As you may, or possibly not, know. I became a dad for the second time. It was a shock to the system, having 9 months to come to terms with it is not long enough. Admittedly, I spent 8 and a half months with my head in a bucket of sand waiting for it all to go away.

My first child is now nearly 4, (August) and he already has the patter of a grifter trying to smooth talk his way into getting a Spiderman web making wrist toy as a present.

That leaves my wife and I. To sum up, we are both completely bolloxed. Most of our nights are spent feeding and changing. This is an issue for me. I am not a night person, no matter how hard I try I cannot stay awake. Therefore I constantly run the risk of accidentally dropping the child down the back of a cupboard, using her as a pillow or repeatedly tapping her on the head wondering why she wont switch to snooze mode. The problem is that because I don’t contribute as much as I would like, I cannot complain about how tired I feel without getting the “glare”. Other dads with tired partners know what I mean. That cold, hard look which says “Say another word and I will rip you limb for limb”.

It is a well known, medically proven fact that tiredness has far reaching affects with respect to general health and personal well being. Forgetfulness, low tolerance threshold, lower level of personal hygiene. I cannot remember how many days I have had these socks on for. Its not because I am too tired to reach into my sock drawer. But more that I simply couldn’t care less if my feet hum a bit. I am unshaven, wearing the same jogging bottoms and my hair has decided to style itself.

Tiredness also plays with your mind and the perception of your immediate surroundings. For example, a cloth used to clean work surfaces is left crumpled next to the kitchen sink. Normally, I wouldn’t notice it. Today, it looked like a small Buddha looking at his feet. A roll of paper on my desk looks like a pair of binoculars and my headphones remind me of Princess Lea.

You become tetchy at everything and everyone. Driving around Leicester can be testing at times, Leicester drivers are considered to be the worst on the planet. Well, by me they are. Every driver stereotype can be found here. From annoying company car drivers to 4 foot women in off-road land rover jeeps. The north of Leicester seems to be in a state of permanent highway regeneration. There is barely a major road which isn’t undergoing some form or repair. So naturally, I have a lot to shout about, and at. This may be normal, or it may stem from tiredness. Ask my wife, and she would concur that I generally am a grumpy old sod regardless of my energy levels.

I need some sleep. (and apparently a shower)

Check out this sellers rating. Do you see 120? Now hit refresh, what did the figure change to?

Here are screenshots if the item is no longer available:

What buyers would normally see

What buyers would see momentarily after a refresh before the embedded javascript changes the rating value back up to 120 (first screenshot)

The javascript not only changes the sellers rating, it also points the sellers link to an actual seller with that rating. Amazingly, Ebay allows javascript to be embedded into templates thus allowing pages to be manipulated in this way. I have seen the offending piece of code which I was going to post but decided against for obvious reasons. I am astounded to think that there are no checks in place to prevent this from happening.

Actual Ebay Item

I need to rant.

Recently, I was on the lookout for a better development IDE. Up until now Dreamweaver was my default choice. Purely because the agency I worked for used it, familiarity ‘n’ all.

I posted a question to a mailing list, it asked others for alternative editors. Back came the usual response which made me want to scream.

“I use notepad, its all you need.”
“I swear by VIM, that’s what real developers use”
“Dreamweaver!?!?! Emacs all the way”

Why do people need to feel that if you don’t use a “proper” development tool then you are not fit to walk the same planet? It is almost a “I have a small penis therefore need to compensate by claiming to have built a site the size of Amazon using nothing but Chalk and Slate Version 0.01”.

It isn’t shameful to use an editor with code-completion. I find I can rattle through development using a framework such as CodeIgniter with an IDE that tells me that this PHP function has the following arguments. Being able to remember CSS snippets doesn’t make you a better coder, it makes you an advert for Omega 3. I can remember code and snippets, but I choose to allow the editor to complete them for me purely to increase my rate of development.

Some claim that coding by hand is better than code-completion. Isn’t it the same? If I am hand-coding a template and I allow code-completion to present me with the a list of attributes for me to choose from, isn’t that hand-coding? It seems to me that there are many so called experienced developers that feel they have something to prove so embark on a journey of walking over hot coals and sleeping on a bed of nails to prove they are in fact better than everyone else.

I am not knocking Vim,Emac etc users. I am knocking the those that seem to have a dig at people like myself that choose not to use them.

Rant over.

No more asking friends for screenshots or waiting for the one Mac in the office to be free. Apple have released a Windows version of Safari. Still in beta, from using it all day I have yet to encounter any major issues. I did encounter a rather odd one. As a test, I decided to write this post using Safari. In the paragraph below which talks about performance. It failed to save anything beyond the word “fastest”. It failed to even copy beyond the word fastest. In the end I had to type it all out again if Firefox. Like I said, a little bit odd.

The big question is whether we can rely on its rendering engine to layout pages in exactly the same way as they would be on a Mac. During my, admittedly brief, testing phase, I had my Mac running alongside and did not come across any differences between the two. Which you would expect since they both use the same layout engine engine, KHTML/WebKit.

Apple seem to be making a big thing about its “Blazing Performance” and go as far as to claim that it is the fastest web browser available. My Firefox installation, like many others Firefox users, has a gazillion plugins and extensions and so it probably isn’t hard to be the fastest. Still, on a fast broadband connection it is hard to make a comparison.

The really really really minor issues are to do with its desktop behaviour. It fails to remember the position and state before being resized so defaults to its pre-set window settings. One thing I do a lot is to minimise all windows to gain access to my desktop icons, for some reason Safari seems to escape my Window-M keystroke. I did say it was minor. :)

Download Safari for Windows

I have mentioned in the past jobs which get posted to various freelancer sites.

This one in particular caught my attention. The job title was “Photos/videos of a repulsive model for a viral campaign”. The job description elaborates on this:

The model would have to be a bit non-standard - probably an older overweight funny-looking model (someone that would shock people just by looking at her). She would have to play sexy though.

Is there a special modeling agency that has “repulsive models” as clients?

If you knew of someone that you thought fit the bill, how would you bring it up in conversation? “You can be a model, i can make it happen!”. “What me? only if they were looking for a non-standard, fat, odd looking woman with shocking looks who can play sexy. What are the chances of that?”

Source:
Photos/videos of a repulsive model for a viral campaign

Come across any interesting or amusing job descriptions? Let me know.