Internet Explorer market share falls below 50% - Google Chrome is the new rising star

[JimOttley]

Me three, rendering,tabs sounds like a brickie having a bad day

Sorry jimeve, Terpe and Steve, techie speak The boss understands and my reply was really for him

Why would I want hundreds of tabs open at once? the most i ever have is 5 or 6 and thats just coz i forgot to close them.

Les, I am confronted on a daily basis with the need to do vast amount of research in order to develop software, I am constantly asked to write code for new devices or to make an application look less boring and none of this stuff is constant or static, new versions of software programming interfaces come out ever other day it's a real PITA sometimes

I was recently asked to write an application that

1) interfaced to any scanner in the world
2) made the scanner scan individual pages and save to jpeg
3) OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition) the barcodes embedded in the delivery notes that were being scanned.
4) compressed the results so that we didn't eat vast amounts of disk space on the server
5) integrated with my document management system so we could retrieve the delivery notes as proof of delivery for inclusion with the invoices (as attachments) at the point in time that I generate the Invoice emails on each batch run.

One might imagine that all this should be easy nowadays, however in spite of there being standard scanning or image capture interfaces i.e TWAIN, WIA, ISIS, finding a standard library that would allow the appropriate level of control was extremely difficult, indeed after much experimentation with TWAIN and WIA code (reasonably priced) it became clear that it was not do-able reliably, TWAIN and WIA are flaky very flaky.

ISIS however is very good but all the interface code libraries available cost thousands of pounds and also require runtime end user licences which was not commercially viable for us.

The primary tool for this kind of research is Google 20, 40, 80, web pages open at a time? Easy and I still won't have concrete answers.

20 pages of MSDN class library references trying to find a half decent example to implement a crappily documented programming interface, I do that every day more than one time a day.

It is extremely frustrating as most of my time now is spent trying to understand code that is supposed to make my life easier but is so poorly documented that it actually makes it harder :(

That's why some of us need hundreds of tabs open at the same time, the answers are all over the place



Jim

[joebloggs]

Les, I am confronted on a daily basis with the need to do vast amount of research in order to develop software, I am constantly asked to write code for new devices or to make an application look less boring and none of this stuff is constant or static, new versions of software programming interfaces come out ever other day it's a real PITA sometimes

I was recently asked to write an application that

1) interfaced to any scanner in the world
2) made the scanner scan individual pages and save to jpeg
3) OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition) the barcodes embedded in the delivery notes that were being scanned.
4) compressed the results so that we didn't eat vast amounts of disk space on the server
5) integrated with my document management system so we could retrieve the delivery notes as proof of delivery for inclusion with the invoices (as attachments) at the point in time that I generate the Invoice emails on each batch run.

it sounds exciting
jim why didn't you go into game development

[JimOttley]

it sounds exciting
jim why didn't you go into game development

Wish I had the skill Joe, it's a niche real time area of programming where you need to understand the GPU in detail and you probably also have to understand proprietary Graphics libraries intimately as well.

Once upon a time it was possible if you were a generalist but now you have to seriously specialise if you want to get into games and a huge part of the real development is done by artists now not programmers.

Real time state machines at the bottom of the stack, I can do that stuff but the high end graphics are hard

You asked the question in past tense and I did not really answer that, my career in IT has been pretty random, I really drifted from one money making opportunity to another, if I had been focused then maybe I could have got into the interesting stuff but I wasn't, the thing I really missed out on was a chance to get into CRM development in the late 90's I had some friends that made a fortune in that field.