Much to my amusement, UPS managed to get me a package 2 minutes before it had even arrived in Saskatoon!
UPS manages to deliever a package before it arrives
I seriously wonder how hard it is to track a package in this day and age…
In my line of work, I see a lot of legacy databases. We often tasked with converting them to something more modern. My #1 gripe with some of our junior programs in this task is not converting fields to a more appropriate data type when this takes place. Two examples that I come across often.
To my condo has a forced air hot water furance. It’s something of a marvel of technology, being as loud as a possible and all… Anyways, the thermostat that they installed with it is a $20 piece of junk. It’s cut off for turning on and off basically guarrentees this place goes from hot to cold over and over again. This, was unfortunate. Even more so was that it would startle me awake at night.
A gift from Rogers Wireless!
Gift from Rogers Wireless
Always providing top notch service…
So I’ve been accumulating the parts for my car computer. I had to special order the dash piece for my car from Taiwan. Around the same time I ordered a really cheap LCD for the computer. This is a quick write up comparing the two items shipping…
At work I’ve been using the newest and greatest Install Shield Premier 2008 for packing aforementioned Visual Basic application. We actually had version 10.5 sitting around, but somehow I managed to change the dependencies for this application is such a way that it confused the heck out of the 10.5 version. Now, I’m coming from a unique perspective here, in that I’ve attempted to use 10.5 and 2008. Here are my “Install Shield Grips”:
I’m working with VB6 at work. This list is not nearly complete, but it does represent all the problems I had today with VB6. I’m sure I’ll remember some more as it bits my ass over the next week. In no particular order of importance, here they are:
Note on August 24th, 2007: I realize many of these issues are fixed in later editions. My point here is that I shouldn’t be developing software in VB6… it’s wasting my time.
I’ll keep this as short as possible. I’ve been doing more ASP.NET 2.0 development at work. Sometimes I’m amazed at how simple and fast you can do something. Other times I’m horrified at how lacking it is. I have nothing particularly against ASP.NET 2.0, but if it was something opensource… people would be fixing these petty problems. Here’s an example:
You have a drop down list on a page that is DataBound to a list of items. These items all appear on the page, but you may have to scroll to them. You want to let the use select the item from the drop down and scroll to it (with the magic of anchor tags). Typically you add an “onchange” event to call some javascript that does this. Something simple like: window.location = “#item_id”;
Unfortunately, ASP.NET 2.0 doesn’t want you to do client side scripting with their controls, so you left with these options:
1. Render the control manually in the ASP page. This is the method we’ve been doing for years, creating large unreadable source pages. It’s what all this ASP control jazz is supposed to fix.
2. Extend or rewrite a new control that accepts this property with no complaints. This may already be done by someone out there. Down side is you add a dependency to your project and usually get a bunch of other crap you didn’t want. Extending it consumes some time, but if done write you can probably reuse it.
3. Add the ‘onchange’ attribute to the control with some code: controlName.Attributes.Add(“onChange”,”javascript: return confirm(“Are you sure?”);”); This works, but you end up combining your view and control code, which once again is something ASP was supposed to fix…
None of these solutions are particularly good. When I worked on a site that used Castle I found many similar problems with their “Helpers”. I submitted updates to them, so everyone benefited. With Microsofts ASP.NET, we have to bitch about it. Send in a request. Wait. Wait some more. Then maybe they integrate the requested fix/feature in the next version. The whole process taking years usually.
Note: I’m not endorsing the use of Castle. It’s relatively mature, but doesn’t provide much of an advantage over a well designed asp.net site. Also, to do anything moderately well in ASP.NET, you should understand their DataSource stuff. For larger sites, be prepared to write your own datasource handlers, because the ones they provide are limited in their usefulness on large sets of data (e.g., they retrieve full sets of data before pagination or sorting).
We’re at coffee tonight and we’re talking about the craziness that is patents. It occurs to us that many of the patents are just the same old technology, but on a cellphone or wireless network of some sort. This is obviously silly for many reasons, mostly that putting something on wireless these days is trivial… and that cellphones are essentially computers. So it stands to reason, if companies in the US can get away with filling this sort of patents… and defending them. Well, obviously there is money to be made by just… making patents up with various applicable technologies. So I present to you, our first prior art claim to… the motion gesture interface to cellphones.
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I’ve been in the market for a new camera bag ever since I bought a 300mm telephoto lens. My plain old 35mm camera bag just didn’t cut it anymore. I wanted to take my camera with me, and be able to swap to a different lens if the need arose. Considering my 35mm camera bag from Lowepro has lasted the better part of 12 years or so… I figured they would be a good brand to continue using. At the recommendation of a friend who is a far more experience camera buff than me, I decided to go with a single strap, over the shoulder bag. This makes for easy pickup and reduces some of that back pain from carrying a load of equipment on one shoulder.
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