geedee77

That is so moving I actually had to stop reading it a couple of times to stop the tears that were forming in my eyes. Thank you for sharing it.

I work about 30 seconds away from the Water Poet but I'm not in the office today! Have a good one and hopefully I'll see you all at the next one.

I use Notepad++ as well most of the time for this exact reason. It's minimalist enough but still has useful features such as colouring keywords which I miss when I use just notepad.

That's really annoying - I've been working on a similar thing on and off for about two years but never had the time to commit to it properly ... oh well, I guess I can just check the google code and see where I could've improved.

I agree with this 100%. It seems that an awful lot of companies like to pass the blame as soon as something unwanted happens. Yes, it may be the underlying fault of a service provider but, to your customers, you are the only company they deal with and it's your reputation that will be impacted no matter how many posts you put on your site and all over the internet.

Using service companies does not excuse poor customer service.

Do you live between the Auber factory and a FedEx office?

I don't know for certain if MTV have any special deals with the music companies (I did used to work for EMI but not in royalties) but everyone who plays music public needs to pay for it. This includes radio and TV stations.

I think the point probably is that music videos tended to be given away as freebies (although public playing of them would still incur a royalty payment) but now the music video is seen as part of the sellable product. I was actually part of the team that helped implement the technology part of this at EMI some years ago.

Any large company who does a seemingly good act is almost always motivated by how it will enhance the business to do it.

Google stopping censorship will make most people think "Google really are a nice caring company" which will make them want to use them instead of "evil" Microsoft etc.

People who don't understand this either don't really understand big business or have never been around a large company before.

Whilst this really does suck, I think it's valid to mention here that Microsoft have now said that the coding was 'done' by a 3rd party developer so all the comments that MS have done this are no longer valid.

Having said that though, someones head should roll at MS for not checking this out properly before go-live and I'm pretty certain MS themselves are ultra embarrassed and will try to solve this as soon as possible.

I hope that the Plurk guys get something worthwhile out of this ... maybe even more than the copious amounts of free advertising they're currently seeing.

I used to work for EMI and I'd never heard of that before. I think that just goes to show part of the problem with the big record companies now, they don't seem to like getting their name out there attached to good things anymore.

I've always done it with MS stack. ASP.NET, SQL Server etc all seem to handle unicode correctly (as long as you don't expect your users to still be on IE6!).

I work for a major law firm (think top 6 worldwide) and we run a DM system that requires IE6 only (ie, doesn't work in IE7 even) so every office worldwide is tied into IE6.

Only recently have we started rewriting it to work in newer browsers ... and I don't expect a working prototype before middle of next year!

I don't mean to be negative about a fellow human (especially one in the tech industry) but Zed comes across in that 'advert' as thinking he'd be doing a company a favour by working for them. I don't know him, or his work, but in my experience touting for general jobs by making out you're better than them rarely works. It'd be ok with a company you know but in a general blog post? It's a big 'no' from me.

Good luck to Zed though, I'm sure someone will snap him up just because of his online status and it's certainly a different way to find a job!

If you work at any big company you'd know it's often standard practice to send out press releases and market statements internally to inform staff of what's happening.

No, not at all. I just meant that I don't subscribe to the 'Google are brilliant, Microsoft are evil' thing that's common these days.

Touches like this make me like Google even though I'm a Microsoft man really.

I think we all hit points, like this, at some point in our coding where we get so frustrated with something we write a huge attack in comment form in the middle of the code. I think it's because we don't really have anyone to rant at whilst we're working.

Working in an environment where many people (often including the target of the rant) will see my code I find myself having to go through it before check-in to source control and remove many of these rants. Oh to be in a position where only I and my closest allies will see my frustrations!

There's something creepy about a company called Cyberdyne creating robotic things ...

You have to admire him for saying he won't sell to the military, although the inevitable big check from Uncle Sam will take some refusing.

This is a really good question and one that I'm having trouble answering. I find that I don't read through code in a definable way, it's more organic. I think it really comes down to (as previously mentioned by someone) why I'm reading through it.

Example, at work sometimes I need to read through other peoples code for reviews / bug fixes / enhancements. In that case I'll read the bits that matter or that I'm not sure what they're doing. Other times I might read, for example, the source to jQuery or a site or something to find out how something being done. In that case I'll try and follow where it does things by jumping between function as the compiler / interpreter would.

Where I read code is, again, something that isn't hard and fast. I'll more often than not just open it in a text editor (notepad as I'm a Windows man) but sometimes I'll load it into an IDE if it's particularly long or I'm having trouble following it in notepad.

Good question though!

Is it just me or did that blog post not really say much? Maybe I'm just missing something.

I do this all the time - all bills have to be the same orientation and in order of smallest to largest value. If I take a few out of the ATM I'll stand there sorting them for a few seconds annoying the people queueing behind!

My worst one, that annoys me greatly, is that I always write "go to" (as in "I need to go to the shops") as goto.

I doubt this is a problem for the kids but I started in early BASIC and used goto an awful lot!

For a while now I've been wondering about the industry and the people in it, and this story just makes me question it all so much more.

It seems that the majority of people who work in IT (or at least, those that contribute to the various sites) are acting like they are still in high school. You've got to be associated with this person or that site to be 'cool' and a 'guru' and if you're not you're nothing. It's getting beyond a joke.

Congratulation, you got a mention on TC or HN, or you've been 'dugg' by lots of people. It doesn't mean your startup or product is actually good or useful you know. If that is all the marketing you are relying on then you've only got a 50% chance of success.

The whole thing even extends to people. I'm not going to name names but there seems to be some sort of god-worshipping to people just because they write a blog. Yes, I enjoy reading them, yes I pick up things from people who have done it before, but it doesn't mean they're some sort of superstar ... and I'm not even going to talk about the "we've just got a new CIO who used to work at Google brigade" (oh, he worked at Google, he must be a hero).

Thanks for reading.