Category Archives: Computing and the Web

Patching My Head In

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I’m not a massive games-player, but having recently built a new PC I was keen to see my new graphics card (a Sapphire Radeon HD 4850) at work.

CoH Patch Download Screen

I loaded Company of Heroes, forgetting that the Company of Heroes – Opposing Fronts installation would overwrite the former. Oh well. Granted, I obviously did not need to load both pieces of software to have a quick game and to see my new 3d card at work, but I did. The only problem is, I have had to apply about 6 patches so far – that means downloading probably in the region of 1GB of data, and each time wait for the download, and then the patch to occur.  As the patch itself obviously has to be done while the software is not running, that also means several restarts of the software.  I simply can not figure out how to run Opposing Fronts without the update applying.

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How to Delight your Client

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(and how your Client can Delight You)

Yesterday’s post reminded me just how much value I have begun to place in my working-relationship with our on-site client-liaison. She has a fiery temperament, is outspoken and very different from me, differences which I have come to appreciate. And let’s not forget, in an otherwise all-male office, she is a she and, sad but true, it really does help to have a little bit of a mix of the sexes.

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Some Basic Object Ideas

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I’ve been thinking about some basic ideas recently related to the design of a Object Layer for the C#/.Net project that I’m working on. Actually, it’s not a proper OL really, more of a set of enhancements to the Data Access Layer generated with MyGeneration for the Gentle framework. Of course, this is all rather old-hat for anyone who’s utilised Datasets in .Net 2 or later, but there you go.

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Low Overhead Development

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More than Mission-CriticalI’ve been a little bit quiet on the blog front recently because I very happily have got a job as a C# developer, after quite a bit of time away from work by choice… and then a fairly long job search. One of the fantastic things working for a small consultancy (<10staff) was proven in the first few days; I had coded some small enhancements to the system… and they had gone live! Continue reading →

Coding Style – A Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid Part 2

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Continuing from my previous post, I wanted to write about something that I have found to be a bugbear – the idea that functions or methods should have a single exit point.

But first, another quick reminiscence of my days programming mainframes with PL/I. There were no internet connections to the machine, data came in on tapes. Someone who wanted to get their own nefarious data onto our machine would have had to intercept a driver, get the relevant tape, take it to a conveniently located mainframe resource, load the data off the tape, insert their own data into the records, put it back onto tape, drive it to our office with a driver with an appropriate security pass… and so on. And I didn’t even mention knowledge of record formats or file validity checks and so on!

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Coding Styles – A Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid

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I’ve been thinking a lot about coding style recently. I must admit that I have probably always tended to code in a way that would be considered to be verbose by many programmers. Although I learnt to program by myself, I benefited from an extensive professional programming course in PL/I (which doesn’t date me too much, but it does date the machines I was working with!)

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