August, 2009

Windows 7 User Experience Guidelines

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 31 Aug 09 - 7:32pm

Microsoft have just released an update of their User Experience Guidelines, for Windows 7.

Worth reading, though the "Print to PDF" format is a bit tiresome.

Are we speaking the same Language?

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 26 Aug 09 - 11:24pm

I'm continually surprised by the level of disagreement and argument that occurs simply because the people conversing are working from different definitions of basic words.

Have you ever had this conversation ...

Project Manager: Can we complete this project by the deadline?
Developer: No.
Project Manager: But I've already promised the customer that we can.
Developer (to himself): WTF?

I believe the problem here comes from a difference in how the word "No" is understood.

An Architects Life

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 26 Aug 09 - 2:30pm

"If Architects had to work like software developers", a hilarious (and sadly true) tale ...

Irony

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 24 Aug 09 - 11:34am

A friend of mine got the following notification from his teams defect tracking tool the other day ...

The Defect "Transaction was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim" has been edited by another user and cannot be saved.

Delicious.

Using new Language and Library Features

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 23 Aug 09 - 11:01pm

Now here's an interesting question that came up in conversation recently:

While maintaining a system, should you make use of new language/framework features or not?

Of course, context is everything when faced with such a generic question, as the best answer may vary widely from one context to another.

MappingLists with NHibernate

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 19 Aug 09 - 9:50am

Here's a subtlety of NHibernate mapping that I ran into this morning.

When you map a one-to-many relationship as a list, you can have null values in that list when loaded.

Locality Counts

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 12 Aug 09 - 12:52pm

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an interesting article "Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware".

One of the interesting elements discussed in this article is the relative cost of memory access. An access satisfied from L1 cache (closest to the processor) might take just 3 clock cycles, but an access requiring access to main memory might take 200 clock cycles.

That's a massive difference in performance.

Data Migration issues

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 11 Aug 09 - 9:17pm

My wife and I had an interesting experience this last weekend while out shopping for a major appliance.

We settled on the appliance we wanted, and were working with the salesperson to arrange delivery and installation. Despite being repeat customers, the salesperson couldn't find our account - searches by phone and address failed to generate any results.

The salesperson apologised, mentioning that things had been difficult to use since a new system had been rolled out last year.

Speaking at DNUG *tonight*

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 5 Aug 09 - 4:22pm

I forgot to post earlier - I'm giving a talk "Towards Supportability" at the Wellington .NET User group tonight.

Update: I've posted my slides from tonights presentation - see Towards Supportability.