Month: January 2013

Hard times on the high street

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Since 2005, a significant number of companies have gone into administration. Some have been rescued, some have been sold, some have just completely disappeared. The list includes, but is not limited to:

Acquascutum
Barratts
Best Buy
Blacks Leisure
Blockbuster
Borders
Clement Joscelyne
Clinton Cards
Coffee Republic
Comet
Game Group
Habitat
Hawkin’s Bazaar
Hein Gericke UK
HMV
Jessops
JJB Sports
La Senza
Little Chef
Masai GB
Mexx
MFI
Oddbins
Optical Express
Past Times
ProCook
Pumpkin Patch
Rosebys
ScS Upholstery
Suits You
The Natural World
The Pier
The Works
Whittard’s of Chelsea
Woolworths
Zavvi (Virgin Megastore)

The times, they are a changin’

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We bought a car

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image

Yixen is getting a bit old and we’re spending a bit of money to keep her running. As part of our new year’s financial resolution, we’re consolidating some of our debts and loans and we’ve included some funds for a new vroom vroom.  So,  meet Charlie.

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Computers can sometimes be evil piles of shite

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I’ve had to do not one but two factory restores on my tablet and I still need to manually faff with updating the firmware. I had to root it to solve a known issue in android ICS. When the JB update came available OTA, I couldn’t run the update because my tablet was rooted. The only way to do a stock restore was to flash the official ROM. That kinda sorta worked, but for some godforsaken reason, my lock screen disappeared and was replaced with a promo-type display. There were a few other weird behaviours as well, like the fact that some configuration settings would not stay put, no matter how many times you set them. Unacceptable. A full data wipe/restore did nothing to fix this either. So now I downloading yet another 1gb ROM to see if I can get my baby back into a usable state. Grrr.

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Best code comments

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Software developers are a whimsy bunch. Sometimes, the long hours and tiredness makes your brain go bye-bye. This is the result:

/**
* For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones,
* the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest,
* fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men,
* I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
* never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry,
* never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
*/

// 
// Dear maintainer:
// 
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
// 
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
// 

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows

stop(); // Hammertime!

//Dear future me. Please forgive me. 
//I can't even begin to express how sorry I am.  

//private instance variable for storing age
public static int age;

options.BatchSize = 300; //Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!

//I am not sure why this works but it fixes the problem. 

//This code sucks, you know it and I know it.  
//Move on and call me an idiot later.

// I am not responsible of this code.
// They made me write it, against my will.

// drunk, fix later

#define TRUE FALSE //Happy debugging suckers

I’m probably guilty of a few similar ones myself. Makes me giggle :)

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Quotes of the day

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From Neil Gaiman

A decade ago, I wrote:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

And almost half a decade ago I said,

…I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

And for this year, my wish for each of us is small and very simple. And it’s this.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

gaiman
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