Posts by Robin

Re: Pics! Where are the pics?

Or far away.

Re: GUI interface

Thanks a lot. I just had to go and watch that clip again, and now I feel sick.

no-one in the office to ask those 'off the cuff' questions

My team of 9 is split across 4 offices and in my particular office there are 3 of us. Today one of my colleagues is off sick and the other is working from home, but I can ask off-the-cuff questions to any of my other team members over text chat or a quick call, possibly involving a screenshare of some code. In which case it's the same whether I'm at home or here. We still learn stuff via these random chats or side-chats during calls. Although obviously it's not perfect 100% of the time, it's pretty straightforward and our team has been working like this for about 5 years now. We work as one team regardless of location and most of the time I have no idea whether my colleagues in other offices are at home or not.

Re: We all traipse into the office for that critical meeting that HAS to be face-to-face..

The problem there is as you say, most people being in one room and some people calling in. For that stuff we try to do it so that either ALL attendees are physically there, or ALL attendees are calling in, even if half the people in the meeting are sitting at their desks on their own machines near each other.

Re: An exercise in pointlessness

road to hell and all that...

The road to hell is Rhea-ly dangerous.

"the stories seem to have got a lot less dramatic recently."

Wait until you hear about the time I left a USB cable on my desk...

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

If companies got rid of the requirements for upper case, lower case, numbers, special characters blablabla and just made users type in longer phrases that are more easily remembered, then the ...1,2,3 stuff wouldn't even happen.

I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!

Re: Microsoft’s changelog...

Yeah if I made 8 releases to fix a production issue in our system, I'd quite rightly be accused of having guessed what the problem was and just trying things until it went away.

Re: Only the Guilty?

Only English allowed?

You jest, but in a previous place where I worked, a manager became frustrated that he couldn't eavesdrop on some conversations between devs (presumably paranoia-driven) and declared "English only in the office please".

Said office was in Gibraltar, where a large % of people speak Spanish. You can imagine how well that was received.

Re: If You Ask Me

"I think someone has an axle to grind."

I'm getting tyred of all these puns.

Re: What is it about 'tech pioneers' and space?

Yeah, better to wait until satellite debris is a massive problem and THEN try and fix it right? (It already is a problem)

What does Tesco do with hundreds of thousands of employees? It was started by one guy.

Re: The game is not just online

I've been doing this successfully using the Lewdle version for a while, and I didn't even know I was playing.

Re: Getting there

Unfinished products like the original iPhone not having copy + paste?

Out of interest, what are the features that make you consider it as not right?

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Ah, The Human Cent-iPad. Great episode!

Maybe this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqTntG1RXSY

Re: pet peeve

> "Login" is the noun for the user's account, "log in" the verb.

I once pointed out a typo on the customer-facing website along these lines, and it was dismissed on the basis that "login" as a verb is used so widely that it's accepted parlance. *sigh

Re: Why not test it on earth?

"Why not test it on earth?"

No, I'm pretty sure that they're going to make a plan to use it on Mars without having tested it at all.

Re: Estimating Software Projects

"My general rule of thumb was to multiply my estimate by 4 to get a believable number and then multiply by 4 again."

When calculating an estimate, I was advised by my first manager I ever had to think how long it would probably take, then double the number and increase the time unit by one (e.g. 2 days becomes 4 weeks)

At the time, I thought he was joking...

Re: "we put our lie detector on her and gave her a test"

They'd need to attach 3 or 4 of them behind a load balancer, to deal with the high demand.

> Are we not tired of this radical left wing feminist nonsense yet?

Yep.

Re: No 'My' in Office?

If I could travel back in time, one of the things I would do is have a 'quiet word' with whoever came up with the idea of prefixing everything with "My..." back in Windows 95.

It's responsible for endless lazy variable names too.

Then I'd move on to whoever had the bright idea of calling both the browser and the file viewer "Explorer".

Loved that film.

"A pint? That's very nearly an armful!"

Genius.

"Earth is the only planet with chocolate or coffee"

...that we're aware of.

Re: Is that so?

"or reports to Google that I burnt the whole wheat again."

Or in my case, the whole house. Must stop making toast after a few jars!

Re: eh?

"As a 67 year old with a functioning brain, I'd just like to add that not ALL over-60 voted leave!"

Here... have your 67th thumbs up :-)

Re: Its the integrations stoopid

I used it in the last place I worked and yes I agree, the integrations for e.g. Jira, Git and Hubot were pretty useful.

In the same conversation group where a particular subset of people are discussing a feature of a project, you can get quick updates on Jira tickets, issue Hubot commands and see the responses, all out in the open so everybody knows what's going on. We used to do deployments and all sorts this way.

People here suggesting it's a poor replacement for email have never used it properly, or at all.

Re: Had a close call

"Call from developers based in USA to UK at (of course) about 16:00 on Friday."

Ah the good old 4pm emergency. It's why I started working 10am-6pm shifts. I get a lie-in in the mornings and my 8am-4pm colleagues get to go home on time, while I spend 15 minutes finding out that's it usually not an emergency after all.

Re: I am Shocked I Tell You.......

I've heard the view is fantastic in Silicone Valley.

Re: Skype has been crap since May 2011

"The reverse Midas touch of Microsoft."

The Sadim touch.

Re: Everytime I see "Mother's maiden name" on the list of security question...

Some security questions are terrible.

On the phone, HSBC ask for your sort code and account number first off. Then as one of the security questions, they ask you to confirm which branch the account is held in. You know, that publicly-searchable sort code lookup information?