This morning I decided to investigate the Windows XP SP1 Bluetooth support. I played with the BluetoothXXXX and quickly became disapointed. I then moved on to looking at how to access the Bluetooth hardware using Winsock and decided that is a much better route to take…
The Bluetooth API that lives in Irprops.cpl appears to be the easy way in to Bluetooth. The API itself has an ‘interesting’ design, but I can kinda understand why it looks like it does.
Andy Hopper has written about what makes the thought of working for Microsoft appealing to a geek.
“It’s presented as a tough place to work even if you’re a wizard coder. It’s also described as a meritocracy - Impress or Be Forgotten. I honestly don’t know if I could survive, and that is the exact reason why I want to do it “
Agree.
I got a little closer than Andy, but not much.
The new laptop is way cool. All the stuff is now installed and it compiles nice and fast… The batteries last well, even when the screen is bright and the disk is quiet. I can sit on the sofa and code without being told off for disturbing the TV watching… The keyboard is SO much better than my aging Dell brick… Haven’t yet needed to try the WIFI, I have CAT5 points everywhere in the flat anyway… The Bluetooth hardware is MS compatible, so I can write that wrapper code now…
The refactoring project rolls on. This week was mainly taken up with managing a seemingly infinite number of minor releases. We decide to appear “responsive” by reacting to recently reported, low priority, issues quickly whilst never seeming to make progress on long term plans… Hmm…
We’re moving foward, but it’s slow going. We don’t currently seem to be taking into account the overhead required to make a release. Management people don’t seem to realise that if they keep insisting on us ‘fixing this now for release tomorrow’ then it takes a bit longer to get the other stuff done :(
Someone in an organisation decides that people’s passwords aren’t secure enough. They implement a policy so that people are forced to change their passwords on a regular basis. People find that changing passwords is a pain so they work around the policy by using a ‘system’ when they change their passwords. Rinse. Repeat.
I just had a password change forced on me at a client’s site. No biggie, but they have a complex password policy, well two, and they’re different.
A while back I found what might politely be called “a mixing of business logic with display logic” issue in the refactoring project. Yesterday it bit me…
So we have an object that has a set of named properties. These properties are a mix of business logic and the display logic for 2 or maybe 3 distinct display modes. That’s bad enough in itself but some of the object status values seem to be represented only as a colour… Several distinct object states map to a single value that stores a single colour value.
My old laptop was a brick that didn’t run VS.Net fast enough for my liking, so I thought it was time for an upgrade. I went for the Sony Vaio PCG-Z1SP because of the weight, screen, wireless connectivity and the fact that I can slap 1gb ram in it. Oh, ok, and it’s pretty sexy.
First impressions are good; it’s light, bright and fast. Done the Windows Update thing. Now installing my dev kit.
One of the good things about working on a code base of questionable quality is that you get a chance to review the way you work as well as they way the original authors worked. It’s my job is to improve the quality of the code and the existing code is so different to how I would have structured it that I find myself questioning the way that I do things.
Obviously been one of those days…
I was woken before 7 this morning as Miche rushed back to work - always a bad sign when people take a wash bag with them; she’s still not home… :( I was going to go back to sleep, but, well, I was awake and thought that perhaps I’d have a doze later. No such luck…
A day of merging, building and integration. Mixed in with a spot of driver updating for the TDK USB Bluetooth dongle that I have.
and reds and blacks and greens and, well, you get the idea.
Every month when I get a shipment of disks I feel stupid. I just don’t get the way the MSDN Universal Sub is organised. I’d like a little hint card in each shipment that tells me what disks I should have in the wallet for a ‘full set’ of ‘up to date’ disks…
The colours and numbers and dates and all that is probably really clever but I just don’t get it.
