Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

I've termed Joel Spolsky as The Easiest Man to Disagree With Who Still Meant Well, but there are a number of places where I agree wholeheartedly with what he has to say. There's one quote in particular about getting into "the zone" while working that I find myself digging back up, again and again. I'm adding a quick-link to freakinname's template just to save from searching for "interruption" on Joel's site again.

Anyhow, here are the important parts of his post:

Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity....

With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

With so many means of non-immediate communication, it's a shame so many people bug immediately. Here are some hints, folk.

1.) Email the person you want to ask a question, and work on something where you aren't stymied for a while.
2.) If your question is going to take a long time to answer, or even if you suspect it might, schedule an hour or so with the person to talk about what you need to know.
3.) For heaven's sake, when somebody's typing, don't bug them. Wait until they stop, zone out, pick up or hang up the phone, walk out of their office (through preferrably *after* they're coming back from wherever), whatever.

If I had a dime for every time I'd been bugged when I was typing with headphones on, bouncing my leg up and down (usually a sign I'm hitting on all cylinders), sometimes even when I'm gesturing with my fingers (while "visualizing" or, granted, occasionally flipping off the computer, which for some strange reason doesn't seem to care), I'd at least be able to get a good burger for lunch today.

Been using Microsoft Outlook at work. Not impressed. Strangely, their html email formatting isn't bad at all but their plain text stinks. Lines are wrapped without any regard for what comes next, and spellcheck for some reason can't figure out what's been quoted and what hasn't when you use a quoting prefix. Not to mention the "---------Original Message---------" header for each line used to cause me trouble with my trialware app!

It's a shame MS can't get something this simple right. Mozilla certainly seems to. Maybe MS should steal some of the MPL'd code.

I wrote a quick VB app to quote text for emails in some spare time last week. Hopefully I'll turn that into something Outlook can use soon.

My other comment -- and you'll have to infer what I really think -- is that I'm not real impressed with the quality of some corporate-level software. At work, we use a number of applications to keep track of time spent on a project, help given, calls to clients, etc. None of them are very impressive, and none strike me as "finished products". Keyboard transversal is lacking in each one, and one looks like it was a hastily slapped together VB6 prototype that the boss used for a little while, saw green when s/he thought about shipping a year or so before a good rewrite would occur, and said, "Ship it!" There is one other piece of software that I've used quite a bit at work, and it too suffers from window focus problems, keyboard transversal glitches (though random sections are done *very* well), and some less-than-straightforward UIs.

Makes me wonder what apps I've seen that are particularly well done. I think Mozilla's browser (especially now that it has type-ahead find) and email programs are quite close to a very well-done set of applications (Composer stinks, and I'm not an IRC fan so I won't comment on Chatzilla). VIm is great, but then only after you've passed ye olde proverbial learning curve, so I really can't count it. I've been impressed with Slypheed-Claws, where you can reset keyboard shortcuts within drop-down menus while you're using them, which is kind of neat. Ultra-Edit is actually quite good for an app that keeps a good Windows look and feel. And I'd been remiss if I didn't say the Windows OS (especially with Windows-E, F, and M and the alt-space R, N, and M(?) combos) and Internet Explorer are well done "apps" from a functional point of view. Windows Explorer itself could use more work, however.

I wish I could say that Apple's iApps, or even Mac OS X, meet my criteria, but the keyboard navigation is pretty shoddy. Very easy to figure out without a manual, very intuitive mouse usage, and usually quite good at doing what they claim to do, but I'm clicking quite a bit more than I'd like.

If you can think of something that's a well-put together application that is easy to use both soley with the mouse and solely with the keyboard, has an easy user interface, and does the job it claims to do well, I'm interested.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!! Back-up your data and, when you bike, always wear white. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in green.
x MarkUpDown is the best Markdown editor for professionals on Windows 10. It includes two-pane live preview, in-app uploads to imgur for image hosting, and MultiMarkdown table support. Features you won't find anywhere else include... MarkUpDown Multiline Table & Bootstrap Grid support. Beautiful Easy Actions that keep the Markdown flowing. HTML paste to paste HTML source into your documents. You've wasted more than $15 of your time looking for a great Markdown editor. Stop looking. MarkUpDown is the app you're looking for. Learn more or head over to the 'Store now!

Monday, March 31, 2003
Welp, it's taken a while, but I've finally figured out what the perfect job would be. I want to work with about 2-4 other programmers who all know their stuff. By that I don't mean Guy Schmoe I is certified in five different things and Guy Schomoe II had a 4.2 average at the state tech university. I want 2-5 guys who are all ace coders and who understand logic quickly. I want people who are self-motavated, and don't need to be spoon-fed more than once per issue (hey, once is fine! That's why you asked a question in the first place). I want a group where everyone manages to manage themselves and their ends of projects. And I want a group that's small enough so that you ... didn't get a chance to finish. Will bbl on this one. posted by ruffin at 3/31/2003 11:56:00 AM

Saturday, March 29, 2003
Finally got around to using one of the unofficially released Safari betas today. I'm using beta 62, which means I quite a bit behind the unofficial times, but the tabbed browsing, accesible from the debug menu (type "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1" in the Terminal) is a nice start. Looks pleasing. Not that well integrated yet, but a neat improvement and a feature I'll really look forward to having in the final release. Other than that, not much exciting. Broke back out the trialware app code to add "one last feature" before I release. I really wonder how long the "one last feature" bit is going to last. There are a ton of things I know I'm going to want to have in the app just for my own personal use, and adding after an official release makes it that much more difficult. Then you have to worry about maintaining bkwds campat, etc, as I've ranted about before. But there are so many pieces of crap available in the share/trialware market, I'd just prefer not to add another one. At least one might think what it does is crap, but I'd like to at least not have it do that crap crappily. It's also been long enough (some of the code is from October) I'm starting to find places where I'm not sure what I was thinking the first time round coding it. That's a lot of fun. I've made myself swear that I wouldn't refactor until after the first release. We'll see if I can stand not updating parts of the code that really need it now until then. posted by ruffin at 3/29/2003 10:03:00 PM

Friday, March 28, 2003
VIm not behaving on Windows (I miss ctrl-Y)? Try this suggestion (aka edit mswim.vim). posted by ruffin at 3/28/2003 02:23:00 PM

How do you zip with Visual Basic? Heck, in Java there are conveince classes for un/zipping that must be in every virtual machine, by definition. Why would I want to spent $50+ for a wacky zip library, when there are free zip utils out there? The code's gotta be somewhere? Welp, looks like it is. At least it's there for VB 4 from 1997. Here and here and here. Was thinking a little about Java driving back from lunch today. What if Sun had let Java become a true standard (Java the language) and hadn't fought Microsoft? Would Java be in a better position? I believe -- don't quote me -- that Ballmer said something like, "Java wanted to leverage Windows and we said, 'Get on our backs and let's ride!'" What would the Java-world look like if Sun had? Simply put, Java might very well be in a better position. Now you can't count on a Windows box having even MS's version of a Java 1.1.4 VM installed, and even that iffy possibility will be gone in a year or so. Even if MS pulled an embrace and extend, you'd still be able to run true 100% Java code in their VM, making it the only truly xplat language. Mono's working on making .NET xplat, but it's a long long ways. REALbasic is close, but is still an immature language and doesn't play well (read: "at all") with Linux. There's simply no way to make code that's write once, distribute to PC desktops everywhere. And before we all label Microsoft as the only bad guy here, let's see about when Sun stopped their 100% Java Pure program. I don't know if it was before or after, but it was danged close to when Sun and Microsoft settled if I remember correctly (and hopefully I dont'). Makes me suspicious how much of a good-faith motivation was behind the program. Look at Apple's VM -- it's easy to write a Java program that doesn't work on another OS as Apple gives programmers all sorts of tools to hook into OS-specific widgets. Then look at portables. Often there's custom interfaces to Java code there too. You can't write once, run everywhere. Sun knew it, but kept [in my opinion, etc] the 100% program up as a sham anyhow just to help highlight how MS wasn't living up to what's turned out to be an unattainable, or at least unattained, ideal. In the end it's a shame there was the fighting. Java could have been what C# is today, and been it years ago. Most importantly, if it had, instead of having MS jerk the world around with its standards (C#), Microsoft would have had another standard they had to support well (like html in IE) before they could reasonably extend. posted by ruffin at 3/28/2003 01:51:00 PM

Now this is a neat idea. It's Rendezvous-powered radio "station" software. You know that stupid commercial where freaky geek-boy instant messages a girl in his relatively large college class asking her out (or whatever)? That's freaky. Let's hope they're just playing stranger. But if you had whatever you were listening to during class or in the library or whatever streaming out for others to discover, now you're on to something. I hope Rendezvous is discovery done right. posted by ruffin at 3/28/2003 09:22:00 AM

Wednesday, March 26, 2003
From here: I'm getting the chance to do things the way I think they should be in an IRC client, and the ease of C# code means I can afford to spend more time in the "sugar" like custom widgets that make for a more complete user experience. Once again, it makes extensive use of existing technologies: Acacia uses Thresher, an excellent IRC library for .NET. It's interesting to note that the author released his (X11 licensed) code only with Microsoft's .NET implementation in mind, yet it runs today on Mono without modification. Aside from the "sugar" reference, this is a very good thing. The Mono project is pretty neat, aside from being named after a pretty uncomfortable disease, but I do wonder how long before Mono 1.0 is out, and how old .NET 1.0 will be by then and how much longer before MS releases The Next Great Thing. What's the overlap going to be between the two implementations of the standards? And will MS pull an, "Embrace me and I'll flee!" once Mono is mature? In other news, I'm waiting for Blogger to work again. Though the posts seem to be getting out, I get errors anytime I post or publish archives, and I can't edit my template. Big fun. This Google buy-out ROCKS. posted by ruffin at 3/26/2003 02:52:00 PM

Welp, stumbled over the gump project over on Apache. Ironicly, its mission is pretty much the opposite of what its existence brought to mind. When I see all these "cleverly" named projects running around all over, some of which might be useful iff tens of thousands of people used it and it actually became a standard, I always picture all these small groups pounding keyboards to create ideals that will never really be used outside of their small community. The Apache community might be larger than some, but I wonder what percentage actually make it out of the testing stage. At any rate, you'll find the following fairly cheesey quote on their site, And most significantly to me - the wisdom passed on from Gump's mother that "Life is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you are going to get!". Well, here's what she forgot: That's only because the people responsible forgot to document/comment the freaking chocolates! Be smarter than the people who make Momma Gump's freaking chocolates. Please. posted by ruffin at 3/26/2003 02:42:00 PM

Finally got the iBook working again, sorta. Tried to save a few bucks installing a new hard drive in my iBook myself, but I'm afraid I did myself a pretty big diservice instead. I accidently took out a plastic piece that holds the keyboard ribbon on the motherboard, and the keyboard is currently useless. That said, I'm using the iBook now with its new, fancy 40,000,000,000 byte hard drive (40 megs my arse). Keeping the fingers crossed. Not quite as portable as it used to be, but hopefully I'll take it by a repair shop and by that piece or rig up something soon. On another, nearly related note, it's nice to see Mac users finally start saying what everyone's known for a long time: Mac users like Mac OS better than Windows, and that is why people use Macs. Some Mac zealots have tried so hard to push why Macs aren't slower than Windows-running hardware for so long that most Windows users now miss the point entirely. It's not performance. It's not that the games are "quality over quantity". It's not that the danged boxes are easier to upgrade. Mac OS is simply more pleasing to use daily than Windows. The end. posted by ruffin at 3/26/2003 12:01:00 AM

Monday, March 24, 2003
And the Great Email Spam War begins. I can't recall what it's called when a computer fools someone into thinking they're actually conversing with another person, not a machine, but this is where it's going to start happening. Somebody's going to write a program that can parse complicated emails and create responses, or follow the route to look up whatever challenge word it has to define, or pick apart the image that is supposed to have some word hidden in it, or whatever. It's just like trying to keep out disease. You might get good antibiotics, but then the disease just gets smarter. I didn't get malaria b/c the preventative medicine never worked well; I got malaria b/c the medicine doesn't work well today. posted by ruffin at 3/24/2003 03:10:00 PM

Sunday, March 23, 2003
Apple is now selling PowerMacs specifically for their ability to boot into OS 9 Cheapest price: $2500. Cheapest PowerMac that runs OS X: $1500. Geez. Who'se using OS 9 and needs to keep using it so badly on the latest hardware? posted by ruffin at 3/23/2003 10:27:00 PM

Friday, March 21, 2003
I've always wondered how to make one of those neat little plug-ins for Visual Basic 6.0 that insert code into the file you're working on. I'm no master, but I finally started checking about and have it proof-of-concepted, at least. In all of my vb apps, I like to use a separate module to handle errors, in case I want to start changing the way they're handled. By having it pulled out, I've got one place that I have to alter to make error handling change globally. But scrawling that error handling crap the same way every time I'd add a method drove me crazy. Enter the "AddIn" project in VB6. When you start a new project, select "AddIn". Add a button called cmdInsertText (for this example). Insert this code: ' Insert text into code module. Private Sub cmdInsertText_Click() Dim vbComp As VBComponent Dim strToInsert As String Set vbComp = VBInstance.ActiveVBProject.VBE.SelectedVBComponent strToInsert = vbNewLine & _ "public sub " & Me.Text1.Text & vbNewLine & _ "on error goto errHand" & vbNewLine & _ vbNewLine & _ vbNewLine & _ "exit sub" & vbNewLine & _ "errHand:" & vbNewLine & _ vbTab & _ "Call mdlErr.errp(""" & vbComp.Name & "." & Me.Text1.Text & """, err)" & _ vbNewLine & _ "end sub" vbComp.CodeModule.AddFromString strToInsert End Sub ... and then build it. Voila. It's in the Add-Ins menu for all your other VB projects, and it'll insert a new sub at the top of your current file. Woohoo! Needs some extra stuff to be really useful, but a decent start. Got most of what I needed from the VB6 help topic "Manipulating Code with Add-Ins" and F2. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2003 02:44:00 PM

Sometimes I'm surprised anyone with sensitive information uses IIS. There are so many web servers out there, and so many ways to skin any proverbial cat, that IIS for anything you'd ultimately aboslutely not want in someone else's hands shouldn't go into an IIS system, or sit on the same network as a publicly exposed IIS. Apache (php/Perl, etc), Tomcat (JSP), even WebSTAR for heaven's sake -- heck, it's not that difficult to write your own danged web server at this point -- are good alternatives. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2003 09:05:00 AM

Though it apparently isn't a new idea, nor is it without its faults, but this "space-based programming" (no, has nothing to do with "outer space") sounds pretty neat. Of course there are still discovery issues to work out, but this space-based crud sounds a lot like the XML of RPC. LMNOP. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2003 08:53:00 AM

Thursday, March 20, 2003
This Java based cvs GUI looks promising. I've always had the dangest time cracking the cvs nut for some reason. Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's revision control system, on the other hand, I learned without a manual in about 10 minutes. Hopefully this app will bridge ye olde "Mac user mentality; I just want to click one button" gap I've got on cvs for whatever reason. Also might be interesting to point out this app is based on the Netbeans Java cvs module. Open source and open licenses strike again! posted by ruffin at 3/20/2003 08:58:00 AM

Blogger/Blogspot's broken. I can't change my danged template file, and even posting apparently has issues. Oh well. Hope you enjoy the colors and the now-much-less-timely/aka "historical" quick links at the top. posted by ruffin at 3/20/2003 08:53:00 AM

Monday, March 17, 2003
Here's a cute bug fix. Got an app (we'll keep it anonymous for now, but I ain't wrote it!) that figures out installments for payments. The app's formula occasionally makes negative final installment payments if the cent rounding for other, relatively equally distributed payments doesn't come out quite plumb. Anyhow, the fix is to download a separate exe that goes into the backend to erase the negatives. Ingenious! sigh posted by ruffin at 3/17/2003 03:22:00 PM

Note to self: Orientation of JTextAreas to one another, regardless of display, needs to be accessible. posted by ruffin at 3/17/2003 12:30:00 PM

I've termed Joel Spolsky as The Easiest Man to Disagree With Who Still Meant Well, but there are a number of places where I agree wholeheartedly with what he has to say. There's one quote in particular about getting into "the zone" while working that I find myself digging back up, again and again. I'm adding a quick-link to freakinname's template just to save from searching for "interruption" on Joel's site again. Anyhow, here are the important parts of his post: Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone. The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity.... With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed. Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds). With so many means of non-immediate communication, it's a shame so many people bug immediately. Here are some hints, folk. 1.) Email the person you want to ask a question, and work on something where you aren't stymied for a while. 2.) If your question is going to take a long time to answer, or even if you suspect it might, schedule an hour or so with the person to talk about what you need to know. 3.) For heaven's sake, when somebody's typing, don't bug them. Wait until they stop, zone out, pick up or hang up the phone, walk out of their office (through preferrably after they're coming back from wherever), whatever. If I had a dime for every time I'd been bugged when I was typing with headphones on, bouncing my leg up and down (usually a sign I'm hitting on all cylinders), sometimes even when I'm gesturing with my fingers (while "visualizing" or, granted, occasionally flipping off the computer, which for some strange reason doesn't seem to care), I'd at least be able to get a good burger for lunch today. posted by ruffin at 3/17/2003 09:15:00 AM

Friday, March 14, 2003
Old .NET intro at MS posted by ruffin at 3/14/2003 01:46:00 PM

select case when 1=1 then 5 else 3 end as smack posted by ruffin at 3/14/2003 10:02:00 AM

I've dealt with enough other programmers now to have a better handle on the whole, "self-commenting code" (where there typically aren't any comments at all, not even a flowerbox) versus code documentation issue to know about where I stand. I've noticed that most great programmers don't like to comment their code. I've noticed most mid-rate programmers are big fans of commenting. I've noticed that most crappy programmers don't understand comments they read, much less the code even they themselves write. Why don't great programmers like to comment and document? That's easy. Which would you rather have... code that works and is designed to anticipate modularity, scalability, etcability, etc or code that's crap but has all its methods and objects carefully commented? To have spent all that time commenting and documenting when your code is still too crappy to use again, and to a great programmer needs to be rewritten anyway, is just a double inefficiency. Nobody likes (or should like, at least) to use code that they haven't read through and understand if they're going to borrow from it liberally. On the other hand, if you're going to borrow objects and use them as black boxes, all you really care about is that the functions exposed and their parameters are documented and their return values are what you'd expect. Neither case demands great, thorough documentation. Now if you're a mid-rate programmer that can't understand code, you want it on a silver platter with comments, else you can't figure out enough to use it. Nothing wrong with that. Any level code is better with documentation than without. But the bottom line is that great programmers want code that works. The end. And if your code isn't spaghetti and is "normalized" (my dba-influenced term for "refactored well") the code will speak for itself. Anyhow, just some first cuts at this topic. Gotta get back off smoke-break to work, but I'll try to make this vomit of ideas make more sense later. posted by ruffin at 3/14/2003 09:33:00 AM

Thursday, March 13, 2003
JFreeChart is an LGPL charting library for Java that got mentioned on the SQuirreL SQL users' list today. Neat. Don't know that I'd need it in my isql client and haven't had time to look at it in action, but neat n'ertheless. Turns out SQuirrL was its author's first cut at using Swing. There are a couple of aggravating navigational bits, but overall it's, as I've said, excellent. I use it daily. Now if I'd just get off my duff, release my trialware app, and make a VIm plugin for it. posted by ruffin at 3/13/2003 03:24:00 PM

Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Not to make any sort of value judgement, but now that I'm in the corporate sector, where political correctness isn't Priority Number One like it is on a government facility, I feel a little nervous for some of the women who work here. Guys sit quite a bit closer than they would to other guys, etc, married or no [on both sides]. I'm happy to finally hear a few jokes that are a bit racier than I heard in the workplace before, but on this one subject, things sure are different. posted by ruffin at 3/12/2003 01:57:00 PM

Monday, March 10, 2003
Apple updates Java to 1.4.1! Bout danged time. Java performance has been abyssmal, as you've seen me rant and rave here for some time, and I'd barely scratched the surface of Apple's JVM being a generation behind what's been out for Sun's supported platforms. Mainly this has been because I've, nevertheless, been impressed with Apple's support for Java. The package a VM with the OS, making Java app deployment a cinch, and they provide a customized, accelerated version of Swing that makes your app look like any native app in Aqua. Other people were starting to release 1.4 for the PowerPC, though, and it's nigh time Apple got this update out. Finally -- I get to use the mousewheel in my Java apps on Mac. Time to download the update and see if this VM is worth a rip. posted by ruffin at 3/10/2003 07:20:00 PM

Friday, March 07, 2003
If you believe all you read, you'd think you can use XML for anything. Well, you can. Just like ASCII (and exactly like 0s and 1s), most any value can be represented in some fashion using the XML standard. The question is not what XML can be used for but when you can best use XML. Luckily, the answer is simple. Use/expose XML whenever someone may need to access data from your application who will know absolutely nothing about the way you've programmed your application. Alternately, this reads: Use/expose XML whenever someone may need to access data from your application and you never intend to work jointly on the project. By this I mean the internals of your application. Naturally, you do need to expose a few bits, like the functions via a discovery file or the innards of your data with an an XML schema. But if you're using Objective-C with a backend of File Maker (or something worse that's not even ODBC compliant), you're not going to appeal to your standard VB6/Jet Engine programmer, and vice versa. Rather than getting up to speed on your techs, you both simply "agree" to understand XML. There are other times you might use XML, of course, but basically they boil down to the same situation. Got a Java-based system that needs to talk to .NET? Essentially you're at the same place. Your programmers don't know anything about the way the other program is written, b/c they can't write in a language that can tweak the other's innards (okay, I'm oversimplifiying a bit). Does your system written in Java have an ODBC-compliant backend? There's your Rosetta Stone! Now we can use ADO.NET to talk to an app written in C#. Vice versa? Use the JDBC-ODBC bridge or a a native JDBC driver (Microsoft even provides a native driver for SQL Server 2000, no less) and get Java dealing directly with recordsets. Are you providing news feeds that you'd like anybody to be able to quickly access without them ever bothering you to figure out how, like Slashdot does? Use XML, the universal standard for creating Rosetta Stones when you can't find a single good standardized data-transfer technology in your joint development plans. (I feel I should point out that you don't have joint development plans with Slashdot by definition. They don't want to hear from you, so XML is the way to go.) Do you have a configuration file for a small application that your company wrote in a year that no other application will ever need to read? Write it using a text file. Really. XML might seem cool, and certainly it can do the job, but save yourself the time, the overhead, and the testing; use a tool more suited for the job. If another application needs to read this information later, they can get the text file format from you, look at your code, or, if necessary, you can then refactor to use SQL Server, Postgresql, or even XML. XML is the Rosetta Stone of last resort. Otherwise it's an over-engineered ASCII replacement. posted by ruffin at 3/07/2003 11:23:00 AM

Thursday, March 06, 2003
From Maccentral: System requirements for iMovie 3.0.2 call for a G3/700MHz or faster; 256MB RAM; Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later; QuickTime 6.1 or later; and 1024 x 768 screen resolution or higher. And there you have it. Not two years after its purchase, my once brand-spankin' new iBook is already out of date even by Apple's standards. Hey, I can understand that it won't play Doom 3. But it's somewhat hard to believe I'm already kicked out of iMovie country. Buy or bye. The Apple way. Update: Well, at least Software Update tells me that's a recommended processor speed. Still, to think Apple's pitching over my iBook's head already is still scary. Ever read the sys reqs for Windows 2000 or Office 2000? It's hard to find an x86 box that can't run them. posted by ruffin at 3/06/2003 07:11:00 PM

Wednesday, March 05, 2003
from this article posted on /.: But I held one last shot in my arsenal, which I thought was going to be a sure showstopper. I wanted to remotely log into our office network using the VPN over the Internet and our corporate Wireless LAN. I was astounded to find that this worked the very first time. Not only did it access the network, but I could assess both our Windows and UNIX servers with NFS and CIFS from the same laptop. Could this be too good to be true? This corporate manager has found out exactly what I've been saying, but even I didn't know how easy it was to hook up OS X using a VPN. That, of course, is that OS X with its available software is the perfect PC for true Personal Computing. It's easy to use. It's stable. The applications work well. It even has a Microsoft-endorsed version of Office that runs on it. There is no better OS for typical personal computing tasks. Once you become a true power user -- or at least a programmer -- OS X has some real drawbacks (like slow Java performance and (like it or not, much more importantly) no .NET support unless you count the Mono project). And gaming sucks if you're a hardcore gamer. I'll admit that. But for those who aren't programmers or more than casual gamers, I'd challenge anyone to show me how OS X is inferior to Windows in meaningful ways (ie, less programs doesn't count). posted by ruffin at 3/05/2003 07:29:00 PM

Sunday, March 02, 2003
Been using Microsoft Outlook at work. Not impressed. Strangely, their html email formatting isn't bad at all but their plain text stinks. Lines are wrapped without any regard for what comes next, and spellcheck for some reason can't figure out what's been quoted and what hasn't when you use a quoting prefix. Not to mention the "---------Original Message---------" header for each line used to cause me trouble with my trialware app! It's a shame MS can't get something this simple right. Mozilla certainly seems to. Maybe MS should steal some of the MPL'd code. I wrote a quick VB app to quote text for emails in some spare time last week. Hopefully I'll turn that into something Outlook can use soon. My other comment -- and you'll have to infer what I really think -- is that I'm not real impressed with the quality of some corporate-level software. At work, we use a number of applications to keep track of time spent on a project, help given, calls to clients, etc. None of them are very impressive, and none strike me as "finished products". Keyboard transversal is lacking in each one, and one looks like it was a hastily slapped together VB6 prototype that the boss used for a little while, saw green when s/he thought about shipping a year or so before a good rewrite would occur, and said, "Ship it!" There is one other piece of software that I've used quite a bit at work, and it too suffers from window focus problems, keyboard transversal glitches (though random sections are done very well), and some less-than-straightforward UIs. Makes me wonder what apps I've seen that are particularly well done. I think Mozilla's browser (especially now that it has type-ahead find) and email programs are quite close to a very well-done set of applications (Composer stinks, and I'm not an IRC fan so I won't comment on Chatzilla). VIm is great, but then only after you've passed ye olde proverbial learning curve, so I really can't count it. I've been impressed with Slypheed-Claws, where you can reset keyboard shortcuts within drop-down menus while you're using them, which is kind of neat. Ultra-Edit is actually quite good for an app that keeps a good Windows look and feel. And I'd been remiss if I didn't say the Windows OS (especially with Windows-E, F, and M and the alt-space R, N, and M(?) combos) and Internet Explorer are well done "apps" from a functional point of view. Windows Explorer itself could use more work, however. I wish I could say that Apple's iApps, or even Mac OS X, meet my criteria, but the keyboard navigation is pretty shoddy. Very easy to figure out without a manual, very intuitive mouse usage, and usually quite good at doing what they claim to do, but I'm clicking quite a bit more than I'd like. If you can think of something that's a well-put together application that is easy to use both soley with the mouse and solely with the keyboard, has an easy user interface, and does the job it claims to do well, I'm interested. posted by ruffin at 3/02/2003 06:30:00 PM

<< Older \| Newer >>