Archive for March, 2009
Mutha fuckin’ boat!
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009I hate Josh, but I hate his boss more!
Monday, March 16th, 2009I hate Josh. No not my little brother, I mean the “quirky” software developer described in Eric Spiegel’s harrowing tale of a borderline autistic douchebag developer that he had the misfortune to happen across.
Let me say right off the bat, that if I write something in five lines of code that is easily understandable and somebody else writes the same piece of code in one line, but it takes half an hour to dissect and understand, then that person is not a coding genius. I do genuinely believe that code can and should be largely self documenting, but just because you say it is, doesn’t make it so. The ability to write (hack together) obfuscated code is not one that I seek, I am after easily understandable, predictable, maintainable code and I would hope that you are too. For me then, the most poignant thing about Eric Spiegel’s article is not the fact that people like Josh exist, but the fact that Josh’s manager (and there are plenty like him) was completely complicit in his behaviour, worse than that, he was encouraging it.
It will always be quicker to have Josh hack up some quick fix solution to a problem then have another member of the team fix and document it properly. This is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy in that as more of Josh’s intractable code enters the code base, it will become less serviceable by the ‘regular’ members of the team, thus requiring more of Josh’s time (and intractable code) to fix it. There are several issues here, not least of which is that having one member of your team holding all of the knowledge in this way is pretty dumb, add to that the fact that the other developers on the team will quickly grow tired of attempting to maintain such a code base and will either up and leave, or worse still, fall into Josh’s bad ways themselves and you can begin to see the snowball forming. Sure it will cost you more in the short term to do things properly and it will look better to your boss/customer if you deliver working solutions in ridiculously short timescales, but ultimately it will cost you far more when you have to tidy up the mess and you *will* have to tidy up the mess.
I’m just saying.
They don't get *it*!
Monday, March 9th, 2009Sometimes people don’t understand why I’m so anti Microsoft, but this week I came across a story which brilliantly illustrates my assertion that Microsoft don’t get *it*. One of the features that Microsoft added to Vista in the hope of persuading us it was secure was User Access Control (UAC), that’s the thing that pops up all of those annoying… er… pop ups asking for your permission to do stuff all of the time. Most Vista users quickly found this to be a royal pain in the ass and began to suffer from pop up fatigue, in the end granting permission to anything that asked for it just to get rid of the popups, others looked for a way to turn UAC off altogether, even if it meant hacking their registry. Fast forward past Vista to Windows 7 and the geniuses at Redmond decided that UAC needed relaxing a bit, one of the ways that they did this (several routes around UAC have been found in the Windows 7 Beta so far) was to create a whitelist of files that can just bypass UAC. Do you see where this is going yet? Yep, by leveraging one of the pre-approved files and making some fairly standard API calls, you can have your possibly malicious code executed sans user permission. So the user gets all the hassle of the pop ups and none of the security goodness. Good job guys. It’s like building a nuclear bunker into the side of a mountain and then installing a couple of Velux windows to let some light in. Still at least Microsoft have added the ability to remove IE from Windows 7, that should keep the EU happy… except that you can’t remove it, you can turn it off, but it can’t be removed completely. Still, why would you want to, it’s not like Microsoft had to request that the world download an alternative browser when they found a huge security hole in IE! I wonder how many people downloaded Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari that week?
Talking of Safari, I have been using the beta of version 4 for a good couple of weeks now and have discovered that whilst the it is quick to render pages and execute Javascript, Firefox 3 is actually faster to download the content and provide me with a working page. I actually have another reason for falling back to Firefox, AdBlock Plus. I don’t know how I ever browsed the web without blocking adverts. Don’t give me any of that crap about stealing revenue from websites by blocking their ads, most adverts have to be clicked on to generate revenue and more importantly if your entire business model relies on ads then you have bigger problems than me not downloading them. Think of it as the equivalent to flicking over to Sky Sports News/Kerrang during the television ad breaks.
In other news, I’ve had some serious problems attempting to set up an IMAP account for a custom domain (area-78.com) with SMTP support, using SSL on incoming and outgoing connections. It seems to work over my Sky broadband connection, but chokes on an O2 broadband connection. Any ideas? Are certain ports more likely to work (I know that 25 is generally blocked to prevent spam)? Is anybody else using SSL, I mean I know it’s not perfect, but surely it’s better than nothing?
Post Tune: Ms Fat Booty, Mos Def, Black On Both Sides.
