Category: Commentary

From Motivational Quotes

In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.

– Theodore Roosevelt

This is an experiment. Working for $BIG_COMPANY. And I’m unsure I’ll like it.

Ars Technica took a look at the recent Safari Public Beta for Windows and came up with this gem:

Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won’t be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.

No, it won’t be as feature-complete but that’s by design, you pillock.

Since when were FEATURES the most important thing?

An international research consortium today published a set of papers that promise to reshape our understanding of how the human genome functions. The findings challenge the traditional view of our genetic blueprint as a tidy collection of independent genes, pointing instead to a complex network in which genes, along with regulatory elements and other types of DNA sequences that do not code for proteins, interact in overlapping ways not yet fully understood.

During my degree, it used to really irritate me that geneticists used the term “junk” to describe these non-protein-coding regions. To me, junk means rubbish, stuff we don’t need, eBay-able. I believed that these regions were important, that they couldn’t be more than just the detritus of thousands of years of evolution.

Now of course, I’d have called it a hash in terms of how it seemed to us to be a jumble. A hash is a term also used for encryption as well as for food (as in a mix of things).

Now of course, the junk is now useful. Perhaps even essential.

The concept of non-evil Stepmom was recently investigated by my daughter.

MEGGAN: Daddy, who is your girlfriend?
ME: I don’t have one, sweetie.
MEGGAN: Can I be your girlfriend?
ME: Nope. You’re my daughter. That’s a hundred times more special.
MEGGAN: yay (hugs me)
MEGGAN: Daddy.
ME: Yes, sweetie.
MEGGAN: Would you marry Jill?
ME: No. She’s your childminder. And I don’t like her.
MEGGAN: Neither do I.
ME: So why should I marry her?
MEGGAN: She would be an evil Stepmother.
ME: Do you want an evil Stepmother?
MEGGAN: No!
ME: I know a couple of girls I’d like to marry.
MEGGAN: Do you like to kiss them
ME: *laughs* I’ve never kissed them. I just like them. They’re nice.
MEGGAN: But they can’t be a Stepmother.
ME: Why not?
MEGGAN: because they’re GOOD…
ME: Oh. Okay. Yes. Makes perfect sense.

I’m counting down the days I still have to work here in my own company.

From the 18th, I’ll be a cog in a massive corporate machine. I’m currently copying my data from my work-owned superfast MacBook to my own 2+ year old PowerBook. Not for any other reason than the MacBook might be better deployed to one of the other guys here. I’ll still have a shexy intel iMac to play with.

Changing bank mandates and signatories so the guys can cope without me has been the only work I’ve been doing during the last month with a few exceptions. I’m here simply as backup. And so far it’s been working well.

I’m not not nervous. But I think everything is going to be okay.

My object of envy is 25, he’s just started working for a BIG company and they’re paying him beyond his wildest dreams. He’s just bought a house, nay, not a house, a shrine, with a girl he met the first day he went to university, 18 years old and naive in the ways of the world and six months later they were dating. Within 24 hours of their first kiss, she decided that he was the man for her and set about making that happen. He’s really smart, creative, he’s still got the imagination and guts to write a couple of books though he’s only every shown anyone his poetry and short stories. He’s compassionate, full of hope, would do anything for a friend (driving 300 miles along Irish roads in the lashing rain because you didn’t enjoy the gig – and he’s come to take you home), generous and so optimistic it makes your eyes hurt. He’s got the world in his hands

Yes, I envy the man I was just under a decade ago.

Worse still, I pity what he will become.

CoreData is Apple’s answer to EOF. A standardised way of saving local data which should be addressable in several ways, not least through a sqlite interface.

Google Gears is a method of storing “web data” in an offline mode. For example, making it so that GMail could be available when not “connected”. It’s got similarities but it’s very different.

Wouldn’t that be neat? I’d see that as really being useful to a device like iPhone. When your “low cost” WiFi connectivity might be unavailable, you have an offline cache which saves you having to use your per-MB 3G connection.

A product we’ve got on the drawing board is a a trouble-ticket system. Initially we’ve designed it to support an Apple Authorised Service Provider so it handles booking in machines for repair and goes through the whole process for them. Next, we’re going to be integrating it with Apple’s online systems for checking warranty status and ideally, part availability. After that – a remote rich client so that engineers can work on repair documentation while not in the office (rich clients are so much nicer than web interfaces). After that, an offline mode so that the engineer can create and update repairs on the system and have them synchronise with the server when a link comes up again. There’s more to this, enough to keep us busy.

Google Gears looks very interesting in this light. Even moreso when you realise that it also uses sqlite…