Wednesday, May 23, 2007

OSAlt - Open Source Alternative Software

I came across this site this morning while looking through my LifeHacker RSS feed. OSAlt is a very cool site where you can enter what type of application (business, communications, etc), or a specific application and find any open source alternatives to it. I am frequently looking for open source alternatives to commercial applications and I am definetely going to be adding this site as one of my first places to search (along with sourceforge.net).

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Recently while working in our HR system I came across some interesting OO design.


&someobject.ShopForEmployees();
....
....
&someobject.CopyShoppingCartToRowset(&RS_Employees);


I would expect this kind of terminology from an HR person (employees being just commodities that can be thrown in a shopping cart), but what developer with any self respect would write up code like this? They, after all, are just an employee.

Besides the method naming, the code had a lot of problems and didn't work as documented. That I expected, but would have been easier to take if the naming wasn't so offensive.