The Code Whisperer

Practical, on the ground advice for efficient software development

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’


Blog Posting

Published July 8th, 2008 in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

I lost my father to prostate cancer in September 2007, but was fortunate to have him cared for by The Greenwich & Bexley Cottage Hospice. With my sister, Karen, I’ve organised a kayak trip along the River Thames to raise money for this essential community service, which is taking place on August 10th 2008. Organisation is taking up a lot of my time, so blog postings will be a bit haphazard for the next 6 weeks.

If you would like to find out more please look at the dedicated website, www.thameschallenge.org.uk

Interesting Postings

Published May 15th, 2008 in Development, Miscellaneous, People, Techniques | No Comments »

I was in London all day yesterday and today has been spent trying to get a software release together and an odd error in Installshield is preventing this.

My usual buffer of postings has been exhausted, so today I’m going to post links to some other blog entries.

If, like me, you don’t like fingerprints over your screen, you will agree with Jeff Attword in his post on the subject. A bit extreme, but I know where he is coming from! www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001115.html

The second is from Steve McConnell. He’s carried out a survey on the classic mistakes presented in his Rapid Development book, which are the basis of the current series on this blog. The survey can be seen here: Classic Mistake Survey

Steve has also updated the Classic Mistakes list recently and we will cover this once we’re past the first 36. The 7 new mistakes are list on this post: Classic Mistakes Updated

Creating PDF Documents

Published March 20th, 2008 in Miscellaneous, Software | No Comments »

In 2005 my good friend Mark Evans and I had a stand at the NEC in Birmingham’s Classic Motor Show. Mark was launching the DVD to his latest series on Discovery RealTime An MG is Born, and I was launching our Restoration Manager software.

We had quite a large stand and wanted to have large images of the MG’s restoration and a Restoration Manager cover shot. Having found a company that could produce images on foam boards at a realistic price, I set about producing PDFs of the images. For various reasons to do with producing a large PDF with good quality images, this turned out harder than expected, until I found pdfFactory from FinePrint Software. Since then I’ve used pdfFactory exclusively and have recommended it to several of my private clients.

However, I was away from the office and needed to convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF and didn’t have access to my trusty pdfFactory. A quick Google and I found Doc2PDF Online, which provides a free service converting files under 2MB to PDF format, which it then emails to you. I was so impressed I used it to convert the Generic Coding Standards posted yesterday.

Please note I have no connection with these two companies or recive any benefit in recommending them - I’m just a happy user!

Guard Against Scam Artists

Published March 14th, 2008 in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

We recently had a contretemp with a scam artist and our Chuckie Bags website. Artist is the wrong word really, as it implies some sort of skill and imagination, both of which were severely lacking in this case.

It’s not unusual for us to receive a request via email for bulk orders and we’ve had a few where they sender clearly hasn’t looked at the website in any great detail. This email stated he (and I’m assuming he) wanted to “purchase some products” did we ship to Australia and do we take credit cards, both questions should have been answered by the website.

Next he stated he wanted 200 wallets and how much would this cost with shipping.

Then how much for just the wallets as he has a courier picking up other products in the UK.

And then the final email, could we charge his card an extra

Why This Blog?

Published March 4th, 2008 in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

In January this year I went to a talk at the Papercourt Sailing Club by Steve Cockerill of Rooster Sailing called “The Boat Whisperer”. It was an enthusiastic demonstration aided by Steve’s DVD footage and a scale model of a Laser dinghy, in which he told the majority of the sailors in the room where they were going wrong. It wasn’t a lot wrong, just a bit and the information was delivered just like someone sitting with you and gently mentioning “why don’t you try this?”.

Steve is a enthusiastic and successful sailor, and, having won the following in 2007

  • Graduate National Champion
  • Streaker National Champion
  • Laser Radial National Champion
  • RS300 National Champion
  • Rooster 8.1 National Champion
  • Laser Master Inland Champion

Steve is very qualified to give this talk.

All of which got me thinking. Having spent many years working on different sorts of software development projects and for a variety of company types and sizes, I have a head full of tried and tested ideas that are easy to put in practice and can dramatically improve the software being developed. So I’ve put this blog together so that you can benefit from these ideas too. Think of it as someone sitting by you quietly saying “have you tried this?”.

If you like what you see on the blog why not sign up to receive a quick, automatic email when I update the blog? We use Aweber to manage our mailing lists and each message sent out has details on how to be removed immediately from the mailing list.

If you sail a dinghy and wonder why you lose control on occasions, I highly recommend either Steve’s talk if you can get to it or alternatively his DVD set there’s a YouTube preview below: