@QAdley Yellowee. The business pages to be exact. We have a lot of information we need to print out, but it's stored in a special way in the database so we can't just print it out easily with a loop. I'm going to need to come up with a templatetag of some sort which loops through a set of fields.
Also, is that page loading really, Really, slow for you?
I've noticed it here at the office, but I'm not sure if it's just something wrong with the office.
Cory has created a poster for the Mario Marathon 5 charity drive, which is basically a bunch of people sitting around playing Mario in order to raise cash for Child's Play. People who contribute get entered into a raffle, and the winner gets the poster along with some other goodies.
@QAdley While she was gone we launched the major revision we've been working on for two months, so I'm sure she will be. Assuming that we've fixed this server problem by then :P
@fbueckert Yes. That doesn't happen here thank God, we release stuff when it's ready, and never before, and we never tie ourselves too much to dates. Hence 18 month release cycle!
During the opening credits for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, after you've played through the epilogue and been caught by Barratt, and subsequently thrown through the glass wall you're presented with a nice cinematic where they're rebuilding Adam and a blonde girl appears in this video multiple times...
@QAdley We're similar here. We originally had a two-week plan for this thing that took us two months, but after we started we realized it was going to be a lot more work to modify the old code than we realized, so the release date just became "eventually".
@QAdley In addition to my coding responsibilities, I also had the responsibility of keeping the call center computers going, making sure the network stayed up, and trying to keep the database servers from overloading too badly.
In order to ensure that the data stayed up to date while I was testing to make sure everything was working, I set up some wonky "pass through" replication from the original to the new.
No sooner do I start testing, then I get the operations manager breathing down my neck that we need to switch over right freaking now!
@fbueckert I worked for a popular (~100,000 hits a week) student news site. There was no dev site, you just worked over FTP, saving changes to the live site as you made them. That was fun.
Also, it was Wordpress (not bad!) with ~50 plugins, some of which were custom-made by various contractors. We weren't allowed to upgrade WP in case it broke something, it's probably still on 1.5 to this day...
@fbueckert I'm doing some freelance work at the moment, the client's method of telling me what to do is to send emails. CC'd to everyone, or sometimes less than everyone. I have to leave any task for a week or so before I start to allow the requirements to 'settle'.
@fbueckert Haha, you should write some of it up for TDWTF
Happily, my current boss believes me when I tell him it's really complicated and he should leave me alone for a while so I can think about it and figure it out.
On the plus side, that last job was my very first coding job out of college. If I can hack that, and succeed, I can do damn near anything when it comes to code.
Nothing builds skills like winging 95% of your job.
Another fun story:
The upper management is paranoid as all get out.
They thought the building management was out to get them, and if they found out we were planning on moving into a different building, they would lock us out.
So, they tell us that they're thinking of moving. This is just FYI, so we can think about what needs to get done.
They keep saying that, six months later. We've stopped believing them, as nothing is being done to actually move.
We get pulled into a meeting one day, with all the managers.
And get told that the company has to be moved. NOW.
We had until the end of the month to get everything set up and going.
This was already near the end of the month. We had a grand total of three business days to do it.
I point out that no way, no how, can we do it in three days.
The CEO responds with, "Oh. Just work the weekend too."
We were supposed to move into a new area, with substandard equipment (our tech budget was non-existent for anything not an emergency), and get it all up and running with no downtime in three days.
According to developers, Diablo 3 doesn't have elemental damage effects, with the exception of ice which chills/freezes.
However the developers said that, because of this added effect, the cold damage is reduced, when compared with other elements.
But I don't understand what this means. It's eith...
Does the game have a built-in safeguard from spot-spamming (pressing the spot button repeatedly, while aiming in suspicious/distant/smoke-filled locations)?
During the first cutscene in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, who are the seven mysterious individuals that Bob Page is speaking to as their voices are distorted and likenesses hidden?
I had a bit of free time at one point, so I started re-designing our website. I let all and sundry know I'm doing this, as the CEO's been talking about needing to get it re-done in the first place.
No objections. I demo some of what I have to the CEO a little while later. "That looks great!"
A couple days later, I'm told to stop working on it. No reason, no explanation, nothing.
@QAppei Technically, my real job WAS coding. I didn't have anything beyond routine maintenance tasks at the time (which was technically outside my job description).
The watch words for everything I did there was "patch and pray".
No time for proper testing. Get it out the door as fast as possible.
@fbueckert I don't know what it's like there, but usually here in Italy if you apply as a coder you also have to be a DBA, graphic designer, software architect and sometimes linguist (to understand what the client is asking you)
@ayckoster if you haven't tried since the nerf then I would suggest doing so - you should be able to get into P3 quite easily now and the rest is just avoiding stuff
I find the game runs super-fast on my machine, and if I don't slow it down somewhat it's a pain to play. Of course, maybe that's the way it's supposed to run? beats me. if it's a cheat/exploit, oh wellz, maybe they'll revoke my steam achievements :O
I'm planning to buy Diablo III for myself.
However, I'd like to create a second character for a friend of mine, who is not yet convinced. So I want to let them play that character (in my account) for some time, and if they like it, they could get their own Battle.net account and we could play to...
Can someone send some feedback: re: Who coined the term scare quotes and when? Why scare in the term? Might calling them distance quotes be better? Do you ever use this term in your papers?
The OED2 draft additions Sept. 2004 has it from 1956;
1956 Mind 65 3 The ‘scare-quotes’ [aka ‘quote-...
@YiJiang I have this problem so badly with YouTube's live streams.
I'm so used to skipping ahead through YT vids I'll be watching something, and repeatedly think, oh I'll just skip ahead, why isn't the progress bar coming up, I want to sk-oh. Pause for 10 seconds. Repeat.
@LessPop_MoreFizz I think you'll find the user is magnificently deranged, about a number of things.
Danny Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan, where the mysteries of the English language still confound him. I'm not much a style guy and newspaper style guides don't interest me all that much, but as the coiner of "crash blossoms" and a few other newspaper terms over the past few years -- ''snailpapers'' for print editions arrive 12 hours late, for example -- I have recently taken a keen interest in the term "scare quotes."
Dr Jerome Keating in Taiwan, professor here, told me today: Good researching Dan.
My guess on the why of 'scare' is that by using it in a braketed way, one can avoid responsibility, but at the same time label someone and draw upon the fear that others have of the term used in labeling.
i.e. that "Damn" Bloom is one of those "damn liberals." Thus all of my conservative friends (all two of them) will be afraid of anything that Bloom says.
Cheers,
Jerome — dan bloom3 mins ago
It's true, a local expat newspaper in Taiwan in an oped article about my work with climate , written by a Taiwanese editor, called me "Damn Bloom" and the term stuck with a few people. SMILE, signed, -- That Damn Bloom — dan bloom1 min ago
@QAdley I have a hard enough time attempt to understand one of them. Put them both in a room, and I think I'm going to have to go grab a shotgun to keep my sanity.
@fbueckert @agent86 Ug. I just tried out the crew teleporter. Made the mistake of sending my guys over to one of those automated vessels. Turns out, they have no oxygen on board. Everyone died before I could teleport them back :P
@fredley re ''This whole page is just surreal.'' – fredley .. please bear with me, i always get my man. remember "crash blossoms"? I used the same MO, these things take time. SMILE — dan bloom1 min ago
I have been in love with logic ever since my father started me on logic in my teens. Logic of itself cannot give anyone the answer to any questions of substance; but without logic we often do not know the import of what we know and often fall into fallacy and inconsistency. Source: Peter Geach, quoted in Steve Pyke, Philosophers (1996). -- ASCRIPTIVISM by Peter Geach (The Philosophical Review LXIX (1960) pp. 221-225) (Some revisions added by the author included in The Nature of Human Action ed. Myles Brand, Scott, Foresman, and Co. 1970) — dan bloom16 mins ago
Now I just lost another game because two systems didn't connect up like I thought they would, meaning I had to backtrack 3 systems to get to the exit. And the fleet was waiting :P
That would be Megan Reed, Adam Jensen's girlfriend. At this point in the story, Adam believes that she is dead.
