http://blog.damianbrady.com.au ramblings of a late 20s IT nerd / volleyball junkie / semi-professional drinker Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:13:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So I haven't written a post in a while, but no, that's not the reason for the title.  I've just been concentrating on other things and haven't felt sufficiently motivated to write about anything. But then I read this post from Steve Yegge on Stevey's Blog Rants.  His title was "Business ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/08/28/write-for-yourself/ So I discovered that Google Streetview is now available in Australia. For example, here's the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane. I'm fairly blown away by the sheer number of streets that are covered to be honest.  This map gives you an idea, but once you get to the capital cities, you can ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/08/05/google-streetview-in-australia/ On several occasions recently I've had to work with data in legacy applications.  It's never fun, and it got me thinking about the origins of the problem.  It's fairly obvious that difficulties encountered when working with legacy data are a result of decisions made when the system was originally written. New ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/23/guiding-principles-for-data-capturing/ In a previous post, I talked about the limitations with CAPTCHA systems and proposed a partially-automated turing test to keep non-humans out. I had a few discussions about this with a friend and he was more interested in the CG Kittens idea I very briefly alluded to in the main text. ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/18/3d-captcha/ 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 ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/08/the-myth-of-the-interchangeable-programmer/ 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 ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/07/that-was-my-idea/ The Queensland Government recently introduced the Go card to provide a single intelligent ticketing mechanism for (almost) all public transport in South East Queensland. The technology was developed by Cubic Transportation Systems and similar cards are in use all over the world.  The idea is when you get onto a bus ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/04/translink-fail/ I want to preface this post with a couple of disclaimers.  When I talk about passwords in this post, I'm talking about the ones that matter.  I'm talking about your Windows Login password or your Internet Banking password, not the password you use for Facebook or Digg. Let's be honest, ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/07/02/most-password-policies-are-bad/ I stumbled across Part 6 of a Programming Job Interview Challenge on the Dev102 blog and thought, "hey, I know this!" I couldn't help responding. So the question was, given this bit of code, what will the output be? 1: ArrayList a = new ArrayList(); 2: ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/06/02/programming-test/ There's no shortage of people lambasting the recording industry for keeping their business model firmly behind the times.  The ability to download music online seems to have presented the industry with a challenge it simply can't accept.  They have a hammer that's been serving them well for a very long ... http://blog.damianbrady.com.au/2008/05/29/doomed-from-the-start/