Unusual Coding Tips, Part 1

Make your font larger in your IDE/text editor. Not only is it easier to read, but you'll tend to write shorter methods and simpler code. In RubyMine, I'm using Monaco 13.

Breakdown

My car wouldn't start the other day, so I called out the RAC. He plugged his laptop in to check for faults and traced the problem to the front fuel pump. He unclipped the air intake and sprayed something from a bright yellow aerosol inside. The car then started. Naturally, I was curious what this spray was. He turned the can over to reveal something called Start Ya Bastard. Unbelievable. I wanted to keep his spray, in case the engine wouldn't start again, but he couldn't give it to me because it was his only one and he had used it twice that day already! Sounds like something we should carry in our cars at all times...

Snow Leopard

I upgraded to Snow Leopard a few days ago. Conclusion? Largely inoffensive. In no particular order, the changes I have seen are:

1. The icons in the top-right of the menu bar are now greyed out when inactive, e.g. when airport is off, iChat isn't running.
2. There's a new keyboard and character viewer next to the clock. Does this replace the international preferences
3. Spotlight can now (and should have been all along) configured to search the current folder when used in a Finder window.
4. New desktop background.
5. Changing Spaces animation is quicker and/or smoother.
6. Selecting a 32-bit panel in System Preferences, causes SP to restart in 32-bit mode. Shame the user has to see this, but I suppose everything will be 64 bit soon enough.
7. More disk space available, not sure how much (about 5 degrees on the Activity Monitor disk usage pie chart!!)
8. Time Machine is a bit more informative. It's also quicker, but since it goes on in the background anyway, it hardly matters how long it takes (within reason).
9. Mail is quicker and I think the tool buttons look a bit different (worse actually).
10. Aqua style scroll bars still around the place (I thought they would all now look more like iTunes).
11. I installed without Rosetta, so now if I try to run a PowerPC app (like Word 2004), I get the change to download Rosetta first. So far, I have resisted!
12. Glims doesn't work in Safari any more.
13. Context menus on dock icons are now black.
14. You can press and hold an application's dock icon to Exposé it.
15. The Software Update 'checking...' window is bigger.
16. Errr....

All a bit of an anti-climax. I knew it wouldn't be that different, but I was hoping for a general speed boost, especially in apps like Aperture and Logic. It is supposed to be more stable, but stability wasn't an issue for me before. Perhaps other types of Mac benefit more than mine?

Let me know if you think I'm missing something important...

Ex-director-y, Part 11. Not so Ex-director-y now.

Looks like I've moved from being an ex-director to three new directorships in one go!

1. Tin Cloud. Not a company yet, so I'm not a director in the Companies House sense, but director nonetheless. Aworka is included in this.
2. Vacancy Informer Ltd. This is a company that pre-dates the new vacancyinformer.com web site, to be directed separately to Tin Cloud.
3. ARC Foundation. This is an incorporated charity for animal welfare and rescue, so I'll be a director and a trustee.

Watch this space!

Ex-director-y, Part 10. Myers Briggs for Programmers

I just found an article relating Myers Briggs For Programmers. Quite interesting, if you like stuff like this (which I confess I do: I automatically try to 'type' everyone I meet!).

There are a few points of interest to me (as an ENTJ):

1. As an E, I shouldn't really be working alone. It's true, I do struggle sometimes, and often talk out loud to myself!
2. The Author couldn't easily relate F for programmers, which from my experience doesn't matter: few programmers are F!
3. J's would tend to prefer C++ to Smalltalk (or Ruby), because they need to fully understand things. I would tend to agree that I found Ruby almost too powerful at first, asking myself how it could possibly do some of the things it does. P's wouldn't care; they would just use the power. How did I cope? I wasted loads of time finding out how Ruby (and Rails) works!
4. Very few (software?) workplaces have high N. I have experienced this too (much to my frustration). S's will tend to resist change, opting for tried and tested approaches, or the quickest (not necessarily best) solutions. This might be OK for business in the short term, but there is a risk of falling behind more progressive N companies, who define bolder goals and invest to achieve them. As I've mentioned previously in my Ex-director-y posts, I wish I'd been tougher on this, but I wasn't and that's why I had to go...
5. I'm gratified that Google is ENTJ, and Microsoft is ISTJ. This makes complete sense to me. I have looked inside a few low N, high S led organisations and the most frustrating thing for me (as a strong N), is that it is exactly an S quality not to appreciate the need for some N, which leaves them floundering about in the present rather than moving towards a future. Microsoft obviously hasn't always been an S organisation, but it clearly is now, so was Woolworths.
6. I'd most like to work with an N-F, to blend their wacky with my mighty.

Ruby on Commodore 64

Yep! But of course, real progressives would expect nothing less than Ada.

(And I thought my ideas for Object Oriented Assembler were nuts...)

My New Commodore 64

My computing career began at age 13 with a Commodore 64. I originally wanted a BBC Micro, but couldn't save enough pennies, so bought a C64 instead. In retrospect, this was a good decision: BBCs were mostly for skiers; C64 for snowboarders (even though snowboards probably weren't invented then). Anyway, I'm not sure what I did with my original C64 so have just bought a similar one on ebay because I decided I ought to own the computer that changed my life! I think I've still got some of my old programs somewhere, including a drum machine (Drumz) and a half finished side scrolling shooter game (OffWorld) (all in assembler of course).

The screenshot shows a Power64 emulator, behind my real C64 (through an EyeTV).

Has anyone got any spare 5.25" Double Density floppies?