Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Delphi networking on LinkedIn
In case you're a LinkedIn user, please note that Fabrizio Bitti has created a "Powered by Delphi" group.
Monday, 24 December 2007
How to get good ideas
Sometimes, a good idea can save a lot of time in programming. A simple change of the specifications can literally save more than half of the programming hours. But how do you get these good ideas?
I get good ideas, when I get fed with the right information in a situation where I have plenty of time to think about possibilities.
One way to get this information, is from another person, a partner. It depends on the situation, what kind of person is most suitable. For an introvert, trust is very important, so that the introvert thoughts are not disturbed by extroverted worrying about the situation.
In order to be a good partner in this, you must be prepared to accept, that the things you say are not always treated as truth. Only by uncovering incorrect perceptions of reality, you can create a new understanding which can provide business value.
A good partner doesn't say "That's wrong", but tries to explain, why she thinks it is wrong, and accepts the idea as good, until it has been proven otherwise.
Sometimes, you cannot find a good partner, either because your field of expertise is too advanced, people around you are not prepared to do it, or just because you're not in the mood to talk with other people. In these cases, you must trust your own intuition and develop your idea until the point, where you have enough documentation to persuade others easily.
A recent study in Danish companies shows, that almost all good ideas were not created at work. I guess there's room for improvement, here.
Merry Christmas!
I get good ideas, when I get fed with the right information in a situation where I have plenty of time to think about possibilities.
One way to get this information, is from another person, a partner. It depends on the situation, what kind of person is most suitable. For an introvert, trust is very important, so that the introvert thoughts are not disturbed by extroverted worrying about the situation.
In order to be a good partner in this, you must be prepared to accept, that the things you say are not always treated as truth. Only by uncovering incorrect perceptions of reality, you can create a new understanding which can provide business value.
A good partner doesn't say "That's wrong", but tries to explain, why she thinks it is wrong, and accepts the idea as good, until it has been proven otherwise.
Sometimes, you cannot find a good partner, either because your field of expertise is too advanced, people around you are not prepared to do it, or just because you're not in the mood to talk with other people. In these cases, you must trust your own intuition and develop your idea until the point, where you have enough documentation to persuade others easily.
A recent study in Danish companies shows, that almost all good ideas were not created at work. I guess there's room for improvement, here.
Merry Christmas!
Saturday, 22 December 2007
Soft hyphen in ISO-8859-1 and Unicode
I just came across this blog post about Unicode and ISO 8859-1 being unclear on how to show a soft hyphen.
The article contains links to other blog posts and documents about this topic.
I will not give a resume on the problem - read the articles if you're interested. However, I have a strong opinion on the topic: The character set standard should not define the application.
Sometimes you want to create an editor, that exactly shows the contents of a file, so that the user is able to see all bytes in the file precisely. And sometimes the editor has another purpose, like making it simple to create a sales brochure.
In the first case, a soft hyphen should be visible to the user. Think notepad... the character 0xAD should be clearly visible in notepad, no matter where you put it. In the second case, a soft hyphen character can be used to implement an application-specific soft hyphen functionality, where the hyphen is only shown when it makes sense according to the application's purpose.
Some of the articles even mention the use of soft hyphens in HTML. That's really out of scope, since HTML already redefines the layout of so much. It seems somebody has forgotten that the primary purpose of HTML is to render things differently.
The article contains links to other blog posts and documents about this topic.
I will not give a resume on the problem - read the articles if you're interested. However, I have a strong opinion on the topic: The character set standard should not define the application.
Sometimes you want to create an editor, that exactly shows the contents of a file, so that the user is able to see all bytes in the file precisely. And sometimes the editor has another purpose, like making it simple to create a sales brochure.
In the first case, a soft hyphen should be visible to the user. Think notepad... the character 0xAD should be clearly visible in notepad, no matter where you put it. In the second case, a soft hyphen character can be used to implement an application-specific soft hyphen functionality, where the hyphen is only shown when it makes sense according to the application's purpose.
Some of the articles even mention the use of soft hyphens in HTML. That's really out of scope, since HTML already redefines the layout of so much. It seems somebody has forgotten that the primary purpose of HTML is to render things differently.
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