Laurence’s Blog

About two months ago a coworker of mine suggested that I implement a Palm-based data entry program for our stock database system (which I wrote). As I had no experience at all of writing applications for anything more (physically) portable than a laptop I was not overly keen on the idea, and a few hours of me being less than enthusiastic seemed to have kept him quiet. At least until a few weeks later when I was presented with a brand new palm (the company’s (of course!), and now in the less than safe hands of one of my other coworkers) and told to write said application.

Last week I had finished implementing a storage and retrieval system and was just starting work on the facility to edit stored data (a fairly trivial task once it was possible to save a new record and view existing ones). The coworker who initially requested the system duely demanded a progress report, which I gave. I was promptly told that editing existing data was not needed, so I deployed the application. Fast forward to yesterday, when another coworker (the one who actually uses the shiney new palm, and my app) says, “You know what’d be really useful? The facility to store part of the data and to come back and edit it and fill in the blanks later, without returning to the office to use the PC-based frontend.” (or words to that effect). People suck, in this case because they don’t know what they want (or, rather, they think they know what they want and then demand that you provide what you thought they wanted after they told you they did not want that (still with me?)).

On a completely unrelated topic, Vista is still going strong on my laptop with only 2 major gripes at the moment. The first is that it uses well over 1.5GB of memory (of which less than half seems to be accounted for by Task Manager’s process list – and yes that is running with administrator rights, my user alone seems to only be using ~200MB although IE7 doubles that when running) which means doing anything (from loading an application to compiling a test build of a program) involves waiting about 3 minutes for Vista to swap enough stuff to disk(the laptop has 1GB physical RAM) to perform the task it was asked to do. The second is that I can not seem to lay my hands on a decent free archiver which works with Vista, my usual choice (IZarc) has major issues, as does 7Zip and several other ones I’ve never heard of before but tried. At the moment I’m using the WinRAR trial and hopefully IZarc’s issues will be resolved before the trial expires. I have not yet had chance to play about with getting WMP11 or MPC to play my music collection due to work, coursework, a sister in hospital and other bits and pieces I have to do to survive and pass my degree. I will probably have to activate Vista soon too, hopefully it will require less effort than the 5 calls to Microsoft it took to activate (pre-installed!) XP on my old laptop.