General

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. I see it far more often in US-based writing, yet it’s also happening in the UK, Australia, and others as well.

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. And it’s counterproductive anyway.

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., 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