When you choose to sort by subject, the sort includes ‘RE:’ and ‘FW:’ so all the emails that were replied to or forwarded are grouped, which is pretty useless.

If I didn’t mention this one before, you also don’t select items like you do in virtually all other windows applications.  You can’t just shift-arrow to highlight miltiple items to be selected/moved/whatever.  You have to click in a column next to your emails.  This column isn’t really marked/divided so it is delightfully easy to make a mistake. (UPDATE: my bad, yes you can…it doesn’t highlight as expected, but the checks show up)

Honestly, its like they decided that the only way to make themselves stand out from Outlook was to just everything in a different way.  Since Outlook tends to do things in a very Windows kind of way, that leaves Lotus Notes to do things in some alien manner. 

Hence Lotus Notes gets used almost no where.

Inventor builds his perfect woman – a robot who cleans and won’t nag | The Sun |News

SHE is the perfect wife, with the body of a Page 3 pin-up and housekeeping skills that put TV’s Kim and Aggie to shame.

Her name is Aiko, she can even read a map, and will never, ever, nag.

(ooo…and catch the sexist undertones!)
(I mean…I’m not one to be overly sensitive to that sort of thing, but COME ON)
(then again, it IS the Sun)

I’ve just started a new job and I’m working as half-dba-half-developer (it is supposed to be mostly development, but I can’t see how thats going to happen).  The product I’m supporting (3rd party product) is very obviously written by people who don’t know much about databases.

1. Instead of passing in data from the front end to a database procedure to handle things like inserts and updates, the front end just generates the SQL and issues it to the DB.  In my opinion, that is a bad design choice.  It turns the application into a black box, more or less.  That makes debugging and writing enhancements harder.  And thats not just for the user end.  The makers of the product have decided that, when there’s a DB level issue, they (or we) will just write a trigger.  Triggers are annoying, poorly implemented, and not meant as a method for patching bad code.  It can also be tricky to predict their behavior as they get more and more complex and start to interact with other triggers.

2. There are no primary key or foreign keys.  No, thats not quite right.  There are conceptual PKs and FKs, but no PK/FK constraints.  The goal of every database platform, be it Oracle, SQLServer, or MySQL, is data integrity and thats why these constraints exist.  The developers appear to understand the concept, and there are columns that are designated as PKs or FKs, but they seem to have missed the fact that without actually implementing the constraints, you aren’t getting that referential integrity.  You might as well have a bunch of flat files because you’ve really decided that the relational model is going to be ignored.

3. I was talking to one of the developers and asked WHY the front end was handling inserts and such.  His answer: “When we had the database doing it all, things got very slow when we had a large number of users.  The database resources got weighed down and slowed to a crawl.”  Moving the code to the front end is NOT the solution to that.  The solution to that is to get someone who knows how to write SQL and whatever procedural layer that database implementation has (PL/SQL, T-SQL, whatever) available.  Of course, given how poorly this whole thing has been designed, there may have been little choice.  Its either continue doing it the wrong way and hope to get it working sufficiently, or scrap it and start over.

But THAT is why you can’t assume that Java/C#/Etc. people can work with databases.

Myopathy.

Oh, yeah…

best thing about iPhone 2.0 release: “I like to think that my bricked phone gave me access to a cool new app
that helps me learn to say “emergency” in 10 different languages.”

worst thing about the iPhone 2.0 release: the 2.0 firmware.  Jeez.

I am returned!

Anyhow, a few things spring to mind before I actually start letting myself be informed about the world again (yes, I admit it, living in a box is very nice).

1. The two most under-rated bands of the 80s: Oingo Boingo, Missing Persons

2. If you hate your PC now, switch to a Mac and then try using the PC again.  You know no such hate.

3. Marvel Studios should just close their doors and give it up if they don’t bring Favreau back for Iron Man II.  Current rumor is that there’s a lot of penny pinching going on.  Favreau made them a blockbuster.  Don’t get me wrong, Downey was great, but it was Favreau’s film.  Unfortunately, there’s a class of moron that gets to make decisions about movies who really thinks that anyone can make a flick, and that the actors only matter because the public sees them.  Marvel has made mistakes before when letting money people make decisions (see Spider-Man 3…the money guys demanded Venom), and this could really kick them in the nuts.  No matter how much it costs to keep Favreau, its gotta be cheaper than making a bomb.

4. Metal Gear Solid 4 rocks.

Searchme Visual Search

This is a nice looking tool I’ll have to spend some time with.  It reminds me a bit of an idea I had for amazon a while back that would simulate browsing a bookstore more than the current site does.

Warning: catatonia and/or self-indulgent poetry may result.

WASHINGTON—Calling it the most effective tool to date in the War on Terror, the Pentagon announced Monday that it had developed a new chemical weapon called “ennui gas,” a nerve agent that overwhelms its victims with sudden philosophical distress over the meaningless tedium of human life and a sinking sense that everything they have ever accomplished ultimately amounts to dust.

While I do understand their point (and, personally, I like the similar feature in OSX), the attitude is very indicitive of Microsoft’s problems (not to mention certain governement officials…).

David Cross:

“The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users–I’m serious,” said Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference here Thursday. “Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run.”

I can’t even imagine the size of this problem, if true

I also don’t understand the logic behind the decision that spawned this.  If going to Windows7 means buying all new software, and/or patching code so extensively as to pale the Y2K crisis (and, contrary to the post, I believe it would far exceed Y2K) why does Gates et al. think that anyone would bother staying with the MS product line?  At that point, you are faced with two choices: virtually start over from scratch, or actually start over from scratch.

I have a very hard time believing this is true, but I also have a very hard time believing Vista got released.

So, last night, we were watching American Idol.  Now, because of some weirdness we’ve yet to understand, we have to watch this on the non-HD channel, even though we are supposed to get the HD channel as well.  For whatever reason, it is shockingly unreliable.

Anyhow, we watch Idol starting 15 minutes late on our direct TV DVR (so we can skip commercials).  Right as it ends, we accidentally switch from the recording to the HD channel with Idol on it.  Surprisingly, we are actually getting the broadcast.

The difference in video quality was like a slap to the face.  We only caught the last two or three minutes of recap, but it was just stunning how much better it looked. 

You don’t usually get to see that kind of side-by-side, but never forget, the difference between standard and HD is not slight.

WOW