magpiebrain

It’s cold, and no doubt it’s going to get colder. Some of my colleagues are currently enjoying temperatures of -35°C, and will no doubt pick up the odd cold along the way. With this in mind I thought that I’d post my favourite cold remedy, courtesy of an old mailing list:

Ingredients

* 1 Lemsip max strength sachet or similar, lemon recommended
* 1 soluable vitamin C tablet, lemon flavour preferable, orange at a pinch. Go for 1000mg Vitamin C, or the 500m Vitamin C/Zing tablets if you can find them
* 1/2 Lemon
* Hot water
* Honey to taste
* Mug
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I used to use the amount I learnt during a job as some measure of how enjoyable the job was. I remember in the Good Old Days(TM) when any day in which I learnt something, was a good day. Recently however I’ve come to appreciate that there are some lessons you just don’t want to have to learn, like “Don’t leave the bleach next to the shampoo”. Much of my recent on the job learning have been things I really didn’t want to know. Like “An Ant build with over 60 inter-dependant targets creates a really large, pretty graph”, or “Managing DB migration is a pain in the posterior with decent change logs”.

Roll on lessons like “Full body massages are really nice”…

You want justification? Lets discuss. First off, I’m brighter than you, have a better job, am better looking, went to a better university, and didn’t vote for Bush/Blair/Kerry/Hitler. You, on the other hand, are less relevant than _anything_ found on the bottom of my shoe.

As you’ll no doubt of heard many times, most problems in computing can be solved in a variety of ways. Knowing which (if any) of the known solutions are best, is typically down to experience, and the desire to experiment with unknown solutions that could yield positive benefits. In a project context, it can be all too easy to just do the known thing – better the devil you know and all that. However if managed properly, there is scope for limited experimentation during a project.

A colleague of mine has successfully used the approach where new best practises are adopted for a short duration – such as a a single iteration. I would actually advocate these best practises being very rigidly enforced, more so than normal. The aim is that people get a good feel for another approach, and will be better able to make an informed judgement call in the future. Such altered practises might include things as simple as “no getters allowed”, or “use the visitor pattern instead of the iterator pattern”, or more process oriented changes, such as automatically running “findbugs”:http://findbugs.sf.net/ when you check in to CVS, or “hansel(Automatic code coverage of JUnit tests)”:http://hansel.sf.net/ when you run your JUnit tests.
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John Peel “died today(BBC News – Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies)”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3955289.stm whilst on holiday. Radio 1 will never be the same.

Skinning GMail

Over at “persistent.info”:http://persistent.info/, Hammers has used the “URLid”:http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/uriid extension for Firefox to create a “personal skin for GMail”:http://persistent.info/archives/2004/10/05/gmail-skinning using CSS. The result is less than stunning, however does show the potential. Personally, GMail’s interface has put me off – not just the look (which is so 2002), but the actual UI – I frequently find myself hunting for links, and find the interface far too busy. Now whilst I can’t change everything I’d like to, I can change some of it, so I should probably stop moaning about the excellent free service.
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My morning routine before leaving for work goes a little something like this:

# Get up & dressed
# Wash
# Watch BBC Breakfast to see if aliens have landed
# Check the web for Underground news (“London Underground”:http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/)
# Check the weather (the “BBC”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml)
# Quickly scan mail to see if anything needs a reply before I leave (“Gmail”:http://www.gmail.com/)
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My new design is up. There are a few kinks to work out, but I decided to do that on a running system. More information on the redesign to follow. Feel free to “provide feedback”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/contact if anything seems screwy…

A meeting with more than six people in it can only hope to achieve one thing – to arrange more meetings.

* A huge supposition on my part, that 1. I’m going to come up with more than these ( It’s kind of like those bands that release “Best Of, Volume 1” – it’s just asking for trouble), and 2. that I’ll come up with so many that some kind of classification system is required.

I have just discovered the delight that is pluggable search implementations in Firefox. Click on the Google icon to the left of your firefox search box, then click @Add engines…@. You are presented with a (rather ugly) page presenting a multitude of search plugins for everything from “amazon”:http://www.amazon.com, “imdb”:http://www.imbd.com, “SamSpade”:http://www.samspade.org and most importantly “AllMusic”:http://www.allmusic.com. Best of all you don’t even have to restart your browser to pick up your newly installed plugins.