Posts by LittleBobTable

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: In other words...

We have a 2nd hand Renault Zoe. 2014 plate, brought for about £4.5K before the electric car stuff became 'big'. It's cheap as the battery is on a lease, as when they came out with the cars they didn't know how long the battery would last, so allowed the owners to lease it. So we pay £40 a month to rent the battery. If it gets below 85% initial charge: we get a new one. Cool, plus it looks like we'd get a 24kW to 40kW upgrade.

In some ways this is great as the battery is not an issue (until they end the lease).

Managed to get a grant for the charger as well, so that was ace. Sometimes it is good to get on the band wagon early (but not too early). Some might argue that 70 miles isn't enough, but round town it does just fine. Cheap to service as well and although it has been through quite a few tyres...

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

There are several examples of the great simplicity of the backend in 'C' and front end in VB that I have worked on in the day. We developed a data recording system, the backend (highly optimised) did the reception of data and writing to tape in C, exposed a few methods as a COM object and hey presto, VB can now make calls to stop/start etc.. Best of both - No faffing about trying to make the UI agreeable with the customer in C, and none of the complications of reading data from custom hardware and drivers in VB.

Another great example was a small warehouse inventory system, VB front end and Access backend, used only by a couple of people. I just worked and was simple to develop. Using other tools would have massively over-complicated the job (this was 2002).

Logging and monitoring can be a form of bullying, and make for lousy infosec

I always have it in the back of my mind that managers are an "overhead" - an administration cost that is applied to anything produced. If all the workers went on holiday for a day: nothing is produced that day. If a manager goes on holiday for a day: all/most of the work gets done.

I have found that a good manager normally works in reverse of what is thought of as a manager: If I have a problem that's stopping me from progressing, it's their job to sort it out so I can do my job. That should be their aim: to make you as productive as possible.

Timesheets are my pain. Whenever I ask why, "for reporting" is always the response. So I estimate how long something takes then I record time against my estimate. If it takes longer than my estimate - am I late or was my estimate wrong?