Have you ever wondered where C#, BASIC (yes, it’s an acronym), or C++ came from? What about Ruby, Python or PHP? And whatever happened to Algol, Ada or Pascal. And where exactly is Delphi at these days?
Well, you can see a timeline of these and forty or so other languages here at levenez.com.
Fascinating!
I have long been of the opinion that developers and programmers (is there any difference?) should be left alone to do what they do best, i.e. develop/write software. Moreover, they outght to be able to do so with a clear scedule and without fear of interruption.
Switching between tasks takes time. There is only a finite amount of room in your head for various programming-related paraphenalia, so the moment you switch tasks, inevitably, some of what you currently hold will have to give way
I’ve recently stumbled across two articles that bear this out for me:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2391-the-pleasure-of-an-open-schedule
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html
So who is responsible for this? Well, a number of people, and it starts at the top. The prime goal of a project manager, for me, is to remove any obstacles from the path of development.
I once answered a Question on StackOverflow regarding surnames and regular expressions. I thought this might be worthy of a note here as well.
The questioner wanted to how to write a regular to transform surnames with irregular capitalisations. I.e. names like
Quite simply this is not possible as there is no reliable rule that holds 100% of the time.
Consider the following names:
They are all correct. Even Mr Macdonald who doesn’t capitalise his ‘D’s. Our regex would churn out:
Bad regex!
We have to be careful when dealing with surnames – these could be our customers after all. And there is little that is more insulting than having your own name being churned up and spat out by some half-baked regex. Especially as this may be done by several such half-based regexes at different companies. You may feel like you want to change your name just so they get it right!
It’s as bad a name mispronunciation. I feel for all the people named Cockburn – (pronounced ‘Coeburn’), or McLeod – (‘McCloud’).
Unfortunately, this is all too common. Some systems are programmed only to store uppercase characters, in which case you are scuppered, and you do have to rely on some magical but flawed algorithm.
Others seek to perform some sort of user-input validation or correction. In any such case, the validation system should allow the user to input what they intended and not tell them how to think.
And always make it really really easy in your systems and processes to make minor corrections to a surname. This is a human being after all!
I still get letters from Scottish Gas addressed to Mr G Wiseman. And yet, they know my first name is James. I’ve tried to change it but just go through numerous levels of call-centre, and then get told that I need to provide it in writing. and email is not good enough. Sigh!
Some time ago I Investigated a problem with that a tester was encountering with forced font smoothing on Windows.
We were migrating a system that utilised Monospaced/Fixed Width font. When retaining this font on the new Web Form (changing font was not an option) the default smoothing looked really bad.
So how do you turn off font smoothing in Windows XP?
These instructions are courtesy of Arizona State University: http://www.west.asu.edu/it/start/faqs/fontsmoothxp.htm
You can also turn off font smoothing in CSS3 (so only IE8+, sorry!): http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-smooth-prop
I also found another useful tool when trying to determine the exact font used in the legacy system (this was not apparent from the code). Find out your font from a bitmap.
Finally, if you want to dig further into fonts, smoothing and subpixel rendering check out This Aritcle From Joel Spolsky
