tail -f carlo.log

Dec 26th 2004, 13:35 GMT

Nice review of McSearchPreview over at Desktop Pipeline – Fire Up Firefox: Our Favorite Extensions:

[Quote] They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Obviously whoever penned that phrase was familiar with Google — after a while, the plain text links all begin to look like alike.

McSearchPreview adds thumbnail images for destination pages to search results from Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, AllTheWeb, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Simpy.com. I found this premise to be extremely liberating and efficient. I was able to more quickly assess the viability and applicability of search results.

[..] this is no fly-by-night extension. It’s very solid, stable and, best of all, supported via a developer-driven message board. [Quote]

Dec 23rd 2004, 17:41 GMT

‘twas the night before Christmas …when my video card died.

R.I.P. Nvidia GF4 TI4400.

Got me a new ATI Radeon 9600XT. I think it was the best card for the money and my sad, sad machine. At least it works much better with WoW than the old one did. Yay! :) Purchase justified, check.

Edited on Dec 23rd 2004, 19:23 by Gossip

Dec 21st 2004, 18:54 GMT

It’s frickin’ cold outside. As Lewis Black once said: “If you have fur on your nuts, it’s a fucking festival.” Indeed. Usually I wouldn’t complain much and simply stay inside, but unfortunately, this isn’t working this time. We have the my mother-in-law’s dog here. She’s in the hospital and the little bitch fem dog needs someone to take care of her. So now we have to walk the dog four to five times a day, which is okay for I get some fresh air this way myself. But since my testicles lack the aforementioned fur I start freezing the second I walk out the door.

Which isn’t as much fun as it sounds, really. At least she has fun:

Anyways, now I’m back inside, and my body is warming up again. Yay for the laws of physics.

Dec 19th 2004, 16:30 GMT

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Web Headlines – Politics > SEX, LIES, NO VIDEOTAPE:

[Quote] The report from Democratic congressman Henry Waxman found that of 13 government-funded programs examined, 11 of them taught curriculum that was out of line with medical consensus. Among the misrepresentations, kids were taught: HIV can be spread by sweat and tears, condoms fail 31 percent of the time, abortion is linked to suicide and sterility and masturbation can lead to pregnancy. Many of the programs also featured a guest lecture by a blind man with hairy palms. [Quote]

By the way: “The Daily Show web headlines (scraped into RSS feeds by yours truly) are almost as great as the Daily Show itself. — Jon.”

Dec 17th 2004, 12:12 GMT

Respecting The Programmer:

In general, Python rewards highly-skilled programmers with a considerably increased productivity, moreso than in low-level languages. […] Finally, to be frank, Python is not the language for companies who expect mediocrity in their programmers, and I think that outsourcing is for companies that expect mediocrity.

sigh Reading this is making me sad especially right now. We’re using that time tracking software here in the company. I wrote it quite a while ago, everyone around here is using it. Since I wrote it, there have been a lot of structural changes to our departments, and the software doesn’t reflect the current structure anymore. So there was much talk about enhancing it, which I strongly objected — the current version, albeit working pretty well and having a rather clean codebase, is PHP. Also, it’s in a certain state of deadlock, since massaging the database layout and the rest of the application would take considerably more time than making a clean cut, coming up with a new concept which is respecting the new department structures, and then taking it from there.

Surprisingly, the idea was deemed good, so we’re doing just that.

Now here’s the thing: it was supposed to be (partially) ready before Dec 31st, a dream which both Morn and I had to shatter quickly. So, now the new deadline is end of January. Given the size of the project and the planned modularity of the application as well as the list of planned features made it clear (to us) that we definitely shouldn’t do this with PHP. We chose Python for it’d provide us with the best tools to make this work in the given timeframe. Our boss was fine with that since he’s trusting our judgement. So that was cool.

But his boss wasn’t. He demands this is going to be written in PHP for it is one of our “standards” here. Yeah, right. First of all, PHP is the wrong language for this project, for there are plans for desktop clients (among other things). He didn’t really care. Now we tried to stress the importance of using a real programming language for the job, for both speed and clean code are essential for a project of this size. No, it should be PHP. Our concern that we’re forced to use PHP 4.1.2 which is older than my little sister earned us a sad look. After a dozen arguments for Python and against PHP the decision was postponed.

Yesterday my boss approached me telling me the newest idea is to buy some commercial product. When I skimmed through the white papers for a few potential candidates I noticed that both the hardware requirements and the license costs will most likely be through the roof. But hey! At least it’s not Python, right?

We were assured that this isn’t a “Python sucks” but a “let’s stick with PHP because we already know it” decision. So, it’s nothing personal, but we have to understand that PHP and Perl are enough languages in our portfolio.

Later that day our boss’ boss came up with the idea of using Java since one of our sister companies is writing stuff in Java already, so wouldn’t it be great to use the same language there?

… Well, fuck, no. Besides, it’s not solving the imminent problem: the end-January deadline. Noone here is speaking Java, so doesn’t that imply we’d need some Java courses prior to attempting to write something in this very language?

On the other hand you already have a few Python programmers here who can hold your precious deadline for a fraction of the cost. One would think this is a no-brainer.

Apparently I’m an idiot for assuming a logical decision would be easy in this case.

They are preaching “innovation!!!1” and “quality management!!” pretty much 24/7. We’re expected to fly, but the cage holding us is actually pressing right into our wings.