Tesmond's Useful Design

To quote Corning "Introducing Corning Gorilla Glass 5, a new glass solution that raises the bar for protection against drops higher than ever, surviving 1.6-meter, shoulder-height drops onto hard, rough surfaces up to 80% of the time." They then go on to say "...That’s up to 4X better in drop failure height than competitive glasses...". They seem to be very careful to say up to  in both cases. That caveat seems rather extreme. Unfortunately the published information only has a graph with "Normalized Average Height to Failure" based on "Incremental face drop on 180 grit sandpaper". Was it this test that they used for the derivation of the up to 80%? Are hard, rough surfaces "180 grit sandpaper". What does "surviving" mean, are there no signs of damage? I would have assumed that you would have written "no signs of damage" rather than "surviving" as to me it sounds a lot better... Additionally when t...

I was in the office when I received a message saying, what colour is this dress? Now I could see the glare in the top right so I though this photo was not taken under the best lighting conditions and so it would be difficult to be certain of the exact hue, but my best guess would be white and gold. I was happy to be slightly wrong, that the white was some sort of light hue, it had a purple tint, but lots of camera throw in blue or purple tints erroneously and the gold could have been anywhere from yellow to brown. Apparently I am wrong, the dress is blue and black. Now this would not bother me, but apparently lots of people, perhaps the majority see it as black and blue, where as some see it as white and gold. So I took different segments of the dress in isolation and performed and analysis of the colour composition of each portion. In HSV terms this comes up with an average colour of bright drab violet (RGB  B9,AD,C4)  and medium faded orange (RGB 7A,63,48). So the ...

If I were to ask what is the most important element to being a good programmer I would say the ability to avoid making assumptions and instead make hypotheses that can be tested. Knowing you are right because you have data to back it up will allow projects to remain on track. Ploughing on based on guess work and things a colleague told you once (without providing you with data & methodology to back up these statements) will likely lead to ruin. I does not matter how long someone is programming it is always possible that someone heard something once, took it as gospel and never tested it to make sure it was true. I encountered this with a couple of colleagues and an SQL query. The SQL query was built from a ORM-like query generator and included the syntax WHERE 1=1. Both my manager and a senior developer stated, "well that is the problem WHERE 1=1 will always cause a full table scan rather than use indexes". When I looked at the same query I thought that the table...

User interfaces are changing quickly, and it can be default to keep up with new designs and trends. The smaller the team the more corners are cut to try and get the product to market. Lots of people advocate the creating and releasing the minimum viable product. This is fine, but companies try to do so without the minimum viable staff level. Creating a great user interface takes good design, user testing and lots of iteration. Unfortunately user testing is often the first "cost" that is abandoned. The next is the available design time. So when you become incredibly constrained then making good design choices becomes your only course to prevent a horrible mess at the end of the project. I have created a usability check list of common design mistakes. I have seen all of these mistakes in projects from the most expensive to the most basic free apps, and if you can avoid all of them you are well on the way to producing a high quality application. User Interface Usability Che...

I was recently asked if I could think of any good questions to ask a PHP programmer in an interview. Obviously this got me curious as to what Google might return for this query. I noticed that a few people recommended asking questions in relation to PDO. All people suggesting questions on PDO were forming questions where the answer essentially was that PDO should be implemented so that switching database is easy/easier. I have worked on numerous commercial products for a number of years and none of these have ever switched database. How common a change it is to switch database on a project? I can't imagine the % is very high, although I have not been able to find any figures on this. Additionally of the systems that require switching I suspect they are probably moving from an archaic language / database which does not support the system they are moving to, and so you are largely doing a complete rewrite anyway. Will SuperSQL++ 2040 support your PDO queries from PHP 5.6? Perha...

Well made a new interesting discovery today. Combining TOP with ORDER BY can severely slow down a query. I was looking into a slow query which was taking around 10 seconds to return 69 results. It was getting the "TOP 100" from a specific date range and then ordering by ID descending. It was fascinating to me to discover that removing the TOP 100 returned the results in 0.005 seconds. Removing the ORDER BY instead of the TOP 100 also resulted in again producing the results in 0.005 seconds. So the moral of the story is don't use TOP and ORDER BY if you want your results back quickly. I have no idea why this kills performance right now, but it is perhaps even more interesting that even though the query TOP 100 ORDER BY ID ASC results in the same set of results as TOP 100 without an ORDER BY command, it takes 8.8 seconds rather than 0.005 seconds. There are definitely some huge optimisations available in respect to these queries. Update Well after reporting this t...

Photographer :  Cindy J Grady I have been lucky enough to experienced using keyboards on iOS, Android and Windows Phone (8 and 8.1) which has really shown me how important a good input method is in the mobile experience. Each keyboard has unique features which makes choosing the best keyboard a bit of a struggle. Until recently I had completely dismissed iOS keyboard for the following reasons 1. 4" display means that the keys are harder to press accurately 2. Selecting & deleting words is trickier than both Android and Windows Phone not just due to the smaller target area, but also the implementation requires a "long press" to activate the magnifying glass to achieve accurate cursor location. 3. Lack of swype / shape writing style input. While options 1 and 2 were of just minor inconvenience option 3 is a major issue. Swyping / Shape writing There are three great features of shape writing 1. It is a much faster input method on the whole than key p...