> Ah yes, let’s quickly do some work this morning. How soon that turns into watching multiple parts of your development environment fail. I want to pull some data from a Microsoft SQL Server and into Postgres using Python/Django. The ODBC drivers come from http://www.actualtechnologies.com and I paid 30 quid for a small license that allows 5 concurrent users. It’s only me using it so I only need one so that’s cool. I say 30 quid -that’s for Mac. If…
> I have a real problem which I am aware of and compensate for, but it exists. When I see CV’s come into my company for technical jobs and that person has some form of IT degree something inside me dies. Now, I am old enough to recognise that. I have and do and will continue to employ people with IT related degrees. But just because you have a degree in some discipline of computing doesn’t mean you know jack…
> I admit it. I am gullible, easily manipulated and just a plain old Apple fan boy. Since they came out, I’ve been a Mighty Mouse user, blinded by it’s ergonomics and usual Apple charm. But over all these years it has suffered from one unredeemable problem. It’s pants, crap, shit, bollox. Call it what you like. Any mouse that has a scroll wheel (OK, OK, scroll nipple) which won’t scroll for more than a couple of days without then…
> Douglas Crockford says in Peter Seibel‘s excellent Coders At Work: The place where I found that to be most effective was taking testing, sort of, to the ultimate: going to visit customers. I did some of that early in my career and that was a great experience, having to go live with a customer for a week, helping them to install a new system, and helping them to work out the problems with using it. It gave me a…
> The Dell is back in Windows land, with Windows 7 installed. I’m using it with the setup I detailed here and everything works as expected. A word about Emacs. I spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of months sorting out the mish mash of different emacs configs I had running. Now there is one config which handles everything I want it to. Whereas before I used to keep the configs in svn, this time I…
> Why is it so hard to print? I have a bog standard HP Photosmart C4180 here running on an XP machine. It is shared as a windows printer. Jaunty works 95% of the time. Sometimes it just stops and wants a restart before coming back to life. Windows 7. Works about 50% of the time. Sometimes just nothing happens. The Windows 7 machine will sometimes think everything is fine but nothing appears on the XP machine. Sometimes it will…
> It’s been four years since I moved back from Japan and I am still not used to the concept of ‘service’ this country has. We seem to revel in mediocrity with the odd beacon of hope shining in the darkness (thank you scan.co.uk, I appreciate you rising about the rest). In my job I like to think I will go the extra mile for a client. For example, over the last couple of weeks I have been sleeping with…
> If you ever decide to buy something from laptopstuff.co.uk, good luck. Having been asked to provide proof of my billing address as the card company claimed they didn’t know it (um, I’ve lived there three years), I scanned the documents, sent them in and was still ignored. After venting after three days (I had asked for next day delivery originally) I was informed cheerfully the goods were not in stock and would I like to change the order. It…
> I hate Dell with a loathing that is hard to put into words. Nevertheless, I now have a Dell laptop. I love screen space and this 15” monitor has a 1920×1050 screen. Portable (it’s bigger but lighter than my MBP) and with a great screen resolution it’s great for developing. Build wise it sucks. A lot of keyboard flex which doesn’t bother me but doesn’t say much about quality. The surround around the screen is also very flexible. It…
> I have only had to shout down the phone twice in my life. Once was in 2005’ish I believe. The other time was this week. Both times were to Dell, although the first time was to technical support and this time was to sales support. It’s somewhat encouraging to know that their sales support is as bad as their technical support. I assume their presales support is better otherwise they wouldn’t sell anything. So here’s the story. One of…