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Admin
...to the outlook problem
*run vmware in a window instead of headless (i presume vmware has a headless 'server' mode?) *using, of course, xvfb since we don't want a graphics card/display/etc in our server *maximize the outlook window in the vmware instance *have an X client read each individual pixel from the vmware window *ocr the resultant pixmap, looking for
okandcancel*use XTestFakeButtonEvent() or XSendEvent() to generate a button event over the vmware window in the position of the dialog windowAdmin
Is this article made up, or transcribed? Its a perculiar mixture of first and third person...
Admin
But that means I can't trust the first guy. Or should I trust the second guy?
Illogical. Illogical. All units relate, all units. Norman, coordinate.
Admin
why o why does this sound so eerily familiar ? Was the lead developer's name Ken ?
Admin
Quick - copyright them and then sue !
Admin
truer words of wisdom have never been spoken...
Admin
[quote user="Walleye"][quote user="MB"][quote] Most employers understand that there is one job in a lifetime where you just couldn't hold on for a year because of a PITA coworker. [/quote]
Or a PETA cow-irker.[/quote]
No, it is cow-orker
Admin
The plural of weeks is weekses, duh.
Admin
[quote user="loki"][quote user="Walleye"][quote user="MB"][quote] Most employers understand that there is one job in a lifetime where you just couldn't hold on for a year because of a PITA coworker. [/quote]
Or a PETA cow-irker.[/quote]
No, it is cow-orker[/quote]
I think the further a quote gets from the Scott Adams original, the more likely it is to be relevant or funny.
Admin
Er, consult an English textbook!
Admin
http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes/
Admin
This sounds like a criminal profile.
Admin
I'll avoid a summary in case it brings the, um, artists(?) behind SSDS to the front pages.
Follow these links at your own risk: The original The return
Admin
Trust me, this guy is right.
Admin
I once walked out of a job after one week because the codebase was such a Big Ball of Mud and complete shit. No notice, just said "This isn't going to work out" to the head of the department and walked out. I can't fathom how miserable I would have been had I stayed at that shithole. The sad part is, like most shit businesses out there, this one continues to stay around instead of going out of business like they deserve.
Admin
If the company's policy is that you may be dismissed at their discretion, for no reason -- and this is common in the field I work -- then the corollary is that you may leave at your discretion because you owe them nothing. Of course the notion that an employee may also have "policies" is regarded by some as peculiar.
Admin
He didn't have to singlehandedly repair it, and was under no obligation to do so. If he'd made his frustrations known and they were not satisfactorily addressed, he could have left in a professional manner, beyond any reasonable reproach.
Admin
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but here, employees have a "probationary period", typically 2-6 months, where either party can terminate employment with no notice. You can walk off if you don't like the job, they can let you out the door if they don't like you. After this period expires, you're subject to the usual two weeks notice.
Admin
but the amount of time you spent thinking about work while driving, showering, etc, more than made up for it.
thank you, scott adams.
CAPTCHA = jugis (thank you, "the man show")
Admin
So? They still could have written a nice Class exposing the needed functionality from Exchange SDK. Said class would only have to make its function available via a remoting technology of some sort.
Admin
roflmao and maybe even ClickYes Enterprise?? they not only make you pay for a tool clicking a button, they even have 2 flavours of it??? I am soooo glad i dont have to develop software in a microsoft environment.
Admin
MAPI is Mail Application Programming Interface
IMAP is Internet Message Access Protocol
Either or both could have been used here to good effect but they aren't the same thing.
Admin
People do it on shark tank and it's never been words there. They usually try to come up with some humorous phrase it may be an abbreviation for.
Admin
Yelling! Let's see..at this point the company is legally required to hand over the check for hours worked and I am no longer an employee. The cto at that point is just another overblown asswipe who will cower in the corner sucking his thumb when someone yells back. These types can exist only within a defined power structure.
Admin
etc.
Admin
Admin
I've seen that.
Admin
MS has an important part of it :) I once had to reconfigure MSSQL to run under a an account with outlook installed and configure to make xp_sendmail (or something like this) to work ...
Admin
Why would you do otherwise?
Admin
I think he was saying that if you don't use Windows, you're not stuck using Windows.
It's its own reward, you see.
Admin
Yep, AutoHotkey http://www.autohotkey.com/ is quite handy.
Admin
This is why Python is so great, all you have to do is type
Admin
I run a cross-build system that builds using Visual Studio .net running under wine, and using various silicon vendor tools. It may not be pretty, and I never had guts enough to get the codebase compile under mingw for the windows target, but it works just fine, deploying it to a new server (if need be) is trivial, and the build is integrated into aegis SCM.
As for Exchange and its interfaces, if they can be accesses remotely via COM, then surely it can be done from Linux or just about any *nix platform.
Cheers, Kuba
Admin
"Of course, they probably did if for a stupid reason like wanting to be "cool" and run Linux "instead" of Windows, but that doesn't make what they did a defacto WTF."
Or perhaps they didn't want to have to shoehorn a very large and very complex application into running on Windows just to make running a single COM object a little easier. If the application is written entirely in c/c++ and perl, why in god's name would anyone WANT to run it on windows?
Admin
Thank you. I was thinking exactly the same thing. But I didn't want to go there. Trust me.
Admin
I am CEO of the company depicted by Colin M and since we are all anonymous here let’s call me Andrei M. Here I would like to give more insight to what it is all about.
Colin M is complaining about 3 main things:
a) he came with a new design feature (after 1 week in the company) and it was declined b) there is a component in the system which was not checked into the SVN so he could not see the code c) when he left the company he was asked to collect his check from our offices.
Let's start with (a). This guy comes to me with a design change proposal. Check it out; this is after one week in the company while trying to learn a reasonably complex system. Indeed, as with most software systems, you can always find things which can be implemented differently and in our company we carry out gradual refactoring of the system. But in such refactoring we always consider risks and business benefits. Needless to say that refactoring is implemented by people who have somewhat longer experience working with our system than 1 week. So to cut it short, maybe hash arrays or whatever he proposed would do the job there, it was not necessary and did not fit in the whole refactoring plan.
Now, let's move to (b). Colin is complaining that there was a component in the system which was not checked into the SVN. Yes, this is true and there are good reasons for this. First of all, this component does not belong to the company Colin was employed at. It is simply OEM'ed to be used. The IP to this component belongs to our parent company and we made this split of IP for many reasons including certain business arrangements. If we wanted Colin to work on this component we would hire him to that other company. So to cut it short again, I just don't understand why Colin is winging about this component, which he had nothing to do with... He might think that he could do a better job on it -- and this is possible, but for this as far as I am concerned he needs to start his own company and compete with us.
Regarding (c) what I see here is that he is moaning that we terminated his employment with immediate effect and about his paycheck for two weeks of work. Hey, what work? In my view "work" has a definition of doing something useful and during these two weeks of notice we would spent more efforts on training him. I understand that the other definition of work is to sit at your workplace ... so he was paid I believe but if this was legal I wouldn't pay HIM and gave this money to a charity to pay to unfortunate people who really work but receive peanuts.
Needless to say, that after two weeks Colin not only failed to understand our system (his diagram is a complete joke) he did not even understand the structure of the company. He calls me "lead developer" while my role is CEO of the business. I am not involved in the development and only do advice on the system because at the start of our company I have personally written a lot of it. My main responsibility is in making sure that the whole company is ticking - developers deliver projects, support fixes things, sales bring new contract, marketing getting company positioned correctly, business is expanding in the right directions, etc. And all these generates money for the company to live on. But to be fair to Colin M how can he know better being only two weeks in the company.
Regarding Colin M himself - after brief interaction with him I saw that he did not understand that professional programming is about delivering projects, rather than going around and finding for yourself something engaging (although often useless) to do as he did just before trying to complete his PhD at the University. I think he is extremely arrogant, cynical and cowardly too. But above all I question his integrity as a person. At his interview he disclosed that he applied for another job but did not hear back. We offered him a job (and rejected another candidate) on his firm word that he will not switch if that other offer comes through. And surprise surprise, after two weeks he went to work guess where… This is why he was so reluctant to come to the office – not because he was scared that the CTO will be shouting etc. -- he knew that he acted dishonestly and was ashamed to show his face here. . "Discussing plans", "safari of the CTO", "fighting with HR" and other things he writes about are just lies of course. We had several people leaving us for different reasons and all this was done in good faith. This case was clearly different.
Actually, I am writing here not to argue with Colin M -- what’s the point? I am writing for the employees of our company who I know read this wtf. I know that research labs and universities are organised differently, but in business we need to deliver. We often do not have time to do it as elegant as one would desire but the customers are waiting and in order for us to get wages, bonuses, interesting projects, etc. we need them to pay us money. Simple fact. You guys know how busy we are here so please keep up good work. As for Colin M -- I wish him well.
Admin
Too abd he didn't pick Option 3. Show up with a Labor board and Lawyer to pickup his check. I had to do that to get my check out of Sears after something similar took place forcing me to leave.
Admin
sounds more like he was too good a programmer, to be honest. maybe i'm wrong: after all, i've only been casually programming for nine years now, but i know that working on bad code is a hellish job. any other TDWers can probably back me up on that. now, it makes sense that you don't want to change your ways for someone who came on the team less than a month ago. that shouldn't be your motivation though, good code is less likely to get buggy in odd situations (being run in an emulator, a different version of the OS, other hardware etcetera) and takes less time to write new code for since it's easier to find what does what. good code is it's own reason.
Admin
Admin
Andrei, how did you have time to write this article? You are busy watching your developers, sales force, and marketing department. Considering Colin didn't give the name of the company and was only there for a short time, why should waste time on writing a response here?
Admin
Those of us able to read would have seen the following in his post:
" I am writing for the employees of our company who I know read this wtf. "
Admin
Sorry Barbar, I skim read Andrei's post. So I must have missed it.
Maybe when I become CEO of a company, I'll be able to read a long lengthy post with out skimming through it. Assuming Andrei is the average CEO, I should be able read and write long posts while running an organization.
Admin
Since we are all anonymous here.... wasn't it Colin P, not Colin M? Is Andrei M trying to out Colin P?
robot check: i'll take no checks from anyone, let alone robots!
Admin
As someone who worked at the company, it’s probably fair to point out that the Windows mail component was about 0.5% of the architecture and the ONLY component running on the VM. The bulk of the code is running on Linux. The XP box was only required for clients who hadn’t/wouldn’t have enabled the imap component of exchange.
Admin
I've worked with such a "lead developer" for a short time. No one was allowed to see his code, let alone touch it. If anyone DARED to make a small change (and even if it was a mission critical bug fix while said developer was on vacation) he flat out refused to ever touch that program again, instead saying "you made a change to MY program, it is YOUR responsibility now!"
That dude was hell to work with/for. Yes, he did write some clever programs from time to time, but let me just say that no one shed a single tear when he decided to change jobs.