work – Page 9

Our Web Developer’s “Line Of The Day”

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.

Aber Graduates Earn Least In UK

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.

An Idea – How To Get Treeware Junk Mail Banned

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.

You Know Your Program Is Convoluted When…

…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.

I’m Still In Aber. Yay.

[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 …

Out Of Place

Something feels out of place. Probably just the time of year, the amount of work I have to do, etc. The only good thing about working as long hours at work as I have been is the anticipation of how healthy my next paycheque ought to be. Which it’ll need to be, because I’ll be penniless by then.

Gonna play some Super Mario World on the SNES emulator I downloaded and try not to get too stressed and start snapping at people again. Must de-stress!

Hugz, ye’all;

Frustrating

How frustrating is it to write 5 CDs for clients, only to discover an error in some SQL scripts on them that mean that they won’t work outside of the development LAN… <grr>

It’s the world rebalancing the good and bad things, I guess. Making up for last night’s wild rampant sex tour of the flat (starting on the couch, finishing on the bed… without need for re-entry). Damn, we were horny.

I’d better fix these SQL scripts. Ooh: office Christmas dinner this evening! That’s something to look forward to.

Some Days You’re The Statue; Some Days You’re The Pigeon

I’m at the office. It’s almost 5pm. So far today I’ve achieved what should be estimated as approximately 7 days work. Some days the code just flows. I like being me.

On the other hand, it may be that I’ve just written the wrong 7 days worth of code – as in; the 7 days worth of code I should be starting next week. Despite having achieved the entirety of my work schedule for the next month, I haven’t yet finished what I was supposed to be doing this morning.

My boss is pretty level-headed and appreciates the way I work, though – that if he doesn’t expect me to do things in the order he asks, and he doesn’t mind that some days I achieve nothing but surfing the web and posting to my blog, and that other days are like this one, with immense productivity. I’m an outlier even by software engineering standards. I’m a bit of a loose cannon. But in any case; I’m worth more than he’s paying me and we both know it, and neither of us care terribly, so everything’s pretty damn sweet.

Got my assignment in on time. Think I’ve done it quite well (actually went to the library and read old journals and books and things – very scary and academic and cool at the same time: after all; it’s just about possible to pass a comp. sci degree with Google as your primary reference). Time will tell.

Chez Geek night tonight at the Ship. Looking forward to it.

First Aid

Yesterday was a long day. After nine hours at work, had two and a half hours of First Aid refresher training at Aberystwyth ambulance station.

On the upside, I’d forgotten how subtly dark paramedics’ sense of humour can be… when one particularly overmoral woman expressed concern at a particular element of the training: “But they could die!”, one of the ‘medics responded, deadpan, with: “No; they’re already a corpse. They’re dead. They’re just lying there, being completely useless.” I like paramedics.

I have a lot of work to do this week – my final week full-time before starting again as a part-timer while I put some work towards graduating – and I’m getting bogged down in other people’s bureaucracy. I can’t get my client’s clients’ computers to connect to my client’s computer because my client’s network administrator has put a particularly secure firewall in the way, and he needs a list of IP addresses (unique identifiers for computers on TCP/IP networks, like the Internet) of all the servers on my client’s clients’ networks, but everybody’s got meetings at stupid times and I can never get hold of the people I need when I need them and… aarrgghh!!!

It’ll all be fine.

Second Place

I came second in the Cymru Prosper Wales “Enterprising Student” competition, which earned me £100, this morning. Pretty much made my late night and early morning worthwhile. Now I’m back at the office. Needed to come in this afternoon to deploy a new version of a piece of software to a client.

Think I pissed Claire off by trying to bum a lift into the office. Gave up and hoofed it in the end (tried to get the bike fixed – something’s gone wrong with the gears – but the bike shop didn’t have enough hands-on to get it done ‘while I waited’).

Knackered. But full of creamcakes, which is good.

In the absence of this work deadline and CPW, things should return to normal tomorrow. Then I can get back to some much-needed Three Rings code.

I need to get a t-shirt printed with “I’m blogging this” on it. Yes, I know ThinkGeek do one, but it’d be cheaper to have The Don here in Aberystwyth print one for me than to pay international shipping charges, considering it’s only a one-colour print.

Early

Like Kit, I woke up surprisingly early. Then decided to go back to sleep and as such will now be late for work. Ah well.

Need to get ready for a presentation I have to give at the Park Hall Hotel tomorrow as my contribution to the Cymru Prosper Wales scheme, which funds small businesses in rural areas for employing undergraduates, and has been slipping my boss a few to give me a summer job, which I’d have had anyway. Hmm…

Paul left his shoes here. Does that mean he walked home barefoot last night?

Anyway, off to work…

Bovini: A Week Well-Spent

It’s been a busy week. I’ve spent a lot of my time at the office, trying to get the replication model for Bovini working – causing much stress as it failed time and time again. For those of you without a grounding in computer science theory, replication is the art of making data be identical (and editable) in several places at once without the fundamental problems that this goes on to cause, such as data identity conflicts.

In this particular case, we have two master copies of a database, and five smaller copies of a particular one-fifth of the data each (plus a little shared data), split around seven UK sites, and who’s computers can only be made to talk to one another between the hours of midnight and 4am each weekday. So: not only does the program I’ve been writing (and sweating on, crying over, and shouting at, this week) have to pull all the data back together and spread it out, it also has to detect whether two users at different sites edit the same piece of data during the same day, work out who’s most likely to be ‘right’, and ‘fix’ the data accordingly. Or, if it’s not sure, know who to ask for assistance. It’s a clever program.

And now it seems to be done. And working. Great!

Unfortunately, working like a dog on this little project has only taken time (and energy) away from my preferred software project – Three Rings – a program I’m writing for free for National Nightline. I’m likely to have a busy weekend catching up!

Regardless, tonight… will be a night for relaxing – Bryn, Claire, Paul, Kit and I are going to spend the evening in the Ship & Castle, drinking Real Ale and playing Chez Geek. A perfect way to end a week.

Timewasting

Look what I found while I was wasting time on the ‘net this morning.

Eventful

Been excessively busy this last week: lots and lots of work. Pulled a 16-and-a-half hour work day on Wednesday, fixing the entire network where my co-workers were unable to. It’s a lot nicer now. In other news, I won an eBay auction for a copy of the 1974 edition of Parker Games “Careers” board game, which is fab, and Claire, Bryn, Paul, Kit and I have been playing it all week.

Three Rings schedule looks tighter and tighter. Having some doubts about getting it to a stable 1.0 release by next weekend, the deadline.

Tonight, sometime after midnight, my awful ex-, Reb (if you ever hear me complain about my ex-, it’s undoubtedly her) dropped me two text messages out of the blue asking if I’m awake and to call her, in capitals (followed by two “X”s, which I take to be kisses). I can’t be arsed. I’ll drop her a text in the morning and find out what she wants.

Right now, I’m going to coax Claire to bed for rumpy-pumpy. ;-)

Stress

Things that are causing me excess stress and reduced sleep:

WORK

I’m writing program features that have been paid for, but may never be used.
I can’t keep a pcAnywhere connection to the client open for more than a few minutes.
I’ve been abandoned to sort out the database replication by myself.
A colleague insists upon demonstrating how stressed they are about their upcoming deadline, as if I needed reminding about mine (I’m already past it, and the client keeps phoning me to tell me all about it).
Pulling extra hours isn’t actually getting that much more work done.

HOME

I still have lots of Three Rings to go, most notably a file-storing system, and I can’t find a way to focus on it.
I have heaps of laundry to do…
…oughta tidy up, too…
…and sort some things out with the bank, with my parents, with the Dept. of Comp. Sci…

But, above it all – the killer:

I can’t find the motivation to get on with any of it, and it’s all building up into a mammoth heap of incompleteness.

End of rant.