JCooney.NET

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.

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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. »

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.

1. 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“
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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”.

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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. »

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!). »

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…

1. Creating layouts, compositions and templates
2. Building custom controls
3. Working with Styles and control templates (includes using Expression Blend to restyle)
4. 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)
5. Working with the new DataGrid control to display tabular and editable data
6. Binding data with ease to your user interface
7. Anything else you want to know about…Bring along your questions - Paul can speak eloquently about any topic in WPF at will.

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[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

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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)?

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