Category Archives: rants

The Flying Developer Is Not A Designer

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Anyone who follows this blog will notice that I’ve changed the theme recently. This was done because I finally admitted to myself that I’m not a particularly good web designer. Whilst I understand HTML, CSS and javascript I lack the design skills to weave them together into something that looks really good. That’s ok. In matters of design I’m prepared to defer to those who have had proper training and experience.

Instead, I’m now using a free wordpress theme called LightWord. The design is far superior to my previous attempt, if somewhat generic. However, I can now tweak this theme to my own needs without worrying too much about all the little details that I would miss if starting from scratch. This approach appeals to me because it’s an example of one of the central pillars of good programming: Code reuse. There are literally thousands of existing themes out there, so starting from scratch would mean repeating the work of many, many people. Seeing as I don’t plan on making design work part of my professional portfolio any time soon, I’m perfectly happy to borrow existing works (within the terms of their license) and bend them to suit my needs.

Complicated vs. Simple

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As a software developer, I’m used to being given tough problems and I’m not shy about building custom solutions from scratch to solve them. However, this is not always necessary. I recently learned that taking a step back and considering simpler solutions is always worthwhile.

This week, I was tasked with gathering and analyzing some data at my job. The task involved generating a couple of thousand data-points and examining their spread. The first part was easy, and accomplished in a couple of hours. What happened next was interesting though. Continue reading →

The iPad Doesn’t Need Multi-Tasking

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Lots of people have been quick to point out that Apple’s new iPad (a name which could have been better chosen) will lack multitasking support – just like the iPhone. I don’t think that this is going to be a problem.

Firstly, what kinds of activities were Apple showing off in the keynote? Let’s see:

  • Reading a book
  • Watching a film
  • Answering/Writing email
  • Browsing the web
  • Playing a video game
  • Listening to music

With the exception of the last item, I don’t think I’d want to combine any of those two tasks, especially on the same device. Who watches a movie while they’re trying to read a book? Even if I do want to switch between two such activities – Look up the name of an actor in the movie I’m watching for example – I’d have to pause/save/bookmark my movie/game/page in order to do so. Even if I could keep my movie playing while I did a search on the web, I wouldn’t want to: I’d miss some of the action!

Music is an exception that should be addressed, and indeed already has. Like the iPhone, you can play music ‘in the background’ while you do other things. Problem solved! The same can be said for services that need notification; Mail, Twitter, etc. Can all notify you that a message has arrived without interrupting the current task.

The iPad is definitely not for everyone, but anyone who is on the fence shouldn’t be too concerned by the lack of multi-tasking. When you’re buried in your favourite book or watching the climactic scene of a movie you won’t care.

Maxto goes commercial, makes me sad

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One of my favourite little desktop apps that I discovered a few months ago is MaxTo. It allows you to divide your Windows desktop into regions and then maximize applications to those regions, allowing perfect and practically effortless tiling. However, I don’t recommend that you download it. Not from the official website, anyway.

As of June 2nd, MaxTo stopped being a free application licensed under a Creative-Commons 3 license and went commercial. There is nothing wrong with this. However, I am miffed that I only discovered this after MaxTo had installed an update to my free version and turned it into a 30-day trial. What the hell? Here’s the dialog box I clicked on to install the new version:

MaxTo Update Dialog Box

I’m not impressed. I clicked on the ‘Yes’ button hoping to see a new, improved version of the app that I loved, not a sudden notice of impending termination of functionality. Instead of giving me something new, the creators decided to take it all away. That makes me sad.

However, there is a happy ending to this tale! The old version of MaxTo may have been removed from the official site, but my downloads folder is very big. I have downloads in there from waaay back. After a bit of digging, I found the old installer for the free version. Hooray! I promptly uninstalled the new, commercial version and re-installed the older one. Balance was once again restored to the Desktop. There’s even a handy checkbox in the options that turns off the update-checking.

Best of all though, because the old version is licensed under CC, I’m free to re-distribute it here for anyone that wants it. Yay!

Maxto Installer version 1