After deciding that my Apachecon-Europe totebag really wasn't suitable for lugging my Vaio around any longer (due to a complete lack of padding, and the fact that there wasn't enough room to carry my glasses around in it as well), I spent a while looking and turned up the Targus Sport Deluxe Backpack, which I got from ThinkGeek because Targus inexplicably refuse to sell it in the UK...
It's enormous, but as long as you don't mind that, it's great. Enough room to carry books, folders, lunch, etc. in a separate compartment to the laptop. Plenty of pockets for accesories, cables (and my fsck'ing glasses). And I have no worries about the straps going.
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're after, but there's loads of really good stuff on TechNetCast. I just got myself an MP3 car-stereo, and plan to grab all the talks I haven't gotten around to listening to, so that I can listen to them in the car.
I've been working out how to redecorate my flat, and I found the best way is to take digital photos of the rooms, import them into Photoshop, and go nuts! Sure, it requires a modicum of artistic ability (I started out studying architecture, so I can just about manage this), but it's enough to work out your colour schemes and stuff...
Come back and ask me in about twenty-four hours. I've been wrestling with an absolute doozy for the last six, and somehow I get the impression this is going to be the one;)
TextPad is, as far as I'm concerned, the bee's knees - not just in terms of Windows-based editors. It's probably my favourite editor on any platform. My only couple of gripes (I've mentioned these to Helios, but to no avail as yet)...
although the serach (and replace) features are excellent (decent regex support) there's still no incremental search feature
syntax colourisation is good, but I'd quite like to be able to use bold, italics, etc in syntax highlighting
document classes are based on file extensions (how very Windoze) - and can't be based on (say) a shebang, so unless my Perl scripts are called something.pl they won't get marked up according to my Perl syntax highlighting
WEC Le Mans 24hrs, which according to this page dates back to 1986 (suddenly, I feel very old) had a cabinet shaped like a rotating saucer, which you sat in with a steering wheel. It was mounted on pistons, and if you drove over the kerbs would jolt "baduhm-baduhm"...
As far as I can make out from their website, Immersion's earliest patents only go back as far as 1989.
As far as I can see, SCEE have pretty much made a disaster of their pre-order system. Supposedly, they are 15% short of meeting their orders, personally I believe the shortfall is greater than that. I still haven't received confirmation to collect my PS2 - Sony are currently telling anyone who phones to hassle their store, take ID, etc, and they'll get their PS2. However, according to Game Ltd Sony are just saying this to get people off the phone (I have spent over an hour on hold trying to get through to Sony in the last two days). All in all, not the start I imagine they wanted to their PS2 launch in the UK...
I recently found myself undergoing a similar transition, which has been tough. Throughout my career I had regarded "management" as a dirty word, and only relatively recently came to terms with the fact that there was a very strong chance that I would end up having to take this direction myself.
The first thing that alarmed me was that I was told (by one of the few very good managers I have encountered) that I should expect to spend not more than 20% of my time programming.
I am still on a very steep learning curve, but I think there are a number of things you can do to make this transition well.
Firstly, learn from your own experiences in the trenches. Think long and hard about the ways in which you may feel you have been mis-managed, and draw on that to ensure that you don't make the same mistakes.
Also, take pride in the fact that you really understand the nature of what you are managaing - something that I still feel very few managers in the industry do.
And lastly, develop procedures (if they don't exist already) which allow you to keep track of what is actually going on. This is probably the single toughest thing involved in managing. There are books out there which can suggest good ways of doing this, but better still is to find a mentor. If you can find a talented manager, draw on their knowledge. They've already worked out these skills, so there is no sense in reinventing the wheel.
The only way that an open software project can quash these kind of rumours is by keeping everyone, including the media, informed. I think a lot of teams (being primarily programmers, rather than pointy-haired types) overlook this. If the project itself is not seen as a credible, authoritative source of news pertaining to the project, then those looking for information will go to newsgroups and the like, and start reading whatever they like in to the random line-noise they find there.
Even open software projects need to manage public and media expectations.
I tend to find that the best way of dealing with this problem is to identify individual elements of the problem, and start knocking up solutions to them, without worrying about the bigger picture. This might be things like creating a new class that will help me solve a problem further down the line, trying to use a couple of new techniques as I go, and creating a bucket-load of useful methods along the way...
This usually rejuvenates me completely. I suddenly find that I know how to tackle the problem, or at least some fo the elements of it. And I can plough back into the task at hand.
All the work I'm doing can be incorporated into the final solution, but I find it to be the most effective way to address individual issues, rather than staring at the problem as a whole going "Ohmigodohmigodohmigod...".
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After deciding that my Apachecon-Europe totebag really wasn't suitable for lugging my Vaio around any longer (due to a complete lack of padding, and the fact that there wasn't enough room to carry my glasses around in it as well), I spent a while looking and turned up the Targus Sport Deluxe Backpack, which I got from ThinkGeek because Targus inexplicably refuse to sell it in the UK...
It's enormous, but as long as you don't mind that, it's great. Enough room to carry books, folders, lunch, etc. in a separate compartment to the laptop. Plenty of pockets for accesories, cables (and my fsck'ing glasses). And I have no worries about the straps going.
Q: What's the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?
A: An extroverted programmer stares at your shoes while he's talking to you.
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're after, but there's loads of really good stuff on TechNetCast. I just got myself an MP3 car-stereo, and plan to grab all the talks I haven't gotten around to listening to, so that I can listen to them in the car.
I've been working out how to redecorate my flat, and I found the best way is to take digital photos of the rooms, import them into Photoshop, and go nuts! Sure, it requires a modicum of artistic ability (I started out studying architecture, so I can just about manage this), but it's enough to work out your colour schemes and stuff...
Come back and ask me in about twenty-four hours. I've been wrestling with an absolute doozy for the last six, and somehow I get the impression this is going to be the one ;)
TextPad is, as far as I'm concerned, the bee's knees - not just in terms of Windows-based editors. It's probably my favourite editor on any platform. My only couple of gripes (I've mentioned these to Helios, but to no avail as yet)...
WEC Le Mans 24hrs, which according to this page dates back to 1986 (suddenly, I feel very old) had a cabinet shaped like a rotating saucer, which you sat in with a steering wheel. It was mounted on pistons, and if you drove over the kerbs would jolt "baduhm-baduhm"...
As far as I can make out from their website, Immersion's earliest patents only go back as far as 1989.
As far as I can see, SCEE have pretty much made a disaster of their pre-order system. Supposedly, they are 15% short of meeting their orders, personally I believe the shortfall is greater than that. I still haven't received confirmation to collect my PS2 - Sony are currently telling anyone who phones to hassle their store, take ID, etc, and they'll get their PS2. However, according to Game Ltd Sony are just saying this to get people off the phone (I have spent over an hour on hold trying to get through to Sony in the last two days). All in all, not the start I imagine they wanted to their PS2 launch in the UK...
I recently found myself undergoing a similar transition, which has been tough. Throughout my career I had regarded "management" as a dirty word, and only relatively recently came to terms with the fact that there was a very strong chance that I would end up having to take this direction myself.
The first thing that alarmed me was that I was told (by one of the few very good managers I have encountered) that I should expect to spend not more than 20% of my time programming.
I am still on a very steep learning curve, but I think there are a number of things you can do to make this transition well.
Firstly, learn from your own experiences in the trenches. Think long and hard about the ways in which you may feel you have been mis-managed, and draw on that to ensure that you don't make the same mistakes.
Also, take pride in the fact that you really understand the nature of what you are managaing - something that I still feel very few managers in the industry do.
And lastly, develop procedures (if they don't exist already) which allow you to keep track of what is actually going on. This is probably the single toughest thing involved in managing. There are books out there which can suggest good ways of doing this, but better still is to find a mentor. If you can find a talented manager, draw on their knowledge. They've already worked out these skills, so there is no sense in reinventing the wheel.
The only way that an open software project can quash these kind of rumours is by keeping everyone, including the media, informed. I think a lot of teams (being primarily programmers, rather than pointy-haired types) overlook this. If the project itself is not seen as a credible, authoritative source of news pertaining to the project, then those looking for information will go to newsgroups and the like, and start reading whatever they like in to the random line-noise they find there.
Even open software projects need to manage public and media expectations.
I tend to find that the best way of dealing with this problem is to identify individual elements of the problem, and start knocking up solutions to them, without worrying about the bigger picture. This might be things like creating a new class that will help me solve a problem further down the line, trying to use a couple of new techniques as I go, and creating a bucket-load of useful methods along the way...
This usually rejuvenates me completely. I suddenly find that I know how to tackle the problem, or at least some fo the elements of it. And I can plough back into the task at hand.
All the work I'm doing can be incorporated into the final solution, but I find it to be the most effective way to address individual issues, rather than staring at the problem as a whole going "Ohmigodohmigodohmigod...".