The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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I know I sometimes struggle to tolerate commuting between the Central Coast and Sydney but when I can see views like these on my lunch time walk last Friday it's not all bad!
Well, I was wrong. In a thrilling, theatrical finish, our Socceroos did win and qualified for the World Cup of football for the first time in 32 years!
I remember watching Australia in the 1974 Cup finals. As I recall they played in a rather defensive style. Hopefully this time they'll actually score at least one goal!
So Australia are preparing for a penalty shoot-out in anticipation of being 1-0 up after extra time in tonight's football World Cup qualifier against Uruguay.
I reckon they have about as much chance of beating Uruguay as England has of beating Australia at cricket... er - wait on, anything's possible!
Passion.
It's the difference between really feeling alive and simply existing, just plodding along through life. Indeed my father, a semi-retired clinical psychologist, once wrote that cultivating a passion is one of the ingredients of happiness. For me cricket is an enduring passion but that's another story.
I consider myself fortunate to be passionate about what I do for a living: developing software and teaching people how to develop software. I know that when I'm working within an environment that fosters passionate software development I'm much more likely to deliver the best software and designs that I am capable of.
Which brings me to Kathy Sierra's recent piece about what happens when clients (and bosses) go bad. Definitely recommended reading. Kathy focusses on the consequences of becoming a slave to your client and how that can result in developers churning out software with no passion or creativity. So true. She goes on to offer a few suggestions about how to treat employees on those occasions, hopefully few and far between, when overtime is reasonably required. What Kathy has to say may sound like common sense but it certainly strikes a chord with me and I can recall a few managers who would do well to heed her words.
Drawing these threads of thought together, may I suggest that happy developers are good for a software development organisation. So, rather than being a slave to your clients, cultivate a passion for developing quality software.
This is a note for myself having investigated a problem related to MySQL recently.
Version 4.1 of MySQL makes some changes to the implementation of foreign key constraints.
In particular, "InnoDB needs indexes on foreign keys and referenced keys so that foreign key checks can be fast and not require a table scan. Starting with MySQL 4.1.2, the index on the foreign key is created automatically. In older versions, the indexes must be created explicitly or the creation of foreign key constraints fails."
Mike Hussey has served his apprenticeship and today, via a Justin Langer's broken rib, will don the baggy green for the first time.
Hussey has scored more first class runs than any other player before winning his first Test cap. And he is averaging 123.5 in the 18 ODIs he has played so far for Australia. So he has well and truly earnt his spot.
I hope he goes well.