Blogitech from Chris Maddern

I don’t often talk about my job on here, mainly because it’s not often relevant. But recently I’ve been in a lot of meetings / discussions about creating a system to keep the executives up to date on the progress of various projects.

It was an interesting meeting in which the system changed from a spreadsheet to a full implementation of Microsoft Project, but I left with lots of words in my head like ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. It took days for the association to hit me but it all sounds to me rather like the job for a blog.

Each entry could be an update tagged with a project title among other keywords. Wordpress could even be slightly modified to store progress of each category along with a few other key pieces of information, but essentially it seems like it could work; you could browse by category for a chronological update of the status of projects. It may even be more advantageous for the developers as they gain the scope of explaining any potential issues to a third party (albeit virtually).

I’m not sure if this has been done before / is implemented anywhere but would be very interested to hear any thoughts on the matter or any experiences.

Chris

While trying to see if a peculiarity in the rendering of this site was due to the IE6 install on a machine in my work (eurgh… companies) I stumbled accross a service that will produce a screenshot of your page rendered an any and all browsers available. And what’s best.. it’s free!

Browsershots will render your page on any of hundreds of OS, Browser and Settings configurations and produce you screenshots of the results. This is the easiest tool to test your page on any setup, ever.

Good Work!

BrowserShots

It would seem that the Python Source Code to the popular game ‘Eve’ has been leaked on the internet.

While apparently downloaders of the Eve Source utilizing torrent links are being banned, there is a MegaUpload link from which I’ve heard no such rumours.

You can find it over at: REMOVED
(hit up your favourite torrent site if you’re feeling brave)

Remember; you heard it here first! Unless CCP is asking!

Chris

Error messages have gotten a lot of flack over the years for unintuitive wording or programatic creation (causing odd succesions of phrases to the effect of ‘there was an error’) to which all you can reply is ‘okay’ implying that somehow it is acceptable for the computer to erase all your data. Today, however, a new level of brilliance was achieved by a success message; a friend of mine is building a download manager that reports:

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris

Okay, I’m about to go in to demo ‘Giggle’, but I just found a way of rendering readable text on glass in C#’ without adding to the onPaint() functions etc… and it’s really easy!

As you can see, it’s easily adaptable in to a function for ‘universal painting of text on to Glass, although notable is the fact that if the pane is taken ‘off screen’ then the text will need to be redrawn, and a glass area can only be drawn to if it is currently visible.

Enjoy,

Chris
note: Cheers to a couple of guys who blog on MSDN for some of the code