This morning I had an epiphany. Someone should design a sticker that will fade at a given rate. For example, one could purchase a sticker that fades in two days to remember when to water the plants, two weeks to remember when the milk is bad, two months to remember when to replace a shaving razor head, etc. Once a product was replaced, a new sticker could be put on overtop. Better yet, the product could be licensed to companies that want customers to repurchase at given time intervals. Patent pending…
I remember my youth. At the time, I managed to “sign contracts” for creating sites for the Yukon Information Technology Industry Society (http://www.yitis.ca/), the Yukon River Trail Marathon (http://yukonmarathon.com/), the Canada Winter Games and a small development company Sorrento Systems. I can’t recall which of these contracts paid.
My process was simple: I used Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Layouts involved complex tables and hundreds of spliced images. I didn’t understand HTML and had no use for CSS.
Flash forward to present day. I work as a software developer and code projects using modern web frameworks.
I now write streamlined code. I fear using a table tag. My processes includes TextMate, CSSEdit, Photoshop, Illustrator, Transmit, Versions and Kaleidoscope. Code is well abstracted and maintainable.
The question I ponder is if I am any faster today than I was in my youth.
Now I seem to spend countless hours designing in Photoshop or Illustrator, only to have to recreate the designs in HTML and CSS. I switch between tools for different steps of projects and will reiterate when required. However, I can no longer find a one-stop tool to do everything.
Web tools could use an equivalent to Apple Interface Builder that allows for a one-stop design place.
Is it just me, or is NSError one of the worst features of the cocoa framework? Who thought these are these better than exceptions? Don’t developers see that these are just fancy return codes? Here are some major problems:
- Most developers don’t handle errors. Exceptions add due pressure to not let things slip. With ‘NSError’ it is so easy to pass NULL or never check the return.
- Mobile devices don’t have any easy way to display errors. Sure desktop applications have ‘NSApp’ that can present them, but what about mobile users?
- Most documents don’t detail what errors can occur. For example, the documentation for ‘NSFetchedResultsController’ states ‘contains an error object that describes the problem’. Great.
After looking through some of the sample applications and templates generated from XCode (specifically for Core Data), I am a bit confused why the Apple engineers insist on repeating themselves. For example:
Is better written as:
Just a minor complaint.
I am currently (but not for long) a customer of Rogers. They have provided my high speed cable for the past year, and in that time frame I have had 2 outages (for over a week), terrible performance and frequent disconnects. I often get speeds around 40 kbps when using their online speed test tool.
Recently, I called in to a local store to have a modem replaced that was a few days out of warranty. The representative told me that the exchange wouldn’t be a problem (I informed him of the warranty issue on the phone) and to come in the next day.
After commuting for 20 minutes, I was forced to wait in line for over 30 minutes. When I finally spoke with a customer representative, they told me that the modem was out of warranty. Despite explaining my previous call, the representative insisted they could not help.
I highly recommend avoiding Rogers. Although many of the staff members are friendly, the internal policy and limited support abilities make it an awful company. It appears to be a classic example of a company that refuses to empower its staff.
After upgrading an application to Rails 3 everything seemed slow. Requests were taking a few seconds - even when connected to the local development machine. To verify, I created identical demo Rails 2.3.8 and Rails 3.0.0 applications for benchmarking (found here). To run the tests, first install RVM by following the instructions found here. Then feel free to experiment switching between Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 (or whatever Ruby version you have on hand).
Switching to Rails 3 for a recent project wasn’t an easy decision. On an initial investigation, too many GEMS lacked support for the latest offerings of the community. However, the excellent new router and ability to integrate more easily with a variety of JavaScript frameworks made switching worth the costs (thus far). If you are interested in switching, be sure to http://www.railsplugins.org/ and see if compatibility will be an issue for you. Otherwise, go for it!
