OJ’s rants

Don’t believe the hype.
Mike G and Dare are dead right.

Today I received a nice letter from HRM Revenue & Customs (yet another site that doesn’t work without being prefixed with “www”). It states:
Notice of determination of penalty for a late Tax Return for the tax year ended 5 April 2007.
I did not receive your Tax Return by the due date so you are liable [...]

This is just a quick post to say how much Microsoft and their draconian OS licensing mechanism are pissing me off right now.
Last week my computer stopped booting. I didn’t get around to looking at it until a few days ago because I had visitors over from the UK. Not just that, it is Christmas, [...]

I’d love to know what on earth got into Adobe’s head when they decided to turn their PDF reader into a stinking pile of sluggish bloatware? Who here remembers the old days when the Adobe Reader download was less than 10MB?
Take a look at the details on their current download page (which I was recently [...]

If any of you out there are able to give me ONE GOOD REASON why anyone would do something like this, then please let me know. Below are “customised” realloc() and malloc() I recently stumbled across (yes, they get called. A LOT):
[source:cpp]void *mcRealloc( void *P, int SIZE )
{
int oldSize = _msize( P );
[...]

I can fully understand the desire a developer has to protect their creation from being copied illegally. I can understand why some steps would be taken to mitigate the risk of losing money due to piracy. What I can’t understand is why some companies go so far with their anti-piracy measures that it starts to [...]

I have a few questions for you:

How would you feel if TV channels changed automatically because you weren’t paying attention to the ads?
Would you like it if your newspaper closed by itself because you were reading the articles but skipping over the classifieds?
How happy would you be if you were kicked out of a cinema [...]

I find myself frequently concerned with the lack of ability of a lot of people in our industry. Today I found an example of at least one of the possible reasons why software development professionals turn out to be crap.
They start by reading tutorials like this.
How can we expect people to become good at what [...]

Yes, it just gets better and better! This beauty is just a few of the lines that make up a huge “property get” in C#. Count the WTFs in this crazy baby:

string amount = "";
double Amount = 0;
try
{
amount = (string)r["Amount"];
Amount = Convert.ToDouble(amount);
}
catch
{
// use formula rather than value
AmountFormula = amount;
Amount = 0;
}

If I had a [...]

Yes, another obscure and extremely useful postback. Bow down to the ultimate in WTFs!!!
[source:csharp]protected void OnCheckedChanged( object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Dummy for disabled checkboxes in lists
}[/source]
It’s a beauty! I guess I should at least be grateful that there’s a comment in there.
WTFness: Has to be 10 / 10.
PS - My good mate Dan is going [...]