Being Mark Cohen

Jeez I these dumb-ass web point terminals

We’re taking over the systems development for a property development company who have relocated from Melbourne to Sydney. So I’m in the departure lounge waiting to fly down to Melbourne for the day. I always worry about take-overs, why is the work really being moved, what do we need to cover, whatsurprises are there going to be after the day of hand-over. The truth is that no matter how intense the day is something will be missed, and that something will only be discovered when I’m back in Sydney. Even if the developer down there manages to achieve 100% coverage, some things will be lost in translation, some things might be missed.

So the mission for the day is to getdown there, pick up as much info as possible, and bring back as much source code, databases etc as possible. curveball for the day: a lot of the work is graphic work, and the client has asked me to try bring the developer’s entire desktop box back to Sydney as there are many many gigs of files that need to be brought back. I somehow doubt my USB thumb-drive will be of much use.

Anyway, boarding call. Better run

I saw an advert for a new mobile phone yesterday that astonished me. It seems so logical and sensible yet it worried me, as it ignores the health risks raised regarding kids and mobile phones (interestingly, in this article the author noted that many of the firms marketing mobile phones were previously directly involved in the marketing of cigarettes and the creation of tobacco science

The Techoni i-Kids mobile phone targets the six to eleven year old market by inserting a crowbar between a parent’s fear and love, and pushing until the gap is wide enough for money to fall out.

Health risks aside, the idea is brilliant, especially the ability to go to a website and see where your kid is currently located. That’s something that would almost never be used, yet in the event of being needed…. well, just think about hwat it could save a kid from.

Anyone who’s done much dhtml work would know the pain IE6 and below have caused to the developers of the world, in that its dropdown lists are windowed controls and so they dishonour the z-index. Good news! IE7 is going to have reworked their windowed controls after all the years of developers begging for a fix. And all it took was the better part of a decade and the emergence of a kick-ass competitor (Firefox) that does things right. Now all we have to do is wait for the 86% of web users in the world to upgrade their IE to version 7.

By my maths, that’s about 875.5 million people who for the sanity of web developers must be convinced to download IE7 (11.2 MB in the preview).

That makes a combined total of 9351 *Terabytes* of data that needs to be moved to fix this problem