\\ NULL //

Going to give it a go

I thought it was all a fad, a deceit, another way for all Sky and Tv manufacturers to wrangle a bit more cash out of the poor consumer. I mean have you seen those ads for HD at the start of your rental DVD’s ? It goes something like this :

1. American Voiceover : “HD is so clear its beyond your wildest imaginings” - while an image of a drop of water falling into a pool sends ripples around
2. “And sound so clear” - An image of a pin falling on glass or something.

If its that much better then how come your able to display all these lovely images and sounds using my normal crappy TV! So i wrote the whole thing off as a big waste of money.

But I was wrong.

Did you see what i did there, you never expected that now did you. Oh you did…. ok fine ill continue.

So switch to last week sometime when i made a short cross border trip otherwise known as going “up da north” i picked up a 37″ HD Tv and a Blueray player for myself and the family. All for a smaller price than i would have gotten “down south” but thats another issue for another time. So i got home and connected it all up and sat down expecting a better picture but not much else.

Needless to say it was a big surprise. I have been sitting in a haze of light and colour ever since. The real treat was when i started up the xbox 360 and played a few of the older games i havent played for a while. Oblivion is just unbelievable good looking. I cant remember playing a game and stopping in the middle of a task to look at a bunch of grass or the way light from the torch flickers across the cavern walls. Its like playing a different game.

Thats how i sum it up, its like a different experience. Tv and games are a form of escape i guess and the more realistic the medium then the more realistic the escape. Oh and Spongebob looks bigger too.

GitHub have a handy application for doing Code embedding in posts. Heres a quick test.

I could survive for 51 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

Created by Bunk Beds.net

Howdy, about bloody time i updated. When i last posted i had just changed job and moved into a new house at the same time. Needless to say it has been an incredibly busy time. The house is still in various stages of development due to my own laziness and ineptitude when it comes to DIY. Well to be fair im learning as i go. Things started off fine and dandy with painting. Painting is one of those jobs everyone can do but few are actually good at and i discovered thanks to my girlfriend im not one of those few. I was relegated to base coating the entire house in white paint before she put on the colour in each room. After days of painting white on white i seem to have blown a fuse in the back of my head which renders me unable to hear the word paint without collapsing into the fetal position. Normally in this situation i will take one of two courses of action, the first is to put my head down and paint like a man possesed until the walls, ceilings and anything that gets in my way is completely whitewashed. The other course is to give up completely and find something else to do instead.
I chose to give up and turned my hand to the wood floors instead and it seems im almost good at it. Im using this Non-glue click stuff from B&Q in the bedrooms and im surprised at how its turning out. It looks like i had help.
The new job… where do i start. In many ways its great. Im working with an experienced developer who knows all the inner workings of the company and so on which has been great. I came in as the new guy with the new ideas which were patiently listened too. I worried that my programming knowledge wouldn’t be up to to what was required but i found to my relief that it was and that was fine. But now after a few weeks i see what i really should have been worried about.
DEADLINES

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams
Sweet jesus but im terrible when it comes to this. Whatever the reason its something i need to sort out. One particular module i was given had a particularly tight deadline and i managed to blow it big time. Granted everyone agreed that the original time allocated was way under what it would take. It did take me longer than it would have taken my colleague which leaves me wondering why? In order to give some insight into what i was asked to do let me set the stage.
Day 1: You get a 20 minute meeting where you are asked to develop a module called X. X it seems is hard for everyone to define, including the person who wants it.
Day 2: The deadline is set at an arbitrary number of DAYS, what this module is supposed to do when its finished is still not decided. So basically we have decided how long something is going to take before we decided what it is going to do and how. Now id like to point out that this way of working has been in place long before i got there and as far as i can tell it worked fine. Timelines were in some respect elastic allowing for some overrun. I dont as such blame the way the deadline was decided on, i blame myself for not putting my hand up and saying “whoa whoa whoa there lads are ye on steroids or something…”.
Week 4: And here we are, the deadline is so far in the past ill need a delorean and a stretch of road in order to see what it originally looked like.

So who’s to blame, my collegue, my boss, the estimation process we used, the existing system i built on, the system i built, the way i built it, or me.
No prizes for guessing its Me. At several points i could have spoken out and said, hey i need more info, i need help here, i need more time here or whatever but i didnt. Things started off badly and went into free fall from there.

Ill be the first to hold my hands up and say sorry but thats of little use when a client deadline will be missed. I think because this was my first major project ive been given some slack but im still dissappointed at how the whole thing went.

Note to self : Must do better.

Well it seems ill be moving jobs. After 14 months in my current job i feel i have progressed an enormous amount in technical ability but it is time to move on. When i started i had an uphill struggle ahead of me in terms of increasing my programming knowledge not only in nitty gritty low level stuff like regular expressions but also in the higher level design side of things. When i started my relative lack of knowledge in certain areas was very obvious to me and i enjoyed throwing myself into learning new stuff, each day brought something new that i hadn’t seen before. My focus was entirely directed into improving my technical ability and because of that i failed to notice other issues that were going on around me. Perhaps i was too busy or perhaps i was just happy with learning new and interesting stuff and i was prepared to allow everything else to slide past.

Alas that is no longer the case so i have decided a change of setting is required and the company I’m moving to is one i have been interested in for quite a while so i have a sense of achievement that i have progressed enough to be considered for the role. I’m not going to name any names, I’m leaving a great place to work in another great place. I hope my new position will have me in over my head in the same positive way i experienced here.

As a follow up to Roy’s post Strip HTML tags from a string using regular expressions I’m posting this piece of code that strips out html style comments. I had to use this when i was using xml files to build menus for a small handheld terminal. i wanted comments in the source xml but not in the live menu files.


public string RemoveHTMLComments(string htmlString)
{
string pattern = @"\<!--[^$-]*[\w\t\r]*--\>$";
return Regex.Replace(htmlString, pattern , string.Empty, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.Singleline);
}


Some pics from our trip to Galway.

Kaiuss Gallery

I quite like this one for some reason, its an old car axel left on the beach.

This is probably the funniest clip ive seen on you tube.

Myself and my girlfriend just bought a PSP, few years late i guess considering theres a new one coming out in a few months. I’m pretty amazed at how good the graphics are on it. Looks as good as PS2. To think of all those years i spent playing a Gameboy (not your fancy Gameboy advance or Gameboy Colour, oh no im talking monoscreen baby) back in the day.