When ancient Roman typesetters or web designers were showcasing a design, and didn’t want the content of the (dummy) text on their mock-ups to distract the client… what did they use for their lorem ipsum text?
These are the kinds of things that bother me most when I’m doing typographic layout. That, and Internet Explorer’s consistently fucked-up interpretation of CSS.
Since I’ve been working from home, things with my “day job” at SmartData have ticked along pretty much the same as they ever did before. But once in a while, something goes wrong. Like this.
I checked my instant messenger, and saw a bit of text from my boss, Simon:
also, have you implemenmted a "message of the day" type feature as users login?msg from [our contact with a client I've been working with][another requested feature][and a bug report]
That’s simple enough, then: our contact wants us to fix that bug and add two features: the second one (not listed), and a Message of the Day tool. Easy.
I implemented the MotD, first, because it’s trivial. It’s nice to implement the fast features first, because it gives the client something to play with, test, and get value from while they’re waiting for the rest of their project. Plus, a “Message of the Day” feature was a nice warm-up activity this morning while my brain picked up steam in order to tackle some of the bigger tasks of the day.
Later, I spoke to my boss via the instant messenger. The conversation went a little like this:
Dan: If you speak to [client name], let her know I've redeployed.
Dan: New version has [another feature] and the MotD tool.
Simon: MotD tool? For [name of completely unrelated project]
You see, the problem was that without a context of time (I’d ignored the timestamps on the messages), I wasn’t to know that the message “also, have you implemenmted a “message of the day” type feature as users login?” referred to the previous conversation we’d been having. And didn’t apply to this project at all.
I just hope that my client likes the unsolicited “free” feature I’ve given them, because – well – they’ve got it, now.
Is an unsolicited feature a bug? I’m just not sure.
And while I’ve failed at hitting it, having scooped up my laptop and gone down to the beach only to have to turn around and come back when the sun disappeared behind thick, dark clouds, Ruth seems to have grasped the concept quite well. She’s reading papers in anticipation of her final ever exam tomorrow, and, well…
A bug report just came in from a client I’m responsible for at work. It reads:
…Main menu – home page – The ‘g’ of outstanding debts is permanently underlined.
Correct.
I’m not even sure what this message means. It looks like the client is telling me that the letter ‘g’ at the end of the word “outstanding”, which appears in the main menu of the software I’ve been writing for him, is underlined. I’m pretty clear on this bit of his message (although I’m as-yet unable to get the same effect on my own computer). What I want to know is, what does he want?
Is he saying that the letter ‘g’ is underlined but that it shouldn’t be? Or that it’s correct that it’s underlined (in which case, why is he filing a bug report?). Or is he asking, in a convoluted way, for it to be made to be permanently underlined (in which case: why – it doesn’t seem to make any sense?).
What a great start to the New Year’s work.
I turned up to work this morning, bright and early, and the first thing I noticed was that my desk, the four computers and the UPS block under it, the KVM switch and Ethernet switch on top of it, one of the two monitors on top of it, and both keyboards on it were all full of water. There was also a sizeable lake of water all over the carpet around my desk, which made disconcerting “splashy” sounds as I walked over it, and my chair was similarly drenched.
“Shit,” I swore out loud. I looked above the desk and noticed that the skylight directly above it had been left open. “Oh, fuck,” I swore again. I’d been sure that I’d closed it before I left the office on Friday: and I was certainly the last person out…
The good news is that it wasn’t my fault, in the end. My co-worker, Gareth (this Gareth), had come in at the weekend “on his way back from the shops,” to use the internet connection (he hasn’t got one at his new home, yet), and while here opened the window to let in some fresh air.
The other good news is that the damage was limited to totalling a couple of mice and keyboards and costing us the time to mop up the remaining water this morning. Gareth had a go at using a vacuum cleaner to remove the worst of the dampness from the carpet, but failed when we later realised that the machine was simply ingesting the water and then squirting it out through the vents at the back. I suggested a nappy was in order, and we briefly considered putting the vacuum cleaner outside the window and continuing to work at sucking up the moisture, but we eventually thought better of it: now we’ve just got the office fans blowing across the damp patch in the hope that we can expedite evaporation.
Just another day at SmartData.
Update: here’s some pictures of Gareth trying to clean and dry the carpet… using a vacuum cleaner?
My Gran’s been taken into hospital: we could’ve seen that coming when we visited while up that end of the country for my cousin’s wedding. She’d protested about the possibility of being admitted then, stating that “she’d been in hospital three times before and they hadn’t managed to kill her yet,” which is an interesting attitude to take. Nonetheless, she’s not in a particularly good state. We shall have to see.
And… my co-worker, Alex, didn’t come in to work today. He’s instead gone to the hospital to have his hand looked at, which he apparently injured last night. We know that he was at the pub until late and that somebody stole his car keys and he needed to examine the landlord’s CCTV footage to determine where they’d been hidden, but apart from that, we know nothing: he carefully avoided saying how he’d managed to hurt himself, which implies that it’s something particularly stupid or embarrassing. Let the speculation begin!
SmartData and friends (including our French exchange students and some of their friends from placements around the UK went out for a few drinks and a dance on Friday night. Here’s a piccy which I think pretty much sums up the theme for the evening:
Today’s progress – at work – has been stunning, compared to the problems of last week. This morning, I came in, plugged in, did the mandatory e-mail and blog checks, read some news, then got down to work. I slapped on some Pink Floyd (Echoes and Division Bell) and the code… just… worked. By just after lunchtime I’d finished everything I had to do today, and I’m now working on a quote for later in the week. Fabulous.
And, to those who I may not see, good luck to Andy, Bryn, Claire, Faye, Hayley, Jen, Jen, Jimmy, Jon, JTA, Katie, Liz, Paul, Pete, Ruth, Sian, Sundeep, and Suz (the latter of whom I presume has some) in their upcoming exams. And to anybody else I’ve missed.
Paul M: fucking nutter. The most random person you’re ever likely to meet. But you’ve got to love his sincerity.
This morning, I’m happily sat at my workstation, staring, as I do, at program code and pausing from time to time to check the RSS feeds of the usual crew, when the phone rings: Matt answers it; it’s Technium reception – they’ve got a parcel for us. Ooh; that’s exciting, but Matt’s deeply involved in some code so I offer to go and collect it. The arrangement here among us lazy folks is that the receptionist puts the parcel in the lift, and one of us toddles along the corridor and takes it out of the lift on this floor.
I stood outside the lift and listened as it came up to the first floor. The door opened, and I lifted out the parcel… and that’s when I noticed the first strange thing: the parcel was addressed to me, personally (which is very unusual) and the address was written entirely in marker pen (rather than being a printed label, as most goods delivered to us here are). I’m not expecting anything; least of all at work: I never give my work address to anybody. Who could have sent this?
I opened it and laughed out loud. It took just a second to realise what was going on, as I recalled a conversation in the RockMonkey ChatRoom yesterday lunchtime…
[11:38] * Ava_Work goes to nuke food
[11:38] <Ava_Work> Hmm… spaghetti hoops on toast for me, methinks…
[11:39] <Pacifist_049> You’re microwaving spaghetti hoops?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Yup.
[11:41] <Ava_Work> Why?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Philistine
[11:41] <Ava_Work> So…
[11:41] <Ava_Work> …how else can I do it?
[11:41] <Ava_Work> And think carefully now…
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> Pan
[11:41] <Ava_Work> A pan. Which I don’t have. But let’s pretend I did. How would I heat it?
[11:41] <Pacifist_049> I know you don’t have a cooker at work, but that’s not the issue here. It’s the principle, damnit!
[11:42] <Ava_Work> So; as it pisses YOU off so much, feel free to bring me a pan and a cooker. Then I’ll do it your way, which is – in the end – preferable.
[11:42] <Ava_Work> However, it doesn’t piss ME off enough that I’ll go hungry rather than nuke spaghetti hoops.
Click on images for larger versions.
The parcel, as shown above, contains a pan, wooden spoon, loaf of bread, tin of spaghetti hoops, and a strangely familiar electric hob.
Which is a fab gesture, although if I use it for my lunch today I’ll have to do so on the sly, on account of the fact that the Technium facilities manager is in today and this particular piece of electrical equipment has not been electrically safety-tested.
What the fuck. Thank you, Paul!
…minding my own business, and some random guy walks in through the office door, looking lost. Nobody seems to get up to see to him, so I – in my new desk, which is quite close to the door – go over to greet him. “Is there;” he begins, sounding a little unsure of himself, “Is there a ‘Scatman’ here?”
Oh; fucking hell, I think. For some reason, I’m reminded of the last time somebody wandered up and confirmed my identity by addressing me by my “blog name”, and it turned out to be a scary stalker type. I try to think back about what libellous thing I might have said this week.
“Hi; I’m from Unigryw (another company in the Technium),” he begins, “I was looking at your web site -“
“Scatmania.org,” I reply, pronouncing the hyperlink with surprising clarity.
“Yes,” he continues, “I was hoping I could use your review of Nice ‘N’ Naughty on LocalTVi.”
So, I let him. Pretty much all the original content on my weblog is covered by a creative commons license anyway, but I just told him he could do whatever he liked with it. And if only LocalTVi had an RSS feed, I’d keep an eye out for my review appearing on it, too. I thought everything had an RSS feed, these days. Ah well.
Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:
“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”
For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.
“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:
<table>
<tr>
<td>
Top-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Top-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
Bottom-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Bottom-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
</table>
What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This young woman has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?
Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.
Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.
This is just fucking weak: the average salary of an Aberystwyth graduate is just £12,968… the lowest in the UK. And on this crappy ‘probationary period‘, that’s still more than I earn. Fucking shitty.
Feeling unmotivated now. Not getting enough work done.
Here’s a thought: a way to try to get unsolicited (treeware) junk mail banned –
Every time you receive a bit of junk mail, just go and put it back in the post box: it’s almost all franked mail, and so the post office will re-sort it and deliver it back to you. Put a tally on the reverse side, and add one to it each time you forward it to yourself. If enough people did it, I wonder how many recursions you’d need to put through the post office before the postal workers union petitioned the government to disallow the sending of unsolicited treeware junk mail.
Not sure if it’d work, but I think I’ll do it anyway, just out of curiosity about how high a tally I can get before the post office start refusing to re-deliver them. Heh.
Got my Dad’s web site done. Just waiting for the domain name registration to go through so I can deploy it.
…the client calls up and says, “I’m not sure if this is a bug… or a feature… but -”
Bovini is fucking scary these days.
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
I’m still in Aberystwyth, which I thought was a good thing even before people who don’t have the same benefit complained [Alec complaining, Ruth complaining, Adam complaining] about it. Aberystwyth is great this time of year – it’s still a little too early for the tourists to arrive, but it’s warm and sunny and feels like springtime.
Sadly, I still have heaps of work to do – Simon, my boss, is breathing down my neck… not to mention the fact that I need to pretty-much finish my dissertation over the Easter break. And an assignment. And start my revision. And train for Malawi.
As Claire reported, we went for a picnic up Pen Dinas at the weekend, followed by an evening of board games in Rummers and back at The Flat. The game we played in Rummers, ‘NTropy’, is really particularly good – you have to build unstable structures with sticks such that other players are …