SQL Server Club

Developers and Telephones: The Ultimate Phobia?

Riiiing! Riiing! Riiing! Oh no, the dreaded telephone is ringing again. You push your nose further into your monitor and stare more intensely at your code and hope one of the other developers will answer it… All of a sudden everyone’s gone quiet and has something so urgent to do that they can’t possibly be the one to pick up the handset and answer that call.

Phone-phobia, also known as tele-phobia, is a common fear and in my experience it’s consistently prevalent in developers. This intense fear of answering the phone or making a call can range from mild hesitation and procrastination to profuse sweating, severe avoidance and even fainting. Thankfully that’s not happened in our office yet!

Personally I hate the telephone. My excuse is partly that the ringing tone interrupts my flow of concentration (essential for long periods of programming), but apart from that I guess it’s just that I don’t like talking through them.

I’m not the most extrovert of people, hence why I develop software and am not a salesman. Was I humiliated as a child when I once used the phone that’s put me off for life? Is it just my shy-and-retiring-would-rather-code-than-talk personality trait that does it? Why? I love technology and surely the telephone is just another gadget to be tinkered with?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not an out and out social phobic, though admittedly most of my friends are techies too, and it’s easier to have a conversation with other techies than it is normal people. I just don’t like being put on the spot and be made to communicate through chat, when I can think through my hands and keyboard. Sending an email, an SMS or IM is so much easier, I can write down all the points I want to make, review it, and then send it. All without having to utter a single word.

Ok, so speaking doesn’t need a spell checker and your facial gestures remove the need for emoticons, but all the same, the stress of having to think and speak and not be able to see the other person on the end of the line is all rather scary to me.

I’ll drop anyone an email, anytime, no hesitation. But having to make a phone call, which is worse for me than answering a call, well, I can procrastinate for days, even weeks sometimes:

Monday - 5.12pm

I arrived at the office this morning and needed to make a fairly important phone call. It’s now nearly the end of the working day and I guess I will leave it till tomorrow, sure, after 5pm is not the time to start something new. I guess it can wait till tomorrow morning.

Tuesday - 8.47am

Well, I’ve just arrived at the office and still have to make that call. I’ll just have a cup of coffee as it’s not quite 9am and most businesses don’t start till nine, so I’ll look through some code while I’m drinking (don’t want to be slurping coffee while on the phone) and then I’ll make the call.

11.27am

Hmm, perhaps I should nip out and grab a sandwich from the local deli before the lunch crowd forms a long queue. It’ll be quicker that way. Besides, I want to make sure they have my favorite sandwich filling.

11.49am

I’ll just eat my lunch and then make that call.

12.31pm

Most people go out to lunch, so the person I need to speak to probably isn’t even in the office. Perhaps after 2pm is the best idea. I’ll carry on with this debugging in the meantime and call in a couple of hours.

15.22pm

I’ve been pushing my brain hard today on some awkward code and trying to figure out the answer to a really tedious technical issue. I’m not feeling too sharp so maybe I’ll make that call first thing in the morning when I’m a bit more refreshed….

The story has been the same every day this week. It’s now mid Thursday afternoon and I’ve still not made that call. I’ve looked through every page on the company’s web site, desperately searching for a form that allows me to make my communication using another medium - email, SMS, smoke signals, who cares as long as it’s not the dreaded telephone?

At some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and pick up the handset… Ok, just as soon as I’ve finished this blog, I’ll make a cup of tea and do it.

What’s your office phobia, I’d love to know? Just don’t phone me up to tell me!

Doodles: What Is Your Doodle Personality?

Doodling is the habit of idle hands. You know when you’re on the phone or in a meeting and have a pen in your hand, some vacant space on your notepad and probably some vacant space in your head?

That part of your brain which just isn’t tuned in to the person talking or the music on the phone system while you’re kept on hold. If you do some desk-walking round your office, you’ll probably uncover a wide variety of doodles from your colleagues.

Just like handwriting our doodles reveal a lot about our personality and about our current state of emotions.

The differences between men and women’s doodles show a marked polarization: men tend to draw boxy shapes while women favor curves and circles. Those that don’t follow the gender stereotype really are an exception to that rule!

So what do our doodles mean?

Doodles are a direct representation of what is going on in our subconscious, so after you read the rest of this blog, you may want to reconsider whether you leave your doodles on public display.

The location on the page

If you do your doodles right in the middle of page you are an extrovert, in need of attention or just a person in need of some space. This position is common among professions involving public speaking. Probably not too many of these in your development team, then!

Doodling at the top of page displays confidence and lots of ideas. If your doodle is right next to the title or heading, this means you’ve got something more important to say than what is on the page in front of you!

Most people doodle on the left hand side, though this can hint at having nostalgic feelings. On the other hand, doodling on the right is more common in lefties though this may represent an urge to express hidden thoughts.

The doodle shape

Doodled chains indicate restrictive feelings, usually pertaining to a relationship or job. It can also represent an attitude or belief that’s holding the doodler back. A drawing of a person in chains means you’ve got one seriously stressed developer on your hands!

Circles are the need for unity and peace, but they can be interpreted one of two ways: the struggle to bring things together and make sense, or a strong sense things are coming together forming a whole.

If you doodle fluffy clouds, you’re probably a happy person prone to daydreaming and with a strong sense of freedom. However, especially for those of you who remember Pootle in The Flumps with his bad mood and rain cloud, angry, stormy clouds could be depression or inability to cope.

It’s more common for women to draw eyes (especially with eyelashes). Eyes display the inner self of the doodler: big eyes for extroverts, small eyes for shy people. If the eye is drawn closed, it means a doodler who is unable to look inside of their self. And of course happy or sad eyes reflect the mood of the doodler.

How about squares and triangles, which is what I always draw? Well, geometric shapes suggest a rational and logical thought process and the doodler may also be good at planning (that’s me!). A triangle can also signify internal desire to advance their career or social life.

If you’ve drawn arrows or ladders, you’re an ambitious person, obsessed by certain goals, but also anticipating achievement. A funny face means the doodler has a good sense of humor (if you have an office prankster sneak a look at their doodles!).

Stars are for optimists, houses mean you’re missing home or want to settle, while flowers and plants reflect your kind, sensitive and warm personality. Er, I didn’t find any doodled plants or flowers from the bits of doodled paper I managed to uncover in our office. Or any undiscovered artistic talent either!

If you draw 3D shapes then lucky you as you have the ability to see the full picture (or at least want to see the full picture), so maybe you’re the project lead.

Underling a name indicates the importance of this person to the doodler (your boss’s name no doubt). Food symbolizes a very hungry developer, though it may be indicative of emotional hunger (probably the former if it’s a drawing of a donut).

And finally transport. If you’ve doodled a car, plane or a train, you have a subconscious need for travel, freedom or a perhaps a holiday. Or you might just find out who’s the office trainspotter.

Register for the FREE SQLBits Cubed Conference

The third SQL Bits community conference will take place on Saturday 13th September 2008 at the Hertfordshire Conference Centre in Hatfield (UK).

Entry is free and the last two events have been successfully filled to capacity. This year’s conference offers places to 440 SQL Server fans on a first come, first served basis.

To register for SQL Bits Cubed, find out all the necessary details and enter the logo design competition, point your browser at www.sqlbits.com.

Anything for a Free Donut: Should You Upgrade from SQL Server 2000?

A developer that doesn’t get excited about new software features is like a dog that doesn’t get excited about a new Frisbee. DBAs, on the other hand, can be excitable in a slightly more subdued manner, but unlike developers, they don’t install and play with new software on their servers as soon as the beta version is released. Well, not the ones who value their jobs, anyway.

No. Like infinitely patient birds of prey, they wait and they watch. When the time is right, the business need is there and the extra performance is needed, then they merely ponder it. They don’t jump right in, feet first with no thought for the consequences.

In today’s SQL Server Performance newsletter, Editor Peter Ward hedged a guess that 50% of organizations are still running SQL Server 2000. Three months back a SQL Server Magazine survey discovered that a staggering 81% of its respondents were still using SQL Server 2000. That’s four out of five, a phenomenal statistic.

So, DBAs are still using SQL Server 2000 because, as Peter Ward agrees, it’s rock solid. Just how a database server should be.

So why is Microsoft using hyped-up developer-type marketing on DBAs to sell them SQL Server 2008? They can gather several hundred developers together for a conference, give them donuts and a free MSDN pen and they’ll install anything Microsoft has to offer! But DBAs are not so easily persuaded.

I like to come into the office knowing what’s going to happen and, when it comes to databases, rather more what’s not going to happen. Can we really get excited about lots of features we’re never going to need? Surely that’s the mindset of excitable developers, not risk-averse DBAs? Or do marketers just treat us all as ‘technical types’ who they don’t understand, incapable of differentiating between the disparate mindsets required to effectively perform these very different jobs.

I suspect much of SQL Server 2008 to be change for change’s sake. It’s certainly seems to be the case for many of Microsoft’s recent offerings, so is this any different for SQL Server? Certainly many of the changes introduced into Enterprise Manager (no, make that SQL Server Management Studio…) were unnecessary and in a number of cases, for the worse.

A quick chat with a few of my fellow developers-in-crime revealed a mostly muted response to Vista. Those who are using it are in a very low percentage. Did we really need Vista? We’re all still happy with XP (but would secretly prefer to return to Windows 2000). Did Microsoft really need to change “Add or Remove Programs” to “Programs and Features” in the new Vista? Did Enterprise Manager really need to be renamed Management Studio? Well, yes if marketing decides terminology needs to be refreshed.

I’m one of a majority of my peer group who welcomes Visual Studio 2008. Surprisingly not because of all the fancy new features in it, but for hope that Microsoft has actually made it solid, reliable and without the gruesome performance problems of Visual Studio 2005 (see Microsoft: Eat Your Own Dog Sick). A sort of Visual Studio 2005 SP2, just three years too late, if you will.

Now that Microsoft are releasing major versions of Visual Studio, SQL Server, the .NET Framework and their desktop operating systems so close together, it means confusion and chaos. Anyone can be using any combination of the above, making testing software an even bigger headache with more variables to test against and more room for error. Especially given the reliability issues Microsoft have brought to us recently.

So when do you decide to upgrade your SQL Server 2000? Do you really want to move to a wobbly 2005, or do you hang on a bit longer and wait for 2008 to be around for a couple of years? Well, if you do that, it will then be the year 2010. So, Microsoft will already have a beta release for SQL Server 2010, with even more features. So do you then wait for that version to mature? You can see where I’m going with this.

There’s a fan base for SQL Server 2000 which understandably doesn’t want to upgrade. Indeed, has no good technical or business reason to upgrade. Are those fans becoming the Luddites of the database world, or are they just not swayed by the MS marketing machine for shiny buttons, an end to UI consistency and free donuts?

Perhaps they are doing their employers and their jobs a simple financial favor in these uncertain economic times, saving them money and avoiding costly technical failures.

If you still use SQL Server 2000, write and tell me what you think. Are you a SQL Luddite or the solid keystone of sanity and reason in the fast-revolving world of Microsoft releases?

Sniffing Coffee: The New Way to Stir Your Senses?

Programmers and coffee have had a long-term faithful relationship since computing first began and I’m no exception to this love affair.

Personally, I can’t open a jar or bag of coffee without a good inhalation of the smell. Just walking past a cafe or even seeing a cup of coffee is enough to make me happy. In fact, just talking about it right now is bringing on my desire for a cup of the stuff.

Anyone who knows me is aware that I’m best left alone in the morning until I’ve had my first coffee. It’s the one substance I just cannot give up for Lent: Chocolate? Yes, I can live without it. Beer? Yes, just about, but not easy. Pizza? There are alternatives. Tea? No problem! Coffee? Now we’re talking serious drug habit! Absolutely, no way!

Most people drink coffee for its taste and awakening capabilities. But how often have you considered the effects the smell may have on your brain? If you’re a fan of aromatherapy, this will be right up your street.

A recent scientific study into the effects of drinking and smelling coffee on genes and proteins in the brain has been conducted and led by Han-Seouk Seo of Seoul National University.

Alongside colleagues in Germany and Japan, experiments have been carried out to find the effect of coffee aromas on lab rats which had not had enough sleep.

This is the first scientific study to highlight how the smell of coffee affects the sleep-deprivation induced stress of rats. Why they didn’t use a bunch of developers for this particular test I don’t know, they’re perfect candidates.

So, can we turn to coffee-sniffing as a proven alternative pick-me-up? The results of the tests will be published next week by the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.

In the meantime, it’s best not to take chances: I’m off for another cup.

Sex, Violence, Video Games and Visual Studio

A report commissioned by the UK’s Prime Minister, following what the London Times described as a “growing moral panic” towards violent video games, has concluded that the harm they can cause justifies them carrying health warnings, not dissimilar to those on cigarette packets.

The whole point of video games is that they are supposed to be just that: games. But today’s graphical capabilities make them so real-looking, that they are too close to reality to have the escapism of the boxy, 2-D, low-color graphics that I enjoyed in my youth. The most violence that video games achieved in my day was the screeching noise of the cassette as it took ten minutes to load up a game.

So, girls of today get silicone implants with Miss Bimbo and boys get violence and prostitutes with Grand Theft Auto. What does this mean and why is it important?

The global obsession with celebrity has penetrated deep into society. Why don’t girls want to do computer science at school? Maybe because they want to be somebody who is famous for being famous and not spend time reading C# programming books or learning about networks. Is the controversial Miss Bimbo game just a reflection of today’s girls? Surely it’s just another media form which pushes unrealistic images and ideas into children’s heads and is just part of our world of self-obsession, self-absorption and a me, me, me attitude?

Unfortunately young minds are impressionable, and whilst I played video games where I fired at space ships or killed characters that were far from human in my youth, it was harmless precisely because it was so detached from reality. There was no blood or wounds or bullets in the games I used to play.
Anyway, I was too busy trying to achieve a top spot on a scoreboard to be worrying about making myself into a muscular, testosterone-fuelled tough guy with an assortment of weaponry. It was more important to have speed, quick reactions and intelligence, the only skills required to be the champion. These qualities have given way to more personal aggression in which human characters in video games are there to be killed, maimed or taken sexual advantage of.

If parents were doing the job they should be doing, would we really have to worry about these games affecting children? Is it bad parenting, rather than what games programmers are creating that we should be worried about? Most stable people have a personal line they won’t cross when it comes to violence, bad-language or sex being pushed too far. Without good examples from parents, how do kids know what is and isn’t acceptable?

Maybe it’s a lack of internal confidence. Maybe kids feel mightier when they have fought and killed and gained a sense of power. Perhaps all this is just a reflection on how emotionally empty today’s children are inside, so they go home and act out control and superiority through a videogame and a big gun. If they felt good about themselves through a balance of sports and outdoor activities, fun family time and yes, controlled time spent playing sensible, friendly video games, this wouldn’t be a problem.

A product without a market demanding it would not sell. Are we just being given what we want? We all like a thrill and some excitement in our lives, but has life consumed us so much with the daily grind, long commutes and even longer working hours whereby the precious free time we do have for finding some fervour means we go to extremes? Is this the example we are setting for our kids?

I don’t think we can blame video game manufacturers for anorexic ten year olds, knife-carrying school boys or the rise in gun crime. We have to blame our society as a whole for not just letting our children’s innocence slip away, but also our own. Should we not be reversing the trends by engaging our children’s incredibly creative minds in activities that might actually feed our own inner child as well?

We’ve created a supposedly dangerous society where adults perceive that it’s not safe for their kids to play outside, so they let them play inside on their games consoles; they bring extreme violence into the home environment, ironically as a result of the overblown parental paranoia which is intended to protect children from the ills of the world in the first place! Bring back bikes and roller skates: great exercise to sharpen the senses and reactions while allowing kids to speed away from anyone bad who tries to get close!

And whilst we’re at it, should we extend the idea of ratings to the software we use at work?
“Warning: this software could damage your health by raising blood pressure and stress levels. Disabling features will not be an effective antidote. User Level: seasoned developer used to dealing with IDE-generated set-backs and ill-tested retail releases. Parental supervision recommended.”

Am I likely to be more aggressive because Visual Studio has mal-functioned and lost my work? Maybe a little, but I’ve not yet done anything more violent than comfort eat several donuts in response. Although I have been tempted!

Are today’s kids just a construction of today’s parents? Is it really all too violent and extreme and do we need to get back to bicycles, baking and bird-watching? Let me know what you think!

Developers: Are We Finally Cool?

Have you noticed how everybody has gadgets these days and not just us programmer types? Even my father who’s just turned 70 has a mobile phone. He often sends me text messages and email is now our main mode of communication. Ok, so he hasn’t got an MP3 player, but he’s just purchased a huge flat-screen TV for the family home. This is now normal behavior in modern society.

Ten years or so ago when I first started my IT career, hardly anyone other than fellow IT bods had an email address and having internet access at home, albeit on clumsy, expensive dial-up, put you up there with NASA. Mobile phones used to be a gadget that only IT consultants could afford. Probably because only they could afford a big enough car to carry the brick-sized monstrosities around with them, while the rest of us were stuck on buses and tubes with our super-weight laptops and that was enough of a load.

In the UK we’ve often been further behind with technology than America, who seemed to have internet and email commonplace in society during the last ice-age. Here in the UK, technology was the reserve of the nerd. But have you noticed that since everyone has gadgets these days, that we developers ain’t considered quite so nerdy anymore? In fact I’d go as far as saying that we’re stylish trend-setters, prototyping and programming home electronics such as the HD TVs, the iPod, Gameboys and Xboxes which consumers can’t get enough of.

No longer are developers seen as brainiac types like Martin Prince off The Simpsons. Rather than chemistry-set wielding, tank-topped trainspotters, we are now something of an alluring mix of intellect and slick design ideas. You just have to look at all the wonderful gadgets, devices, web sites and technologies we developers have created over the last decade to see this. We have sites such as thinkgeek.com to sell us cool, individual clothing, our non-IT friends behold us in high regard for setting up blog space and web sites for them and upgrading the RAM on their laptops (a must-have item for anyone who works in an office these days).

At last we have acceptance from the rest of the world. Whilst everybody seems to have gadgets, we are now cool because we’re the ones who program them, so a developer for the Apple iPod, Microsoft’s Xbox or Nokia’s N95 surely must be a pin-up icon?

So what do you think, developers: are we finally cool?

Microsoft: Eat Your Own Dog Sick

It’s always been a bit of a brain-teaser to me, thinking about Microsoft using a development environment to develop a development environment. When Visual Studio 2005 shipped in November 2005, it had some pretty bad bugs in it; the worst one I experienced was when I added controls and graphics to a form, only to have the form try to re-draw itself, go white, delete everything I’d just added, including stuff I’d already saved and then end itself, dying in a horrid mess. I thought perhaps it was a hardware issue. I got a PO for a spanking new dev box, fastest possible CPU and 2GB RAM. Guess what? Same errors, just got ‘em quicker!

Every time I was forced to close down the IDE, it gave me the opportunity to send my bug to Microsoft. How many times did this happen? I lost count. Surely there must be enough entries in their database by now for them to fix it? Service Pack 1 certainly didn’t do the job. Maybe they can’t fix it because their controls keep disappearing and Visual Studio goes white and deletes their work too.

Come on, if we are to believe Microsoft really eats its own dog food, then this serious bug would have been fixed way back. Their developers would not put up with the frustrations that you and I, along with many of their other customers, have had to endure.

So… dog sick. Not dog food, but dog sick. If Visual Studio 2005 is flaky, how can Microsoft use it to develop their future commercial applications that then get handed to us through our MSDN subscriptions, when previous bugs have not yet been exterminated? I don’t want a new version of Visual Studio with new features when the old one doesn’t even work properly.

They shipped Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 together on 7th November 2005 and now, barely two years later, we face new versions of each. Both shipped with some shameful errors. I used Visual Studio 2003 for a while and yet it was more stable and much more responsive than 2005.

Is this then a vicious cycle of the low quality software coming out of Microsoft? We at Norb all thought that it was marketing driven deadlines causing un-tested software to be shipped too soon. Perhaps because Microsoft is using Visual Studio 2005 with all its bugs to develop the next generations of their software, it’s creating a downward spiral of bad applications. Here’s my theory:

- Microsoft release Visual Studio.NET 2003, a pretty solid environment.

- Bill steps down as head honcho at Microsoft and Mr Marketing, Steve Ballmer, takes over.

- Ballmer wants quicker release cycles, more versions sooner to generate more sales (let’s face it, there’s only so far Microsoft can go with their software and maybe they reached their pinnacle already. More frequent releases should mean more purchases and more upgrades).

- Meanwhile the developers are developing Visual Studio.NEXT using Visual Studio 2003. While the 2003 version is stable enough to develop the next version on, Mr Ballmer wants the new version to be released even quicker to coincide with the scheduled release of SQL Server 2005. He’s planned a big marketing fanfare and a deadline that can’t be moved.

- Visual Studio 2005 is rushed out the door and released with serious bugs (and so is SQL Server 2005).

- The Microsoft developers have to eat their own dog food so they start developing everything using Visual Studio 2005.

- Because of the bugs already in Visual Studio 2005, this dooms all future versions of Visual Studio as they’ve perpetuated the same bugs. Possibly not just in the next generation version of Visual Studio, but everything else they develop using Visual Studio (SQL Server, Word, Outlook, Exchange etc).

I attended a Microsoft TechNet event last summer (July 2006) and they clearly laid out their release plans:

- Launch RTM version (eg Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Exchange 2005, Windows 2005 etc).

- Two years later, release an interim version, fixing the recorded bugs, so we’d have Visual Studio 2005 R2, just as we did with Windows XP R2.

- Fours years after the RTM version, release the next version, eg SQL Server 2009, Visual Studio 2009 and so on.

Microsoft explained that it would make life easier for all their users and those of us who develop on their technologies, as we’d have an advance schedule and could plan development, upgrades and installations. Great idea, I thought.

But what we should have is this: release Visual Studio 2005 in November 2005. Approximately two years later release the interim version, so this November should be Visual Studio 2005 R2. Then in November 2009, release the next fully blown RTM, which would be Visual Studio 2009. Confused yet? You should be.

It did make sense, but now it doesn’t. So just as staying in is the new going out, and other stupid phrases marketing people throw at us, is Visual Studio 2008 the new Visual Studio 2005 R2? Send me a decent or highly amusing answer that makes me laugh, and I’ll publish it and the best ones will get a free SQL Server Club t-shirt.

Oh, and Microsoft? In case you reading this, I could have made the title of this blog something other than dog sick!

Tidy Desk Policies: Neat Freaks, Desk Diners and GPSi (Germs Per Square Inch)

It’s just gone midday on Thursday. The sun’s shining, it’s nearly the weekend and I’m ready for lunch. I’m a desk-diner, unless I’m invited to the pub for a ploughman’s and a pint. This is rare as none of us in the Norb office are any good at coding after beer.

Now in order to eat my lunch, I going to need to clear some space on my desk for my plate of sandwiches. My desk wasn’t exactly tidy when I came in at eight today and it’s progressively worsened throughout the morning. You know how it goes: coffee cups, pens, bits of paper with doodlings and hex color values, a landline phone with lots of buttons you never use unless you’re the receptionist (when have you ever seen a developer use a Call Pickup button…?), mobile phone, MP3 player and headphones, couple of technical manuals and a trade mag or two. What else? Post-It notes stuck to the monitor, staples pulled from documents, paper clips, loose change, bits, things and stuff. Oh and some emergency high-energy foods such as Snickers bars and a bag of kettle chips. Let’s take a quick look at my desk:



Here at Norb Towers we don’t have a formal Tidy Desk Policy. Our desk is our own zone, to make comfortable as we see fit. Our only rule is making sure sensitive data is shredded or secure to protect ourselves and more importantly, our customers. Given the state of my desk, I’m pretty pleased we don’t have one. Unless you hot-desk I don’t see the point. And if you’re a hot-desker, read on, you may wish for a permanent abode by the time you reach the end of this article.

In my experience developers seem to fall into one of two mindsets when it comes to their desks: the desk-diner developer like me who leaves their brain on their desk when they go home and rarely tidy it; the other is the neat freak developer. You know the type, they arrive at the office all bright and breezy, dust and polish their desk, stationery all neat and ordered in an organized container in their pedestal, books ordered by technical category and then by product version number. And if you borrow a book on SQL Server 2005, God help you if you put it back in the wrong order behind a SQL Server 7.0 manual. Tsk!

You see if I tidy my desk at the end of the day, when I come in the next morning I feel mentally unhinged and don’t know what to do. When I walk out the door I try and leave my work life there, and when I walk back in the next morning and sit at my desk I’m plugging my brain back in. All the notes I was scrawling yesterday are right by my keyboard with a pen just handy and I’ve probably even left the lid off, all ready to go again. The books I was referencing yesterday are open to remind me what I was doing and I have a couple of snacks ready to go. Oh, and a random pile of books and paper on the floor behind my desk, which is overspill because I ran out of space.

As developers we build things in, and with, our minds. You can’t reach out and touch our code or web site or graphics, or a script that does some fancy work on SQL Server. We build and operate in worlds that are fabricated from our minds. So is it more vital to us developers as creators of virtual products to have our brains sprawled on our desks and reject the very notion of a Tidy Desk Policy? Unless of course you’re a neat freak developer who can code and be tidy and remember exactly what you did when you finished yesterday. Ok, so your code’s probably tidy too! And neatly checked into SourceSafe with a comment that you spell checked. And you have one to-do list, not multiple lists on bits of paper on your desk, and stuck to your monitor and being used as a bookmark inside a SQL Server book for that chapter on replication that you really will read one day. One day in 2010, maybe.

Now if you’re a neat freak developer we’re going to talk about germs on desks, so this may disturb you. Actually you probably don’t eat at your desk and you use coasters for your mugs of coffee and a plate for your biscuits, so it probably won’t apply to you anyway.

I have to confess that my keyboard is filthy. It’s well used as I tend to be in contact with it most of the day, so it gathers crumbs and dust and somehow has rather a lot of cat hairs wedged in between the keys. Fluffkins hasn’t been to the office with me, so they must drift off my clothes and onto my desk, forevermore stuck to my keyboard. Are any of you neat freak developers feeling weak of stomach yet?

Well apparently a study by germ guru Dr Charles Gerba of Arizona University revealed that the average desk boasts 20,961 germs per square inch, or 3,249 per square centimeter! Not worried yet? The average office desk has 400 times more germs than an office toilet seat. No way!!!

Another study, comparing men’s to women’s desks, found that women’s desks tend to be germier than men’s. Who’d have thought that, eh? Now this was down to two things: food and make-up. Make-up apparently harbors germs, but then the head count of female developers is usually pretty low in any IT department, so no need for bio warfare suits just yet. This particular study found more germs in women’s pedestals because they tend to have stocks of food.

We developers tend to like our snacks to fuel our brains and keep us coding. I know I certainly stockpile munchies. Perhaps other developers tend to buy snacks from vending machines and don’t store them. My desk may look like a bomb site, but that doesn’t mean I’m not prepared in times of low brain fuel or that I can’t find where I put that back-up Snickers bar. I have my priorities, y’know.

Now before all you females accuse me of calling you germy, let’s discuss men’s wallets. Men tend to keep their wallets in their back pockets, which are notoriously bad as they tend to get heated up, creating the perfect breeding ground for Mr and Mrs Germ to reproduce. It’s a similar story with us men and our PDAs too, always fiddling with them apparently (Mmm… iPaq. Sorry, I got distracted there). Will your wife ever go fishing in your wallet for some cash ever again? In future she may approach with caution (or at least a bottle of disinfectant and some latex gloves). And ladies, will your husband be borrowing your make-up when pantomime season comes around again or will he insist on his own make-up collection?

So where does this leave us? Hopefully with strong immune systems. All this talk of food is making me hungry. I’m off to eat my lunch over my keyboard and increase my desk germ count. Can’t have female developers living with more germs than me! That’s just not fair, I believe in equality. Now I wonder if Fluffkins is at home worrying about the number of germs in his basket.

Warm up your Keyboard to get your Hot Keys Back!

Do you remember the days when you used to use your keyboard a lot and only mouse occasionally? Do you even remember the days when we didn’t have mice? Things are different in the new generation of Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. When using an application, everyone used to know all the short cuts for all the F keys, the Alt+key combinations and Control+key combinations.

It’s amazing how these days I seem to be able to do so much with a mouse in one hand, a pen, sandwich, mobile phone or bar of chocolate in the other. That’s apart from when I’m coding of course, or writing a blog or letter. But then again I don’t use my keyboard for opening up menus so much, I tend to just grab my mouse and let it do the work.

So what’s going on here? Is this just how we’re become, dependent on our mice? How would you cope if yours was taken away? Many applications these days are written with no support for keyboarders and require a mousey touch. Surfing the web these days is nigh on impossible without a mouse, or Human Input Device, if you want to get posh about it.

Can you imagine using SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005 or the 2007 Suite of Microsoft Office tools without a mouse? With the sparkly new ribbon toolbars and all those tabs, it would be impossible and downright frustrating.

I’m fond of my keyboard and I like to Alt+Tab and Alt+F+S and find it so satisfying to Alt+F4 my development machine at the end of the day, especially if it’s been one of *those* development days.

Did we stop using Alt so much because Microsoft took it away in Windows XP? You don’t see those underlined letters by default anymore. Remember hot keys? Now you only see characters on menus and buttons underlined if you press Alt. Since I started using Windows XP, I’ve missed having hot keys and have felt, how can I put this, rather Alt Grrrr and irritated about it. As soon as I started using XP I noticed they had vanished. It was only the other day that I stumbled by chance on how to turn the hot keys back on.

So if you’ve not worked it out yet either, here’s how to do it:

1 - Right click on your desktop and choose Properties from the bottom of the menu. 
2 - Click on the Appearance tab.



3 - Click on the Effects… button to open the Effects window. 
4 - Right at the bottom, unclick the checkbox ‘Hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key.




5 - Click on OK. 
6 - Return to IE or Windows Explorer or where ever you came from, and lo and behold you have your hot keys back. 

Ah, good to see you again, I missed you…