Hmmm, I’d better post something before we’re overrun by del.icio.us posts.
I’ve been putting in lots of overtime, and as a result not been playing much. I need to finish Galaxy, but the remaining levels are going to need a lot of practice - mainly the long jump which I seem to always mistime. In Puzzle Quest I’ve headed up to an area populated by minotaurs, #1 has also started playing (the game allows two saves) so I may eventually get him hooked on RPGs.
These are my links for April 4th through April 8th:
For any management out there, this is obviously not true. I have never had a sword fight while waiting for code to compile.
Comic from xkcd.
Well, I’ve installed Safari for Windows and I thought I might as well record my thoughts. As Joel Spolsky says, it does seem to take a while for the application to initially load and the fonts do at first seem blurry, but loading times do get better and being a font whore (ever since reading Donald Knuth’s MetaFont book back in the summer of 1990) I think I approve of the reasons why the fonts look the way they do and could easily get used to it.
It is a bit odd that like a Windows 95 application it installs straight into the root of the “All Programs” folder and not as per current windows style guidelines into a sub directory (e.g. “Apple Safari”) - even Microsoft Office now does this correctly - and the fact that I’m now running something with a UI that looks extremely Mac-like is particularly odd (the only obvious difference I can see from a mac is the menu bar is within the app). So far (and I’ve only used it for an hour or so) there is one feature which other browsers should (ahem, cough) borrow and that is all text areas are resizeable - quite frankly brilliant. I’m also fairly impressed that, with the exception of a popup calendar, the web application I work on works (yay! for attempting to be standards compliant).
- Don’t be afraid to suck. It’s easier to fix something that’s broken than it is to create something from nothing.
- Write your first draft “with the door closed.”
- Don’t try to make everyone happy. If you try to make everyone happy, you end up with According To Jim. Write what you’re passionate about, and write to entertain, amuse, and satisfy yourself. To borrow a phrase from Joel Hodgeson, the creator of MST3K: don’t ask yourself, “Will anyone get this?” Instead, tell yourself, “The right people will get this.”
- If you’re going to write, you have to read. If you’re going to write screenplays, you have to read, and you have to watch lots and lots of movies, both for entertainment and for education.
This applies to programming as well (particularly the first two points), point 1 is a no-brainer - there will always be bugs in initial code (although there are ways and means to eliminate some - unit testing *cough*, *cough*) , but just for my own sanity getting that first draft is important. As to point 2, if a programmer says they’re not ready to demonstrate their code that should be respected. I often find someone wants to know how things are going while I’m still working on my initial version - which means I feel irritated, they form opinions based on something I’m likely to change anyway and nobody goes away happy.
This weekend I should, in theory, be sitting at home doing some overtime each evening. Unfortunately the work laptop won’t let me in - the ‘5′, ‘6′, ‘t’, ‘y’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘b’ and ‘n’ keys appear to be dead and my current password needs one of those keys (not to mention my code). I can’t use one of the home computers since I need VPN access which is obviously not setup on the home laptop or PC.
Like I said Pah!
The virus scanner at work has been changed in the last fewed months to Symantec antivirus and it is horrendously slow. We have a scheduled weekly scan and this is the screen I was greeted with on getting into work this morning. Nine hours and it is only three quarters of the way through my main work drive. AARGH!
Sometime over the weekend the enormous window next to my desk (3m x 2m?) has broken and been removed. The window has temporarily been replaced with hardboard and my desk has had an enforced tidy up. Oddly this is at least the third window on our floor that has broken since we moved in.
Well they can tell me all they like that there was grit, but quite frankly I don’t believe a word of it. Nigel rang the office sometime before 8pm saying that we could leave early, which at the time seemed pointless since nothing was moving from the Brindleyplace car park. Something must have happened as around half eight everything suddenly started moving and we decided to scarper before the roads cleared of cars and froze up for good.
Oddly the drive home was fairly straightforward - apart from the impromptu slalom laid on by the owners of abandoned cars (why when bad weather has been forecast do people drive without plenty of fuel?), and a dicey moment when I realised the ice on the downside of the Perry Barr flyover was having a greater effect than the car’s brakes.
Since the school was closed and I’m doing a week of evening support, the kids and I had a snowball fight this morning which we all enjoyed. Unfortunately it was the wrong kind of snowâ„¢ and we couldn’t get a decent ball started for a snowman.
It’s odd, but I’m doing the same thing with this years snow as when it last snowed properly, January 28, 2004 I was also doing evening support when, during the rush hour, Birmingham ground to a halt. When I’m on evening support I have to move my car from the NIA car park to the office car park (by about 17:30 enough management and others have left for this to be possible); the car journey is less then 5 minutes, but on that day it took me over an hour to do it. I suspect it is memories like this which have led to so many school closures and the reported numbers of people staying away (although this didn’t seem to be very true of my office when I turned up). I know that the Highways Agency has said that people should only make essential journeys, but quite frankly all the main arteries into and around Brum appear to be clear.