The Ramblings of Octavo

Yes, you comment spam assholes. I win! I just turned off all comments on this blog. Yeah, that sucks I know, but if you had any idea what my gmail inbox looks like with all the comment spam I’ve been recieving for the last two weeks, you’d understand my annoyance.

I got thirty eight (38) pieces of comment spam since the 24th - that’s 38 pieces of spam in 3 days or roughly 12 comment spams per day.

So all historical posts have had their comments turned off and only new posts will allow comments. The instant any post gets comment spam, the comments will be turned off on that post too.

In other news, things are all good in the hood. Peace out homies!

You may or may not have noticed a dearth of posts these last two months - while I would love to blame it on some noble hiatus I took from blogging to “find myself” or “rediscover the inner me” or some other hippy bullshit, it was merely a bad combination of no time, too much tv and a general apathy to all thing blogging related. Fear not however; I am sure that posts will once again begin flowing thick and fast as they were back in the good ‘ol days.

It’s weird how on the one side, there’s an impetus that drives me to turn this into a more technical blog. I almost feel guilty that I’m not geeky enough because I don’t discuss the latest coding techniques on my blog. On the other hand I actually don’t want this blog to have a “theme”. That’s why it’s called “The Ramblings of Octavo”. To be honest, I would most likely suck at a technical blog - while I’m passionate and good (I hope) at what I do, I’m not the best evangelist.

What I’m trying to say here in a very roundabout way is: prepare yourself for more classic and uncut Octavo. Expect pics of bad service, rants about idiot drivers and more excuses for why I haven’t updated my blog!

Oh and more swearing too. I’m sick of writing politically correct bullshit. Until next time - Chill the fuck out.

Yes, I’ve not blogged, nor produced the requested DargoReader screenies (they’re coming I promise) - but it’s been crunch time this last week or so - hopefully I’ll have more spare time this coming week to get some decent work done. Tonight for a quick change of pace, I’d like to talk about project planning and the inevitable clash that happens between developers and managers when it comes to timing.

Every developer has experienced the dread that accompanies delivering your estimated time to completion, only to have management cut it in half - usually for the worst reasons. It happens. Some times it happens because of promises management has made to the client, or a general feeling that “it shouldn’t take that long”. Whatever the case, it’s a fairly common problem. This means that developers end up taking short cuts or not adequately designing or testing their software. The end result is bad code and an unhappy client.

To illustrate this point in all of it’s glory I present this story about the DART spacecraft. A $110 million dollar project to demonstrate autonomous docking with a satellite which fails and instead collides with the thing. You’d think that on a $110 million dollar project, you’d fix ALL known bugs and that you’d test EVERYTHING you could before launch. Let me quote: “That error was worsened by a known computational bug in the navigational software that the DART team had never fixed” and “But the gain was changed to place an inappropriately high level of weight on the GPS measurements late in the spacecraft’s development and was not properly tested“.

Why would the software team not fix the bug and not properly test the gain? Were they incompetent? I doubt it. Most likely they had a strict launch window that they could not miss. So instead they rushed to get the job done. The result? Bad code and $110 million dollars down the tube.

As always, your comments welcome.

Read this. And this. And this.

WTF is going on here? How long do the tech savy minority have to shout and scream at government to DO SOMETHING? How long is it going to take people to realise that Telkom is actually crippling this country. YES. Crippling us with insane broadband prices. Our broadband penetration rate is 0.5%. This has been going on for years and it’s so blatant, but no one in government is doing anything. I don’t care what Telkom have to say about this, their prices are completely unjustified and border on outright robbery.

This shit just gets me so cross, I can’t even write about it man. I’m not asking for them to slit their wrists - I just want them to lower the prices to something a little more reasonable. What Telkom don’t seem to grasp is that this country is DYING to get connected. The demand isn’t there because no one can afford it. If they dropped DSL prices, demand would MORE than make up for the lost revenue. I do not understand Telkom’s logic - it makes absolutely no sense.

Morons.

Recently I’ve been wondering about people management and how to be a successful manager - I’m by no stretch of the imagination a manager, have never had any real management experience and so of course I have 20/20 vision on the matter and am thus supremely qualified to comment on the foibles of managersHumour warning: This sentence may contain wit and should be treated as such. So from now on, a new topic for my posts will be hypothetical work-place situations and how to handle them (badly).

Imagine a situation where you, as a qualified professional, get called upon in your personal capacity by your boss to perform (free of charge) your services for his own personal benefit.

Now, my personal reaction to such a situation would be to politely tell my boss to look in the yellow pages for a freelance specialist who would be able to help - either that or invoice him for my time. Of course, such an action would be of serious detriment to one’s future career at that company. And so you are left with a dilemma. Now, let’s back up a few steps here. Who put you in this dilemma? Your boss. So, is your boss’s behaviour acceptable?

In some situations, maybe it is - if you have a close relationship with your boss and you regularly do things for each other in non-work time perhaps. In almost all other situations though I’d say that it’s completely unacceptable. Your boss should never exploit his position of power to influence you to give up your personal time to engage in work for his personal benefit.

Your thoughts?