The Phantom City » Work

What the %@$*&^!?

Shane Thacker — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:40:57 +0000

Seriously?

I just ran across this little requirement in signing up for a service that I’m now nervous about using:

Username: 3+ lowercase letters and numbers, starting with a letter.
Password: 8+ Alpha Numeric characters & must include – 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase, and a number.
Special Characters are not accepted!

No special characters?!? I haven’t been this annoyed since I figured out my database IDE couldn’t handle a schema password with an @ in the name.

Motricity leaves Durham

Shane Thacker — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:29:47 +0000

You know, now I’m feeling better about the fact that I didn’t get that job with them. I suspect Motricity is going to be laying off some good people in Durham to do “what’s best for the investors.”

Anyway, it opens up a great office space for some other company in the American Tobacco campus. The interior of that building is nice and new.

CFEclipse Article on IBM developerWorks

Shane Thacker — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:02:51 +0000

Hey, I work across the hall from this guy! He’s got a window, but since he’s published I won’t begrudge him that.

The article is a good tutorial on the CFEclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which I use for ColdFusion coding at work. (Eclipse and I have come to a pause in our struggle and are trying to normalize relations to avoid future conflict.) I had been ignoring the snippet feature for a while, since I didn’t see a lot of time savings with it, but Jim’s article convinced me to use it again.

Anyway, if you want more about ColdFusion, check out TheCrumb.com.

A small gripe

Shane Thacker — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:54:11 +0000

I’m reading an article about a framework in ColdFusion designed to handle object dependencies, and the author relates everything to making a car — A car object needs an engine and transmission — to make things clear. That’s a metaphor with a long history, but I don’t build cars. I handle users, reports, forms…mentally translating from cars to those kinds of collections of data doesn’t really put me ahead at this point. Too bad we have the Factory pattern name; I think it just encourages it.

Excuse me, sir, but do you have any…

Shane Thacker — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:01:19 +0000

The subject line of an email I just received (not spam):

loaner mouse for photo shoot

Yes, that would be a live lab mouse. It’s always the little things that surprise you when you move to a new job.

The importance of good communication

Shane Thacker — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:36:46 +0000

Nothing quite brings that lesson home than watching your production web server go down just before you’re about to leave for the day, all because a message from you to the hosting reseller inquiring about hard drive capacity was translated by the hosting provider as “Take the hard drives out of that server.”

Alpha Kitty

Shane Thacker — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 17:02:26 +0000

In an attention economy, reputation can take you a long way. In this case, it takes Atoosa Rubinstein, former editor of Seventeen, to an investors meeting to talk about videos of her cat. Perhaps someday I’ll be famous enough to propose cat videos as a business project. Or maybe I’ll keep it simple and just get a cat.

Link courtesy of Gawker.

Update: Doesn’t Alpha Kitty Atoosa sound like a good name for an anime?

Office Space, starring the Superfriends

Shane Thacker — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:36:43 +0000

Good mashup.

Link courtesy of TV Squad.

Agile Programming and Google

Shane Thacker — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:03:28 +0000

Steve Yegge writes about the Google Way. Interesting stuff.

At Google, projects launch because it’s the least-energy state for the system.

Link courtesy of Joel on Software

GE/Durham: Engines of Democracy

Shane Thacker — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 04:12:57 +0000

GE/Durham makes the pages of Fast Company.

GE/Durham has more than 170 employees but just one boss: the plant manager. Everyone in the place reports to her. Which means that on a day-to-day basis, the people who work here have no boss. They essentially run themselves.

Link courtesy of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog