December 2007
7 posts
Sign up to the data breach petition (UK)
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/databreaches/BNNaxVBItj5pAYGDpTAAoCg
Office 2007 Adoption Barriers
Posted here. I’ve been using it for a while now, moved because of incompatibility issues. Perhaps the complete redesign of the interface? Try finding “save as” in Excel – the File menu no longer exists FFS! It is there, but nowhere obvious. Perhaps the “ribbo” that takes up half your screen if you’re on a low-res machine? Perhaps the redesign of formatting in Word, which...
Debugging Rails Applications
I’ve said that I use netbeans on this blog a few times but never really gone into why. First, I can park all of the class/project browsers and output windows in the margins of the page and they only pop-up when I click on them. Second, I can tear off editing windows so I can look at, e.g. Rspec’s and the code next to each other. I can also have multiple views of the same file. Third, it has book...
1972: Dead teachers don't lie
What follows is an extract from my novel Archive Fragments. There were great tensions in society back then; tensions that people do’t remember now. They talk about class and ethnicity as if they were new phenomena. But I lived in a country that tolerated Jews in a leery, cautious way. It had been nominally Christian and definitely white for over a thousand years. Some schools were still tied to...
Fun with openssl on Ubuntu and Ruby 1.8.6
We migrated a core system to our shiny new cluster on Friday. Colin got everything going apart from a call-out to a 3rd party back-end system that uses SOAP. Tracking down the problem: The error message was a method_missing talking about load_file. I did some google work (googling is apparently not allowed by google because it could undermine their copyright – like I care) It looked like the...
Joel hits the nail on the head again
Joel does it agai Part 1: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html Part 2: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/04.html Part 3: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/05.html Posted o reddit. I’ve been in the game since 1985 and there was only really the “in house programmer” type job in those days, usually using COBOL. Have managed to work for a couple of...
Coding Horror: Presentation: Be Vain
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001007.html?r=21636#endcomments I spent most of my spare time from age 8 to 16 learning to play the guitar and these instant gratification things just annoy me. That said, I agree with the point that presentation is far more important that people think, and the example is a reasonable one. Please stop focusing on the specifics here – Jeff’s trying to make...