows 7 Core Applications)
- Working with the new DataGrid control to display tabular and editable data
- Binding data with ease to your user interface
- Anything else you want to know about...Bring along your questions - Paul can speak eloquently about any topic in WPF at will.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
[Warning: This is not a technical post]
Dear Children's Book Authors
If you're writing a book in english and feel compelled to put an alphabet part in the book (maybe that is the WHOLE book) please please please for the love of god think about what word you choose for each letter. The english language is pretty messed up, so just choosing any word that starts with the letter in question just won't do. For example lets consider the letter E - unless you've got a pretty good reason not to I expect to see a picture of a fscking EGG when I open the 'E' page of the book. Eggs are a fairly distinctive colour and shape. Kids eat eggs (so long as they aren't alergic to them). Egg is a pretty easy word for a little kid to say. Don't use a word like Ewe (a female sheep) or Eye (unless you want me to come around to your house and poke one of them out). While these are both good short words and are somewhat easy to say they are atypical of the sound made by the letter E when beginning a word, instead sounding like the letters U or I respectively.
Ewe is particularly bad because it commits the second fairly flagrant sin - using a specific word for a more general concept. If you've bought the rights to a nice picture of a ewe and want to use it in your book throw it in as S for sheep not E for ewe, OK? Since a ewe is still a kind of sheep you're still correct, just being less precise (something you were clearly happy enough to do when you dropped off the species, location, age, lineage and DNA sequence of this particular specimen and compromised at ewe).The worst offender I can recall seeing in this area is a picture of a sheepdog under S. WTF. Do you want my kids to have learning difficulties? Kids will be wondering - it looks like a dog, but the name has sheep in it too. I know what sheep are, but that doesn't look like a sheep. Could it be both? What other animals can you mix together? Goodbye learning the alphabet and hello Chimeras. Just don't do this.
Thankyou and good-day
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
100% of anything is hard in I.T., and yet I often hear people shooting for it. 100% availability, 100% code coverage, 100% bug-free code. Yes, some people NEED to strive for this, but it is certainly not something to be undertaken lightly or in many cases something that can be realistically achieved. And just aiming for it, without any necessary guarantee of success, costs. Lots.
High availability is probably one of the better understood areas here so lets look at the numbers: 99% uptime gives you around 87.5 hours of down-time per year. Going up to 5 9's gives you about 5 minutes of downtime each year. That typically means redundancy all the way to the bottom, probably geo-plexing, replication of data, and maybe finding your local
disused nuclear bunker and turning it into a data center. And building james-bond-esque data centres 30M under Swedish mountains 'aint cheap. Some people from the less...rigorous parts of the organization structure might use numbers like “100%” with the best intentions in the world (they're so used to telling people to give “110%“ that they probably think their being all engineering-y by asking for “99.999%“), and sometimes goals like this can take on a life of their own without any critical thought being applied to them. So next time you hear “100%” or some other arbitrary-sounding hard target think critically about it: - is it even achievable? Is it necessary (
37signals didn't think 5 9's availability was with their Basecamp product, which by all accounts is a great success)? Has the person asking for it thought about the cost of aiming for it (even though we might not even get there)?
Monday, January 26, 2009
After the sub-par commercial success of my first microISV product
thoughtex I've been working on another
turd commercial disaster product recently. The wit and wisdom of mac developer extraordinaire
Wil Shipley (will ship, as in ship software....yes, from what I can tell that _IS_ his real name) has been of great comfort to me (except the parts about only developing only for the Mac...no-one is perfect). What - you don't know who Wil Shipley is? He appeared in his own penny-arcade strip.
He co-founded the Omni Group that wrote a bunch of stuff for the mac. He co-founded
Delicious Monster with a teenage designer and (working out of a coffee shop) in eight months hacked out Delicious Library which netted Wil and Mike Matas $54 K in the first day and $250 K in the first month. With no advertising budget.
Recommended listening -
his WWDC (think tech.ed or PDC but for apple people) talk to students.
Recommended viewing -
his C4 talk on the creation of product hype
Thursday, December 25, 2008
When people hear you can write computer programs they sometimes (in the mistaken belief that computers can somehow defy the laws of time, space, mathematics or reason) ask you to write the strangest things. The most infeasible thing I have ever been asked to write was in a taxi ride home. The cab driver said he already had a computer program that could pick 6 out of the 7 lottery numbers in each week's lottery, but that he needed a program that could pick all 7. Could I write something like this for him? Using my most soothing consulting voice I calmly told him that writing such a program would be “quite difficult” (in the same way that factoring prime numbers is quite difficult) and that he should instead repeatedly win the smaller prize pool with the 6 numbers his current program gave him. All the while I tried to retain a pleasant smile while my inner voice screamed out “you've being driven home by someone who is completely in-freaking-sane!!!!1! jump out of the car now!”.
Sadly this penchant for people to ask for infeasible programs is not limited to casual acquaintances and sometimes manifests itself in those who should know better, the so-called “business representatives” or “business analysts”. I heard about an incident where, during a meeting someone asked if the specialized CRM system could record a specific type of entry for pregnant women “even if the woman doesn’t know she is pregnant”. Should the entry be recorded at the moment of conception then, or when the act of procreation takes place? It would take a team of crack-smoking BAs WEEKS to figure out the “most correct” way for that to happen, but why mess around – why don’t we just pre-create all the entries for all the people (living now, or as-yet unborn) that will fall pregnant during the lifetime of the system. Computer programs can do some pretty amazing things - they can learn to play checkers, they can come up with antenna design that humans would be hard-pressed to, but there are limits. What is the most infeasible piece of software you've ever been asked to write?
Monday, December 01, 2008
I tend to live in a bit of a Microsoft bubble and often wonder how people outside the bubble percieve Microsoft's offerings. I was pleased when I saw this post from design shop Effective UI describing their impressions of surface.
I think the Surface has huge potential! Imagine hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, dentist offices, doctors, etc. Any place people are sitting with time to kill, the Surface could really make a big impact on the customer experience....Microsoft hasn’t always led the fold in UX, but Surface really is a very cool step in the right direction.
Judging from the content on their blog, these are pretty serious Flash/Adobe designer/developers. I got their via Peter Blois' blog, where he ported some control themes he found on one of the Effective UI guys blogs from Flex to Silverlight 2. Nice work Peter (oh, and I'm still a big fan of Snoop).
Saturday, November 08, 2008
I was just looking at the Vertigo Obama Newspaper cover deepzoom page and noticed all (bar one) of the Australian news papers didn't feature the Obama victory on the front cover, they instead featured (mostly) details about a particular horse race. Does this mean Australians don't care about what's going on outside their own borders? Nah - it's just that these are all the Wednesday newspapers....printed early some time on Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night. The election wasn't really called until Wednesday afternoon here. The only paper that does feature Obama on the cover is MX, the freebie paper you get when you're getting on the train, and which usually features celebrity gossip and the like. It is an afternoon paper. I was glad to see a number of non-Australian newspapers running stories unrelated to the US elections on the cover - such as football. Perhaps they also suffer from the terrible problem of not being in the same timezone as the continental united states.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
I guess somebody had to do it (and probably has done it before me) but goog...err windows live was only filled with search results for stories of announcements from ASUS and other netbook vendors of future machines that _will_ run Windows 7, but no word on anyone actually doing it. Armed with a copy of vLite and a blissful ignorance of all the things I didn't know about creating cutdown windows installs I went in a chopped out anything that looked non-essential. After installing in a VM (with a resultant vhd size of about 4GB) I was encouraged enough to burn a disk and give it a shot. It installed without a hitch, although I had to use the second, larger 8GB SSD in the 900 and the installer took a little while to complete. Only 3 devices didn't work “out of the box” - the video card (fall-back to VGA, and a display res of 800x600) the network card and another “unknown” device (still not working...who cares). The wireless adapter picked up immediately, and before the install was complete it had identified my wireless network and was asking me if I wanted to join. There are almost 2GB left on the 8GB dirve (so that's a 6GB install for those of you playing along at home) with the other 4GB drive untouched. The performance is fine for what I use my EEE PC for (casual web browsing, and reading PDFs and RSS feeds at train stations, and there are a number of additional tweaks I can try. Overall I thought this would be difficult, but I was completely wrong.
