General

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., the public outrage would be huge.

2019-02-06

In the 1990’s I was running a software company. We had a great sales guy who was also a great friend. One of the things that I loved about working with him, is that even if he didn’t know how to solve a technical problem, he’d ask the questions that I led me to see a problem differently. I could then solve it. I wish every technical person was lucky enough to have someone like that.

2019-01-22

I don’t know if it’s considered some sort of modern trend, but what is it with applications now that just swallow errors instead of dealing with them? Is there an edict within these companies that errors should get shown, so they can argue their app doesn’t have errors?

I’m working with a SaaS app right now. It does editing. Sometimes when I save, it just doesn’t save. No error, just nothing saved. Or every now and then, I find the order of what I’ve entered just gets changed. Again, no error, but the order was changed.

2019-01-08

Hi Folks,

Just a short note today to wish everyone a happy new year. I know that new year is a time when many people make resolutions, with the intention of changing something about themselves during the upcoming year. It makes it a time full of hope for fresh starts.

I don’t tend to make too many resolutions as I think that needs to happen on an ongoing basis rather than once per year, but I understand why people do.

2019-01-01

Hi folks,

It’s been a big year again and the number of readers just keeps increasing quite fast. So pleased to have you all here. You make it all worthwhile. Thanks to so many who reached out during the year.

Just wanted to wish you all the best for the holiday and Christmas season, from here down under.

Greg

2018-12-25

It’s that time of year again when people look philosophically back at the current year, and start to think about how they’ll improve their situation in the new year. But for many, this is a very hard time of the year.

I’ve had a few friends this year who seem to have almost lost hope when they’ve ended up in poor situations.

I just wanted to make a short post to encourage you all to never lose hope. Alexander Pope said:

2018-12-18

I used to do a lot of work at the operating system and network level. I was always fascinated watching people use network trace tools when they were trying to debug a problem. The challenge was that they had no idea what was normal activity on the network, and what wasn’t.

The end result of this is that they’d then spend huge amounts of time chasing down what were really just red herrings.

2018-12-11

Well today WordPress on my blog site went up to version 5.0. I knew a new editor (Gutenberg) had been coming to replace the classic editor but I hadn’t had time to try it. So when it did the upgrade, I happily let it go and install the new editor.

Then I tried to write a post.

Oh my goodness, that was just a horrid, horrid experience. I can see what they’ve tried to do but it literally took me about five times longer than normal to write a single post.

2018-12-07

I’ve been in the IT industry a long, long time. One thing that I’ve never liked is case sensitivity in application development tools or in database languages.  And it’s creeping into more and more places.

I know that will offend some people but hear me out.

I think we’re stuck with case sensitivity in languages like C, C#, C++, Java, etc. because that was the easiest way to implement those languages in the first place. As soon as you decide that a language is case insensitive, you also have to decide the internal collation rules. For example, is the letter A the same as the letter a ? But then what about the letter á ?

2018-12-04

One of the real beauties of the Internet is its global nature. But ever since we’ve had it, people keep trying to ring-fence certain locations, and make applications location-aware. While geolocation can be useful, over-dependence upon it is a real pain in the neck.

The first situation where this is painful is in media restrictions. Companies are still trying to enforce country and region boundaries for media licensing.

We need to get past this.

2018-11-27