A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… I made a contraption to enable me to strap a camcorder to my head whilst I skiied. As you can see, it wasn’t the most subtle of devices.
Well, times change. I upgraded my camcorder this year because I wanted a device with DV in for archive purposes. The new camera also has AV in and for Christmas Michelle bought me a weatherproof bullet camera which can plug into the AV in on the camcorder.
I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.
Voltaire
From a comment in ESR’s blog. Given our current dealings with our building’s mismanaging agents this seems particularly appropriate right now.
Wayne Allen asks why so much code is so bad? Why the majority of code, even new code, that he sees as a consultant is terrible.
Meanwhile, Rory Blyth is complaining about “Paper bag” code.
I think Wayne hits the nail on the head with his comment about much of the problem being down to the individuals involved willingness to learn and change. But there’s more. Doing a good job requires lots of thinking, lots of self-discipline and lots of courage.
Today’s job is putting up the Christmas tree. That involves climbing around in our storage space “loft”. We didn’t use the tree last year, so it’s now got 2 year’s worth of stuff in front of it. I feel like I’m digging back through my past to get to it.
I’ve just pulled out my previous pair of skis. 2m+ Salomon Superforce 2S. Straight as a very straight thing. Towering a good 8 inches above me (I know… but I was young, and keen, and they were wonderful at the time).
My time working on the refactoring project has come to an end; at least for a while. Here’s a little look back over what we achieved.
I’ve been working on the “Refactoring Project” for around 9 months now. I’ve worked alongside the team responsible for the project several days a week for most weeks of that period. In that time we’ve tried to take a project that had become a big ball of mud, whose original developer had left, and make it more maintainable and testable and correct.
We flew to Geneva last Thursday evening and skiied in Italy and France over the weekend.
Just holiday snaps.
We were travelling with Ski Weekend. They usually run you around the Chamonix resorts, but at this time of year there’s often not much open in Chamonix itself so they take you further afield.
Day 1 was a quick trip through the Mont Blanc tunnel to Courmayer. Which had good snow, nice pistes and few people.
I still have my ‘director of the management company for a building of 78 apartments’ hat on. It seems to have one of those little straps that goes under your chin. I don’t seem to be able to undo the strap…
I hope that the worst is over. We held a meeting with the residents which went really well, we got 100% support for our actions and lots of offers of help.
The refactoring project rumbles on but my time with it is drawing to a close. This week the currency traders decided that they wanted to be able to manually override the live data in some circumstances. They wanted to be able to edit a live data point, set its value to a fixed amount and have all dependant displays take this new value into account.
Like most things in computing an extra level of indirection saved the day…
I’ve been really busy this last week. The building in which I live is having some issues with its managing agent. I’m on the board of directors for the “company” that runs the building and this week things finally came to a head and we had to take over day to day management of the building from the managing agents that were previously “acting” for us. This has led to me being really busy with all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t usually care to do…
I knew it would happen eventually… As mentioned earlier all of the email filtering code has been developed without any sign of a main(). Now that the time has come to create the actual filter program I found that I didn’t actually have a real version of one of the objects that I required, I only had a mock version for testing. The thing is, the mock version is pretty much all I need for the real version, so it looks like it’s time to promote it…
