I’ve been thinking lately that I’m a motherfucking genius. I didn’t even realize it. I was sitting there, doing what I’m supposed to be doing and getting shit done because when I wonder what methods are on an object or how to use them, I USE THE FUCKING HELP!

I had no idea that I was so fucking elite.

It seems that most people just to go to google when they want to know which method on System.Decimal format’s the number as a currency. I GO TO THE FUCKING HELP ON DECIMAL and I see that FUCKING .ToString() takes a format string and if you want it as a currency value, you can give it that format string.

It takes me all of FUCKING 2 minutes rather than 15-20 on google.

So that must be the secret to being a coding genius. There you go.

From the “Hit bottom and can’t stop digging” pile:

Borland to Relocate Corporate
Headquarters to Austin

Cupertino, Calif. - Apr 16, 2007 : Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL, www.borland.com), the global leader in Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), today announced that it will relocate its corporate headquarters from Cupertino, California to Austin, Texas….

Full story.

Fucking brilliant! Hey, why not just move it to fucking China where they can keep the company going on $75.13 per month?

Tod Nielson says in the press release,

“We are making this move to take advantage of an area that combines a strong talent pool with a cost-effective environment for Borland, so that we can continue to execute on our plan to profitability…”

Let’s translate that as, “We think that a crapload of people won’t be moving with us and we can hire replacements at half the price, plus, I can afford a huge mansion out there! And anyway, it’s not totally BFE, there might be some engineers out there who know VB.”

Wow, if you haven’t shorted this stinker yet…

BTW- when did they become the “leading vendor of Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions”? What’s that mean? What’s “Open” mean in this context?

Is this the 15th or 20th different direction they’ve had for the company in the last 15 years?

Marco Cantu appears to be seeing the light too:

Don’t know about you, but more time goes by and less I understand Borland and don’t really care about it.

I realized something lately- the people who I think are good developers rarely do something without knowing why.

Recently, I was interviewing a person for a mid-level developer’s position and I asked them what transactions are for.

The person basically indicated they had no idea. Then I led them through the “If you want to move money between bank accounts, you don’t want it to fail in the middle right after I take the money out of one account…” motivating example.
They still didn’t get it.
Several more hints were given include “begin trans” and “.BeginTrans”, etc. Still nothing.

Then they realized that they’d been using scripts that loaded data and they all started with “begin trans” but couldn’t give me a good idea why.

This person was doing things without knowing why. And what’s worse, is that they saw them and never bothered to ask or try and find out.

This is another instance of Cargo-Cult Programming- doing things because you’ve been told to, or someone said it was a good idea without having any clue why. In this kind of case, you can’t even STOP because the World Might End if you do.

You also never learn anything and that might be the worst part of it all.

It’s really fucking time to retire to lame joke.

The user’s always seem to think it’s so funny, “Ha! Look at me, it’s like I know some insider lingo!”

Ha- no you don’t, you’re lame, it’s not funny, shut up.

I suggest every time this happens, we Dog Whisperer Tsst-them. Eventually, they’ll stop.

Kylix, she’s dead.

One product not on the revitalization list — much to the chagrin of its vocal enthusiasts — is Kylix, the discontinued Linux version of Delphi and C++ Builder. Fans have clamored for renewed development of the tool, but Smith said it’s unlikely. “I hear lots of discussions about Kylix, but I didn’t see lots of revenue in my reports about Kylix,” he said.

Does anyone really care? Ok- there’re 2 dorks reading this now that care. But let me ask a different question- to those 2 dorks- did you buy a copy? Alright- now how many of you that bought a copy ended up buying several copies for businesses, etc?

None- because Linux is not where it’s at (to use the vernacular). It’s never been where it’s at, no matter how much you like recompiling your kernel to ad support for your network card.

It’s good that Borl finally decided they couldn’t afford to spend the the money on it for next to no return. I’m not sure who thought that a Linux Delphi was a good idea- they didn’t consult me, but I could have told them it’d be a large waste of their efforts for the money it was going to return.

Gosh, reminds me of some other company that jumped on the Linux bandwagon because they had no other sexy choice to get investors to pony-up. What is it with Corel? What kind of person runs that company? Wow! Its stock can be shorted!

So Borland has spun off its dev tools. Who’s the owner? Borland? No one? Not really certain. But there apparently was no buyer- OH! Quell surprise. Why? Probably because no one was offering much, if any money.

ElReg says that Borl set the price at $150 million. Oh please, who was going to give them that much money for the warmed-over Dephi and similar tools? In other places, I’ve read that the tools made Borl $15m/year. So they wanted 10x revenues?? If that’s right, then they didn’t want to sell it anyway.

So now Borland is free to die after finally having trashed its name and now Delphi is free to die as well.

So long, buddy.

You don’t have to change your oil. You don’t have to brush your teeth. You don’t have to upgrade to the latest version.

No one’s going to call the Version Police if you don’t.

But your teeth will rot away and eventually you’ll end up in a lot of pain, wishing that you’d simply brushed your teeth before you started to have problems.

Remember this when someone on your staff says, “We need to upgrade [tool X]. We’re only behind on the latest version by two years, much more and it’ll be a pain in the ass.”

If you try and install SQL05 or REINSTALL it and it STILL thinks there’s an instance on the box, then go to:

hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\microsoft sql server

and you you’ll see the instances that it THINKS are installed even if they aren’t.

Nuke that entire key and reinstall and you’re cool.

Weird- “Lisa Simpson” and variants consistently lead more people here than most other things.

“Tawnee Stone” and variants have been the most popular for months… no surprise. However- you’d be smarter to go here for her.

I’m drooling over a quad-core CPU. Yup, 4 chips in one, how could it be any better except for even more cores?

Am I’m so. very. tired. of reading articles that question if “anyone really needs this much power?”

It NEEDS TO FUCKING END.

Every time we get a huge speed increase, we start seeing articles about whether anyone actually needs this much power to ‘read web pages’ or ‘make spreadsheets’.

It’s the journalistic equivalent of shitting in a barrel and it needs to stop.

NOW you don’t need this much power, tomorrow, you will.

That’s all- stop asking, let ME worry about how much extra power I’ll have.

Somewhere around ‘96 or so, I’m pretty sure that I read an article in Discovery magazine about these guys at MIT who made a jet turbine on a chip in silicon and we were eventually going to see these things in our laptops giving us trillions of hours of battery power for just a shot of Rum…

Then I saw it on TV several times, and I looked it up a few times and still nothing.

So last week, we started seeing stories about it again!

Can someone tell me what the fuck the deal is?

It’s been a FUCKING DECADE since the initial reports came out, and as far as I can tell, last week’s articles are a simple rehashing of the previous articles. WTF has changed?

Nothing. You’ll never see this technology. 10 years from now, we’ll see these same fucking articles again and we’ll be absolutely no closer to using them for anything.

I had to put a machine together recently and something that I really hate is connecting the front-panel electrical leads to the motherboard.

Lots of times, in my experience, the leads are poorly documented and labeled, and the motherboard manual frequently doesn’t go out of its way to make it clear which is which and which is the positive or negative lead, etc.

In addition- getting the leads into that tiny, tiny little pin at the edge of the mobo is annoying. So I was really heartended when I saw this QConnect deally that was included with my Asus mobo.

Essentially- they’re little blocks that have the same pins as the motherboard and you plug your leads into them, then you plug the blocks into the motherboard which means there’s no annoying Operation-style activity for you! Plug the leads into the QConnection and plug the QConnect into the mobo and you’re done!

Saved me a crapload of time and hassle.