Dev Dawn

It’s been over a year that I’ve been working with the Crew (props to ma boyz) .. over a year since I started gleaning great pieces of wisdom from seeing people in action who have done this for far longer than I.

And I’m scared that I’m never going to be rid of The Curse of the Nose-Hairs.

You know what I’m talking about. Getting caught in amongst the hairs, instead of cutting through them and getting to the good stuff.

I laughed when my brain came up with this on the walk to work this morning. If I could pull it off, it’d be a winner. Of course, discussing bodily functions isn’t the most appropriate of development chats.

Anyway.

So. It was one of the first lessons I learnt when I starting working with the Boyz.

Cut through the crap to get to the purpose. Make sure it’s in your brain, this direction, before you start to code. Break things down, segments.

I have a lot of ideas. Most of them are bloat, they fly around the room and get zapped by the Bug-Zapper (man those things are cool, I could stare at them for hours, listening to the hypnotic sound of little insects being fried). A rare few (and they are rare) stick around, lasting through the period of time it takes before bad ideas get seen for what they are.

The problem is, as I’ve just been made to see again just recently, is that I still haven’t learnt the lesson of the Nose-Hairs.

I still get caught on the superficial, the nose-hairs (at the risk of over-using a GREAT analogy).

What I want, is to, in the heat of the moment, to remember this lesson. And put it into practice.

This is my Christmas Wish-List. Or something like that.

I guess, to an extent, it’s something you either get or you don’t. But I believe (or else I’m doomed) that I can learn it. At least partially.

End Rant

It seems that something dark the something of man.

I mean.

Google has trouble a-brewing.

Google in Trouble for Suggesting Illegal Software.

It seems the “Suggest” feature of the Desktop Toolbar is in all sorts of hot water. Basically, they filter out ‘porn’ suggestions, but don’t stop filtering the hacks, cracks, and smacks that appear when you type something in.

I guess this is an inevitable growth problem. You can’t really fault Google for returning these things, as it is a search engine. Searching is it’s primary function, at least in the eyes of the adoring public. However, on the flip side, the adoring public is probably starting to think about the consequences, and now people are wanting Google to start being more than just a search engine that filters porn.

From an analytical point of view, they are right.

I mean, if I built a system that could write receipts but wouldn’t do payments, I’d be in the sewers catching rotten fish for my breakfast.

But from all the other points of view, things are not so easy. In the end, it’s about them becoming too large an empire, and these are the issues that will have to be dealth with. People are not comfortable anymore with the idea of Google. Or at least, that’s the way it’s heading.

One time, maybe even a year ago, people still had the dream in their eyes. When talking about Google, I would think I was cool because I could recite the quick rise to power, and tell people that they are taking over the world one search phrase at a time.

People laughed.

I felt like a reporter giving them the truth .. Peter Parker eat your heart out. Him or that Clark guy.

But instead now, it’s not like that. Well, the reporting thing is, the content just changes .. heh heh .. but,

It’s now getting to be where there’s a darker side. The idea of having so much power is now reality and so .. it changes from dream-state to totalitarian-state.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not into too much political or social questioning etc.

But this is where the babble is leading me today.

So yeah, Google Suggest can’t really stay the same. At least, in a PR sense, they will have to say that _something_ is being done.

On the other hand, they’re Google. If they wanted to, they could probably negatively affect all websites who publish bad stuff about them. That’d be a trip.

Peace out,

Feeling a little slow, although hopefully nothing related to the previous post.

I’m in a void of creation at the moment. A moment, more than a few moments, when my creative brain doesn’t seem to be firing. Normally this is a time of flux and change, when I (unconsciously?) seek out something new to get excited about.

However, this seems a little more pronounced. Not sure why. But I do know what I’m going to do.

Persevere and continue writing posts, even if they are lame 2 second short ones.

Perhaps rambling will help. What can I ramble about?

Apologies for the lack of any posting the last couple of days. I recently discovered what a lumbar puncture is .. and that my back has either too much fat or too many muscles to allow for one. So two doctors and five long pokey tries later, and they still couldn’t get to my spinal fluid.

I had a bit of an episode at rugby training. The fires of a thousand suns exploding in my head .. that sort of thing. Not that I’m making light of the situation .. okay, i am. It was pretty scary at the time. With that much pain I wasn’t so much scared as pragmatic .. kind of out of body .. well, if this is it Lord .. look after the wife and kids..

But anyway. There were no side-effects, nothing the doctors could latch onto. So no prognosis either.

The result is that I’ll probably not play rugby for a while ..

Cheers,

Ha ha ha.

I just had to link to this PVP Online strip. Awesome stuff.

Subject :: Dual booting the Mac

Note :: This mp3 is 40+ megs, so it might take some time if you have anything less than adsl speed.

Interview (001) with Bruce Johnson (and Jono Woodhouse) of Capesoft.

Be nice okay. Listening to my mannerisms and bad bad BAD technique in this interview gives me the willies. But everyone starts somewhere, and I couldn’t have picked better people to start with. Thanks Bruce & Jono (Capesoft), thankyou very much.

In the Interview we get to find out a few things about Bruce & the folk over at Capesoft.

• History of Capesoft, the first (and sort of first) Tools they created.
• Work ethics
• How the Web is affecting our work
• The Clarion community
• and at least 40 minutes more!

Once again, I realise there are so many things wrong with my interviewing technique. So try and look past this. It’s a first run for myself, and I learnt a lot, so much, from this experience.

Cheers,

Edited :: 8th May 2006

Another Disclaimer, Again ::
Apologies to any sessions that aren’t mentioned in these reports. I’ve said it before, my memory is faulty.

As Sunday’s are special to me, I did something special as soon as I woke, which wasn’t very early.

On went the togs, and before the sleep had fled my brain, or eyes, I jumped into the well landscaped pool.

And instantly became the most awake person within the campsite. Man alive! that was cold water. So, instead of getting out, I tried to jump around more, in and out, getting the body moving. That wasn’t working, so I sat in the heated spa that was next to the popsicle pool. This was just the ticket. If I sat in there for a bit, I was insulated enough to spend more time in the arctic waters before freezing. Twas fun.

Fun With Capesoft (Bruce & Jono)

Now, reader beware, there will be some ranting, some froth around the edges of my mouth.

At this point in the conference, we saw probably the best single capsuled event that should be the shining driving light of clarion.

(more…)

Discovered Successful Selling Tips for the Technically Gifted from a post on the Clarion Newsgroups. It’s concise and doesn’t rabbit on, but the owner states a lot of very nice points. Healthy points. Points that make you think, even if you don’t agree with them.

It’s the right place to be. Being on the cutting edge, pushing yourself to be better, learn new facets of the business (programming, sales, ..). It’s the place to be.

Those that know me know that i’ve been around for a while developing software and am pretty conservative when it comes to hype and the next big thing… I remember how XML was going to change the world… but i’d been around long enough to remember (and work with) SGML…. invented in the mid 70s, of which XML is derived from (this is Bill writing not Stu - Stu’s a little more excitable!)

Anyway, after OzDevCon06 I came back and purchased Profiler. In the past with big system I’ve manually written code to profile and benchmark bottlenecks, or expected bottlenecks!

To cut to the chase, it is possible using the debugger to get a feel for the event driven nature of your program flow. But it is still difficult to be certain when events are firing and what processes are being called. Especially OCX callbacks and other time critical routines.

My current project is a large system with some very complex screens (I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make the screens easy and concise for the users… which often seems to have the inverse effect on the code). One screen took upwards of 4 seconds to finish its housework one close. Now, before you all laugh at me, the product is in beta and I knew it needed tuning. My instinct told me database was the most likely issue and many tables are updated on pressing [Ok].

But with Profiler and the techniques Bruce demonstrated, I had loaded this project, found over 3.5 seconds of the problem, fixed it and recompiled within 10 minutes.

For the sake of completeness and so my friends can tease me, i’ll briefly explain what i was doing wrong.

In all my systems, for each update window, all field level validation including hiding and unhiding of controls is centralised in one rountine RefreshFields. Any field that requires validation just calls RefreshFields after the Accept event and its all handled in one place. Usually this is very rudimentry code, and centralising ensure i can easily prepare a window after open with just one call to RefreshFields and all controls are handled correctly without concern. But… as is always the case when you realise you’ve screwed up, this one was a little more complex. Profiler told me it was taking between 150 and 400 ms to execute… but the real shocker was…. 17 times… just when i click close! It is at this point that we all realised it was being called for every control with the RefreshFields as part of the normal AcceptAll validation process… now this lazyness in my coding (I have a life-time membership to the lazy programmers club) never really causes a problem… except except except…

So of course I just added a switch so this code executes once on AcceptAll and problem solved… This good habit will now be adopted, forthwidth!

So a big thanks to Bruce and the Team at Capesoft for an exceptional tool. 10/10!

Google Sketchup has been released in .. wait for it .. beta form. From a cursory glance, it’s not bad. Anyone who’s run Google Earth and seen their campus has seen the work of this piece of software.

Looks like a good addition to anyone actually doing stuff with GEarth, as it exports straight to the format used (plus a bunch of other formats). Not bad.

Just thought I’d jump in and post this asap, otherwise it’ll never happen.