Random Musings

In the interests in doubling up some learning this weekend, I spent 5 or 6 hours using LaTeX to do some homework for my graduate-level Databases Class. (Aside: I’m attending Grad School at Oakland University now. I kinda missed going to school. On the other hand, I kinda miss free-time now. but whatever.) So, I really am intrigued by the power LaTeX has. The learning curve on it is a bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of typing out equations in it, it’s really not so bad.
I don’t think I could imagine using anything else to do equation-laden things in the future…. So, for anyone reading this and pondering how to handle equation-laden stuff - I really don’t think there are any realistic options for you, outside of learning LaTeX. If anyone is interested, post a comment and I’ll put up the raw .tex file I used for this. (Well, after I turn the homework in. Gotta have some ethics.)

This week at work, we rolled out an update to our flagship application, including integration into Salesforce.com for our customer service needs.

What strikes me as odd is the apparent lack of feedback from the users that will interact with the system on a daily basis, such as the development team that I am part of.

All I ask for in a ticket/case/bug tracking system is that it can operate entirely via email, so that I don’t need to login to it.

Salesforce.com, well, can’t do that.

So incredibly annoying.

Hell, it can’t even provide the entire details of the case in 1-click from the notification emails, it’s 1-click to view the case overview, then 1-click per ‘detail’ to get at all of it.

I really wish we had evaluated a real product, in use by literally thousands of people first - like, oh, say BugZilla maybe?

Hell, even RequestTracker would be doing a better job at the moment!

At work, we’ve been switching to using BitKeeper instead of CVS - I’m even more impressed than I was when just using it as a lazy way to download updates to the Linux kernel to play with at home.

It’s odd to feel inclined to do real work just to have an excuse to play with the tool involved…. but then again, my current project is to replace all text strings in our main product (ADX) with calls to gettext…. which is an incredibly boring task.

If only I could figure out why xgettext has no facility to set the character set (encoding? Whatever UTF-8 should be called.)…. I’d love a way to get rid of the crapload of warnings that ends up causing me.