Posts by AndyDent

Re: Next Case...

Great detailed breakdown of the problem.

She's not an idiot - it was (is?) a real problem. I have family members who experienced it when one member had to start using a Windows Phone for work reasons, and everyone else's iPhones remembered them as being on iMessage.

Apple really screwed up this experience

(Informed opinion from mobile developer with 30+ years experience who struggled to explain how this problem happened and what Apple were thinking).

Re: Only keeping what they already keep

Has Brandis actually gone on the record to say that they just need to start keeping things for longer that they "already keep"?

That will simplify things - there's a ton of stuff in the list I've seen which telco's definitely do NOT keep and all that bollocks about being able to store chat details is a large part of that.

Another point - do the KEEP it or keep it and make it queryable? Those are two very different things.

Given the history of major IT projects in this country it is possible that he's being genuinely misinformed rather than being deliberately misleading.

Maybe they will do what they did with the outsourcing of employment and hide a lot of the costs in other budgets (hint, look at the cost of compliance auditing for providers and see if that ever gets sheeted home as a part of the "successful" outsourcing of CentreLink).

Re: So...

Webstorm is the dedicated Web editor version of Intellij (which can add Typescript via plugins).

http://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2013/11/enjoy-typescript-in-webstorm/

"One of the new features in WebStorm 7 that cannot go unmentioned is access to TypeScript community stubs. They provide TypeScript definitions for a wide range of JavaScript libraries and help code completion

...

WebStorm provides powerful refactorings for TypeScript code

"

Lack of Aussie protectionism

From my local reading (I'm in Western Australia which often feels like yet another country) and occasional discussions, I'm pretty sure that we do NOT have a protectionist policy. One of the frustrations often voiced by people trying to sell local major IT products to government is that there's a distinct preference for US products over local, regardless of quality.

In the field of contracts to supply services, most are structured in such a way that only the multinational consultancies are able to tender.

Re: Solution???

"cross between a Jack Russell and a Tiger Tank..." Based on that description alone, I want one.

Can they live on anything other than these ants or do I have to import a colony too?

(Australian joke alert - we have a distinct wariness of importing species after a little thing called the Cane Toad was brought in to combat an annoying beetle).

Re: Why aren't all phone water ressistant?

Having just walked around Kuala Lumpur for a monsoonal week, I would have appreciated my iPhone being water resistant. I was nervous just about having it in my pocket of my increasingly damp shorts.

Re: I wouldn't have guessed

BMI is only valid for sedentary people, ie: people with no muscle mass beyond that acquired in an office lifestyle with no external exercise. Unfortunately in the UK it's been given way too much prominence in welfare and medicine.

The underweight stuff is also bollocks for people of different ethnic backgrounds.

My brother used to cycle about 250miles/week. He told me of walking into a doctor's office and have the doctor, without looking at him, start the conversation with "well, we'll have to do something about your weight", looked up at my skinny, short brother, looked down at report, drew a line through it....

Graphisoft are genuine

I worked to develop a building information system for a company using ArchiCAD, in the early nineties. At that time, the story of how much encouragement they had received was well known amongst ArchiCAD users. When they started, they were literally working out CAD software on paper and having it compiled outside the country.

I suspect you have to have worked closely with people from former communist countries, as I have, to understand how much this kind of support meant to them. I have no doubts that their sentiments are genuine.

If the statue had been erected in the USA, I'd be cheering on your sentiment but your cynicism is misplaced.

Getting out of the sandbox is the trick

Apple aren't relying on devs to implement sandbox protection. The changes needed are for apps to continue to work once the sandbox is in place.

In particular, for apps that need to do things like opening files - there is one protected way to put up a file selection dialog for a sandboxed app and if your app doesn't use that it will not work.

Fitaly FTW

Fond memories of Fitaly on my many Palm models. A truly excellent piece of research translated into software and I loved the way it was available across most apps.

From my research into gestural interfaces, stylus-based interfaces are still very popular in Asian countries where the local language requires more precision than can be achieved with a finger. Having the choice would be fabulous on my iPhone and iPad for precision work even now.

Having said that, for a lot of sketching work, remarkably good UI refinements in smart alignment can go a long way to compensate - Nick Nallick did a great job with the usability of Intaglio Sketchpad. I wouldn't have believed a vector drawing app could be usable just on an iPhone until I tried it.

Abandoning (freed) code is easy, nurturing aint

Yes it is easy to throw some code up on one of the big sites and abandon it. It's like putting your old furniture out on the verge for a special rubbish collection - some people will fossick through it and get things they can recycle.

Putting code out to build and nurture a community is harder in open source than it is within many organisations because open source communities typically demand a messy open management style.

I've disagreed with a lot of this author's articles but this one makes a lot of sense.

BTW I've developed a lot of code in many oranisations in nearly 30 years of programming, including contributing to mid-size open source projects and releasing much of my own work as such. Even products which people were willing to pay for can fail to attract contributors and regular use.

There's also the "invisible success" phenomenon where you release something, people pick it up and use it but never become "community members". That happened to me with my XML layer expatpp - I didn't know Steam used it until I saw my name in a book and Dr Dobbs article! (Hey Valve, if you're listening, a free account would be something I could finally impress my teenage son with!).

Keeping them on the phone doesn't work

I was working at my mothers' farm one day when one of these regular callers rang and as I was working on something fairly undemanding, decided to spin them out and see what they did.

Their spiel is scarily convincing for anyone non-technical - they wallk people through a number of commands including showing actual error events in the event viewer that don't take much spin to sound scary.

I stopped it short of clicking on the web page link that was their GotoMyPC, and was doing that in a more secure environment than a PC browser.

Wasting their time for over an hour and telling them I just wanted to see their URL so I could report them didn't do anything to prevent the sods from continuing to call her.

Mentioning the word criminal fraud does make them hang up very quickly though ;-)

This is in the South-west of Western Australia and I suspect they are targeting a lot of the older residents in that area.

new projects in C++, yup!

I just reviewed the options for coding a cross-platform GUI desktop app for OS/X and Windows with nine different programmers and the most common recommendation was C++ for core logic with native UI in Objective-C/Cocoa and C#/WPF.