Category: humor

Clickwrap UI mini-rant

When I am ruler of the universe, this will be my first edict:

Any clickwrap license which:
(a) is longer than 1000 words, OR
(b) is longer than ten (10) times the height of the text box it is enclosed in, OR
(c) is displayed in a text box that uses less than 5% of the total display area and cannot be resized by the user for easier reading, OR
(d) cannot be selected for copying and pasting into another document, OR
(e) cannot be read before purchase,
IS AUTOMATICALLY NULL AND VOID.

Inspiration abounds, but today it’s the Firefox 3 clickwrap license window’s that fails (c) and probably also (a) and (b) which reminded me of this common UI issue.

Bad, Bad Code

I’ve written before about tips for offshoring. One specific thing I said to watch for is the bait-and-switch of talent: during the sales process you’re shown rockstars, but the real code you get is written by clueless newbies. When you set up a project such that you’ve minimized the cost per hour of development, but you don’t have anyone checking the work product (i.e. code reviews) coming from the subcontractor, very bad things happen.
Continue reading “Bad, Bad Code”

Prefactoring

I have a text file full of links and notes extracted from about a month of reading everything posted to the 2 dozen Ruby, Rails, Postgres, and web tech blogs that I subscribe to via RSS. There’s so much going on in Ruby and Rails in particular, especially when it comes to convenient shortcuts that save you work, that there’s something new and cool and slightly revolutionary on a daily basis that you could use to make your app prettier.

So I’ve been in a state of analysis paralysis for about a week.

I was trying so hard to be clever and state of the art that I forgot to get something working.
Continue reading “Prefactoring”

Bruce Tate on learning J2EE

I’ve been listening to the Ruby on Rails Podcast over the last month or so, starting with the first episode from way back in July 2005 and now I’m up to the March 10, 2006 episode with Bruce Tate. There’s a great section in this podcast where Bruce describes the immense amount of information that programmers have to learn in order to approach J2EE.
Continue reading “Bruce Tate on learning J2EE”