Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

The Sex and the City graphic novel wasn't what we expected.

 

From the BBC website:

This week's picture honours the passing of British artist Beryl Cook with one of her pictures - Satin Dresses, kindly supplied by the Portal Gallery.

The prize, of a small amount of kudos, goes to the following:

6. thenumberten
The Sex and the City graphic novel wasn't what we expected.

5. W_K_Snowdon
When Wags breathe out...

4. Turfnell
Charlie's Angels III: Mission to Middlesbrough

3. throbgusset
"I'm pretty certain it's three glasses of wine = one unit."

2. Ed Loach
"Scary and Posh said they'd meet us at the bar."

1. greekdancer
"Why couldn't we have been painted by Lowry?"

Cracks widen

This article's headline - Islam, not gays, will split the Church - reminded me of one of my favourite headlines.

It was on the BBC early morning news a few years ago during a period when one of the christian churches was vigorously debating whether they should allow gay priests or not. 

The headline read "Gay priests widen cracks in church".

Not sure why I found it funny... I just did.

The one thing IE does which I wish Firefox did but it doesn't, or does it?

When I want to download something in Firefox it shows me this:

When I want to download something in Internet Explorer it shows me this:

 

I use Firefox but I want it to look like IE when I download.  I want the option to RUN.

There must be a firefox addin that can do this ... but I can't find it. 

 

Can you help?  Please ...

Sneaky bastards

Real networks used to try to trick people into buying their software when they gave away a perfectly good free version.  The moment I noticed that they were doing it I stopped trusting them.

Avg - the virus people - seem to be doing the same.  I use their free version.  Just lately I've been getting a wee pop up telling me I need to upgrade to version 8.0 and when I follow that link ... it seems to be trying to sell me an upgrade.  Perhaps I'm just being daft ... but now I don't trust them.

Here's the free version - which I found via google.

Testers - the worst thing that happened to software development?

Some of my best friends are testers but ...

Once upon a time I used to be a very good programmer (this was before programmers got all upity and became known as developers) then I left university and got a job working on code older and uglier than I was.  It's hard to be a very good programmer under those circumstances.

The second program I released into product bombed - but not very badly since they didn't let newbies work on important stuff.  The program did something with travellers cheques and my job was to put in some simple exception handling which put out useful error messages when things were a bit wonky with the input file.  I did this without hassle, tested it thoroughly for every possible problem that I could think of and it worked well, then I put it into production and it bombed.  I'd forgotten to test that it still worked when there weren't any problems.  It didn't.  I was mortified and I spent the next day apologising to everyone I could for my sloppy work.  I'm sure, in retrospect, that they were all smiling at the humbling of the fancy-arsed graduate.

As far as I know I only every put 1 more bug into production in the 7 or 8 years I worked as a professional programmer.  There may have been more but I don't think so.

It was the same with my colleagues.

There were three reasons for this ...

1. We didn't have any testers to catch our mistakes
2. Our mistakes could potentially cost brazillians of dollars (I worked for a bank) and we'd know about it very, very quickly.
3. We were never, never, never - not once - put under pressure to sacrifice quality in order to deliver quickly.  (The bosses wouldn't let us - see point 2, they suffered the consequences of bad code much more than we did).

Oh, and a 4th reason: we would have been personally mortified if a bug escaped into production.  Our professional pride was at stake.

That was a maintenance environment.  Maintenance programmers - and their managers - were (and still are I think) regarded as a lesser breed of programmer.  It is the same with maintenance managers too (I think). 

There's a huge amount that development managers (i.e. those that work on bigger projects) could learn from the way good maintenance teams work.  The first would be to break down their work into smaller chunks ...

Firefox 3 is go, go, go

I've been using firefox 3.0 release candidate 1 for the last few days and it is fantastic.  Unlike firefox 2.0 this beasty hasn't crashed once.  It seems to use less memory too.

The best thing: GMail and GReader are so, so, so much faster to open and use.  Considering they're the main applications I use these days ... that's good.  I held off upgrading until now - despite my friend Graeme advising me to switch for months - because the Better Gmail 2 extension wasn't compatable.  It is now.

I've also just added Better GReader and the preview option is really rather handy for all those blogs which only show a snippet of the full post.  It's a very elegant implementation.

I don't normally ...

TOC Thinker Kevin Kohls ...

I think you'll enjoy reading this interview with TOCThinker Kevin Kohls.

I enjoyed Q7 most, where Kevin discusses how they "designed in" the bottleneck at GM.  It's a great example.

Who out there would like to be next?  Any volunteers?  Any nominations?

June 2008 Carnival of Trust - Call for Submissions

Charles Green - author of one of my favourite books Trust Based Selling - has very kindly asked me to host next month's Carnival of Trust.  It's the carnival's one year anniversary. 

The Carnival normally includes the following areas:

• Trust in Sales and Marketing;
• Trust in Leadership and Management;
• Trust in Strategy, Economics and Politics; and,
• Trust in Advising and Influencing.

This time around I am adding a 5th category: Trust in Software and Product Development.

I already have a few submissions but if you'd like to suggest an article, blog entry or "other" to be included in June's Carnival then please submit them here (by this Friday).  If you're unsure then email me: clarke.ching@gmail.com.

From The UK Times:

The Portuguese parliament voted last week to change its national language to reflect the more popular Brazilian Portuguese, the language used by about 80 percent of the world’s 230 million Portuguese speakers. In the next six years, European Portuguese will be phasing in three new consonants – k, w and y – and dropping confusing hyphens and silent consonants.

Isn't that extraordinary?