October 2007 Archives

Amy Wang has won an Adobe Design Achievement award for her Amertrica Campaign. The best piece in my opinion is a taxi with an LED digital display showing the vehicles speed in km/h.

I spend 6 hours yesterday, and about 3 hours today trying to get this bastard installed.  Can I just say how much I hate Sqlite3 and its Python plumbing.

When you’re installing Python make sure you enable threads support at the start. Then install databases/py-sqlite3 for the sqlite default modules. Only then install trac.

I’ve been messing around with flash for a couple of months now.

Gotta say that I love some of the nifty little features of the FlashDevelop editor. When you’re typing in the names of variables in related classes it auto-completes them for you.

I’ve still to work out how to get it to compile the AS3 directly, but I’m getting there.

Update: I had trouble finding a way of indenting or outdenting a selection of text in the documentation. However highlighting your selection and hitting Tab or Shift Tab does the trick.  Just as I’d started to get used to Ctrl [ and Ctrl ]. Humph.

If you use Subversion to keep your software under version control, you probably use svn:keywords attributes.

Here is a quick and dirty way to get the Subversion revision number into the build number of your classes. I recommend using this as a build number and set the major version number by hand.

public static const VERSION:String = "Software 0.1 Build "

   + String("$Rev: 335 $").slice(6,-2);

To save screen real estate I then put this string into the right click context menu.

Just discovered the Eventlog to Syslog utility which sends your Windows log events to a unix box running Syslog.

Centrally managing the log files of all your servers makes for quicker reaction time to resolve issues. Which then flows onto customer perceptions, and inspires confidence in your own job performance.

Having the best fun with a telemarketer tonight…

Got two calls this morning with no one on the other end, which is the precursor give away that you’ve be rung by a computer, which has now flagged your phone line as answering.

So this evening I’ve had 2 calls so far with Indian ladies that swear their names are like Stephanie, or Mary. After you answer you get a good second or two before their system connecting you to the phone slave assigned to your torture.

I start with “Hello?” and it’s like hitting the start button on the spiel.

“Hello this is Stephanie…”

“Hello?”

“Hello can you hear me? This is Stephanie I’m calling…”

“Hello?”

“Hello? Sir, can you hear me? This is Stephanie I’m calling…”

<click> doot doot doot doot doot…

Update: Wed 10th - Just had Stephanie call again.

“Hello, this is Stephanie calling…”

“Oh sure, can I just start with what you’re wearing?”

…silence…  doot doot doot doot doot

One of the best articles I’ve read in a long time about the art of Software Development.

Kyle Wilson answers “Why we can’t build software the same way we build bridges?”

The difference is that the overruns on a physical construction project are bounded.  You never get to the point where you have to hammer in a nail and discover that the nail will take an estimated six months of research and development, with a high level of uncertainty.  But software is fractal in complexity. Software construction is the most complex endeavour ever undertaken by mankind.  It makes building things like cathedrals and space shuttles look like child’s play, and it strains our little monkey brains to the utmost.

When I write software I like to keep a history of it’s development, so I use the Subversion source code repository system. On a Windows desktop you can use the TortoiseSVN client to integrate with File Explorer to make keeping your code synchronised.

Also handy is when you can pop a couple of tags into the top of the file and have TortoiseSVN update all the info for you on commit.

Here is what I did to get that happening…