A comprehensive list of relevant topics

Dilbert comic strip for 02/10/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

Those out of my industry may think OMG FACEBOOK SUX LOL!!!!

Those that us that program for the web went FFS NOT AGAIN!

And please, don't start about how we (and Scott) are overreacting about Facebook. The problem isn't really Facebook, the problem is everyone else.

Why?

Facebook is making obscene amounts of dough by keeping captive audiences that for most part don't spent money except for example game credits and that kind of thing. They then turn around and get what is probably even more money from dumbass advertisers that are terrified of missing out on this captive audience.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBaseWhile I am concerned that Ivette is a degenerate Facebook addict that plays stupid games that I can't figure out their appeal, it is no different than the time *I* spend playing video games that Ivette sees as stupid and SHE can't figure out their appeal. If people want to spent money playing, I can't judge them.

What really irks me is the companies falling prey to this Facebook scam. While the end users at least get entertainment out of using Facebook, these companies are being sold a bill of goods.

When was the last time that you saw an ad that ended with "visit us on Facebook at facebook.com/companyname"? Why in the hell would anyone find it easier to go to facebook.com/toyota than to toyota.com? Or facebook.com/dell instead of dell.com? It's IDIOTIC.

Worse, it creates annoying circular references. You go to facebook.com/companyname and basically it says:

Hey, we are on Facebook!
Go to our website at companyname.com!
(optional) Here's a sale/discount coupon code/deal of the week/etc.

That's all you get. And worse, if you go to companyname.com it has a fucking facebook logo and it says HEY WE ARE ON FACEBOOK!!!

This makes no damn sense, especially knowing that they are basically paying Facebook for a longer route to find their products/services.

Comments

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

Software Entropy and the Strangler Fig: Surviving a 20-Year-Old Codebase

Right now, I find myself fighting a three-front war. Front one is keeping a 20-year-old behemoth of a B2B application alive. We are talking about decades of legacy ASP.NET and VB.NET where two decades of tweaks, patches, and "temporary fixes" have become permanent, load-bearing pillars of the architecture. Every time I touch it, it feels like playing Operation with oven mitts on—spending 90% of my week untangling logic just so a simple bug fix doesn’t cause a ripple effect that crashes a critical service. Front two is modernizing the architecture. I am actively trying to implement a rudimentary Strangler Fig pattern—slowly carving out legacy functionality and pushing it into a clean, testable shared library project so we can actually run proper unit tests and stop the bleeding. Front three is modernizing the team. While keeping the lights on and quietly rebuilding the engine, I am also pushing a retraining effort to get my peers up to current framework versions and embracing ...

The Insomniac Coder

Search This Blog