OU blog

Personal Blogs

neil

IE

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Neil Anderson, Saturday, 17 Dec 2011, 11:49

What on earth would you want to do with this? When did you last mash raw binary? Never mind doing it on a web site, with JavaScript!?

That said when I first saw XMLHttpRequest I thought, useless. [Anyone remember XML? wink] Someone will find something awesome to do with it.

The one good thing is that there seems to be a W3C standard that MS are working to. As I write that a sinking feeling descends, not only will we have to fork the request, we're going to have to fork the return aren't we? But I'm not going to use it anyway!

I'm making a personal bet that nobody knows what I'm gibbering about.

Permalink 4 comments (latest comment by Neil Anderson, Monday, 19 Dec 2011, 19:19)
Share post
neil

didn't

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Neil Anderson, Friday, 30 Sep 2011, 16:48

Go too badly [see my last post for context].

What helped was that I'd built something that wasn't as shoddy as I feared that it might be. When I started to explain why things were the way they were, I recalled all the considered choices that I'd made when I was building the thing. [And the hours spent shuffling cards about the floor.]

I wasn't then what I am now, afraid to do something that I know that I can do because I can see the problems. But I knew that maintenance and upkeep are nine-tenths of a project. I'm actually pleased with the thing that I made.

I'm always battering on about doing things right—don't take short-cuts, don't penny pinch, spend some time thinking about what you are going have to do when it is all finished. Often I don't win these arguments with others, mostly I lose them with myself.

But for once, once, I did something right.

 

Permalink 3 comments (latest comment by Neil Anderson, Monday, 3 Oct 2011, 17:33)
Share post
neil

fret

Visible to anyone in the world

Tomorrow I have to train the admin, and perhaps some other, staff at my school how to upload documents to the school's website and link-in said docs. Aaaargh.

I'm not worried that I'll make an idiot of myself [I probably will, but that doesn't matter], or that I don't know what I'm talking about. What worries me is that I'm going to have to try to teach other people to use something that was built only to be used by me.

There are things that I've built that even I find difficult to use. What on earth are others going to make of the thing? And if they bring along a Word-only type mentality to the party we're talking recipe for trouble.

I'm not looking forwards to this.

I could blame me for this pass, but there isn't really any blame to be divvied up—when I built the thing there weren't any choices, it was me doing it or nothing. So I built it for me, I had to.

This is a common problem: you start something, it works, you are now out of your depth because of unexpected success, how do you mainstream it? It's called scalability; what worked when you were small is positively toxic when you get big. [Think lactose intolerance.]

The big boys can throw money at this, alas my school only has me. And me doesn't have the time to build the interface between a product of my mind and normal people. Even if I could.

Still, I get to stand up and waffle-web at people, so a win for me at least.

Permalink 2 comments (latest comment by Neil Anderson, Thursday, 29 Sep 2011, 22:50)
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 252621