Verdage has snagged an office in Stockholm’s trendy “SoFo” area (I know, I know *rolls eyes*). It’s next to a Harley Davidson repair shop, so I have no doubt that our assets are safe and sound here. Come visit us at Bondegatan 17 and receive a FREE cup of coffee!
Ah yes, and at long last, this blog has moved from WordPress’s servers to this snazzy domain. Yay!
Name your classes something sensible! If I see another CSS class named “blueText” I will scream. YOU CAN TELL IT’S BLUE WHEN YOU LOOK AT IT, STUPIDS.
CSS was invented to make attributes easy to change. Say you want a blue message on all your pages. You sensibly label it with a CSS class ‘message’ and set its ‘font-color’ to blue in the stylesheet. Then it hits you that your users are blind idiots. Since you’re smart, you just go to your stylesheet and change one attribute from blue to red. Then you can shut down your computer and spend some time with your kids before they end up in juvie from your absentee parenting.
If, however, you are retarded like some of the people I work with, you will not name your class ‘message’. You will name it ‘blueText’. When you change it to red, you will go through every one of your pages and change the class name to ‘redText’. Then you will go home, wonder why CSS was ever invented, and cry yourself to sleep.
I’m looking for someone to chop PSD files into clean, W3C-compliant CSS layouts. If you have a keen aesthetic sense, replete with Macbook and box frame glasses, great. However, I already know many talented designers who are shit coders. I don’t care if you think black looks good with orange, or if you can’t tell mauve from burgundy. I just need you to know CSS.
I will shower you with riches and glory if you can do it right. However, if I catch you confusing an id with a class, notice repetition in your stylesheets instead of clean cascading (why do you think they’re called ‘cascading’?), or see so much as a single table used for non-data purposes, you are FIRED.
Telecommuting acceptable. Javascript a plus.
Al Gore’s huge energy bills, the massive carbon footprint of the Live Earth concert, and now this from a client’s company mailing list:
To whomever is printing out the 100+ page report on Carbon and the Environment,
Please cancel your print job or watch over the printer while your report prints. I’m waiting for documents to print that I need to fax to our customers’ charge companies, and they are behind your report—which keeps jamming in the printer—in the queue.
And is it really necessary to kill tress printing out a report this long—about the environment?
This doesn’t have much to do with technology, but…LOL.
When interviewing a programmer, check that he is: a) good at coding, and b) bearable. Chat about his experience, let him scribble an algorithm to reverse a string, and wish him luck. Right?
Hell no. Tihomir Nakov just released a list of dumbass questions Google asks during its job interviews.
They include:
If you have ever been interviewed for an IT job, I bet your ass in that blender that you’ve been exposed to this bullshit.
Let me make one thing clear: I am a decent developer. I can do what I claim I can do. Give me a real software problem at an interview and I will pull infrastructure design, algorithms and a DB schema out of my behind. However, when I’m dressed in an itchy wool suit with nylons creeping up the aforementioned behind and I’m worrying about sweating all over the interviewer during our handshake, the last thing I want to do is solve extra credit word problems from a fourth grade math test. Ok?
Would you ask a doctor how many daisies are at the end of a rainbow? No, you’d see if he can tell genital warts from a common cold. Would you ask a mechanical engineer how many lollipops are in a candy store? No, you’d ask him to design a fucking bridge. What is it about IT interviews that makes them so bullshit-permeable?
Some Subversion naming conventions are downright lousy. For instance, “svn revert” reverts your code to some older revision, right? Well that’s what you think, my sensible friend, and you’re wrong! All it does is it reverts your working file to the latest version in the repository, the same thing that can be accomplished with a simple delete and svn update.
So to actually revert to an older version in the repository, you have to issue this madness:
svn merge -rhead:123 http://my/svn/repository ./workingcopy
Where 123 is the number of the old revision to which you want to revert.
There’s a new site called Vision 20/20 that allows you to find sex offenders in your neighborhood. That’s neat and all, but the cheerful messages kind of sound like social networking for rapists and pedophiles: “Locate Sex Offenders”, “Wouldn’t you like to know if any of them are living in your neighborhood? Now you can!” and finally, “Do it now. It’s Free!”
I know it’s intended to protect your family and all, but really, won’t these dudes just drop by each other’s houses for coffee, bowling and evil?
That’s right. I have too much work on my plate and am looking for evil minions to do my bidding. You must be:
Scandinavian/Baltic location would be great, but not required. Knowledge of Java, Ruby on Rails or PHP preferred. 
Please send CV’s and hourly rates here.
Before getting to the point, allow me to bang my head against the wall one more time:
Me: I can do this in Ruby on Rails or I can do this in .NET.
Client: Which would you prefer?
Me: Thanks for asking! I personally prefer Rails. Development will take half the time, and will cost you half the money. Plus I think adding new features, as well as AJAX special effects, is much easier.
Client: Interesting idea. Let’s go with .NET.
That said, some of you other poor souls may have been wondering how to make a .NET control that:
There is a very good C# solution here. I have translated it into VB, so if anyone needs that, give a holler and I’ll post it.
John Dvorak and I are not saying that Web 2.0 technology is useless. Hell, Web 2.0 is revolutionary and exciting. The point is, so was Web 1.0. What we are saying is that thousands of companies are getting much more investment capital than they’re worth. We’re saying that for every YouTube, there are dozens of FooTubes getting millions of bucks. We’re saying that once those companies go bankrupt, we’re all in a bit of trouble.
When I argue that there will be a Web 2.0 collapse, people respond “no there won’t” or “does it matter?”. So to prove my point, I will quote some of the counterarguments I have seen and modify them ever so slightly to show that they could have been used ten years ago. You know, right before the 1.0 bubble burst. Read More