Making Wrong Code Look Wrong – I was away for 2 weeks, catching up on email only now!
Tag Archives: Development
Ignore details early on
Oh, this is so true!
We’re crazy about the details. We love the details. The space between objects. The perfect type leading. The perfect color. The perfect words. 4 lines of code instead of 7. The perfect flow. 90% vs 89%. 760px vs 750px. $39/month vs. $49/month. Success and satisfaction is in the details.
However, success isn’t the only thing you’ll find in the details. You’ll also find fixation, stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These poison projects. These are the things that kill morale (and if morale is low, your chance of success is even lower). You want to avoid these at all costs. If you procrastinate, procrastinate the details.
Testing the Developer
Usability testing can be daunting and goes overlooked in the rush to get things out the door, but it’s important, if somewhat hard on the egos of developers when their super-duper ideas are torn down and trodden on!
See the great comic too! hehe.
Optimising MYSQL
Optimising MYSQL – several good points here. I more than doubled the queries per second after reading this and doing further research on the topics covered.
Easter Is
It appears that Easter is at the end of March this year…
echo Easter is `echo 2005 '[ddsf[lfp[too early]\
Pq]s@1583>@ddd19%1+sg100/1+d3*4/12-sx8*5\
+25/5-sz5*4/lx-10-sdlg11*20+lz+lx-30%d[30+]s\
@0>@d[[1+]s@lg11<@]s@25=@d[1+]s@24=@se44le\
-d[30+]s@21>@dld+7%-7+[March ]smd\
[31-[April ]sm]s@31<@psnlmPpsn1z>p]splpx' | dc`
(Thanks to Stewie for that scary nugget of code!)
Generation Perplexed – Technology Waves and Undertow
How Does One Keep Up? – how many computer languages and concepts have you learned and abandoned in your career? How often do you think you’ll do the same in the future?
Unless you work on Cobol then you’re probably like me and Tom and you’ve gone through several iterations – 6502, 8×86, 68000 Assembly, Pascal, C, C++, PHP, etc etc..
It scared me at one stage but now it’s fascinating.. all this new stuff to learn and find out about! Woo!
This article on technomasochism is more relevant to all you UI watchers.. how much pain will users put up with? Quite a lot in my experiences!
Incorrect MIME Type for CSS Files
mozdev.org – editcss
I haven’t tried editcss yet, I have to restart my browser to finish the installation! Looks dead handy for editing css easily!
MySQL: Finding the records in one table that are not in another table
OK, this’ll make users of “proper databases” cringe but because MySQL doesn’t support sub-selects you can’t do the most obvious way of selecting records in one table that aren’t in another. Here’s how it’s done, with a clear explanation of why it works!
select po.id
from po left join pn
on po.id=pn.id
where pn.id is null
Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to filter the second table as I don’t want to select from the whole table, only a subset. Anyone solved this?
The Joy of Usability
The comic going along with this article really caught my attention – how many times have you taken apart an old joystick to add the auto-fire switch from another joystick, or to repair the plastic struts that broke while you were playing Combat School! 🙂
Must read OK/Cancel: The Joy of Usability too of course!