Army Of Care

And they do it again

I can fly

http://cad-comic.com/news.php?i=1574#1578

Like Tim States in the short intro , im sooooooo happy at the justice they are doing to the iron man movie. From the trailer i can see most of the major events in iron man history but how far are they going to take in in terms of time lines ,i.e. are they going to stop at the current iron man series cos that would be awesome. Though i doubt they have the cgi power to power his current storyline to full justice

See you in 4 years

So i dunno if i will ever get the chance to do this i again , so here goes . Wooooooohooooooooooooo Leap Year day thingy post .Hopefully i will get a chance to do this again.

Beyond WTF

Ok i have seen some really great WTF’s in my short life but today i saw one that takes the cake (and no the cake is not a lie ;) ) .

Background  :

One of my clients that i deal with uses and internal application that was developed in house .For the past 3 weeks or so they have been complaining about not being able to use one of the more tested document submission features.

The Problem  :

The problem that they were having is that not very large documents were taking hours to upload to our servers. Having ruled out the in house bandwidth after some testing it was declared the problem was on there side .So of runs their IT team to check , but come back with a all clear. Next i hook up a speed test application (the thing you would see on some ISP sites) so that i can test the bandwidth between them and us. This also comes back clear as they have a really high upload rate. So i start checking and re-checking the code to see if there might be some oddity there. No , again the code is clean nothing to report .

D-Day  :

After last minute checking before heading to the client we set of on the great adventure to determine the cause of the weird speeds (bare in mind that they say its takings hours to upload a 2mg file). So when we get to the site i see the users busy testing the site and notice that they had just submitted the file successfully. So now the cogs start churning  in my head what are they complaining about , so start the walk through with them to find the problem.

Step 1

Select file to upload from the local pc by clicking the browse button. Status : completed successfully .

Step 2

Press the upload button . Status : Completed Successfully

Step 3

Click the OK button on the pop up notifying the user that the file was uploaded successfully . Status : Completed Successfully.

The whole process takes less than 15 secs in total for a 2mb file. So what was the problem that they were having .No it seems that they  are to clever to click the OK button ,instead waited for the loading bar the bottom of the browser to finish.

To them that meant the file was uploaded . A Message poping up in your face  and locking the entire browser means nothing to them :( .

Back to he drawing board for me

May the force be with your code young padawan

So who said that ?

Doubt anyone will get the answer but if you do let me know .The topic of discussion in this post i would like to think is around the whole concept of mentoring. Not only in programming but in any field a mentor is quite important. But the important question is how long do you stick as someones mentor before they would be ready.In the programming workspace because of the constant changes around us all the time i think it would be in accurate to judge when someone is ready based on what they have learn’t ,instead i think you need to judge a padawan as ready when they are able to pick up on concepts easily and implement them the way that they were designed to .

Obviously this is my personal opinion , how do you judge when a person is ready?

using System.Reflection

Reflecting back on the past is usually never a good thing but i thought id make quick post about the change in my job environment. If there is one thing i get to do alot these days is reflect on the past and one of the major changes i have picked up is the change in work environment. In my first company we would all come in  dressed relaxed jean and T Shirts .Now i come in dressed so formal i think im going for a interview everyday. But thats just natural progression i think as you increase in rank and responsibilities you are required to act the part .I am just curious to see what the future holds .So how has your environment changed if at all

How dammit how

For some weird reason my last post now has   a post date as 1970 , considering i wasn’t born yet it seems spirits have access to wordpress as well :)

And the laziest of us shall rule the world…….

Well almost.

Anyway back to the post. Some time ago my good friend Ewoudt came up with a nice use for his cellphone ,he used it as a remote control for his pc . Sounding interesting i decided i wanted to do the same cos i spend a lot of time watching stuff on my PC and basically using it as a jukebox. The only down side being that the application he used for the control between his pc and phone was a linux only application.

This it self wasn’t a problem for me until i remembered i cant install linux on my laptop and there was no way i was gona setup a vm just to watch movies and listen to music. So the googleing started for the quest to find a windows version of the application .Lo and behold there is not a single decent windows application. The ones that do work need a license and nothing open source that had progressed far enough for everyday use.

Final option develop my own app . Man that was the worst option of all. Being a .net junkie i quickly check out msdn and a good few other blogs that looks promising( C4F being the main source) .Get a ton of source code compile in C# express 2008 and try to run the app .Thats as far as it got , no matter what i did it would not find any bluetooth device in the area around me even though there were plenty. More research and i find out most of the C# Source is for the Microsoft Bluetooth stack ,and since i was running the Widcomm stack it was a no go once again. The effort to remove drivers and try and use the MS drivers were just not worth the effort as there was no guarantee it was going to work.

Ok so may be C# and .Net was not the best for this scenario i decided that i would switch to Java and see if i could get it going there. While this proved to be a bit beter than the C# path i eventually hit a dead end again with the code.Now just frustrated and getting no where i started random googles to see what i could find and kept on coming across Sony Ericson’s developer link. Nothig left to loose i looked a bit around the site .It seemed what i was trying to do this entire time was quite simple .

You see Sony Erricson being the cool guys they are made most of there phones HID’s .This simply means that almost every SE phone is a Human Interface Device. And that when used in conjunction with bluetooth can remote control a pc with its OWN BUILT IN SOFTWARE . So how cool is that , i can now do everything i wanted to do + do it with no config or install at all on any bluetooth capable pc.

Now i can finally relax and watch movies at my convenience

So enjoy and let me know if u can replicate this simpler and free at the same time

follow Vista SP1

follow Vista SP1

Dont you love easter eggs

Its not really a major easter egg or any thing hectic but its nice anyway .

Place : Wordpress Blog Stats

Steps to find:

On the blog stats page scroll right to the bottom of the page and in the bottom of the left hand corner you will find a :)

Like i said nothing hectic but still funny :-)

Now that i look at it more , it seems that its on all the settings page.