Family birthday dinner
28 Sep
My brother (Ian) is in Cape Town for a bit which just happens to have coincided with my birthday yesterday. Visited my mom for a bit, but she was still in too much pain from her accident to go to lunch with my father, Ian, and I. Was pretty strange - we talked about politics (my father is way more liberal and pro-government than I imagined), economics (my brother is planning to major in it), and music and software piracy and its effects on our rights (my mother agrees with me!). My brother is starting to think about finding his way in life, including trying to find his own way regarding religion. Hopefully we'll have more opportunities to get together in future.
Simple PHP Test Framework
25 Sep
Being a fan of test-driven development, I wanted a testing framework for my work projects. Python's testing framework and Twisted's trial are my background, but I couldn't find something as easy to use. So until I find something similarly useful and easy for PHP, I wrote a quick'n'dirty testing framework so I could start writing tests as soon as possible.
Using csv to read SQL output
25 Sep
One of my devlings mistakenly broke the file paths for our image store (or she seems to think it was her), so we needed to go to the backups. I needed to convert the SQL backups to UPDATE statements to fix it. Python 2.3's new csv module made it really easy.
Owning the platform
25 Sep
No surprise here - Microsoft is aiming to take out Google. Surprise? The nonchalant manner Microsoft talks about abusing their monopoly to do things that are only possible for them to do due to their monopoly. ``"Our ability to innovate is predicated on our ability to own the platform," he added, a clear sign that Microsoft thinks it can only beat Google if it owns the technology.
Joel's Bionic Office
25 Sep
Joel Spolsky is another believer in well-designed office space, especially for developers (and other creative people). He describes his companies new offices, which contains a number of interesting architectural features, including every (programmer) office has windows on three sides, two of which look outside. Light plays a major role in my experience - my last three buildings have had terrible lighting. My move to the window at work has lowered my eye (and breathing) stress dramatically.
Jon Udell writes in Baseball lessons for software teams that new discoveries in valuing baseball players (based on the number of walks) are a lesson to be learned for the IT industry. ``Software development has an equivalent to the base on balls: a module that doesn?t have to be written new because it already exists and can be reused.'' I've never been a fan of any of the existing metrics I've encountered; KLoC least of them all. Jon highlights the effect of community involvement and reputation as clues to the value of developers.
Weekend of 20030920
23 Sep
Saturday saw Zenobia Africa's Proudly South African party. As usual for Zen's parties, the food and drink could not be faulted, and the company was suitably diverse. Sunday brought Jeremy and I to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and we picked up the Bethesda Pirates of the Caribbean without realising it was related.
200 unaware visitors
23 Sep
Yesterday Barry unleashed a horde of Rhodes Computer Science first-years upon my web site. It looks like he was teaching them about search engines, given the skewed search statistics from yesterday.
QOTW: Utilitarians
18 Sep
Myself: ``Are all utilitarians so irritating?'' Raphael: ``On the whole...''
Complain or not?
17 Sep
I've got into trouble for shooting my mouth off about companies and services, even though most of the time I've been totally correct about the problems. So, should I post about problems I'm having with companies? Isn't a "permanent" page even worse than just chatting with a few people, since it'll be available constantly and relatively forever? But how can I not vent and tell people about problems I'm having with organisations, especially those who don't support Open Source software, or even worse only support Microsoft software? Comments?