Lykkjulok Thursday, 29 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in initiatives.add a comment
This morning I snapped (again), having stubbed my toe on yet another impenetrable bit of code knocked up at the end of a typical 14-hour day by a fresh-from-college “subject matter expert” (honestly, that’s what they call them) in our Indian office.
The comments in the code defy description. Sure, the words were English(ish) on the surface, but any meaning was buried (and remains to this day) deep within the misfiring synapses of the stressed-out, burnt-out graddie who wrote them.
The code was written six months ago, so naturally the perpetrator has long since been head hunted and is now burning out even more brightly in another Bangalore sweatshop. Good luck to him/her.
In the meantime, I’m left trying to figure out what the hell s/he was thinking. So naturally after about 10 minutes I got bored and started wondering about how difficult it must be for somebody who doesn’t speak English as their first language to use the if-else/do-while constructs of a programming language.
Wouldn’t it be easier for them to marshal their addled thoughts if they could use their own grammar? Their own set of meaningful function names?
Enter Wikipedia.
Turns out that at least one bright spark in Iceland had the same idea back in the 80s, and “Fjoelnir” was born.
What does this do, I wonder?
bottles ->
stef(;n)
stofn
val n úr
kostur 0 þá
skrifastreng(;"no more bottles"),
kostur 1 þá
skrifastreng(;"1 bottle of beer"),
annars
skrifa(;n),
skrifastreng(;" bottles of beer"),
vallok
stofnlok
See what I mean? I can see that it’s a switch statement, but it hurts my head. No wonder most of the code coming out of India is crap – not only do they have to deal with English in the programming language itself but they’re increasingly faced with design patterns* that most native English speakers find hard to internalise.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the programming languages of the future are based in Esperanto. Or Latin. Luckily I won’t be around to see it.
* or “knitting patterns”, as I like to call them when trying to make a point to an imagination-challenged colleague
25% Extra Friday, 23 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in confused, corp-o-cack, moneygrabbing scumbags, pillocks in high places, really crap ideas, staggering displays of incompetence, things I hate, wankers.add a comment
Just bought a bag of Quavers. The bag looked bigger than usual, and had a large banner spread across the extraspace:
NOW WITH 25% EXTRA*
The * is theirs, for once, so being the ever-cynical tw@ that I am I bought the packet to see what the * meant, as (at the moment) even a bunch of mnygrbbrrs like Frito-Lay (aka Pepsico) have to own up somewhere if they’re trying to pull a fast one.
Turns out that the * meant “compared to previous 16.4g packs”
Ok.
Problem 1: our lardmachine used to sell 20g packs of Quavers until this New Generous Offer.
Problem 2: unless I’m rubbish at maths (which I am, but I don’t think I’m *this* rubbish), the difference in weight is actually 18%. Which means the “extra 25%” must apply to something else.
I wonder…
Totentanz Thursday, 22 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in staggering displays of incompetence.add a comment
In those odd momentary* lapses of concentration at work I occasionally find myself in need of something to stimulate what’s left of the pickled walnut in my skull. This week I’ve been trying to work out how to make a Whatnot move along a line, for reasons I won’t bore you with until it’s on the AppStore and in need of charitypurchasing.
Imagine my amazement when I tried out the latest scribblings (above) on the laptop at lunchtime and THEY ONLY WENT AND WORKED, DIDN’T THEY.
Erm. Wow. Exciting, and yet somehow frustrating, as I now have to face up to an afternoon of SQL because I’ve run out of interesting things to do.
* some moments have been known to last for hours, proving yet again that time is indeed relative
Wandercam Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in pillocks in high places, pix.add a comment
Not sure quite why they’re lowering the canal bank here – hope its waterproof whatever it is, as obviously nobody told the architect that the towpath on the other side (higher up) regularly floods in winter…
Caffeinated Consciousness Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in management.add a comment
That’s the form-filling deadline successfully ignored; let the japes commence.
It’ll be a while until the Wooden Spoon works out what’s happened, of course, as there are far too many pseudofires for him to fight at the moment. Staff numbers are way down as everyone seems to be getting a bite of this year’s training budget (whether they need/requested it or not). Turns out that Uberboss realised recently that none of the training budget had been used up for the year, and that if it wasn’t used up soon he’d not be allocated any for the next financial year.
Result: lots of people away “learning” irrelevant stuff at the same time, leaving their projects in crisis and their managers running about looking pale but important (yet failing to solve anything of consequence).
Now, tell me again what “to manage” means? My dictionary says “to regulate and administer”.
Fair enough, I suppose there’s nothing in that definition that presupposes “competence”. I guess it *is* possible to regulate badly and administer ineffectually, but I doubt even Success Factors would let that sort of behaviour ride for long. Perhaps I’m just being an idealist again, although I thought I’d finally woken up to the fact that it’s idealism that leads to a constant state of disillusionment.
No matter. I’m busy doing nothing much for The Man while blissing out to The Humans and dreaming of drum kits.
Oh yeah, and we had a scrum meeting for the first time in ages this morning. Can’t remember what happened in it. So everything’s fine in paradise.
Brollycam Tuesday, 20 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in pix.add a comment
Walking home in the rain still beats driving in any weather 
Ieya Monday, 19 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in corp-o-cack.add a comment
Ah, my iPod smiles upon me, making me remember what it was to hate the world with a passion… oh, hang on… nothing much has changed, then. Baggier eyes, less hair, and more gut, but otherwise that same feeling of do you really expect me to take you seriously, universe?
The Oracle course is over and I suppose I’m marginally wiser about what LGWR and MMON are all about, but frankly I could have used those memory cells for something better. Like how to draw shiny things with Illustrator, for example. No matter how studiously I read the Classroom In A Book I’m still left with a hefty dose of What-Do-I-Click-On-Now Syndrome when I want to make my upcoming iPhone game’s map coastline look nice and sandy. Actually, it’s worse than that – I get WDICON Syndrome when I want to draw a straight line. And a curve. And a dot. Still – needs must – if I’m ever going to escape this hell hole I need to make some convincing money out of iOS games, and for that to happen I need to get this graphics thing cracked. It’s a good job I just have to turn up at the office instead of actually work for a living, I’d be knackered if I was trying to learn this as well as expend any brainpower in a proper development job.
Anyhow. This week’s complainathon isn’t supposed to be about overplastered undocumented 10-year-old database code or my ineptness with state-of-the-art graphics tools, it’s about the latest round of the company’s pukeworthy appraisals process.
For some reason we’re supposed to waste an hour or so of our precious development time (hah!) filling in an online form (in a system hilariously misnamed “Success Factors”), scoring our own performance so that we’ve got something to discuss with our manager in the obligatory follow-up meeting. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to do this, as it never seemed to affect my (lack of) pay rise even when I did bother to fill the form in. Nowadays I always pretend to be busy by finding a critical problem which keeps me busy until after the system automatically locks my account once the deadline for the form-filling has passed. Then I discover that the critical problem was down to a misconfiguration, that there is no crisis, and that I now have time to have a bit of fun with the HR people by complaining to HR about the locked form, that the company IT department can’t unlock it, that they’re not taking my career development seriously, etc.
This tends to annoy my boss, of course, because he then has to come up with the numbers himself, and also brace himself for an unpredictable followup meeting where he tells me his numbers and I naturally argue back (even though I know it makes no bloody difference what number I get – I could get straight 5′s across the board and I’d still get less than 2% in the next pay rise, if anything). Still, it’s the little things in life that make it worth living, and having fun at the expense of corporate ladder climbers like the Wooden Spoon is one of them.
This year there’s more to play for, too. Rumours abound that they’re re-introducing the bell curve system again (which was thrown out due to its universal unpopularity, but is now being reintroduced as a consequence of a recent employee survey – can’t think who they surveyed – obviously not anyone below manager grade). The aim of this system is to “normalise” people – an impossibility when you look at nerd quota in our department – and also to give the company a pretext to axe the bottom 5%. All strictly illegal, of course, but that doesn’t stop the company from doing it anyhow, as they know full well that the people they axe are usually utterly fed up with the place and quite happy to walk away with an NDA, six months’ pay to kick off the contracting career, and the minimum of fuss.
I’m hoping my turn has come at last.
Lissie’s Heart Murmur Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in staggering displays of incompetence.add a comment
Amazingly, after only TEN years of nagging, I’ve finally been sent on an Oracle course.
Pity it’s the wrong one.
I’m a developer, so naively I assumed that my Lords & Masters (in their utterly infinite wisdomness), would send me on something to do with PL/SQL, debugging hard-to-follow stored procedures, that kind of caper. Not a bit of it. I’m about to become a DBA.
Joy.
By 5:30 today I’d had enough, and, as the instructor started telling me about enhancements to the ACL commands (whatever they are – clearly I don’t need to know about them, having survived the last 10 years in blissful ignorance), I got up and mumbled some excuses about needing to go home and cook the kids tea (and why the fuck am I here in the first place, by the way).
This was after an entire day of theory, which wasn’t exactly on the agenda. The clever people in charge of setting up the classroom machines had installed the software required for a Weblogic administrator’s course.
Bravo.
Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I get to install an Oracle database then make it do griddy, highly-available things. There’s a first time for everything, and hopefully it’ll be the last time for this particular experience, too. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever do it again, as even the Wooden Spoon knows that to let me within 100 nautical miles of a database server is to sign its death warrant, and I have absolutely no intention of admitting to any Oracle knowledge whatsoever on my CV.
Onward and upward.
Granadaland Monday, 12 September 2011
Posted by JasonBored in things I hate.add a comment
Some pillock managed to sell the idea that table football (“foosball”, if you’re trendy, which I’m not, and jolly glad I am about it too) is a good stress reliever for wage slaves in software companies. So we’ve got one in the kitchen. A kettle, a broken microwave, a smelly dishwasher, a vending machine that cools crisps down to near absolute zero while simultaneously yet supposedly impossible injecting moisture into them, and a trendy management-supported table football table (I agree, clumsy, but I refuse to say “foosball” no matter how well it fits). Table football relieves stress.
No it fucking doesn’t.
I’m crap at it, for one thing. So on the rare occasion I get invited to play a game (very rare, because I really am crap – dismally, utterly, hopelessly, irretrievably crap), I get totally stressed out because my hands don’t know what my eyes are seeing. Or something like that.
End result: Jason Bored 0, Absolutely Anyone Else (Including That Lass From The Travel Department Who Can’t Even Use A Telephone) 10.
There’s another reason that table football doesn’t relieve stress. Our Lords and Masters, as is well established, are utter pennypinching tightwads. This means we don’t have enough meeting rooms for all the faux-crisis management meetings, One-To-One patronising line management meetings, and even the occasional “design”* discussion.
Upshot of not having enough meeting rooms: we have to have meetings in the kitchen. Impossible, of course, because of all the foosball table football games. There’s one bloke in particular that you have to avoid – he’s a bit like Glenn Gould – likes to hum along while he’s playing, but at around 350dB (yes, that’s louder than the Tunguska Event). When he scores he interrupts his humming with a loud “woohoo” (loudest recorded woohoo was at 14:25BST on Thursday 9th July 2009 – a staggering 617dB).
Suffice to say, meetings are all but impossible in the kitchen when there’s a match on.
Result!
* just kidding, of course we don’t do “design” – that’s SO 80′s. We’re Agile, remember?
