Last night I went out to the distant village of Constantia to attend a dinner organised by and for similarly minded individuals in the local IT community. One minute ago I went to let in the plumbers into the house for the umpteenth time. Anyway, I’ve been dancing around naming the event, but I’ll have to let it go now; it was in fact a so-called Geek Dinner. I don’t have any problem with people calling me a geek, but at the same time I think openly labeling the event such is a bit crude. At least BarCamp sounded good.

Unfortunately, whilst the food and some people were good, nothing much else was. I’m saying this from a young developer’s point of view. It’s nice to know what David Jarvis is up to, considering I spent many a year cursing the very connection he (barely) provided me with (*waves*) - but at the same time, I could go read an FAQ on his website. I’m more interested in seeing people passionately talk about something they’ve thought of, or developed, or thought of developing - any time someone like that gives a talk, you’ll find far more people paying attention and taking away something useful from the event. Jonathan’s talk about his restaurant review site was close to what I was expecting on seeing. Teraco’s (no link for them… as in I can’t be bothered to link to them) talk was pretty much a press release, and on top of that, a press release aimed at apparently no one attending the dinner, since I guess the majority of us there did not require their services (and subsequently, could not afford said services). Visit Melissa’s site for additional complaints.

I guess what I’m saying is that I understand to split the already small community, attending events like this, into smaller niche communities is not really plausible, but at the same time there are definitely presentations that do not appeal to everyone. The problem was that there weren’t very many presentations (someone is going to comment and ask why I didn’t give one then), so there wasn’t really that much variety. Also, I have an allergy to business related topics, so anything remotely related already had offended me. Maybe the problem I had with “Geek Dinner” was that I was expecting some in-depth programming discussions, or a talk on cool tricks to do with your phone, but it wasn’t.

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Neil’s OpenID talk was also great, it’s something I’ve been meaning to read up about and he handily saved me the trouble! Despite my negative views above, I’d still like to thank Joe for organising everything; at least someone is trying! Maybe I will speak at the next one, we’ll see.

Another month almost done, and so many things still to do! Looking back, work wasn’t absolutely crazy, but there’ve been so many different projects floating around that it has really felt like an intense month. On top of work, in my free time I’ve been working on my own projects as usual, slowly getting there - but still don’t really know if it’s worth the effort.

I’ve had to start learning about forex trading recently, in order to do some work for my employer. Finance has never interested me, especially with all those stupid terms, bullish market etc., but this is actually pretty entertaining. Forex trading is a lot of looking at your daily/weekly/(time period) graphs and watching trends whilst developing strategies; this all seems very close to the data classification and regression work I did in the fuzzy logic and computational intelligence course at university. Anyway, apparently the market is very volatile at the moment, so we’re trying to develop and back-test a stable strategy that copes with bad patches.

Been playing a lot of guitar again lately, I’m hoping that it’ll stick this time and I’ll actually progress. I’ve already noticed a lot of changes in my playing - I started to pay attention to what my hands were doing, and have been actively trying to improve fingering/picking as I notice the bad habits. And yeh, it is already paying off, it seems.

I’ve got a little jumping spider that lives in the light above my computer screens - whilst that may sound like the opening to a rather bizarre poem or short story, it is in fact the truth.

Here is some pictorial evidence, notice specimen A in the bottom right-hand corner of the image.

I figure as long as I don’t get more than 5 spiders, and definitely do not adopt any street spiders, I have a good chance of not turning into crazy spider guy. Actually, I used to be pretty scared of spiders, but only the big black ones really. They still freak me out.

Meet the world.

From Melissa: World Mapper.

Time for that follow-up post; but first, let’s take a look at something deeply disturbing.

Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever.

Why can’t programmers… program?

Maybe 2 years ago - fresh from my degree - I would’ve thought that perhaps half of people claiming to be able to program would be bullshitting, or at least vastly exaggerating their skills. *cough* Nowadays, after spending my time with various people and companies, helping out, working, I think I can quite strongly agree that there is a large group of very deluded people out there.

Programming isn’t some trivial task that anyone can do, neither is it rocket science (ok, bad analogy), but it is a skill like any other. Some people can do it, some people can’t - some people are insanely good at the little details, some people are great at seeing the bigger picture. Some people should not be left in charge of a computer system. Ever.

I might not be a great programmer, but I’m consistent and thorough - thorough, to me, doesn’t mean releasing 0-bug code though; I am strongly of the opinion that the end-user must test and report back bugs or mis-labeled features. Doing so requires a cooling-period, there should always be a period of time where things are tested and reviewed. Yet, time and time again people I have worked with have scrapped production code for basically new untested code. Why on earth would this ever be a good idea.

Anyway, reporting back on fresh travesties of code and assaults on common sense:

Apparently a Javascript script running on a user’s PC (Javascript is NOT Java by the way) can cause a CPU load spike on the web server that is serving the content. So, a script that doesn’t communicate with the server (no AJAX), a script that runs in a sandbox, in a browser, on a PC miles away from the server, is responsible for a 328 load on a single CPU box. For those of you not in the web development field, the mere statement that Javascript is capable of running server-side is akin to me telling a car mechanic that the puncture in my front left tyre is making my back right tyre deflate. Back in the real world, the obscene load was caused by some circular requires (no use for require_once here, thanks).

Similarly, back in outer space, MySQL is now able to store multi-byte data in single-byte data columns. Even kanji, of which there are around 10 000, can be stored in a column with a 255 character space. 7Zip move over, we have a new compression contender. Additionally, for those of you who thought that internationalising your project was going to be a huge hassle, it now seems that the quickest and easiest way to add UTF8 support is to open each source file and go to your IDE’s File menu, and then change the file encoding to ‘UTF8′. It really is that easy.

I’d continue, but I actually feel bad for what I’ve written already. I think further illustration of what is painfully obvious is unnecessary.