Over the falls

Well, we only have one. House, that is. But we've got lots of pox! I've spent this Canberra rainy weekend quarrantined with my kids, who all have chicken pox. It's not a particularly virulent disease, they all seem perfectly fine, just, well... spotty. And itchy. So now I'm working from home (lying in bed, in fact.) It's easy to get things done, but it's a bit lonely. Somehow I don't think the telecommuting revolution will ever really happen. A bit like the XML revolution. Remember watching that Microsoft guy drag a project reference out of a Barnes and Noble web page and into Visual Studio.NET, many years ago? Remember how the world was supposed to be inter connected with all these vendors publishing their catalogs in XML and SOAP? Whatever happenned to that? Weren't all the computers supposed to be doing all the work, and all the humans just lazing around on the beach? And what's with the whole "Year 2000" thing, and NOBODY HAS ANY JET-PA...

Can someone please explain to me what is going on at www.frozenchicken.com ? UPDATE: Stilly comes to the party to explain . I'm still not sure why someone would do that though...

While browsing for Visio Shapes, I came across this: The Visio Crime Scene Template: At first I thought - "Oh - that's just some crazy joke thing - but no, it turns out that people actually use Visio for recording evidence like this. (When you think about it, it makes sense - Visio's ability to do scale drawings is great, so it would lend itself to this sort of thing pretty well.) But still, a little creepy. There are twenty different murder weapons, including a meat cleaver and screwdriver. ... ew. Now what I want to see on CSI is someone yelling at their terminal: "No! I didn't want to rotate the shape! I wanted to resize it! Grrr..."

Our development team is in the process of moving from Visual Source Safe to Subversion for Source Control. (Yeah, I know that there’s all kinds of cool new stuff coming in VS Team System, and that VSS probably won’t ever suck as much as it has for the last 5 years. But we’ve made the decision.) As part of making the Transition, I read Eric Sink’s articles on Source Control , which are probably the best things I’ve ever read on what can be a super boring topic. One subject that was particularly well explained was the topic of branching. (Branching is a way of creating a copy of a bunch of code so that you don’t break important stuff. That’s my 20 words on the subject. If you want to know more, go read the article . ) In the end, we settled on Eric’s preferred model of branching – having an unstable trunk. So all our development work is actually done on the main trunk, and we branch our releases off for future maintenance. Seems sensible enough. However, developer idiocy (a common malad...

I was musing over job advertisements today, and I decided that the one thing that made them all sound horrible was the all too common overuse of superlatives. Let's face it, nobody wants to hire a bozo. But on the other hand, very few people actually qualify for the ridiculous aspirational ideals posted in most job ads these days. Check out this, randomly selected from seek : Leading Consultancy. Career opportunity. You will possess excellent business communication and presentation skills, with the ability to deliver outstanding enterprise solutions to key clients. You will be client facing, with strong business relationships skills at all levels. You must have a positive attitude to today'’s technology marketplace, and the qualities to deliver the required solution to your clients. C'mon, what does all that mean? What exactly is client facing? S omething about where your desk points? And having a positive attitude to today's technology marketplace. That doesn't ma...

Okay - a lull. The pounding sets seem to have stopped coming. Paddling time. Trying hard not to use every ounce of strength left in my arms, it's head down, and left, right, left. I can see a couple of guys sitting up on their boards on the horizon. I paddle straight at them. All of a sudden, they vanish, disappearing behind another giant blue wall that rises up in front of me to become my immediate problem. I can see the crest about to topple and crush me - do I paddle straight at this thing? Surely that would be madness. Or do I dive? I panic a little, and take far too long to decide. In the end, the wave makes the decision for me. My pathetic attempt at a dive consists of staying pretty still and sticking my bum up in the air in an attempt to get the nose of my board under the water. .. Miraculously, it seems to be enough, my stomach lurching as I travel up through the face of the wave to emerge in the air on the other side. A fine spray travels slowly down with me as I re-conne...

If you like the Format Painter in Word 2003, you're going to like this - you can cut and paste formatting from and to anything by holding down shift when you cut and paste - (so Ctrl + Shift + C to copy formatting, and Ctrl + Shift + v to paste formatting) That's cool - no more poking about with the little paintbrush icon. Ahh, the small pleasures of life. I do so love discovering a new shortcut.

I've been tasked with preparing a presentation to explain to new members of staff the way that the software development process works at TOWER Software. As part of my preparation, I thought I'd draw up a mind-map around the topic of "What Is Software?" Software is more than just a bunch of ones and zeros banged out by computer nerds. There are a huge number of other tasks that need to be completed in order to have a successful commercial software product. Once I'd mapped out as many as I could think of, I was a bit scared by the size of it all: I would surmise that a company that strived to achieve success in every element, would be a really successful software company. Of course, this list is far from conclusive - any additions or obvious exclusions are welcome!

I'm not very fit I don't live anywhere near a beach There are only 44 Pro surfers in the world (or in the Men's WCT anyway) I get scared by really big waves I'm not a very good surfer.

Whereas StrangeBanana just tends to make random hideous color mash-ups, Colorblender seems to do a great job of choosing a color palette. You pick a colour, and it automatically selects complementary and highlight colours. Works right in your browser, great use of sliders, and lets you download your new palette in a variety of formats. Now if only there was a similar tool for screen design and layout... (Via Mitch Denny )

The Software Management Bible, Peopleware , has a parable buried within it somewhere that goes something like: (I'm paraphrasing, because someone nicked my copy, and I haven't read it for years) People hate Change . They really hate change, They really, truly hate change , Oh yes they do. With software - the path of least change is always the path to greatest acceptance. But then, without changing anything, the software doesn't get better. Sometimes you have to just give up and force people to make a change, in order to make the world better in the long run. Check out the new Office 12 Interface . I automatically hate it a little bit, because it's different . But I know what's going on under there. Microsoft are bridging the gap to Vista (which has a radically different look and feel) with the big product that most people use. They're forcing us to change. And most people will absolutely hate it. I'm not sure exactly why, but today has just reminded me of t...

I like project sites. Whenever I start a new project, I always create an online portal that shows the team where they are, where they're going, and what should happen next. Back in the bad old days, I had to laboriously create project sites using ASP and carefully hand-tooled HTML. Nowadays, there are a thousand automatic instant-web-site-majiggery things out there. For Context ice , we used a sharepoint team site with a few minor tweaks. It did the job, but it wasn't anything special. This one , on the other hand, looks a bit special. The ability to see code checkins on the project site, plus a solid bug tracker and a pretty cool looking wiki engine makes Trac look like it might be well worth investigating for your next project. Looks like they've nicked some of the best ideas from FogBugz, as well as some cool highlighting features for viewing code changes... In order to get code checkins published onto our ice team site, I had to set up a service that published an RSS fe...

KrazyDad talks about audiophiles, while discussing the Sonic Impact T-Amp , a new $30 dollar digital amplifier. "But did you ever notice that these audiophile guys who talk about the frequency response of their speakers for hours on end never talk about the actual music they’re playing on them? That’s because they’re actually listening to Celine Dion." I wonder if you can get gold-plated, zero-distortion, frequency reducing ear plugs...

Ahh. I like holidays. After driving for two days, (the kids were generally great, but I have learned that it's not a good idea to to fill your seat-belt clicker with magic gum) we made it up here to Mooloolaba, on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. I finally got back in the water! To my surprise, I didn't suck as much as I would've thought, although my paddling muscles are really, really sore. Doesn't take to long to get back a bit of surf-fitness though - lots of 6am starts... The swell here is pretty awful, and catching choppy beach-breaks is a skill that I am really far away from mastering. Still, lots of fun. So far, we've seen koalas at Noosa, been out to a massive salt water lake called lake Cootharaba, which is about three kilometers wide and about sixteen inches deep. It's weird to see your three year old dissapearing into the middle of a lake. We've paddled the canoe around the Maroochy River, lay on the beach and generally had a lot of fun. With all th...

I have a folder in my RSS aggregator that I call "Newbies". If I find a blog I think I might like to subscribe to, I add it to the Newbies folder. If I find I like their posts, I'll promote them to the "bloggers" folder. One of the blogs I found through my referrer logs and added to the newbies folder was Bill Rini - a poker player from LA. I thought that it might be nice to open your mind to the fact that other peoples lives and interests are entirely different from your own. But, little did I know, exactly how true this was. The latest post arrived this morning, and out of ALL the sentences, I understand approximately ZERO of them. Observe: "I got aces cracked twice in two orbits. Both times I picked them up in the blinds and had 7 or 8 callers before it got to me. The first guy to crack me was this older Asian dude who called two cold with pocket threes and hit his set on the flop. After my aces got cracked the second time I turned to the dealer and ...

Working in a software company comes in two flavours - the green-fields, dream-plan -build-software bit, (which is fun) and the dreary endless bug reports that come from testers and customers (which are not fun). As a very depressed project manager once said : "The software is not finished until the last user is dead" At TOWER Software, as these bugs arrive, they are prioritised according to a simple scale: 1) Urgent Fix 2) Fix ASAP 3) Fix 4) Fix if Time 5) Won't Fix It's pretty self explanatory, so I won't go into the bleeding obvious, but each day, the team goes through and assigns a significance score to each bug. Then we hand them all out and get to work. That process is called triage, after the medical hospital waiting system. The goals might seem pretty similar -you might think "Ok, you want the bugs that are really bad to be fixed first - not unlike the hospital scenario where the man with the axe protruding from his head gets treatment before the snot...

No matter what you think you do, reality will catch up with you.

Doesn't everyone love to read a blogger handing out a good bollocking? I've been working on [secret project] using Ruby on Rails of late, so I've been subscribing to some rails lists and blogs. Getting started with Rails can be kind of weird and hard, but being a fairly patient person, I've just kept at it with nothing more than some head scratching and mild swearing. This guy, on the other hand, had obviously had enough persevering.. . His review of ROR? " it's fucking horrible . Anyone who tries to convince you that it's in some way an elegant and consistent way to create 'web applications' is entirely insane." hehe :)

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I usually manage to contain my fanboy-ness, but today's unveiling of the Nintendo Revolution controller at the Tokyo Game Show made me all frothy with excitement. I desperately want to play with one of these things. I want to slash my way through bad guys, wandering the worlds of Hyrule. I want to point at the things I want to use. I want to pick up and roll the dice in Mario Party when I'm playing with my kids. I want to battle fellow pokemon fans on the other side of the world, and race other people in Mario Kart. Interaction is where all the magic of gaming is, and thankfully somebody is thinking outside of the (x) box. The Revolution will be able to wirelessly download and play all of your favourite Nintendo games - all the way back to 8-bit NES land, 16-bit classics, through N64 games, and still play gamecube titles. Plus who knows what cool things they'll come up with for the revolution itself. Hats off to Nintendo for making a truly next-generation console. The mor...