Rev 21:5 Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And He said to me, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.”
Blog
StackOverflow
All week I’ve been trying to get myself some reputation on stackoverflow so I could mark helpful answers as I keep poking around for solutions to tricky programming problems I’m working on at work…but hadn’t been having much of any luck with trolling around the site to find open questions to answer that weren’t extremely difficult questions or outside areas of my expertise. But then today, when I was poking around on there, thought I’d try answering a couple, and actually stumbled upon a question that while I wasn’t sure I had the *right* solution I had a partial idea what was wrong and what I’d try to fix the problem, and left a comment suggesting my idea, and then a couple hours later, whoa, when did I got from reputation of 3 to reputation of 28? Go back and look, and apparently my hunch turned out to be right on and just what the guy needed to solve his problem so he’d approved the answer and voted up the answer giving me reputation points for each of those actions. So I was excited about that.
And this was kind of random funny coincidence too, but when I was poking around on the site–they have this feature called badges, and when I was poking around on the site, I happened to notice a username that sounded awfully familiar, and so I clicked on it, curious whether it could be my college classmate Mike or not, and sure enough, the personal info in the profile matched up. And for bonus funny random points, it looked like he’d created his account near the same time I did (like as in within the last week?) from his profile.
Bugzilla
Does anyone have anything to say about whether upgrading Bugzilla 2.x to the latest version is a major pain in the ass or totally worth it? We’re still using that “dinosaur” version at work, and I’m sure we’re missing out on all kinds of improvements and cool features and usability improvements, but the question remains, is it worth the headaches of upgrading?
Jon Courson on Worshipping Confidently
Great thoughts on being free to worship God despite our sin by Jon Courson:
When a Jewish person went to the temple to worship, he would bring a lamb to offer on the altar. After careful examination by the priest, if the lamb was found to be without spot or blemish, the worshiper could worship confidently. You see, the priest never inspected the person—only the lamb. Satan will try to whisper in your ear, “You’re blemished. You’ve dropped the ball. You haven’t been a woman of prayer. You haven’t been a man of integrity. You can’t worship. You can’t talk to the Father. You can’t be blessed.”
But he’s wrong. At the temple, the priests didn’t inspect the worshiper. They inspected the lamb. The same is true of you and me. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” declared John the Baptist—which is why three days before His crucifixion, Jesus Himself was scrutinized as the scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees, and Greeks questioned His theology, His morality, and His integrity (Matthew 22). Pilate’s declaration that he found no fault in Jesus meant He passed even their inspection perfectly.” -Jon Courson
Amusing Typo of the Day
Screen-shot of an error message on a phone I was working with today… C’mon, even spell-check would have caught that misspelling.
Team Lunch
We had a team lunch today since G. (a product manager who mostly works off-site with customers) was in town, to celebrate the re-release of the product I’ve been working on. We went to this Brazilian restaurant in downtown. It was kind of fun, nice to get out of the office too. I really need to get a recipe for those Brazilian cheese bread balls; they are so good. I remember thinking the same thing when I went to my Brazilian au-pair friend D.’s Brazilian theme party too. Yum Yum.
Work is moving along, getting into documenting things to pass off to the porting team, which means going back and writing a lot of additional documentation. It’s nice to get the chance to do that, and quite satisfying in moderation, but after a while can get kind of tedious to do for long hours straight…maybe its a good thing its Friday!
Quote of the Day
“Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.”
– http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html
Busy Time
Things have been really crazy and busy at work this week…we’re trying to get a release out the door by the end of this week, so a lot of extra stuff that needs to get done in between…I’ve been at work late every day this week, but then again, maybe that’ll works out even since I’ll need to leave early next Friday to go camping.
Pizza
At work we’ve had pizza twice this week. Its actually been perfect timing both times too, because it was on the exact days I had no idea what I was going to do for lunch and hadn’t brought anything and figured I’d have to go pick something up. One of the pizza lunches was a thank you for a bunch of us assisting another project team, and the other was celebrating the end of an office weight loss challenge.
Porting to Touch Phones
So work’s going pretty good…I’m really enjoying what I’m working on, I haven’t been doing as much work with actual (cell-phone) handsets lately, but none-the-less having fun. I’m working with two very different phones right now, an LG touch handset and a very basic Samsung feature phone.
Right now I’m working on adding/testing the features for touch-enabled handsets to the J2ME edition of the app. This entails things such as making sure we have all the right images and requesting any missing ones from the art department, setting up a configuration file that specifies all the fonts, fixing lots of little bugs like re-positioning the buttons so that the larger buttons (that a fat-finger can press) fit on the screen, ripping out unnecessary code so I don’t have to fix other issues in twelve places, etc.
Basically I’m just doing all that little fun stuff that makes the app just…work…knocking out one bug or problem after another until it is ready to submit to QA. There are lots of little things that go into making the big thing work.