October 2005 Archives
Follow these simple steps for something really quite amusing...
1 - Go to http://www.google.com/
2 - Enter the word "failure" (without the quotes) as your search term
3 - Click "I'm Feeling Lucky" to go straight to the first search result.
[At the time of writing, this takes you to the biography of one George W. Bush, President of the United States of America.]
Time -- Time Management Tips for Developers
Collect all tasks in a to-do list -- I started doing this fairly recently (in part prompted by an internally delivered training course I went on) and it's actually made a bit of a difference. It certainly makes the work-load I'm dealing with *feel* like it's more manageable. It also makes it seem like I've achieved more when I can see a list of items crossed off a list.
Delegate when feasible -- Something that I know I don't do as much as I should do. "Dump It. Delegate It. Do It". The three options I was told to use (in the same training course!) whenever a task comes my way. I'm a hoarder at times. I keep tasks for myself because I think that I'll be able to do them better and quicker than anyone else. Mistake. Repeat after me, "Others can do the job too."
Identify your Timewasters -- Is someone dragging the rest of the team down? If they are, is it even their fault? Maybe they're out of their depth. Maybe they don't like the job they're doing. Maybe they're just bone ideal. All people have a working style, some peoples working styles just aren't right though. Changing a persons working style is one of the hardest things to do, the soft option is to manage them out of the business.
Reward Yourself -- (and your team!) Nothing provides for team motivation and cheer than a reward of some kind. Even a thankyou can be a reward. It's surprising how many people don't say "Thank You" for a job well done at work!
Developers -- Semack.Net - On Being a Manager
Keep Everyone Pointed in the Right Direction -- It's all too easy in a big project for people t o take divergent paths. Requirements are easy to interpret in any one of a thousand ways. Many things can be implemented either in a very simple way, or in a very complicated way. The very complicated way often has a lot of benefits associated, but, will they ever be used? To a developer the complicated way is good, because it is. To a development manager the simple way is good, because its quick and will bring the project in on time/budget. To the good development manager, the middle road that follows the same path as the rest of the development team, utilising any pre-existing code and best practice. This is also the way that was planned out and documented prior to the start of the project.
Double-Check Everyone's Work -- This ties back to keeping everyone pointed in the right direction. There's such a thing as "Specification Creep" and hand in hand with that comes "Implementation Creep". As well as checking to make sure a piece of work has been implemented correctly (including following any development / coding guidelines in place) and in an efficient manner, ensuring that what's been done actually fits the specification is just as important.
Evaluate Employees -- This applies to everyone, not just developers. Spend some time talking to your team. Coaching and guidance should be a constant and ongoing thing, but, always take time to block out 15 minutes a week to touch base with each person in your team. Use the time to find out how things are going, to deal with their concerns and to track their professional development. Annual appraisals are all well and good but everything that gets written on the appraisal form should be things you've discovered and discussed during the year previously. An appraisal shouldn't have any surprises for the appraiser or (especially!) the appraisee.
Most of this is a reminder to me. Things I should do. Practices, process and procedures I should implement. I just need to make sure I do it now!
One of the biggest surprises for me with Visual Studio Tools for Office is that the parts of the Office suite which are supported are Excel and Word. Mainly that Access isn't (or doesn't appear to be - directly) one of the supported platforms. There's not been any mention in the Access 12 blog or the Access Developer Centre that I've seen of support for using .net as a development platform within Access. In fairness, Access already has a quite powerful forms package and the thought of the work that would go into interfacing that with the .net winforms package doesn't really bear thinking about.
But still, when oh when will Access be augmented so it's usable as a dot net development platform? Surely having code and datastore all in one file is the ultimate in One-Click deployment?
I'm fairly certain I haven't linked to this before, but, Incessant Ramblings: The anatomy of a bug makesfor a fantastic explanation of something that I deal with day-in, day-out at work. Yes, it might be a bug, but we know about it. There's a work-around. The cost of fixing it is too high. Sometimes I wish it was easier to get people to appreciate that.
What makes it even better is that the example used in that article is one of a problem I encountered this month when mucking around when mucking around with deploying to a mobile device! Fluke or,.. ?
They're fantastically useful things which make it easy to access metadata in SQL Server in a (theoretically!) version agnostic manner. I've mentioned them (or similar) in SQL Server 2005: sysXXXX tables and Finding the Foreign Keys for a table.
Something that's long been on my list of things to do is to explore the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views and re-code some things which I use that directly reference the sysXXXX tables so that they use INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. One of these is a one line script which generates a resultset containing one row for each Foreign Key in a database, eg. "DROP CONSTRAINT [xxxxxxxxxxx]". Very useful, but if all is to be believed, it won't work in SQL Server 2005.
Related Links:
- [DevX.com] INFORMATION_SCHEMA: A Map to Your Database
A quick, and quite useful overview of INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Explains both the pros and cons. - [msdn] SQL Essentials: Foreign Key Metadata: Improving on INFORMATION_SCHEMA views
An interesting article on extending the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to increase their usefulness.
There are various different ways to run scheduled process on Windows systems, depending on what's available:
Admittedly the articles / blog entries I've linked to for using a Windows Service or a Scheduled Task don't show either in a particularly shining light, kinda the plan really! Using a Windows Service is just plain silly, talk about un-necessary overhead! I've seen XYNTService used for this purpose (obviously it'd been changed somewhat, but the base implementation was much of a much). Bad. And. Wrong. Bad. And. Wrong.
SQL Server Agent Jobs on the other hand,... Easy access to a datastore, the ability to run both executables (and by virtue of this, scripts in damn near any scripting language) and TSQL and easy and ready access to a database for logging, data storage and manipulation.
Well, it looks like slashdot have something to say about the Petzold article I linked to earlier...
The best bit is, reading some of the comments, they're incredibly insightful and well worth a read. Go on, you know you want to!
Code somehow seems like it was a lot more "fun" back in the days when an IDE was simple, like QuickBasic.
Well, I've finally got tired of jumping through the hoops that LloydsTSB put in front of me. Hello, and welcome back, HSBC.
- I have a credit card which LloydsTSB in their infinite wisdom have registered with Experian (a credit reference agency!) not once when it started, but twice. Once when it started and again a few weeks ago. This means that it's negatively impacted on my credit rating. And it's just plain wrong and not what I'd expect of a financial institution.
- I wanted to transform the credit card into a loan. Now you'd think this is a good idea and the bank would support this, given that it's me managing my finances responsibly! (Fixed term loan rather than open ad-hoc credit) But no, apparently the CREDIT BUREAU says NO.
Now, this means (to me at least) that because they've fucked up my record with the CREDIT REFERENCE AGENCY (aka CREDIT BUREAU) their own systems won't give me a loan. There also didn't appear to be any option to say, yes, I know I have a credit card which might be negatively impacting my credit rating, but I WANT TO GET RID OF IT AT THE TIME OF GETTING THE LOAN. No one, but no one, seemed to be able to make a decision independtly of the computer.
At LloydsTSB, The computer says no
Totally and utterly bloody useless.
Well, to an extent they have redeemed themselves! Boots have a new "seasonal" range of sandwiches which are nothing short of fantaastic. Having been thorougly un-impressed with their previous offerings (see here and here) I tried their newly released "Seasonal" sandwiches and have to admit to being thoroughly impressed. Butter-basted Turkey with other goodness, Pork, Salmon with cream cheese and dill and (as yet un-tried) Brie & Grape. The first three are all fantastic and a nice departure from the usual choices of chicken, chicken and, erm, chicken. Now I've just got to hope and pray that the next "Seasonal" set are as good as these.
Finally -- something worth eating at lunchtime from Boots!
