Optimizing And Readability

July 25th, 2008

Filed Under: Technology with 0 Comments

Optimizing code is generally an expensive process (read: time-consuming) and there are established ways of getting to the bottom of “what to optimize”. Thankfully, profilers are available to help with a lot of the guesswork, so it’s generally a good idea to make sure you work with one *most of the time*. Moving along, it [...]

Snippets

July 3rd, 2008

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How often you store code snippets, only to lose them again? Often enough (or maybe you aren’t writing that much code). There are plenty useful routines out there, already written, some you could probably rewrite in your sleep without looking them up and probably aren’t worth saving. Others are gems that need to be published [...]

PAYE

June 19th, 2008

Filed Under: Business, Rants, Technology with 1 Comment

UPDATE: 3 July 2008
Updated code to reflect more recent tax tables (2009)
When I was asked to estimate PAYE on a gross monthly salary, i hauled out the calculator and started chipping away, according to the SARS Tax Tables. Not being a tax consultant or looking at various structured packages, the first stab is mostly always [...]

Mac

June 11th, 2008

Filed Under: Technology with 1 Comment

Finally. It has arrived. After some time of deliberating, this once MS-only geek, turned and ran for the cover of open source operating systems; but not happy to just stay there, went one step further and has now immersed himself into the world of Mac
Afterall, i was tired of hearing the debates all [...]

Clamour of Petty Kings

June 4th, 2008

Filed Under: Rants, Technology with 0 Comments

We have some serious issues facing our world today. Heck, in South Africa, the land of opportunity, we have more serious issues than we sometimes care to face up to. Tackling real issues is hard work. So, what’s the alternative?
Stop the press! Houston, we have a problem! In fact, call Heather Brenner out of retirement! [...]

Ding

June 3rd, 2008

Filed Under: Business, Technology with 0 Comments

That’s roughly equivalent to the sound of the resonating chord which struck me this morning.
But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy [...]

Investing in the Learning Curve

June 2nd, 2008

Filed Under: Business, Technology with 1 Comment

We have a concept of what the learning curve represents, and unfortunately, the same thing can represent 2 opposite concepts. What makes more sense to me is looking at a learning curve from a classical labour cost perspective and more keenly towards labour productivity. In this sense, the learning curve is interpreted, broadly, as: the [...]

Attitude Driven Development

May 27th, 2008

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A.D.D. From the textbooks of an introduction into the business world (Department of Decision Sciences, UNISA):
Control does not, however, keep workers from making mistakes. The motivation of workers and a positive attitude towards their tasks, limit the number of mistakes they make.
It explains why TDD on it’s own will fail, and also why some folk [...]

Annoying Software

May 21st, 2008

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One of the funniest things i read this morning… or maybe it was the tea?
“And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that’s because I really want to, not because I’m having a crisis of doubt.” (The bold is my emphasis)
LOL How many times have you joked about this? Are you really really really [...]

Learn By Do. Part III

April 29th, 2008

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This is kinda like a bumper edition, since it wasn’t intended but after hacking this for a bit, it turned out to be a pretty useful exercise, no matter the language. Why? Primarily since you get to, depending on implementation, write your own data structures and use recursion. This combination of tasks usually allows you [...]

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