A little while ago a good friend architect of mine told me about a crazy over-engineered project he was working on; the application had two or more caching mechanisms, and took over a week for a new developer to get onboard. At a gig I had last year (and I’ve written about this) I worked […]
I can never remember what version of Linux I am running. It’s a pain if you are doing installs and faced with a few different versions of software. And I’m a developer, not an escalator dammit. Just use the uname -a command and here’s how you can figure it out: user@ubuntu:~$ uname -a Linux ubuntu […]
Many years ago I was working on a website and I had to do some image manipulation for the graphics. The company I was working at wouldn’t let me get a copy of Photoshop or anything close to install on my computer — if you installed anything out of bounds the monitoring service on your […]
This kept coming up from several of my colleagues at my current gig, at some other sites and then touched me this week. Its, working without a mission. Or a work statement. If you read some management sites, or about human nature in general, human nature seems to be motivated on the need to be […]
Do you know what this is? It’s called a Chadburn, or an Engine Order Telegraph. I don’t know if they make these things too much anymore, maybe they do. You can see a bunch of them if you visit the Queen Mary, or maybe ride the riverboats Mississipi Queen or Becky Thatcher. A […]
I’m currently consulting on a project and got one of those classic “consultant workstation” spots to sit at. Cramped legs and a very, very high traffic area sitting next to customer support people wearing headsets. Also what had been happening is that people were also taking liberties with our row’s personal articles (pens, papers, chairs […]