Code Comments

By On · Add Comment

I know it’s almost heresy to say it, but comments in code are harmful.

We could start with Jesse Liberty’s post which suggests that you probably don’t need them. If you have a function that does something, use the function name to describe what it does, which is sound advice.

The problem with comments is that you end up with 2 models. One which says what is being done by the code, the other which says what is being done descriptively. But developers can already take code and work out what it does and form a descriptive version of that code in their minds.

OK, the argument goes that if you do it descriptively, you shortcut the process. But if you’re doing it descriptively, you still need to describe it in as much granular detail as the code, or else the documentation is incomplete, and will still require the developer to go and actually look at the code. So, comments are again pointless.

So, comments are pointless. But comments are, then, by their presence, harmful. You have two definitions of the logic. One written in a language the machine can understand, one in a language humans can read. What’s the chances that they are consistent? The only way to do so is to make sure that they are reviewed, in which case you have to hope that the developers care enough to review it carefully and that the management will fund it. In the world of Theoretical Methodologies this may be true, but down here on planet earth it rarely is.

And once you lose confidence in the comments, they are simply more code for people to scroll through.

JSON Editor

By On · Add Comment

A quite useful little website that does more for your JSON than even Hera could is jsoneditoronline.org which allows you to past JSON text, and get it visualised as a hierarchical structure. As a bonus, you can then get the hierarchical structure back to pretty printed JSON.

To explain:

take some unformatted json

json1

convert to the hierarchy by clicking the right arrow

json2

then click the left arrow to get back to nicely formatted json

json3

Enough of the Facebook Gateway

By On · Add Comment

I’m not sure if this is just a cost thing or not knowing about other options, but I am pretty fed up with companies pulling this:-

Capture

 

 

The problem is that I don’t have a Facebook account. If I click that “Like” button, it will ask me to create an account. I could create an account, but the only purpose would be to have an account to signup for companies that use crummy signup processes rather than building their own or using something sensible like OpenID.

The Kindle for Technical Books

By On · Add Comment

I finally decided to join the current decade and get myself a Kindle e-reader. I wish I’d done it earlier because it just makes reading easy. I’m not sure if it’s that it’s held in one hand, or that you don’t have to fold over pages, or being able to resize fonts, but I am reading more. I’m also enjoying the facility for sending files to it, which is allowing me to read various 19th century books from gutenberg.org.

One thing that I wasn’t sure about was using it for technical books. A novel, or a non-fiction book about say, music or writing is linear. You read from top left, across and down, until you reach the bottom of the page. With a technical book, the text sometimes refers to a diagram or a code-snippet, or perhaps to something mentioned earlier in the book. Where a printed book can be set up to put a diagram in the right place on the page, the Kindle isn’t like that. You can get text onto the page.

But, that’s what I feel is the only problem with the Kindle for technical books, and it’s outweighed by other considerations:-

  • I can read the books on my PC, checking the document on the page next to the code I’m working on.
  • I won’t soon need a shelfful of large O’Reilly and Apress books. Put it all in a little device.
  • Price. The Kindle book I’m currently reading (Entity Framework Code First) is half the price of the paper edition. Others are around 1/3rd off. At £16-35 a book, it’s not going to take long for a £70 Kindle to pay for itself with cheaper books.

 

Yak Shaving

By On · Add Comment

Seth Godin borrowed this from MIT Media Lab, and has a full description here. It’s a great term.

Community Version of VisualSVN

By On · Add Comment

I’m a little behind on this, but as I was reinstalling Visual Studio 2012 on my Windows 8 PC, I went to see how much the VisualSVN plugin was, only to find that since version 3.0 that it’s been free for non-domain use.

It’s even in the Visual Studio Gallery

Windows 8 Thoughts So Far

By On · 2 Comments

I’ve installed Windows 8 on my laptop (for various other reasons), and this discussion from The Big Bang Theory sums up my feelings so far

Penny: Sheldon, what are you going to have?

Sheldon: I’ll have a diet coke.

Penny: Okay, can you please order a cocktail, I need to practice mixing drinks.

Sheldon: Fine. I’ll have a virgin cuba libre.

Penny: That’s, um, rum and coke without the rum.

Sheldon: Yes,

Penny: So coke.

Sheldon: Yes. And would you make it diet?

OK, in this case, Penny is offering free drinks, so you can hardly complain when she refuses. Microsoft isn’t. You’re getting Windows 8 as given. If you don’t like the new UI, tough. And “not upgrading” isn’t much of a choice. Staying on unsupported operating systems or having to convert to a whole new OS is hardly a small job.

I’ve installed Windows 8, installed all my normal applications, downloaded all the source code from my server and I still can’t get past the fact that all the stuff they’ve added isn’t anything that I want. The desktop, app store, the flip-up login screen and connecting my account to my Windows account are all really about tablet use where you get limited screen space and slow input devices. Microsoft want to give me a cuba libre, but what I really want is just a diet coke*. So, I’m running Windows 8, but the UI is being turned back into Windows 7 with the help of Start 8 which brings back the start menu and boots straight to desktop.

I think Apple got this in a way that Microsoft didn’t. The early Microsoft tablets just ran Windows with a few bolt-ons for tablets, and no-one liked them. Apple come along and rather than creating Tablet OSX, they create iOS. I’m sure there’s lots of the same stuff under the hood, but they do have two separate operating systems, one leaning towards phones and tablets, one for desktop. They understood that the needs of people on a tablet and a desktop (often sometimes the same people) are quite different. One is more about consumption, the other more about productivity, and trying to squeeze both into the same OS is just going to annoy either users trying to be productive or consuming.

Intel stopping user-upgradable CPUs

By On · Add Comment

From ZDNet

It seems that this is the beginning of the end for upgrades, and not just CPU upgrades. Apple is already soldering RAM onto the motherboards of its MacBook Pro systems.

This feels to me like the beginning of the end for the desktop PC. Modularity made the desktop PC, and removing this key feature will break it.

Not really. We have had PCs with on-board graphics and sound chips (and rather good ones) for a few years, reducing some of the modularity, and it didn’t kill the PC.

It’s really about how much modularity is useful to people and at what cost. As someone who likes the upgradability of desktops, the CPU being wired to the motherboard isn’t that big a deal to me. It’s been over a decade since I upgraded my CPU without also upgrading my motherboard. The amount that a CPU improves from one year to the next rarely warrants an upgrade. Wiring the two together is actually a benefit – I no longer have to worry about putting a screwdriver through the motherboard.

at

Converting Email to IMAP

By On · Add Comment

In this day and age, it really makes sense to switch from POP email to IMAP.

What’s the benefit of IMAP? Quite simply, that if you’re doing email in more than one place, it keeps it all synchronised (if you also need calendars and folders, then it’s worth considering Exchange). For me, I have email on my Android phone and in Outlook on a PC. I want them to synchronise, so I can send or receive email from either, but also have the state reflected in both. To do this, the mail is kept permanently on the server.

So, when I switched hosting to Vidahost, I decided to set up IMAP Outlook and Android. It’s quite straightforward. The main thing to remember is that mail is going to be kept for you on the server not deleted on retrieval like with POP3. So, having created an IMAP account on Outlook, I then had to copy all mail across, and then let Outlook synchronise it, which was mostly painless. And then create an account on Android to do the same thing. And that’s it. Well worth it.