Posts by Decani

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

How to not serve customers

What atrocious customer service. HP are lying by attributing this forced 15 minute wait to "call volumes".

It's understandable to want to drive efficiency, it makes business sense. I like talking to people in general, but I would prefer to quickly resolve issues myself and avoid poorly trained, poorly motivated staff who possibly struggle to communicate effectively in English.

A properly trained and effective AI - sad to say it'd be preferable.

A decent knowledge base on their website - preferable again.

But crappy AI chatbot, crappy knowledge base and crappy human support once you get through is real reason to avoid HP and other foolish companies also doing it.

Happy customers = repeat business.

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

They've already failed

Any organisation that succumbs to the urge to surveil their employees has already failed. 100% stick rather than looking more deeply at "why is our productivity so poor?"

It breaks my heart to see the direction Boeing has gone in ever since their merger. An engineering-led titan collapsing in on itself. The big cheeses seeing problems in the trenches rather than being able to look at themselves as the problem.

Sad.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Superstars leave shit everywhere

I've worked with so called "superstars", they typically leave crap in their wake, crap that mere mortals have to clean up once they've become bored and moved on. They are also, typically, poor team players.

I avoid them.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: NULL is just the pointer analog to NaN

I've not looked into the Dart implementation, but null safety doesn't necessarily mean no nulls. There are different ways of handling things that can be optional or required.

1. Kotlin, for example with it's "?" on type declaration, allows null. It requires the code to say whether a variable can be null. "val name: String?" allows null to be assigned, whereas "val name: String" (no ?) doesn't allow null to be assigned. There are plenty of operators, pattern-matching, etc in the language to allow safe dereferencing. The point is that the code MUST explicitly handle null; NPE's are not possible (with caveats when interoperating with Java).

2. Functional languages have the explicit Option/Optional type: here there is no null at all; the code must unwrap the option values ("none" means no value, or its "some" + value. Pattern matching makes this elegant. Again the code must handle the "none" case explicitly (or pass it on. Again, very good language support to handle Option[al].

Specifying in code if a values is required or not is very nice (my experience is Kotlin).

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Just started twittering this week...

I've had an account for 10 years but never used it. Having forced time off for surgery meant I had a rummage and amongst oceans of dross there is very good content from people I admire in our field; Alan Hollub, Martin Fowler, Lukas Eder, etc.

It's been stimulating and I wish I'd been active years ago; I believe I'd be less cynical and burned out about the job I still find fascinating given the chance.

Ironic that his takeover and the possible car crash caused me to engage with it!

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

I'm getting rusty

I've still got 5 to 10 years before I retire, but I'm looking into migrating to Rust, to escape the utter BS of modern Java development (endless frameworks rather than writing code, verbosity, vanilla developers). I did plenty of C and C++ back in the day so it wouldn't be a total shock. Null-safety, memory safety, sum types, no reflection, no byte code weaving, etc. All good. Plus maybe the framework w*nks won't destroy the fun of programming in Rust before I retire.

Either that or I've got PTSD/Long Covid after looking at so much shocking java.

TypeScript joins 5 most used languages in 2022 lineup

Re: re: the median time spent was actually just over 15 minutes.

Says the person who's found the time to post 3711 times - pity the poor devs covering for you whilst you goof off.

Boeing's Starliner CST-100 on its way to the ISS 2 years late

No end to end testing...

"including the discovery that Boeing hadn't bothered with end-to-end testing" - unbelievable and so very sad that a once mighty engineering company has come to this. Sack most of the fekking bean counters and managers and move management back to the factories.

Logitech Pop: Stylish, portable, but far from the best typing experience

Re: Number Pads

I asked the same the other month and it's a good question. By reducing the keyboard size you have more space for paper to design/take notes (or can work on a smaller desk). It also reduces the amount of arm movement (and hence arm strain) to access the mouse.

It led me down the rabbit-hole of trying vim. Being modal vim does very well without requiring nav keys. it ended with me installing an extension to chrome to navigate using vim keys without a mouse or dedicated nav keys. It was quite effective, though old habits die hard. It also got me to improve (after 30+ years of bad typing habits) my touch typing.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: The curse of overchoice

^^^ This ^^^

I would like to move to some Linux-based distro as I resent MS insisting I buy a new PC just to keep getting Windows updates (Win 11), but choosing the "right" distro puts me off. I understand it doesn't matter too much as it's potentially non-destructive to change, but as a long-time Windows user it's not obvious. Windows makes it easy. I use git-bash from within MS Terminal and I want to go "all in" on bash, but all the distro choice is off putting - it is a "barrier to entry". I can tweak and choose a different one when I am comfortable.

I want the power of Linux, but I want the on-ramp to be easy; I want to be productive (able to earn money) with the minimum of fuss. I'll happily fek around with arcane settings and different file-systems, desktops, etc as my confidence level increases, but not in the first few days and weeks. Choice is fine, but...

The poor accessibility is surprising to hear. It pee's me off that apps/sites all have different keystrokes for the same function (e.g. starting a bullet list in Word/OneNote, gmail, JIRA, etc - all different), but at least I can rely upon the Windows basics [Alt]+Tab, Alt+F4, Win-Up to maximise, Win-R to run, etc.

TBH the other thing putting me off is my current dependence on OneDrive (and OneNote to a lesser degree). And no, I'm not interested in some after-market, reverse-engineered hack on OneDrive.

Sadly

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

Happy days playing with the T414, developing a thermal print array based chart recorder (replacing wiggly pens). The (anticipated) product range went from 10cm wide at about 10mms/sec to 100cm wide at 100cm/sec. Transputer seemed ideal though it never got past the low end device which would have been far easier using a 68000 than the Transputer with its IO chip and a bunch of PIC microcontrollers doing the IO. Happy days, much better than the shite financial services systems (monstrosities) in Java nowadays.

Beijing to build Communist training college in a metaverse

Mandatory viewing option

The mind boggles; they could require all "citizens" to spend time in this metaprison to entertain (ahem) them to get social credit. Scary shit.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Amen to this. No more easy cross pollination or easy support. No more banter. I'm torn though, as the office seems to have changed for the worse (open plan) and colleagues prefer to be left alone rather than ever collaborating. WFH is comfortable and no more distasteful and expensive commute.

Apps made with Google's Flutter may fritter away CPU cycles. Here's what the web giant intends to do about it

Snip "In Flutter the cursor is a timer and for each frame we need to composite and paint the layer tree to the surface." WTF? A blinking cursor doesn't change any layout dimensions, so the dirty region is the tiny bounds of the cursor. Even ancient Java Swing would just repaint the minimum of pixels. Why have they not learned this simple lesson? Dumb arse programmers.

A Windows 11 tsunami? No, more of a ripple as Microsoft's latest OS hits 5% PC market

Re: Time to move

Microsoft can do what they want, but I will move to Linux and take the initial hit. I expect my productivity to improve significantly as I become increasingly confident on the linux command line. I also expect it will improve my marketability. So, no, I'm not thinking about this the wrong way around.

Time to move

I've wanted to move to Linux for ages and these seemingly needless restrictions are the final straw. I'm starting a new contract where they use RHEL so I'll use that to learn what I need as a Java dev. My old but still perfectly capable laptop will get shifted to Linux once I'm comfortable I can do everything I need. The only things I'll miss are OneDrive and OneNote, I'm otherwise happy to get off the MS train. My needs are simple, I've only delayed out of an excess of caution and inertia. No games, no Windows development.