Over the falls

What a rotten few days. First my car's rear window was smashed. Apparently some complete prick ( and I use those words with all the venom and vitriol with which they were designed) backed into my car at about 2 AM, smashed my window and then drove away. At least , that's the best theory I can come up with. The car had one of those ugly rear window louvres, so I'm assuming it was an accident and not an act of mindless vandalism (there was no rock or other projectile in the car) . That's not the dodgey bit though (although it is pretty lame in itself) The dodgey bit is that the complete prick then decided to move my bin (it was bin night) and place it next to my car to frame the bin man for the crime! When I first came out in the morning I assumed that the giant clumsy bin robot atached to the garbage truck had broken my car. Careful inspection showed me that the bin hadn't been collected yet, and was also far too short to reach my window. So thanks fellah,(or...

I made a resolution today. One that I plan to keep for the rest of my life. Ready? Here Goes.... I will never, ever again watch the Channel Ten News as long as I live. I know that's bold, but there you go. I can not believe the level of stoopid "News-Tainment" total , utter toilet clippings they pass off as journalism. And it dawned on me the other night as I was watching something really important about Brad and Jennifer, that I don't actually have to watch this crap! I can turn it off! so now, everytime I hear their serious news theme, I'm going to turn the TV off, or walk out. Save money on all that spat out beer. And cleaning. I was thinking of writing some software that did speech recognition on the newsreader, and then everytime there was an adjective blowout , automatically e-mailed a complaint to the station - you know stuff like " A Heart-Breaking Decision for a Lonely Panda", "A Horrifying , Barbaric Act of Cruelty to handbags...

You know those days when you should really stay in bed? Well, yesterday was one of those days. I came in to work, made a task list, failed to fulfill any of the things on the list, and then inadvertently managed to configure our dev server so that nobody could check anything in or out. After working back until I finally figured out the stupid Joy of File Permissions, I managed to restore things to the previous level of functionality and went home - not having made anything better, but having made utterly no difference. I broke something, spent the rest of the day making it unbroken and then left. Amazing! Remember that just because somebody is busy doesn't mean that they are actually adding any value! Reminds me of my first job as an APS1 in the defence department. I was a finance clerk. I really, really didn't want to be a finance clerk. I thought that was really dull. The reason I had decided that was because it was really dull. Anyway, I discovered that Office 97 had Visu...

Had a moderate amount of fun playing with Parasoft's.Test today - it generates N-Unit tests from your .NET code. The tests it generates aren't super clever - it won't be able to tell what your functions actually supposed to do (as Simon said - "If it can do that why doesn't it just write the code for you already!") - but it does do a huge amount of testing of types and looking for null exceptions etc. I fed it a pretty small project (12 Classes) and it produced about 1630 various tests - 400 of which failed... I figure that if we fix them, we've got better code right? It also provides stubs for you to fill in based around your business function. I think it's worth spending some more time with it. Ooh - Picasa V2 is out! Go and get it now . If you have a digital camera and a Windows PC - you really, really need this program. It's wonderfully designed with just the right functions to manage all your digital photographs, without confusing you w...

Noodling away at Jack Johnson's Posters trying to figure out how he plays the intro. Jack reminds me of Jimi sometimes. In that they both string a beautiful melodic selection of notes that get together underneath a lyric. You know Jimi's Angel? - like those pretty notes after he sings "Came down from heaven yesterday.. ". Anyways - enough musical wankery. My arms are still aching from surfing all weekend with Alex and Ian. Got a few nice waves on the Saturday Evening - Sunday was a bit lame. Still, lots of paddling makes your arms sore - regardless of the waves. I can't believe the number of people at the South Coast these days. One guy joked that if you got a decent run-up on the headland, you could get all the way to the other end of the beach just by jumping on surfers... I gotta work on my top turns more - I can make the bottom turn nearly every time, but I almost always fall off trying to turn off the top of the wave. Something to practice in my head. P...

Man, the templating system that we're building for Project Tremble is really cool. Building on some of the ideas available in Gmail - (namely returning JavaScript elements back to the DOM from XMLHTTP Requests), The solution is so clever, that we spent considerable time debating whether or not it was ground-breaking innovation or complete lunacy. You know those feelings of disbelief- often there's a really really good reason why somebody hasn't done something yet - because it's actually retarded. Occam's Razor would say that this is usually the case. But, after much deliberation, Big-Headed Simon (not an ironic Australian insult, but a fact - we measured developers heads one drunken Friday, and Simon's is the biggest) and I decided that we really had something here. I'm utterly blown away by the approach. When V1 of Tremble ships in July, you'll be able to see what I mean... I love this photo of paddling out in Teahupoo, Tahiti. Apparently Napoleon alw...

Me and my nephew Tom went shopping for surfboards today (well a surfboard - he'd been saving for some time.) After consulting many a surfer dude, and visiting all the surf shops in Canberra (not hard, seeing as Canberra doesn't actually have a beach anywhere nearby - believe me, I've looked) Tom settled on a 6'10 Fish board - not probably the best choice for a big guy who's never really surfed much, but damn it will look sexy on the beach. Which is really quite important when you're seventeen. I remember being seventeen. It seemed like the hugest, most dramatic and revelatory time in my life. Back then, there were REALLY SERIOUS things that happened to me and my friends. Man - this one time My Aunt Chris got really mad at me and wouldn't let me back in the house, and me and my friends had to sit on a mountain in the dark and smoke bongs and talk for hours about how serious the situation was. I mean - man it was really REALLY HEAVY. Listening to Tom te...

This weekend, I had some minor revelations. Revelation 1: Watching the fractocumulus clouds roll in over the lake, and talking to Cam about software development, it dawned on me that the default state for software teams is to not produce software. This seems a bit strange, but having worked on various teams in both public and private sectors, I'm convinced it's true. People assume that you can just leave the project in the hands of nerdy software geniuses, and that the final result will be the software solution of their dreams. This is really, really, really not true most of the time. If you do that, you end up with developers who "Go Dark" and end up doing something that nobody understands. And by then there's nothing you can do about it...You've spent heaps of cash and you end up throwing good money after bad. This happens all the time. I often get calls from recruitment agencies that go something like: BodyShopChicky: "Hi Gordon, I've got ...

Stilly wonders If I would break his fingers in this post. Ha! Not meaning to piss in anyone's pocket (where did that expression come from? Anyway, like most of us who aren't a little twisted I don't want to) - but as a long time reader of Mikal's blog, it was Stilly who prompted me to start blogging in the first place. And as usual he's absolutely right - TOWER is an excellent place to work, and my job is hard! I upgraded my mobile phone to the Sony Ericsson K500i today. It's a very nice thing, that is really quite a lot of overkill considering I primarily use it to talk to people who are in a remote location. Mind you if I end up lost in the desert, and find I need to take a VGA photo of a coconut and e-mail it to my Mom, while playing 3D Splinter Cell and MPEG4 streaming videos out of a speaker phone, I can do that too. Mp3 ring tones! Now I get Jack Johnson's Inaudible melodies intro when people ring me up. So If I sound mellow and distant, it's ca...

Why, oh why do I eat Chili? It makes my tummy really sore. Oh well. (writing post curled up in ball) The guys down the street from us have lodged a long and very very boring complaint about somebody building a bigger house in the street. The complaint is all full of "bring down the general tone of the neighborhood" and "impinge on the privacy" and nah nah nah The funny thing is, these people live in an enormous house that they just built, and are at least 5 houses away from this "Monstrosity of urban development". I wonder why people would care? For anybody else who wants to come and live in my street, you can live in an enormous pumpkin, or a great big house shaped like a wanger if you like. I mean, you have to live in it. It's utterly no concern of mine. Of course those folks down the road will absolutley blow a pooper valve, so maybe it's not gonna happen... ;^) Mez pointed me at this site , which is truly magical.

I've really been enjoying Eric Sink's posts on Micro ISVs and finding a product idea . (A Micro ISV is a one person sideline enterprise. ) I think I've got a good idea for my enterprise , which I'm going to reveal once I've figured it out in more detail. Meanwhile, I should reveal that this aforementioned (and bold and italicized) enterprise has more than one person in it. My wife has endeavored to help me fill in on the bits that I don't understand. Looking at what else is on the cards, (Where are these alleged cards, anyway?) This year is going to be full of great software for me. My role as PM at TOWER Software is helping a truly talented team build some innovative stuff around Document Management, Nova Software's LongWire technology is under development, and it has the capacity to revolutionize legacy application management in a Service Oriented Architecture. Add mysterious MicroISV Project...Surely that's enough for one guy? And sti...

Looking Up My Nose. 

I've decided to start a blog. Ahem.. That's pretty amazing. (in a very non-amazing sort of way.) This year is kinda critical for me - it's the thirty-first time I've been around the sun, which is not really that relevant, but I'm still proud of it nonetheless.. The criticality lies in my decision to label this year (as I tend to label every year) to be Gord's year of enterprise . Really, it's all about surfing. Surfing is more fun than work. Surfing doesn't pay very well. (or anything for that matter, unless you're really really good - which I'm not.) So, I'm going to have to use the skills I have in software development to allow me to get to a point where I can go surfing whenever I want. This means developing a product that I can sell to people for money. so I can go surfing and not go broke at the same time. I always liked the idea that software could give people more time to play . Now I want that to be true for me. In...