Re-inventing the wheel...only squarer...

I was talking to a guy a couple of weeks ago about the evolution of programming languages. I mentioned to him about what a huge change there was between Microsoft C Compiler version 5.0 and 6.0. He was like..."you mean from Visual Studio 5 to 6?" and I was like "how long have you been out of short trousers??"

Ok...I get that a lot these days. Everyone is younger than me.

Microsoft introduced the capability to work with Windows in the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler version 6.0. It was so incredibly complicated to launch a window that it really didn't seem at all worth learning how the hell to do it. If my memory does not fail me entirely, they introduced Visual Studio after the C/C++ Compiler version 7.0. Visual programming was something of a revelation...

But that's another day's story. I'm not fundamentally anti-Microsoft. I think they've made a few really good products. I just think it's a shame that they're so inconsistant in everything they do.

I use MS Word all the time. I used to use a couple of DTP packages to prepare docs to be able to get the layout flexibility I wanted, but now I can actually do pretty much all I need to within Word. I tried using OpenOffice and it is a total train-wreck by comparison.

I also use MS Excel all the time. It is an extremely powerful tool without which we would have a hard time running the business. That's no exaggeration, because we use it for so many different things. I tried importing a few of my general purpose spreadsheets into OpenOffice...it cried its little eyes out...it willingly donned the gimp suit and stuffed a little red ping pong ball into its mouth and offered me some ripe pink rump...it failed...

I had a run down on KeyNote on the Mac the other day. I liked it. I liked the feel of it, and I really liked that the presentations did not automatically look like PowerPoint...I use PowerPoint quite a bit but I never really like the end result much.

It made me think about the MS Office packages. I can now draw a box on the screen in just about any of the MS Office component packages. There are also a couple of packages that are specifically written to help me draw a box on the screen (Visio, PowerPoint, Publisher...I think they canned the other one...Photoshare? something like that...not counting that total waste of space MS Paint...). Every single one of them works a different way! Why can't they just write a drawing/painting plugin and let all the apps use the same interface?

They must spend so much money having separate development teams maintaining all those different products, as if we (the user) gave a damn!

Disillusionment and People Who Do Not Get It

I'm really getting sick and tired of people who have a stack of certificates but who can't tie their own shoe laces. If I have to hand-hold any more SixSigma black belts through the simplest process of not alienating the client whilst still getting the job done I will probably show up on CNN next day as the guy who took an Uzi to the office...

It seems as though you can't walk in to a Starbucks in this part of the world without discovering that the guy squeezing the beans has some god-damned MBA from some two-bit third world flea pit. Every person who arrives for an interview for any position regardless of how technical claims to be Cisco Certified to some degree or other, but strangely they just sit there and grin at me when I start asking them how they'd design one of our networks.

I sort of "get it". I understand how hard it must be to stand out from the crowd when the crowd has literally billions of people in it, and to figure even in the top 50% is maybe fantastic because they at least means there are a hell of a lot of people further down the food chain to you. I sort of "get" that...but I don't get all the expats who seem to want to join in with that crap instead of just standing out on their own merits.

Today (not just today...it's been a while now) I've been once again disillusioned by a person with a lot of certificates. This guy left the company just the other day (and would have been fired if he'd stayed any longer) after spending months digging us into a worse and worse mess on a site with a client. Throughout the process he's been telling me all is good, he's been telling me he's on top of everything. He's been telling me he's in constant touch with the vendor who sold us the equipment he's been trying to get work, and he's been telling me that everything is being done to resolve the problems.

Bull...shit...

All of it.

We paid this guy good money. We even touted the guy around, telling people how great we were because we had such a highly certified engineer working with us...sigh...

I don't have time to follow these guys around holding their hands and making sure they're doing things right. Why (and I have used this expression several times already this week) have a dog, and then shit on the carpet yourself?

The process of resolving problems seems to be beyond so many people nowadays. So many people would rather sit in front of a PC monitor and stare at it for hours and hours in the hope that some solution to their problem is going to just leap out at then...when we all know that it frequently does not.

Fix things. Make things work. It does not matter that you ask for help or that you do not know all the answers, finding the solution is all that matters.

I get a little annoyed with people who try to pull the old "we need to solve the problems ourselves if we are going to learn". No, my friends. You need to fix the fucking problem so the company can get paid and thereby pay your god-damned salary at the end of the month. Full-fucking-stop!

You want to learn? No problem, we'll send you on a training course. Fix the problem and we'll make enough money to do that, otherwise call the god-damned support line, read the fucking manual in your own time and do what you get paid for!

In which I complain about people who aren't as perfect as me

So which browser am I using...? You need a clue??

Wow...the browse window got so big! First impressions are good...

I don't know why I let things bother me so much but they do. People things really bother me a lot in a way that probably makes no difference my team at work but that really effects me a lot outside of the office. I'm a sociopath - I get that. But I've got feelings too...weirdo...

Did you notice that a lot of us work for companies that have the word "Solutions" in their titles or in their marketing tag lines or slogans? We're all into providing "solutions"...which is a bitch, because by implication it means that we're always surrounded by problems.

I don't mind problems. Not at all. We all have them, and to a lesser or greater extent we all make them too. Remember the addage? The person who never made a mistake never made anything. It's a good one. It's very true. The clients I deal with come to me with only one or two actual problems, we then design a bunch of systems to try to solve those problems and in the course of coming up with those systems we create dozens and dozens of engineering problems for ourselves that nobody's going to solve but us.

That's what we do (or it was when I first learned about what an engineer was supposed to do). We provide solutions to problems.

One of the important lessons any good engineer needs to learn very early on if he's going to ever get enough time to get anywhere is that a solution is a solution wherever it may come from. You can't afford the time to work it all out by yourself. Other people can help. If you need to know something go ask. If you don't know who to ask, ask someone who can help you work out who to ask. Very little ever got fixed just through somebody staring at it for days and days - and even if you might eventually discover the truth - why wait? Get someone to tell you the truth so you can take it and go out discover new truths armed with that initial truth as your guide.

Why am I so keen on this topic today? Well, because today I had to listen to a guy I believed was a good engineer tell me how it wasn't his fault that a project went over time and over budget by months because nobody offered to help him. He complained that the only people he ever saw were people asking about when the project would be complete and when could we get paid.

This guy just couldn't get his head around the fact that throughout the months during which he failed to complete what he'd been tasked to do, he continued to receive his salary. Where did that money come from, I wonder? During that time he was present at more than one team meeting at which I explained that project over-runs and over-spends hit everyone in the pocket. And yet despite all this, he failed to come ask for help, he failed to even identify who he needed to ask for help from or what help he should seek. And at the end of it all, he blames all around him for not coming to his aid...ironic when he was the most highly certified member of the team on the particular piece of equipment he couldn't get to work properly.

Look, when it all boils down, this guy does not share my core values. He and I do not see eye to eye on what constitutes getting stuff done, and that in itself means he's not right for my team. You can't afford to have a democracy when it comes to driving a company forward. Only the people who know where to go and how to get there can get to help steering the boat. Everyone else is rowing in the wrong direction and slowing the rest of us down.

Another example of my callous cold heartedness...myeh...not really. This whole incident and the last couple of weeks that have led up to this point have actually upset me a lot. I lead by example and I expect (reasonably or not) people to follow me out of respect. When people fail to do that I do not cope well. I get annoyed. I get upset. I sulk.

It was up around 45 degrees today too, which is bad weather for sulking in.

Take the veil cerpin taxt

I don't know what the hell it means either, but I love those fuzzy haired bastards.

So now I'm wondering whether to get an iPad or one of those Blackberry Playbook things...the dual compelling facts that I can sync to my Blackberry mailbox and browse sites with Flash makes me think favourably of the guys from RIM (even though they named their company after a dubious sex act)...actually I think Apple did the same, now I come to think of it...

I'm not really one for games or the like, and Apple's iTunes gets on my nerves. I hate the fact that I can only have one profile on one machine. I do not listen to Justin Beiber or Boyzone, and my daughter has not yet matured into Frank Zappa or The Mars Volta, but we each musst tolerate each other's tastes whilst I have to host her uploadings.

iPad or Playbook, though. One or t'other though. I deserve one.

Hey, I deserve a whole lot of things while we're on the subject...

A friend in the games industry has convinced me that the best way to achieve our business video conferencing requirements is through an XBox with Kinect. Yes! (air-punch). I guess we'll be playing Halo in the boardroom then...

So what's with L3 and Praetorian? I heard they canned it - but that would be weird given the money they pumped in. Immersive C4i makes a lot of sense to me (or immersive PSIM if you want to be all modern and hip with the youngsters).

Oh boy...The Haunt of Roulette Dares just started. Can't sit still to this one so I gonna have to go head bang around the garden for a while...

Kong has lucky escape due to 125th floor viewing deck

Callous and insensitive? No, really. I was planning this picture for weeks.

Last time I got refused holiday by anyone I just gave my wife their phone number...problem solved.

Summer is almost here and there's a lot to do. I was at the Milestone Partner Day in Dubai the other day along with about 160 other lucky people. Did you know they have a song now? Like a real, honest to goodness Milestone song all of their very own...

Taking something dreary by Coldplay and pretending it was written about them wasn't good enough for the Danes, oh no, they actually had to destroy some guy's soul by forcing him write a song about an open platform video recording management software package. I wonder if he's out of councelling yet.

They had a video to go with it too...which was interesting.

Okay, I'm being pithy now. Bite me.

They had like a little mini-trade show thing there too with a bunch of Milestone technology partners. There were (I think) three different analytics providers, four camera manufacturers, three storage companies and an access control guy (yay for diversity). They were all in the room shooting daggers at each other and bitching about the other guys' performance. I hate that.

But the food was pretty good and I got a free screwdriver from Vivotek...er-hum...you have to grab on to the small wins sometimes...

I'm not going to get to IFSEC this year...well, not the Birmingham one anyway, which perhaps isn't such a bad thing. Now I can maybe justify going to some other show somewhere a lot nicer than the B place.

I'll do a run down on those Aperio locks some time soon...they still on my desk under a mountain of other things that seem to be more important right now.

Having trouble with a Lenel/Bioscrypt fingerprint integration on a site at the moment...weird hang ups (the system, not me...). I'll update when I have something worth updating...