Life

Why Amazon Prime is a waste of time

Chris Hart — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:25:38 GMT

I recently purchased an item on Amazon that I needed delivered quickly, so I selected Express delivery from the delivery options. I saw a message - did I want to spend £49 and get express delivery on all my orders for a year? I decided against it - most of the time I can live with the delay of supersaver delivery. On the same day, I bought a load of stuff with free delivery.

You may see where this is going - yes, the free delivery stuff arrived yesterday, without a hitch. The doorbell is in need of batteries, so I didn't hear it arrive. No problem - the Postie left it in my Parcelsafe. The express delivery stuff shipped yesterday, and was attempted delivery today. I'd popped into town with Nathan at the time. Thing is, Express delivery requires a signature, and my Postie wouldn't leave it in the Parcelsafe and has had to take it back to the depot. And if you've ever done a big trip into town with a nearly-2-year-old, you'll understand my reluctance to venture back again this afternoon!

So yeah, stick with free delivery - most of the time it works out fine.

Future plans

Chris Hart — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:33:10 GMT

I've made the somewhat difficult decision to leave permanent employment and dive into the uncharted waters of contract work. While I've had a good six months back at work, I've been thinking long and hard about how best to move my career along. I've been spending a long time in the car to get to work, and being that far out makes it difficult to work more than 7 hours a day and get back in time to pick up Nathan from nursery. Working from home saves me at least an hour and a half in the car every day, which is really going to help me to be a bit more productive with my working time. I'll still do three days a week, but I can now do three full days a week instead of two and a half.

I've got my first contract lined up starting in a couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to the change. We've had a hectic summer with a bit of a garage conversion being done, but now that the study part is finished, I've got somewhere to work that isn't the dining room!

I've got one of the new Dell Vostro laptops on order - they seem to be way cheaper than the Latitudes, but I'm hoping that's just because they're a little bit more chunky, and not down to the cost of the parts! Still, Dell warranties are pretty good, so if it does all go pear-shaped, at least I can get it repaired. Having read how Dan's fared with his 64 bit machine, at least I have some idea of what to expect.

Heroes and Villans

Chris Hart — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:04:03 GMT

On Monday night we finished watching Heroes series 1 on the Sci Fi channel, and even though we've had to put up with it being shown in 4:3 aspect ratio with annoying advert breaks, it's still the best show I think I've ever seen. I have been jumping off the sofa with excitement, almost shouting about how cool it is, and not many shows have ever had that effect!

Now the excitement is going to start all over again, and if you've not yet seen it and you're in the UK, for goodness sake, set your watches for next Wednesday night when it arrives on BBC 2. Even better, if you have HD, it's being broadcast in its true glory on BBC HD! Despite having watched the first series already, I'm really looking forward to seeing it again as it was meant to be seen, without half the picture being cut off the sides, no ad breaks, and in high definition too!

A lot of people have been raving about it, and with good reason - it really is fabulous. Unless, for some strange reason, you don't think the idea of ordinary people developing extraordinary abilities is cool. The many different stories and character threads evolve and intertwine over the course of the series, so don't give up on it if you find it confusing (I've heard that as an excuse from several people who gave up on it).

On a separate note, when are the Sci-fi channel (and Hallmark) ever going to go widescreen?

Who'd have thought it?

Chris Hart — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 22:22:51 GMT

I've had mixed feelings about the recent series of Doctor Who; while I've enjoyed the Doctor's new assistant, Martha, the quality of the episodes has been very variable. The really rather awful Dalek two-parter in the middle didn't help the series much at all, aside from the fact that the Radio Times gave away the plot before it even aired! Grumbles aside, the last few episodes really picked up and have been very enjoyable.

The Human Nature / Family of Blood two-part episode (based on a book by Paul Cornell) was wonderful, then there was the extremely creepy and wonderfully entertaining Blink (with the best 5 minute love story you could ever ask for). And finally, the return of Captain Jack for the final three-part masterpiece (pun intended) that was really rather fun. Yes, I ranted about Five People in a Basement in the past, and aside from one excellent episode (penned by Noel Clarke, aka Mickey from Who), I really didn't much care for the characters or the whole concept. Now, having watched the last three episodes of Doctor Who, my opinion of Jack has softened - he's an entertaining character to watch (just don't give him a gun - no-one can look more camp / less intimidating holding a gun than Jack), and he now has an incredibly interesting destiny to fulfill.

David Tennant is an excellent choice for the Doctor, and I I really enjoyed John Simm's performance. I really don't care about the fact that the final episode was hacked together from many, many sources (Return of the Jedi and Flash Gordon being the two that came to mind), because it was an enjoyable romp with a Big Reset Button and, naturally, A Ticking Clock - you can't have a scifi-by-numbers showdown between two rivals of this magnitude without using the biggest cliché's available! Much as I love Galactica and Heroes with their original approach to science fiction storytelling, there's still a market for this sort of fun stuff, and when it's done right it's very enjoyable. I just hope the next season of Torchwood isn't as much of a let down as the first one was.

By the way, why couldn't the BBC film Doctor Who in HD? The main thing that kept me watching Torchwood is that the BBC's HD content is absolutely glorious to watch, especially when compared to the HD content on Sky One. I'm not sure why this is - perhaps it's a bandwidth thing, but with the Sky HD content I'm less likely to notice the difference between HD and non-HD than with the BBC HD content.

--- UPDATE ---

Looks like Torchwood may yet have an ace up its sleeve for the next season - I do hope this rumour is true!

Documentation is an art

Chris Hart — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:53:35 GMT

It looks like my last post on documentation (or the lack thereof) has gathered some feedback (Hello Rigel :) so I just wanted to clarify a few points. Firstly, having previously edited books on programming, I find it very hard to read any technical material without a highly critical eye. I find myself getting frustrated when I see simple mistakes, shortcuts, and general sloppiness in articles. I experience similar pain in my day job when I encounter documentation written by others, and often have to stop myself from grabbing that documentation and helping to fix it when I'm supposed to be working on other things. The point is that many people (ok, most people) view documentation as a chore, something to be done at the end of a project because it's on the project planner. I've seen many project plans with developers and infrastructure people alike being allocated to develop a solution over a period of months, and allocating little over a day or two to "documentation". That's not what it's all about, people.

Documentation is not supposed to be "because we have to". It's because you _need_ to. If you've spent the last couple of months developing a system, whether it's completely bespoke, or whether it's extending / adapting an existing solution, your approach needs to be written down so that some poor sod who comes to look at it a year or two down the line can get some level of insight into what was going on in your head at the time. I spent about four months on just such a system a few years ago, which was a highly-customised implementation of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002. I'm glad I took the approach that I did and dug in my heels when it came to documentation, because if I hadn't, even I would have trouble, looking back at the project three years later, understanding what it was that we did and why we did it that way. That particular project is a good example of a need for documentation - in the three years since it was rolled out, all the other developers, the project manager, even the original sales account manager have all left, and the only people who have any knowledge of the system at all are the system tester (who isn't a developer), and myself (and I just took over a year out of work for maternity leave).

Now, that was a relatively small project - four developers, four months. In my last post, I talked about Community Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Community Server is a much bigger project than the one I worked on, and the guys have produced a book to help developers hoping to customise their product. Don't get me wrong, this is great stuff, and I'm glad they've done it (though I've not yet read the book, so I can express no opinions on the content of the book yet), since this means that they have documented their product in a way that is accessible to developers. They have done a great job on documenting the product for end users, by the way - Rob Howard himself does a lightning fast tour of the product over two video streams that gave me all the information I needed to decide that it was a good fit for the solution I have in mind. I guess I was just a bit disappointed with the quantity and quality of information available via the wiki. It's important to have basic documentation available and accessible to people wanting to use your product, and that's something that can be time consuming and difficult to produce without having access to a dedicated team of people who are able to build this sort of thing alongside the product.

Microsoft, to their credit, are so much better at this than they used to be. Back when .NET first arrived, the quality and quantity of information in the .NET SDK, for example, made the editors at Wrox have to really stop and think about how to approach the book market. The SharePoint SDK (my current companion), is fairly thorough, but I am finding myself getting a bit frustrated with the quality of some of the walkthroughs (notably, the Workflow walkthough). For starters, anyone who leaves anything with the glorious Visual Studio autogenerated title of thing1 (whether it be textbox1, task1, or workflow1) should have their wrists slapped hard. I've had to debug and fix code written by people who never bothered to rename their controls on an ASP.NET page, and it doesn't take long to get really fed up with trying to figure out what label15 is referring to, or wonder why someone would ever be happy checking in code featuring textbox1, textbox2, and so on. Perhaps I should log that as a request to the VS team for the next edition of VS (though I'm probably too late for VS2008) - please, whenever anyone adds any control to any page / form / workflow / etc., force them to name that control! Anyway, I could go on (and would, if I didn't have other stuff to do), so I'll have to stop here. Maybe some day I'll put together the DSG guide to writing successful documentation!