KryptonBreadCrumb

Creating the hierarchy of bread crumb items at design is very painful at the moment. You need to edit each set of child items as a flat list of items. So if you need to edit a node several levels down the structure you end up with several collection editors all open at the same time, one for each level of the structure as you make your way down to the node of interest. Not pretty.

I have now implemented a collection editor that presents all the items in a tree view so that you can see all the nodes at once and easily move them around as needed. Here you can see it in action…

KryptonWorkspace

The same problem applies to the recently introduced KryptonWorkspace control. It consists of a tree like hierarchy of elements that would benefit from a user friendly editor. In fact it needs the editor more than the bread crumb control because it is much harder to visualize the structure with the workspace. Here is the new improved editing dialog…

Yahoo have announced they are cutting 10% of its global workforce, about 1500 people, as it tries to cope with its ongoing problems. They also reported a 64% drop in third quarter profits and only a 1% increase in revenue over a year ago. So things are looking pretty rough at the moment for Yahoo and this is before the upcoming recession/depression really starts to bite.

Remember this is the same company that turned down a $47.5bn offer from Microsoft last January. I wonder if Jerry Yang still thinks that offer ‘undervalued the company’. This is where the problem of having the original founder as CEO really causes problems. Is he really thinking about getting the best value for shareholders? I don’t think so and I doubt he would have sold the company to Microsoft for any price. Not only because he hates the mother ship but also because he would lose control of his baby. Yahoo is his creation, his project, his ego trip and so he naturally wants to keep it independent and keep control over it. Once Yahoo is sold off he is no longer ‘the founder’ and ‘the special one’ inside Yahoo. Instead he becomes just another employee and that assumes that he would actually be kept on after a takeover.

His inability to think like a real CEO has cost the shareholders 10’s of billions of dollars. I believe he will keep driving the company to nowhere until the other execs finally push him aside and appoint someone that can bear to sell the company. Although I suspect anyone interested in Yahoo should just wait another year till the bottom of the recession is reached and then pick it up for a fraction of even the current share price.

I bet Steve Ballmer is thanking his lucky stars he managed to dodge this bullet.

I know that writers are not usually techies and so might struggle getting the terminology right. But surely they could at least consult somebody before using techno-speak in TV programs. In what possible way could this line ever make sense?

“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address.”

Check it out for yourself CSI:New York Clip

This point release fixes the KryptonConextMenu bug where changes are not correctly saved when you exit the editor. The bug is not obvious to begin with because it looks as if the changes have been remembered but once you run the application you notice they have not been persisted.

Download 3.0.8

There is an interesting theory in software development that the quality of your software is limited to that of the second worst programmer on the team. Why the second worst and not the worst programmer?

The theory goes something like this. Everybody in the team knows who the worst programmer is. They usually stand out like a sore thumb and so everyone is carefully watching his work. But because his work is so closely monitored it is also corrected before it impacts the code base. Sure, you end up losing time but you can mitigate the problem because you are aware of it.

Now think about your own team and you will no problems deciding who the worst is. But who is the next worst? Who is the one that nobody is watching but is still checking in poor quality code? Their code spreads like a web throughout the project and so ultimately they limit the quality of the whole teams work. While you are carefully monitoring Mr. Dunce you are blissfully unaware of the time bombs being planted by his prodigy.

So take a look around your office and decide who is wearing the dunce’s hat and then decide who the runner up is. If you come to conclusion that there is no weakest player in your outfit then I have bad news. In poker they have a saying “If you don’t know who the patsy is…” and I hope I don’t need to finish the quote for you.