Being Mark Cohen

Note to self: Next time you need to do a bulk manipulation of many many gigabytes of images, before you launch off on a project to write a console app that uses GDI+ and does all cool but essentially unnecessary stuff, have a chat with the Unix boys first.  In fact any time you need to do something in a bulk / batch / scripted manner it’s worth talking to them first.

If I had followed my own advice I would have seen ImageMagick has a build for Windows and ships with a good tool for compressing JPEG and other formats, from the command line.  there’s a convert command and a mogrify command.  Mogrify overwrites the source file (ie changes it), compress will output to another file.  Brilliant.  Also released under the GPL.  If you have a website with a wealth of uploaded images and you want to save some space, consider running this over your old images.  Quality at 75% looks good, and the space savings are huge. 

Hooray!  Internet Explorer 7 has shipped at last.  We did some last minute testing and all was good.  One of our developers spent time on our Watin test suite and ran them on his desktop with IE7, and he commented that the tests ran observably quicker.  The end of the Windowed Dropdown list control is nigh.  Wacky javascripts to allow flyouts and  menus to work are nearing redundancy. rss will be on a gazillion desktops in months, or even weeks (now we just have to educate the masses ) and best of all tabbed browsing is now the norm.

Three cheers for the IE7 team, they’ve changed the world   Even if the critics did some wierd security issue on day one.  I installed IE7 on my MacBook and it refuses to run.  I’ve had to stick to Firefox on XP for now.  But on the PC it’s great.  now to move 9351 Terabytes of data to 875 million PCs

I’m at Coffee Club in Eastgardens, chilling out with a coffee and reading the news.  The service is good, the coffe is good, and they have free wireless internet and comfortable lounges

I *used* to go to Gloria Jean’s at Maroubra Junction, no wifi, mediocre coffee, designed to keep you moving.  Coffee Club has got a real "stay a while" vibe going.  No points for guessing where I’ll go next time I want to read the news and have a quiet time out and a cup of coffee.

Slashdot has an article titled Get Buff while Geeking Out talking about two new gadgets to try help geeks shake the accumulating body fat that plagues us as we get older and our lifestyles get ever more static.  It’s a borderline humorous read, especially the discussions.  Call me a cynic, but pedal-powered workstations just don’t seem like they’re "the future"

Fifteen years of being a keyboard jockey started to have a cumulative effect on me like it eventually does on most people, and so I signed on to something called The Twelve Week Challenge which is a one-man operation run by a personal trainer named George Coudonellis.  I’ve been at it for about nine of the twelve weeks so far, and between that and the work I did before, I’ve dropped close to fourteen kilos.  And I’ve been a slacker when it comes to training.

Weird gadgets won’t help geeks lose weight.  Cutting out the fatty foods, dropping the carb intake and cutting out the sugary cold drinks will do more than anything else.  I reckon George should start a version of his twelve week challenge called The Geek Recovery Program, and he’ll be booked out forever.  Personally, I’m enjoying the higher energy levels and buying clothes two sizes smaller.

I sat down and thought about what I’d done with my team over the last year, and it really did stack up.

Some of the key things we did were: 

• Established a more scalable architecture
• Introduced more effective use of css and table-less layouts 
• Introduced nUnit 
• Threw out SourceSafe and moved everything over to Subversion, eliminating checkouts blocking work and allowing a more structured branching release process. 
• Introduced some key Agile development ideas like continuous integration, user stories, code reviews and more 
• Moved towards Scrum as a management technique 
• Eliminated the old 1.0 and 1.1 framework bits and pieces and rolled out our first asp.net 2.0 systems. 
• Eliminated Crystal Reports (hurray!) 
• Brought in the use of more .net goodies like caching, master pages, section handlers and more 
• Introduced and rolled out the concepts of syndication and extensibility 
• Extended the dev team with some really good new people and grew with some really good old people  
• Shifted our culture towards being more inquisitive, more technically aware, and learning more of how to be creative (my personal favourites are no 9 and 29) 
• Extended the concept of offline processing for asynchronous tasks based on a simplification of a design I’ll admit to having pilfered from Seth

We didn’t acheive all that I would liked to have acheived, but all in all I would say that the team is operating a league above where we started out this time last year and I would call our efforts very successful.  And worth it

Google Labs showed coders that they do like us still, yesterday.  They rolled out Google Code Search, which is an impressive vertical search tool focused on publically accessible source code.  The search uses regular expressions (POSIX Extended) and the advanced search allows you to filter by license, by language. and more.

This search engine also indexes cvs and subversion repositories so if you have a web-accessible commercial svn repository you may want to review your security and block the crawler :P

Google have made the search results available via GData/XML feeds and are hoping for the developer communities to build tools to leverage it, such as IDE add-ins.