Just realised that my MT setup was wrong and that all my stuff is being posted with a timestamp of an hour in the future. Just fixed it, I wonder what will happen now…
Hmm, nothing, so I’ve edited the timestamps on today’s entries and hopefully everything will be OK from now on…
I’m a firm believer that software rots unless you’re very careful; and like apples, once one piece starts to go bad the rest quickly follows. The Pragmatic Programmers talk about Software Entropy and The Broken Window Theory and, unfortunately, this week the refactoring project showed how true this is…
We’ve spent several weeks working on cleaning up this project, but there’s a lot of code and it’s all in a bit of a state.
My dabbling with Bluetooth continues. Using WSASetService it’s pretty easy to get your device to advertise a standard Bluetooth service on one of its sockets. Simply create your socket with the Bluetooth address family, bind and listen as normal and then call WSASetService to start advertising a service on this socket to other devices within range. Now call accept and wait…
I chose the File Transfer Service as my hello world service.
We skated on The Broad Walk in Kensington Gardens on Saturday morning. Lovely place. Much nicer than “The Beach” in Hyde Park. Much quieter, wider, smoother and with a nice little hill…
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…
Went to a really cool local restaurant tonight. It’s Greek Jim but not as we know it.
We’ve been to The Real Greek in Hoxton several times before. Tonight we did the meze stuff in the bar area. The bar’s really cool. A lovely room, full of character. It used to be a chapel, has a real 40’s feel to it and is always buzzing.
Unfortunately the service was pretty sluggish tonight.
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.
