September 2003 - Posts
Why is it that every piece of hardware I buy these days comes with drivers that simply do not work? It seems that no matter how new the product is, the drivers it ships with will be useless and I'll be forced to go hunt down updated versions. As a developer I know that bugs happen, but this is getting ridiculous.
Today it was a new LinkSys router and 3 LinkSys NICs. These are all brand new products (they are from the new 802.11G product line) but before I could use them I had to download new drivers for the NICs and flash the router's BIOS.
Normally this isn't too much of a problem, I just download the drivers and move on. But this just happen to be in the new office that currently has no internet connection (see previous rant). So I ended up having to drive home and download the drivers.
For what it is worth, I'm very happy with the products now that they are working. But the amount of work it took to get them working was a bit frustrating.
Ed Kaim's latest post is going to change will change the face of every industry forever.
[Now Playing: Unknown - Chapter 7 (00:00)]
Scoble mentioned this article in his blog last night. I reads like Linux Universe hired former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf to write this one.
[Now Playing: Unknown - Chapter 7 (00:00)]
.... I'll just leave it at that.
[Now Playing: Unknown - Chapter 7 (00:00)]
As I mentioned last night, we are moving into a new office. Along with this move comes the purchasing of new development machines. Now it has been some time since I actually purchased a myself, so I was in for quite a shock. And after spending 3 hours working on a PO I came to a conclusion; we must end this acronym madness!
I mean it guys, we have gone way overboard in the naming department. I can't for the life of me tell whether I'm purchasing a PC here or ordering a medical procedure. It is no wonder that the rest of the world looks at us like we are lobotomized martians.
I know that we spend so much time surrounded by this technology that we simply get used to the massive collection of acronyms. And I'm sure it as true for the hardware guys as it is for us software geeks. But I've now seen what it looks like from the outside, and it ain't pretty.
Oh, and does anyone know what an AOPEN MX440/128/DX9 is? Is it anything like a vasectomy?
I got this off of Savant's web site today... I will kick your monkey butt!
Kaje is a Man-Eating Samurai Monkey with a Battle Rating of 8.9
Unleash your own Food-Eating Battle Monkey
Know what the problem with 3:00AM is?
I'm awake for it.
We decided a little while back to add a developer to the company. Until now it was just me and some contractors to pick up the slack. But as the customer base has grown and the decision to move to .NET was made, it became clear that I needed real full-time help.
Now, for the last 4 years I have worked out of my home. And for the first 2 it was fantastic. For the last 2 however... Lets just say that my cat is a poor conversationalist and the dogs don't seem to care about who was booted off of Survivor. Seriously, working at home full time is lonely; damn lonely.
So not only are we adding someone, but we also rented office space to house the two of us. It is a very nice space in a beautiful old building (built in 1834) with hammered tin ceilings and oak trimmed walls. Oh yeah, and HUGE windows with stained glass at the top. Windows that were quite dirty and that I decided I was more than willing to just clean myself.
Funny thing about stained glass, it is made up of some very small pieces. Insanely small pieces in fact. There I am, straddling the top of a ladder with a bottle of Windex in the right hand and a tooth-brush in the left, doing my best to scrub microscopic pieces of colored glass. But I did it! All the hard work was over, the windows were clean! And so I stepped down from my ladder, looked up and my window and thought to myself: “Hmmm, doesn't look any different at all”.
Joel linked over to this article today. It is a worthy read.
After you have read it you'll understand why when someone gives me that line about “software development should be like construction”; I tell them it already is.
I've been working with the Compact Framework the last few days and I'm really in love with it. Talk about simplifying PDA development. Wow.
In a matter of hours I had a simple UI that could connect to our existing Web Service API, search for a customer record, and then edit that record. And most of that time was spent working on the UI (I'm still getting used to such a small screen area to work with). Pretty sweet if you ask me.
The only thing I wish they could enhance is the events for the controls. More precisely, it would be nice if each control supported a Click event. Currently most do not, so you need to do some playing in order to get a click-able image for example. Not really a big deal, but it would have saved me some extra work last night.
More Posts
Next page »