Damian Brady’s Blog

I just read a fantastic article by John Miano called, “The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?“.

Basically, the premise is that there’s a very common misconception that all programmers are alike and have the same productivity.  It’s definitely worth a read.

While his article focuses on the practice of offshoring programming to cheap overseas countries, the idea is also relevant when talking about hiring new (local) programmers either to replace others or in response to increased workload.

The misconception that all programmers are the same can lead to an almost apathetic approach to hiring by managers.  If someone quits, that’s fine, we’ll just hire another programmer to take over the work.  If there are new requirements that mean we need a new developer, then fine, we’ll just hire another one.  One problem is that there’s usually a significant lead time filled with learning about the project before even the best programmer can be truly productive.  The other problem is that which is outlined in Miano’s article; one programmer can be many times more effective than another.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is.  I’ve preached this line many a time but because it’s in such stark contrast to the person x time = fixed productivity formula that is relatively true for most other professions, it falls on deaf ears.

David from 37signals posted a blog entry about people who have succeeded with ideas you may have thought of a while ago.

He’s right about it all of course - an idea by itself it worth nothing.  If you do nothing with it, then you have nobody to blame but yourself if someone else makes a whole lot of money from a similar idea.

Of course this doesn’t necessarily stop the nagging feeling that it could have been you with all that income…

My big idea that I did nothing with?  I think it was around 1998 when I thought it would be useful to have a real estate website to which rental agencies could submit available properties complete with photos and searchable descriptions.  Seriously.  Oh well.

I read a Coding Horror post in March about testing localisation code for Turkey to make sure it’s correct.  Apparently Turkey has one of the hardest languages to write Internationalisation code for.

Anyway, it appears that a localisation fault on a mobile phone in Turkey has resulted in two deaths and three jailings.  Warning - bad language in this link!

Wow.  That’s a very bad side-effect…

Yeah, I finally bit the bullet and changed my blog tagline…

ramblings of a mid-late 20s IT nerd / volleyball junkie / semi-professional drinker

…how depressing…

The book was called The House of God.  Nervousness makes me forget things!

Damo

if (thisWeekend.Contains(easter))
{
  thursday = friday;
  tuesday = monday;
}

Obviously I post very rarely. It’s been a long time since my last one.

So, in an effort to actually make this something that gets updated, I’m changing the way I’m going to do it. I’m not going to wait until I have an essay to write, because it’s clear that doesn’t work. Instead, I’m going to write short posts.

This is the first one. Hope you enjoyed it. Read it again if you like.

Damo

I read this article in CNet that talks about functionality we can expect in the next generation of digital cameras. Cameras that have face detection are already fairly standard, and Sony’s new Smile Shutter feature takes it one step further; only taking the photo when someone in the shot smiles.

The CNet article mentions a few technologies that are interesting, and the combination of these technologies look to make the sorting of photos a lot more hassle-free. There’s the possibility of automatic tagging of photos for location based on GPS, tagging of people based on face recognition, and tagging of emotion based on expression detection. I could imagine extensions into analysis of the scenery in the background too. Identification of buildings in the background, perhaps the weather, whether it’s night or day, indoors or outdoors, etc. The possibilities seem nearly endless given the gigantic leaps that are being made in computerized pattern recognition.

Give it a few years, and automatic tagging could mean that you could just snap away wherever and whenever you are, transfer the photos when you get home, and have some basic photo software organise and name your photos for you. Without doing any manual tagging yourself, you might be able to search for all photos of John in Paris, or even photos of at least three people with the Eiffel Tower behind them when it’s raining and at least one person is looking miserable.

The prevalence of digital cameras and the plummeting price of solid-state memory has basically meant that you don’t need to wait for a great shot to start snapping away. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for people to come back from a two week holiday with over 1000 photos. Who wants to sort through all of that?

I’m heading to Thailand soon and I’m likely to come back with more photos than I know what to do with. With the technology where it is right now, I’ll be spending a very long time sorting through those photos when I get back. I’m dreading it even now. I’m sure I’ll long for the day when I don’t have to do it at all.

Damo

Hi all,

I’m ignoring the fact that “all” is probably nobody by the way.

So I’m back online with a new web host and am planning some changes to some things around here. The first change will be the link to “Home” just on the right there - it still goes to my old domain… Any ideas on how to fix it? I can’t find it anywhere in any of the Wordpress or theme files - I’ve checked sidebar.php about 14 times…

So anyway, this new host will be hosting some new projects coming up. I moved from my old one mainly because they didn’t support Ruby on Rails, and this one does. I’m a bit excited about RoR at the moment, even though I haven’t touched any code - just pages of a book. I’ll probably blog on that when I do.

That’s enough for now, keep an eye out - the blog may not be the default damianbrady.com.au page for long…

-Damo “Visa” Brady

I’ve been a bit slack with the posts lately. I could make excuses citing lack of time, but truthfully I haven’t found much that I’ve been motivated to write about.

While I honestly haven’t had a great deal of free time (self-inflicted, as always), I guess I’ve just been consumed with things happening around me rather than things I’ve read about or have heard about.

Perhaps the lack of motivation comes down to recent disappointing events. Last weekend my volleyball team lost two finals, knocking us out of contention for the flag despite finishing third after round games. St. Kilda, the AFL team I support, suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Melbourne Demons (and injury) and the Broncos (NRL) lost the first of their finals to the Dragons. On top of that, Australia lost two legends in Steve Irwin and Peter Brock.

So all in all, it’s been a fairly ordinary last week or so. I’m sure I’ll be motivated enough to put something decent up here soon.

Damo “Visa” Brady