I worked for a company in the '80s that made the Sharp PC3000 handheld computer. After resisting for a while (because the company thought it would be too expensive) they gave (lent) the dev team a PC3000 each. I thought it ran far too slowly, so I rewrote the ROM interface one evening in my own time. This made all the apps run a lot faster. The marketing department estimated that this had made the company £100k in direct sales, and £100k in indirect sales. I got a "programmer of the year" award but no hard cash. I don't mind though, I am sure that most of us didn't become software engineers to become rich! Later on I joined an insurance company (yes, yawn) that were going to rewrite the cobbled-together COM/VB/ASP/etc. website. I managed to keep it going and refactor it (by myself for a while); all the permanent members of staff left after one of the offices was closed. The team that took it over also wanted to rewrite it, but they never got round to it. I think most of them have now left. The cobbled-together classic ASP website is still in use (I reckon it is over 15 years old now). I would imagine it still makes them £millions/week. Even I think it should be rewritten now though!

Jon CodeWrite

My cat used to love those pull tabs - I used to get them on orange juice cartons. She also used to love playing with crumpled bits of paper[^] - she could chase a bit of paper around for hours!

Jon CodeWrite

I quite like Navfree for Android. It takes up a lot of space because the maps are offline (which I think is good), but seems to work pretty well as a in-car Sat Nav. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.navfree.android.OSM.ALL[^]

Jon CodeWrite

Microsoft have obviously got an aggressive marketing campaign under way - just saw this on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.switchtowp8[^] Which (surprise, surprise) has a rating of 1.5. Embarrassing really. You have to feel sorry for the poor sods that had to implement that (presumably on zero budget).

Jon CodeWrite

If you're not going to fight it probably means your device is cr&p (sorry suboptimal - the marketing people told me not to use words like cr&p and sh**). Or everyone else thinks it's cr.. suboptimal, so they don't bother to argue with you. Hmmm, I always seem to overthink these marketing campaigns - it's quite funny otherwise though! :)

Jon CodeWrite

I was very disappointed when I got this question wrong: BBC mobile phone quiz, Q3:

Quote:

The first text message was sent by a 22-year-old engineer more than 20 years ago. What did it say? 1. Happy Easter 2. Merry Christmas 3. Hello World

It's obvious, isn't it? What sort of engineer would send anything else???

Jon CodeWrite

ABBYY Finereader 9.0 came free with my scanner. It's very good - and the OCR works very well - although handwritten text is a bit hit and miss - but personally I'm amazed it can do it all. I can't say about the API though - I haven't used it. They have trial versions on the website - so I'd recommend trying those first.

Jon CodeWrite

Quote:

ROL and ROR are not part of the language

Although << and >> (as well as <<= and >>=) are equivalent to SHL and SHR if I remember my aseembly language correctly...

Jon CodeWrite

They should make them share a prison cell. Or is that just cruel of me :laugh:

Jon CodeWrite

I'm not sure that would work - but if I was going to try that I would have done it the other way round :-D:

Quote:

My vote of 5 NIKHIL JOSHI .NET PROGRAMMER 23hrs 38mins ago hate it

Jon CodeWrite

There's a funny story behind that picture (well I think so). The company I was working for wanted a picture of a hardware engineer at work - but the photographer didn't like the look of the hardware engineers, so he got us software engineers to pose as hardware engineers - and mine was the picture that was chosen. But yes, your right, the fact it made it into an Annual Report practically makes it porn, so I should change it!

Jon CodeWrite

I did wonder if it was that, so I thanked him by giving his comment a vote of 1. (childish of me, I know ;P)

Jon CodeWrite

oh ok - well that's alright then! :omg:

Jon CodeWrite

I try to answer questions and respond to comments on my articles, but sometimes I just don't understand what people are trying to say... :~

Quote:

My vote of 2 NIKHIL JOSHI .NET PROGRAMMER 23hrs 38mins ago like

(Article Link) Is this like, "I like your article" or is it like, "like what's up with your article", or is it like, "like I don't know what to say". Or is it like, something else?

Jon CodeWrite

We don't talk like this in the UK :sigh: : http://www.thefreedictionary.com/misaligned[^] If you click on the American flag you hear how it should be pronounced, if you click on the British flag you get - well I don't know what that's supposed to be...

Jon CodeWrite

I see from the patent that it took 15 "inventors" to come up with the idea of the rectangle. Sounds like there might be a "how many Apple employees does it take to change a light bulb" joke there somewhere...

Jon CodeWrite

Master/Slave and Server/Client really aren't the same at all. From Wikipedia: Master/slave is a model of communication where one device or process has unidirectional control over one or more other devices. In some systems a master is elected from a group of eligible devices, with the other devices acting in the role of slaves. The client/server characteristic describes the relationship of cooperating programs in an application. The server component provides a function or service to one or many clients, which initiate requests for such services.

Quote:

I was told that since we are a "forward thinking and diverse company" I should change the designations in the software to read Primary and Secondary.

Primary and Secondary is even worse. This all sounds like something out of Dilbert. Your project is doomed.

Jon CodeWrite

The answer to this (in absolute terms) is £8 because they were giving you £26, but now they are giving you £18. So - option 2. But it depends how you look at it. If instead of the arrangement they have gone for, they said they would still give you £26 but you had to pay in £8 (or £26, £100, or whatever) - in theory you are no worse off, but in practice you are having to pay more to get the same from them. Their argument would be that you going to get it all back eventually - but that depends on your view of how well the pension is going to do...

Jon CodeWrite

It doesn't at the moment. Garth thinks I should do an article about the whole app - which I will consider... I felt justified in posting this because I suspect that people may not realize that Dots & Boxes is NP Hard. Although when I put it like that, it doesn't sound very interesting! ;P

Jon CodeWrite

Garth J Lancaster wrote:

I dunno - I'd like to see it as an article - of the app as a whole not just its algorithm

Ok - I'll consider doing that. But it would probably be quite a lot of work - at the moment the code is part of quite a large framework (for other apps), so no promises...

Jon CodeWrite