Minimal

Painful eXPerience

Finally upgraded to Windows XP last week. For a full two days, I was absolutely loving it. Not only was I rid of the house of cards that was Windows Me, but XP was finally showing me real benefit to storing things in the folders it suggested. Everything was going absolutely swimmingly... and then I installed Service Pack 1.

As much as I feel the need to stick up for Microsoft when they’re getting things right (and getting no praise for it), they can still let you down. Badly. My installation of XP was as fresh as a daisy, so you would expect the patching process to be as smooth as... a very smooth thing. But no, it killed my PC instead. I can’t even boot in the most basic Safe Mode available. Not only that, but the blue-screen advice it offers disappears in an instant as my machine resets itself. I have no idea what it’s trying to tell me. Somebody up there’s telling me to get a Mac...

Incidentally, it may interest you to know that XP was the first step on my plan towards a better website. The following steps involved: installing and learning Apache, PHP, & MySQL; getting a new hosting provider; redesigning the site (visually and structurally); transferring of old content to the new setup; and... wait for it... adding comments. Oh, and RSS feeds, too. Even the longest journey starts with a single step — it’s just that this step seems to be quite a difficult one to make.

The curse of reverse

No matter how much I wish for it, I can’t reverse time. Nor, apparently, can I reverse my car. One moment’s misjudgement and now I’ve got over a grand’s worth of repairs to pay for. If I weren’t so emotionally inept, I’d be in tears right now. Gutted. Absolutely gutted. Not the best way to end a holiday. :(

Random brown sign holiday

Next week, I’m off work for my first planned holiday since Christmas... yay! I say “planned,” but you know I’m not really that organised. Instead, I’m going to be chancing it, driving up to Scotland (yes, I’ve actually got a destination) and then seeing what’s there. Big hills, hopefully.

Once there, I’ll be enjoying the roads and the scenery in between being distracted by the odd brown tourist sign. I don’t really care what I find — the novelty will be enough for me to enjoy it regardless. In fact, that’s half the fun of it. Bring it on... whatever it is! :)

Technical debt

A colleague introduced me to a brilliant metaphor today: technical debt.

In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice.

It’s definitely one to use when explaining to non-technical management why they might want to wait a bit longer for a better solution. The consequences of unmanaged debt, described later in that page, will ring horribly true for many a software engineer.