General

For better or worse, I spend a lot of time in hotels, airline flights, dealing with many suppliers, etc. What’s become really common now, is that a few days later, they’re sending me a survey asking me how they did. Now I’m sure that they’re just trying to follow some best practice to make sure they’re delivering what was expected, but lately, I’m finding many of the surveys really quite annoying.

2019-06-11

In a previous post, I discussed the way that adjectives have been replacing adverbs, and pondered about what had happened to “ly”. For example: Drive Safe rather than: Drive Safely I had quite a bit of feedback on this, both on and offline. Language discussions are always busy. But another similar trend came up in a discussion that I recently took part in. A friend asked that if you used the term:

2019-06-04

In recent years, there’s an odd trend that I’ve been noticing. Adverbs seem to be getting replaced by adjectives, and at an increasingly fast rate. I see signs that say things like this: Drive Safe Now when I was at school, we’d have been given a hard time for writing that. We’d have been told in no uncertain terms that it should have been: Drive Safely I was trying to work out if it was more of a US-based thing.

2019-05-28

Who moved my cheese (diagram tool)? I was part of an interesting email chain today. It started with a guy complaining that in SQL Server Management Studio 18x, the database diagram tool had been removed. Now I was disappointed to see the tool gone. Mind you, I didn’t ever think it was a great diagramming tool. I would have hoped they might have replaced it by a better one instead of just removing it.

2019-05-07

Over the years, many product names have become verbs that describe what the product does. The typical example is to google for something, or to super-glue something to something else, and so on. The first and dominant product in their markets tends to become associated with the action that they perform. But was has me puzzled in recent years, is I keep hearing company names used as nouns for something that their applications deal with.

2019-04-02

After some recent upgrade to Windows 10, I’ve found that the headphone volume is way too low for me. I’m using Microsoft LX-3000 headsets, and have always really liked them. So I was really puzzled what makes the volume so low. The thing that’s made the biggest difference for me is to enable loudness equalization in the properties of the device. For those that aren’t sure how to do that, here’s a quick set of screen shots:

2019-03-27

Just thought I’d send another plea out to my developer friends: Please stop making windows fixed size when they don’t need to be. Take a look at the main image above. The issue isn’t just this one application, it’s a plague. The window: Is fairly small Is way smaller than the desktop space Has no resizing handles Is not able to be maximized Has content that doesn’t fit in the current window size Why?

2019-03-27

A quick piece today to talk about something that still seems to drive me crazy. Why oh why do so many applications still default to putting a shortcut on the desktop when you’re installing them? And this applies to even very current applications. I installed Chrome on some machines yesterday, and again, no question during install, but desktop shortcuts created. Haven’t we moved on past this? Nowadays, there really isn’t a need to plaster shortcuts all over the desktop for all the applications on the machine.

2019-03-12

Ever since I’ve done development work on Windows, I’ve seen two things happening: People arguing that development should never be performed in an admin account People using admin accounts for development because otherwise they can’t get anything done This is a long-term nasty problem, but I thought I’d share today an anecdote I was told by a Microsoft product group member about how easy it is to get security wrong during development, if you always develop as an admin.

2019-02-22

Background I was reading a story about a woman in the US who was removed from a flight because she didn’t want to sit in the middle seat between two large people either side of her. When questioned by another passenger, she responded “do you want to sit between those two pigs?” Now if you replaced weight (which is contrary to common perception a nasty medical situation, not just a result of endless self-indulgence), in that story, with race, religion, other physical disability, etc.

2019-02-06