March 2008 - Posts
I love watching people. I like to sit back, and watch peoples expressions, their body movements, their reactions to certain things. I don't really consider it eavesdropping, as I am not paying attention to the conversation, and I don't usually hear what's going on. The other day I was watching a few developers from a larger company here in town bicker about something.. A friend of mine joined their group and saw I was drinking some coffee and invited me over. The conversation soon turned towards working conditions, job satisfaction, salary, management etc... really whatever a group of developers talk about at a coffee shop. Now many would think we'd talk about games, however as "Geeks" we must maintain the persona that we have lives (note Geeks, not nerds... Geeks).
One person then mentioned the well coined phrase "Well the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence". At that point I had to but in and tell him to give his head a shake. The grass is greener where you water it!
As a working individual it is your duty, heck it's your God given duty to put 100% into your career / job. It doesn't matter if it's full time, part time, a "stepping stone", or whatever. If you are getting paid for a job, put your all into it because that's really what you're getting paid for. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, look at where you're at. Think of what makes the grass greener on the other side and bring it up with your manager / boss. Now there are some cases where the grass you're currently on was laid on a bed of concrete, in those rare occasions even the dirt looks greener (And you might want to either talk to your manager about buying an excavator if you're in this boat).
Yes this is a bit of a rant, and it might be because I'm a new dad and my career is very important to my family. But wherever you are in your career, make it the best it can be. Put your all into it. Yes, the company across the street might have the newest computers, or the company across the way has lunch time gaming time... whatever it is, if you put your all into where you are, whenever you decide to move on you'll do it with integrity.
I'm going to change my babies poopy diaper now.
Yes the Acid 3 test has been released. The official announcement is here, and because I loath copy/paste blog posts you will need to go there to read all the nitty/gritty about it. Pretty much Acid3 tests specifications for "web 2.0" (What the heck is web 2.0 anyways? When did the web get an update... I'm still waiting for my CD!). Too see exactly what's tested, check this out.
The cool this about this is that It shows the "Percent" on how good your browser is. Believe it or not, IE7 gets like 13%. FireFox 2.0 gets around 52%.
I'm not even going to attempt to do this in IE8 beta.
Holy Cow! I know this isn't new news. IE8 and FireFox 3.. Acid 2 tests, heck Acid 3 tests. When is it going to stop?!?
As some know, I'm writing a very complicated vehicle tracking system that is all web based. It can track up to 200 vehicles at once (in one browser instance), draw them on the map, and give you all the nice tid-bits of information about them. This application is very heavy CSS and JavaScript. I pretty much took most of .NET out of the application except for 3 web service calls.
However, To make applications like the one I'm developing work in a real world environment, they need to be efficient. That means that if I'm going to be doing collision detection on vehicle labels (so they don't overlap) I would rather use a few extra bits of memory to remember the answers from complicated math (storing the values that are returned by using COS / SIN calculations) than to have to calculate them each time. If you didn't know anything done using COS, SIN, TAN etc. are extremely expensive.
So back on topic, I have my application, It's as efficient as I can make it, and now I have to test the efficiency in not 4, but SIX browsers. And to top it off, those browsers have tweaked Javascript engines. WHY WHY WHY! I already tried my app in these 2 new browsers, and they "do" work, but not as well as I would've hoped. Come on, when can a Guy run a simple <div> collision detection script that checks over 100 divs and repositions them in a self expanding circle every second? Why does it need to take 3.2 seconds?
I know... to better humanity and all other species on this earth, new web browsers are pertinent in order to form an electronic self sustaining ecosystem. Anyways, WHY! I already have 4 browsers to test (IE7, FireFox 2.0, Opera, safari... stupid Safari), and now I need to test on 2 more? You know, the day when those 2 browsers (or days) get released I'll forget to test on them and I'll get over 100 emails in my inbox stating that my website broke the internet (if that were true then I'd really have something to blog about).
Can we invest more money in holograms like on Star Trek so I can get a duplicate to do the testing? I know testing is the bestest most funnestest thing ever and that programmers everywhere are running at the opportunity to test... but I'll sacrifice my ego and let my hologram clone do it for me.
Ok I'll stop whining now.
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