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Sloppy Development
I spend all my working day dealing with software development and developers and have done so for the last 25 years. Over that time I have come across some interesting practices and learnt how to do things the right way. The five years I spent with Admiral Computing in particular was an invaluable education in delivering quality software.
So when I come across something like that shown to the left I find it both amusing and perplexing in equal measures. How can a menu item called “Test” make it through to a live system? Clicking the link takes you through … Read the rest
What we did Before Google
I was away over the weekend and spotted this on my in-laws book shelf – The Internet Atlas by Richard Dinnick. A guide to the “best 1,000 sites on the web”.
Even though the book is only a few years old, it was published in 2000, it is a fascinating snapshot on what the web was like only thirteen years ago.
It includes sections on the browsers available which besides Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape also includes the first alpha version of Mozilla.
There is also a section on search engines which includes Altavista and Ask Jeves along with … Read the rest
Documenting MySQL Tables in MediaWiki
The last few companies that I have worked for we have setup an internal wiki that everyone uses to hold information about all aspects of the business including, of course, the technical team. We use MediaWiki for this mainly because it is easy to setup and is also familiar to users through Wikipedia.
One area that we try and document is the database structure. Having this on hand and searchable in the wiki allows new employees to quickly get to grips with it and makes us all more productive.
The issue is that creating the MediaWiki tables by hand is … Read the rest
Recognising the Opportunity: I Could Have Written WordPress
Over the last few weeks I have been moving the content from one of my other sites, The Williams Database, to WordPress. This means that all my sites are now running on what I consider to be the premier content management system but if I had acted differently a few years ago that might have not been the case.
In 1996 I launched a fan site to the Williams formula one team. In those days there wasn’t much of an internet to speak of, connection speeds were slow and access was costly but it was new and great fun. … Read the rest
Hacker Monthly
I have a voracious appetite for technology news which by and large is satisfied by twitter and apps such as the excellent Zite.
An even more hardcore technology news source is Hacker News. This is little more than a collection of user submitted links that are that voted up or down by other users. Eventually interesting and popular stories float to the top of the list. Unfortunately there is far too much stuff there to read it all and sometimes I just want a leisurely offline read. Enter Hacker Monthly.
Hacker Monthly is a curated version of … Read the rest
Mailstrom
Think it is going to be a while before my Mailstrom account is going to be ready…
This is what happens when you get a positive shout out from Lifehacker!… Read the rest
“Hello this is Windows Software Support”
One of the things that I hadn’t been quite prepared for with working from home was the number of phone calls that I would get from random individuals. It’s actually quite ridiculous the number that feel I need help with my energy supply, PPI reclaim and so on.
However, until today, I hadn’t had one of those fabled calls from abroad telling me that I had an issue with my Windows PC and offering to remotely fix it for me.
Whenever the phone rings and the display says “International” my heart sinks but when this caller said that she was … Read the rest
Rule #1 – No Matter How Much Testing You Do Users Will Find Something You Didn’t
I was casually looking through the database (as you do) for my side project The Chubby Challenge yesterday when I noticed something odd. The latest challenge to be created had a blank end date, something that you are not supposed to be able to do.
I immediately went to my test site to see if I could reproduce the issue and what I found was that even though you are supposed to select a date using a date picker you can still type something, anything, into the associated edit control. I guess that this is precisely what the user had … Read the rest