sutton050

One sore lesson to teach some developers is when to trust the compiler, once you've gotten that across you have to start teaching folks to stop re-inventing the wheel. If someone has already implemented a file handler, or a serial port abstraction, or a wrapper for some obscure feature, you need to evaluate that offering... To evaluate whether a library is worth using, firstly see if it works, then see how many folks actually use it, the more that use it then the more likely bugs will be flushed out and the whole thing has been tested. Leveraging this kind of mature code within your projects assists in bootstrapping the startup phase of new projects. Boost is a note worthy example of what I'm talking about here, many software shops (at least the ones I know) resist using open-source or third party libraries, they prefer to stick to in-house developed niche implementations until the very last moment, this of course slows development and completely symies innovation. Boost howeve

I'm having difficulty communicating with some folks about the beauty of cmake and using ccmake to leverage that beauty. These are folks whom are either completely ignorant of what a makefile should look like, are happy to manage their own or at worst case are folks put off of makefiles by having inherited projects which have spiralled out of control with mammoth makefiles and a propensity to being so complex as to prevent any cost-effective entry grade for new developers to key into - i.e. they're too hard to learn, or obfuscated sufficiently to allow established developers to retain their positions of glory and power. I don't subscribe to that ethos however, and believe that as a leader in development you should facilitate everyone to be being able to do everyone else's development role, be that starting a new project or continuing an old. It perhaps comes from my being able to work alone and defining a role which others are then keyed into, I have been forced to allow

Someone was cold, this is where they perched... Ain't he the cutest....

With the news today of EA reducing by 75% the time it will take in Star Wars Battlefront 2 to unlock a hero character, can we expect to see modern gamers head into WoW Classic and start complaining? (c)2017 Electonic Arts Lets just recap though, World of Warcraft, vanilla, people played a character to level 60 in about 4 days played, that's about 96 hours played. EA's plight, and collapse into pandering, happened with a played time of around 40, that's less than half... Reducing it by 75% that now makes a hero in SW:BF2 in 10 hours. 10 hours for Vanilla WoW was not enough, and this is where my first concerns with WoW Classic come about, firstly, will Blizzard be forced to pander down to newer gamers whom most certainly want action & reaction, risk and reward.  They certainly don't deal in patience nor RNG. My second concern comes that this is a big issue, and perhaps Blizzard will side step it, by simple nerfing the amount of time to level, or perhaps increasing th

From my prior post, I have now appended the first ResultSet1.csv file - used to generate the chart in my previous post.... However, since than I have been doing some processing, and between 20:00 and 21:59 there are 191 entries in my little chart.  Remember this is what virgin refer to as "Peak time", and they state an average of 50mbits in 24 hours.  I'll be fair here, they never state what the actual speed they throttle down to or limit one as, but the chart here clearly shows 50mbits ... So, what average did I receive for 24 hours? 22.124 mbits/sec Less than half the speed promised. My speed during the peak time slot?  Averaged out as? 6.310 mbits/sec Utterly pathetic... You can download the results csv yourself, plug this into a spreadsheet and enjoy the proof positive of this dreadful situation. To make matters that little bit worse, I have tried to call Virgin, and spent tens of minutes of my break and lunch in the queue to speak to someone, and their live chat sim

Phase one of my plan is now complete, I have monitored the speed of my internet ALLLL day, from just after I got home in the morning, through until just now. No-other unit or device was being used through from around 4pm until just now - the wife and I went to watch the new Thor film at the cinema - so, how can Virgin Media explain that clear throttling down mid-afternoon... It is awful and far below anything listed on their website, utter and total garbage speed.  Yet we see a general level of 25+ for most of the day You will need to click this chart to see the image close up. My data points were taken with my script - see the previous post - every 10 seconds, it has generally used resolved to the Server in Leeds. The time markers (green) were added by myself, artificially, by eye.  But they give you the gist of the time, and I will also upload the raw CSV somewhere... I am now going to hit twitter. Edit - This is fabulous, I've just gone to the link I was provided to send info to

You know that moment in Misery where Annie (played by the excellent Kathy Bates) raises the lump hammer to Paul (James Caan's) ankles?  That hopeless moment, where you know what's coming, and she's determined this is the best, and he's helpless to change things.... Yeah, his feeling at that moment is the same feeling I get whenever I try to solve my service problems with Virgin Media.  I've tried in the phone centre, they either won't talk to me, or deny I'm an account holder - the account being in my wifes name, but I'm a registered up user of the account etc etc.... Or they simply deny there's an issue.... "I can ping you now sir".... Really, a few ICMP packets get through and you think it's a-okay do you? Or I get told, reboot your superhub... Or variously asked "are you on wifi or wired"... It makes no difference when the speed recorded by either is less than 2mbits!!! And I've just been told in a reply on twitter &quo

I had a spike of viewers over the previous week, and they put a certain country on the map of my analytics for the first time.... France!

It has been said by far bigger and better minds than myself, that if you sit still, if you don't continue to learn about new things and innovate you will stagnate.  This has been a huge problem looming within the business I work, certain things have worked since the industry sector was conceived and even though more than half a century has passed it has largely passed the internals of this industry by. That is until very recently, where market competition has sprung up, the market base itself has reduced and so pressure is on... Nowhere is this more apparent in my industry than on the software, the front-line of pushing product to customers. The trouble however seems to be that many people have stagnated, they've stuck with the safe option, the tools which work off of the shelf, I am of course talking about Windows, the entire tool chain that is used by 99% of the company is all Windows based, I am the man on the spot waving the Linux flag. But just a few days ago, the Windows

Its happened, the announcement with not quite enough information, but it did happen and the WoW orientated internet has slightly melted over it, everyone and their dog on YouTube have posted opinion pieces on whether this "in development" service will fullfil their desires.  I have no opinion in that, instead I'm going to talk about my Warcraft Experience... I first met the world that is Warcraft with "Warcraft II", which I remember my brother and I bought whilst on a trip into Nottingham, we bought it from GAME on Lister Gate, and talked about it incessantly as our parents made us trudge around Marks & Spencers, rather then rush home to play immediately. We played this on our Intel 80486-SX2-50Mhz, with 4MB of RAM and a 128K S8 video card - VGA baby! I don't remember finishing the game, I have to be honest, I don't remember it that much... However, I still have the game, the exact box we bought is proudly on the shelf, and has been visible behind me

I'm continuing to have my issues with Virgin Media, let me explain.  Last month I came to them asking to remove the superfluous junk offering items, as I was simply paying more for items I didn't use, want nor need. They could not help, in fact they flat refused to, so I cancelled 66% of my services off completely, TV, Phone all gone and never ever to return - well done them... The next item was the 200mbit broadband I was paying for, below is a historic speed test I carried out a lot, as you can see I never, ever, got near 200Mbit, but I always got over 50Mbit... Being quite a logical person therefore, and based on this evidence, this proof I had for myself, I downgraded the internet from the Vivid200 to Vivid50, i.e. 50mbit... Yeah, save money, it can do 50 mbit easy, right... Right... RIGHT?..... WRONG. This is tonight's speed test... Last night it was slower than that, I had a download speed of 1.22mbit, and upload of 620K. Yeah, rocking the 1990's internet speed. A