Category: Life: Work and Techy

And from Evolt, there’s the top 10 lies told by clients – which my old workplace especially will recognise. Handly, it also provides some advice.

1. Do this one cheap (or free) and we’ll make it up on the next one.
2. We never pay a cent until we see the final product.
3. Do this for us and you’ll get great exposure! The jobs will just pour in!
4. On looking at sketches or concepts: Well, we aren’t sure if we want to use you yet, but leave your material here so I can talk to my partner/investor/wife/clergy.
5. Well, the job isn’t CANCELLED, just delayed. Keep the account open and we’ll continue in a month or two.
6. Contract? We don’t need no stinking contact! Aren’t we friends?
7. Send me a bill after the work goes to press.
8. The last guy did it for XXX dollars.
9. Our budget is XXX dollars, firm.
10. We are having financial problems. Give us the work, we’ll make some money and we’ll pay you. Simple.
11. and from a commenter there: We’ll pay you less than you are asking and make it up as royalties on the product.

From IBM there’s the Six ways to write more comprehensible code – How to keep your code from destroying you. Usefully it provides examples for:

1. Comment like a smart person
2. Use #define a lot. No, a LOT
3. Don’t use variable names that will mock you
4. Do error checking. You make errors. Yes, you
5. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” – Donald Knuth
6. Don’t be too clever by half.

Before I forget, here’s a few internet orientated blogs which are worth keeping an eye on occasionally (by internet orientated ones, I mean ones more orientated around the operation of the internet)

Domain Names

• Nominet’s tech blog .Nominet are the .uk domain name registry. Useful information if you are running a big Oracle based system
• Nominet’s “official” blog. Mainly press release style announcements
• Icann’s blog. The “Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers” could be classed as the “government” of the internet: they ultimately assigned all IP address allocations, domain names etc to various providers. Very press releasy, but do have interesting things like the very simple map of the internet (ok, dated September 1969 but 😉 ).
• Bob Parsons. The CEO and Founder of GoDaddy, one of the largest domain name registrys out there (IMHO, a bit like McDonalds being the largest chain of restaurants). Very little techy orientated stuff though, seems to be more about him achieving his press releases and publicity.
• Domain Tools. DomainTools itself is a very useful site and their blog gives a “well I didn’t know/think about that” way of thinking.

Hosting Providers

• Softlayer. The official blog of one of the best US based dedicated server providers (IMHO). Only one entry so far so still too early to judge.
• The Planet. Softlayer’s main rival (especially in Texas). Appears to grant a good “insiders view” about the datacenter and the way it’s run.
• Kate’s Comment. Kate Craig-Wood (who is married the sister to Nick Craig-Wood of RISC OS fame) is the MD of Memset – my VPS provider. Good overview of things you hadn’t thought about hosting wise (such as environmental impact, power usage issues etc).
• Redback Internet. A more techy orientated blog by the providers of web hosting space to my other half.
• Dreamhost. A very “strange” blog from a major US shared hosting provider. Covers a wide variety of issues, but the way they do them is very strange to me.
• EUKHost. A very technical orientated blog from a UK shared web hosting company.

Do you know any useful blogs like this? I’m sure that many many other companies have them, but let’s see if we can make a good list of them!

Lost your password to your WordPress blog and no longer have access to the email account you set up? Well, there’s a couple of solutions to this – you can either use the Emergency Password Recovery (thanks WeblogToolsCollection) or, if you have got access to the MySQL database, either change the email address contained therein or be really clever and decrypt the stored password.

But the password is encrypted I hear you cry!

Well, there just happens to be a MD5 password lookup site which you could use to decrypt the password!

Hope it helps!