My perfect weekend starts early on Friday, by leaving from work at 2pm. Get home, play with the kids for a couple of hours, and then spend the night on the town with the wife. Saturday is filled with a couple of hours of work, a bit of gaming, dinner with the family and a movie or some engaging tv at the end of the evening. Sunday is relaxing by mowing, playing, gaming, coding or chasing the kids around the house for a good game of tag (if it is sunny tag has to go outside). Monday is a holiday! HAH!! More gaming, playing, coding (for fun) and maybe a movie for the kids. This is turning out to be a perfect weekend!
I want documentation that says three smart developers is better than three smart developers and two dumb ones. It is frustrating that I have to spend much of my time trying to either fix their code, explain what needs to be done, or how to do it. I want a study done that measures the amount and quality of code that is produced by the two teams above. Does the time spent bringing the two up to speed (constantly) produce more / better code? I think it may be more, but I seriously doubt that it is better.
Does anyone have experience where the two left and the productivity rose? Cause EVERYONE knows that productivity goes DOWN when the two arrive.
One of my primary frustrations is dealing with web developers that don't know anything about how a web server actually works. They don't understand how the server receives data. I think Charles may be dealing with the same issue. If you are a developer, you should know how to set up your own development environment. If you are a developer, you should know how to set up a project from scratch. If you are a web developer you should know how to set up your own web server. If you are a database developer, you should know how to set up a database. Also, if you are a developer, you should know how to read. I am amazed at the number of questions that I have to answer, simply because my fellow developers don't know how to use Google. Are these requirements to much to ask from a fellow coworker? I am getting to the point where I am not sure I want to hire anyone unless they are actively developing in their spare time.
What do Polar Bears like to eat?
This is a rather humorous article (with pictures) proving my point.
Good movie. I have one complaint. They strayed from the style of the first. This is evident in two elements of the movie, the plot line and the cinematography.
"Hollywood" got their hands on the plot and muddled it in typical fashion. There were a couple of unnecessary scenes in the beginning that detracted from the plot, but they may end up showing how they factor into the story in the next movie.
The first movie was framed as if it were part of a comic book or anime cartoon. The shots were wide and simple with few actors in view. Reloaded was focused and populated. Busy.
The special effects were fantastic. Often, I couldn't tell if it was a real person or computer generated. There was one shot, that is in all of the commecials so I am not ruining anything, where an agent is jumping onto the hood of a car on the highway. That is the only scene where you can TELL a computer was used. Every other scene, you really had to look for the signs that what you see is not real.
My primary project has grown, and I have grown along with it. I know so much more about Java now than I did just 8 months ago... which is when I started the project. I can safely say that most of the code in the project is crap and should be scrapped. There were political issues that kept me from scrapping the code earlier. Those issues are now mostly gone.
I have a small problem with a developer that implements "reuse" via copy and paste. And there isn't much political will behind revamping the system from the bottom up, and I haven't found a good way of incrementally making the change. Very frustrating.
I am proud to make my 50th posting about something very near and dear to my heart. I have finished the first iteration of a new webapp. Some may say, big deal and woopee, but this is a big deal in my book. It is a requirements management tool ala XPlanner but is more focused on Joel Spolsky's painless schedules. I need to get the installation instructions written and then I may actually provide a link to download the war and source. All I can say is WOOOT!!
My hardware blues are finally through. It appears that Creative Live! cards do not play nice with GeForce2 MX 200's. After I blew up my GeForce4 Ti4200, I had to fall back on my "second" card and it was causing all kinds of havoc. WinAmp would start chirping, squeaking, popping, lagging, or whatever you want to call it, any time something would happen on the screen. At first I thought it was the CPU because it always seemed like it was CPU intensive things that were causing it, but when it happened when I moused over hyper links in the browser, I started to suspect the video. After a couple of hours searching, I found this little gem on google groups. Creative Live! + GeForce2 == Bad.
So, how did I remedy it? GeForce FX 5200. It has Dual VGA so I don't need a second video card anymore. I find that I can no longer work with just a single monitor. I am too dependent upon that extra screen realestate for watching logs and other ancillery windows. I put IntelliJ IDEA's Ant Build window on the second monitor as well. Ahhh more code in view. Weeeeee I am developer heaven now!
Writing web apps should be easier. I was tossing around writing a tool using J2EE with a friend. I said I could do it in about 40 hours. He said he could do the same thing in Lotus Notes in about 4 hours. Of course, when everyone on the team is forced to use Notes, then it is an option, but in the real world (heh) not many people have Notes installed. Back to web apps being easier... I should be able to write a web app in 4 hours. I shouldn't have to care about Hibernate or Struts or Torque or JSPs or Taglibs. I should be able to open my browser, start a new "form", tell that form what fields I want. I should be able to tell it how to group those fields and use them. I should be able to create a working "system" just by using a wizard.
The hard part is customizing it. Making it pretty. I bet if I sat down and tried, I could whip up a system that would allow for the creation of other systems, but who would use it?
Of course there are systems that do this already, but they are aimed at very specific solutions. CMS systems, Shopping Cart Systems, Bloggers, etc... The only system that really comes close to what I would want is Remedy's Action Request System (ARS). ARS could be used to do ANYTHING. It had a nice GUI, a robust scripting language and was easy on the eyes. And the last time I used it was back in 1998. They had the right idea, I wonder if anyone out there is building something like that, but web based.
UGH!!! My biggest problem of late is of the "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!!", "You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!!" sort. It is all due to my rookiness. I continue to put Model components into my Controller. I am getting pretty good at keeping my View out of my Controller, but that durn Model keeps creeping in. Worse than a teen-age boy sneaking into his girlfriend's window. :: sigh :: I am almost done with this little app. I will have to refactor it as soon as it is complete while I am adding some new functionality. But for now, I will leave it the way it is and try to remember to keep them seperate. And I was wondering why I was having such a hard time with recursiveness. duh.
I saw X2 and was gonna write a review. But then I read this one. There are so many love triangles you start to wonder if you are watching a soap opera. The one in the original movie, Rogue -> Wolverine -> Gray -> Cyclops is nothing compared to the mess the sequel creates. It was distracting from the plot. Read what Charles has to say, he sums it up pretty well.
Gees, my computer is dying. It didn't start out very well. When I received it, the fan had fallen off of the CPU during shipping, so I had to send it back to get that fixed (there were small dents in the CPU). Everything went fine for a couple of months, then one of my friends came over and blew it up. My video card, motherboard and ram had to be replaced. I had a friend do the repair (hardware and I are not friends) and he replaced my Abit NVidia based mother board with a Gigabyte board. The onboard sound isn't as good as NVidia's and it kept killing WarCraft III during online play. So, today I turned off the onboard sound and put in a SoundBlaster Live! Now WinAmp starts chirping whenever the CPU gets loaded and WarCraft just died again. I will probably have to reinstall XP... again. I suspect that it is a driver issue, but I hate having to reinstall everything only to find out that it is yet another hardware component gone bad. Note to self, next time you want to save money and build your own system.... Don't.