Time to start working on the darknet in earnest.

I worked on a project this year to completely rewrite a company's signature application from the ground up. Objectively, you'd think that's something you never, ever want to have to do. But, having done it, I think planning a complete overhaul & rewrite into the product's lifecycle is probably a good idea.

Since the application was first written about a decade ago many, many features have been added with each upgrade. The scope and customer base have expanded. And programming technology has changed hugely during that time.

Rewriting the entire application is a massive effort, sure. But to truly modernize and streamline it, to get rid of the legacy cruft and take advantage of new tools that didn't exist 10 years ago, I think it's worth it. I also think it would've been wise to do this sooner than we did (though that wasn't possible in this case for business reasons).

So maybe when you're choosing a framework, don't worry about whether it'll be the right solution forever. Plan to reevaluate your decision every 3-5 years and change frameworks if something better comes along. And, yes, absolutely adopt the MVC model, because then you don't need to replace every part of your application if one becomes obsolete.

A giant wall of ice? Where have I seen that before?

I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.

Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.

It's also amusing the ads and pages FB recommends to me. They seem to think I'm a black latina (I'm white, non-Hispanic).

Yes, it is absolutely possible to measure project manager performance objectively. I work for a very large software company and we have to do this. The record keeping is a bit of a pain for those of us "in the trenches," but with such large projects, I can completely understand why the managers need these kinds of metrics to make sure everything's on track.

If they don't take your recommendation simply to fire or reorganize him as the parent states, recommend implementing a project tracking system. Some examples are Pivotal and Base Camp. Or possibly their current bug-tracking system has some kind of time & budget tracking built in. But this manager needs to regularly report status to his boss. It's just a one-line email or a progress graph once a week, but it will show where they are in relation to where they planned to be on the project.

That should give the manager's boss a really good example of how this guy works. And honestly, most project managers I've known actually like using these kinds of metrics to follow a project's progress. They like seeing objectively how far along the new features are, how many bugs have been found, and whether the project is on schedule or not. That's why they became project managers in the first place!

Not that the 5 people in that field have trouble getting jobs anyway. But if you like math and the ocean, it's a good field to go into.

I prefer myself to the regular Flippy.

Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth, which means that there are little kids who have to manage their insulin levels. A weekly treatment could be much, MUCH easier for diabetic kids & their parents to deal with, and less invasive than an insulin pump.

Stack Overflow can't always solve all problems. Many times I have looked for an example of how some piece of Sencha's poorly-documented ExtJs framework works, only to be directed to a Stack Overflow page where someone posted a question looking for the same thing.

I know it can be dull and time-consuming to create examples and documentation, but, really, just linking to the source code does not really explain what a particular class or config option does. If you want programmers to get the most out of your framework, you have to show what can be done with it. If you don't have time to document a feature, why did you bother including it in the first place?

With federal government projects, and I assume with state projects as well, there are all kinds of specific guidelines and rules that have to be followed. If these aren't stated explicitly in the proposal, they cause cost overruns. For example: Only union employees are allowed to move servers, equipment must be sourced from certain suppliers, certain technologies such as bluetooth aren't allowed in some government locations... The unwritten requirements can go on and on.

What a wonderful policy! At many workplaces in the US, it's the younger employees who haven't earned a lot of vacation time yet who have kids under 12. That's another reason they go to work sick: they want to save their sick days in case they need to stay home with a sick child.

They switched to this combined PTO system at my husband's workplace shortly before he was hired. They used to just let people take as many sick days as they needed, but people started abusing the system. Since so many of the employees there have been working there for 10+ years and have tons of vacation time and their kids are all grown, they didn't mind. Most of them had more PTO banked than they could use.

But new hires, like my husband and most of the people in his group, get screwed. They get 10 days PTO for the first 4 years & that has to account for vacation & sick days. What ends up happening is that the younger folks go to work sick, especially in the beginning of the year, because they have to save up the sick & vacation days for if they really, really need them.

For example, my husband went into work sick today because the entire workplace has to take a mandatory holiday from Dec. 24 through Jan. 2. If you have PTO to use on those days, great. If not, too bad! And if you have customers who need work done during that time? Too bad! We are a large, inflexible company! We do not accommodate the petty requests of individual departments, no matter how profitable they are!

I don't know about a "Slashdot omelet," but I've been enjoying this recipe for Slashdot chai for years now. I haven't been able to find the original comment I copied it from, but to that long-lost Slashdotter who posted the recipe in the first place, thanks for the many cups of spicy chai I've enjoyed.

This gives me a great idea. You know the little symbol that marks tuna as "dolphin safe"?
They should have one for tilapia that says "No shit!"