Posts Tagged ‘why?’

For the Love of PDF

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Today I received an email from the SU. Nothing unusual there, it was telling me about interesting things I could do as a Student Rep.

This email had two attachments. Again, nothing too special - attachments are good and explained more details about a couple of the opportunities.

The attachments were a .docx and a .doc - bad.

The assumption is clearly that everybody has a piece of software which can read those file formats. A .doc isn’t too bad, since it’s a standard for Word, but very few people have upgraded to the Word 2007 needed to read the .docx format. Even worse, both formats kinda assume you are either using Windows and have a copy of Office, or have bothered to download something like OpenOffice (which can read both formats).

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Take your use case and shove it.

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

UML is horrible, cludgy, trying to be all things to all men, and all in all an over-complicated method of shoehorning an OO system into a non OO modelling framework.

It’s the kind of thing that actually gets in the way of real work, the type of thing generated by some consultant ’systems analyst’ to make the development team stop programming and document the system using a godawful syntax. Then the ‘consultant’ can look at the UML diagram and say “here’s your problem, this arrowhead should be filled in” when in fact the only reason it isn’t is because the developers couldn’t give two shits if the arrowhead is filled, hashed, open, closed or even pointing to the right place.

Seriously, I’ve spent longer trying to draw the UML than I would have taken to just write the damn program. Even in COBOL.

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Posted in In Passing, Thoughts, University | No Comments »