This does very much remind me of Special Constables (fancy speak for “unpaid Nazis Police”) – generally speaking; whilst there are of course lovely people who volunteer their time to be Special Constables, there are additionally little Nazi fuckers who apply for the job because they don’t cut it as a paid copper but they desperately want the powers of arrest and other such maniacal abilities that they were previously unable to obtain (and so ended up getting a job as a parking attendant or traffic warden – or both)

The Commons is an entirely different breed of course; the entire aim of the game is to maximise the degree to which they can take the utter piss out of the entire electorate – helped mainly by the fact they get to set the rules.

Now, I must admit that paying a shit wage to MPs is not something I’m in favour of – not at all; if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys… Yet, if one looks at the NHS then we see that people are expected to pay a flat fee for their medication, regardless of whether it’s cough syrup or a cocktail of AIDS pills and so similarly, the fuckers should get a flat yearly salary and a rail warrant booklet (which they can only use if they’re travelling to or from Parliament) – a yearly wage of £60-70k should do the job… to be perfectly frank, suitability as an MP is a balancing act, you should be doing it because you want to, not because you can make a mint… though you shouldn’t make minimum wage from it either, it’s certainly a fair balancing act to offer around £70k a year… it’s enough to attract people who will sign on for the right reasons rather than for the wrong reasons (i.e. if you liken this to the police nazis doing it for power, similarly we have MPs doing it for the cash)

Either way, Labour’s fucked, so it’s only a matter of waiting for the election.

Actually it’s quite nice, plus the logo is actually pretty sexy I must admit, but there’s something lacking… something falling a bit short of the mark on this and I know exactly what it is.

Plugins.

Yep, Plugins are those things that Firefox pulls off so brilliantly; I use several plugins ranging from FireFTP through to Chris Pederick’s rather cool “developer toolbar” – not to mention stuff that lets me fuck around with my cookies and block adverts using a regularly updated database (see Filterset.G), and yet, for all that, I must say that Chrome is pretty bloody good with RAM; it runs each tab as its own physical process so there’s no problems with garbage collection, which I think is a great concept and generally speaking, it’s quite good at managing memory.

But… the one thing stopping me from switching to it, is the lack of plugins – if they were to create a plugin API I’d be happier… if they took it a step further and actually made it possible to port Firefox plugins directly into Chrome, that’d be even sexier, and I’d dump Firefox pretty bloody sharpish after that.

I’m sure they’ll get around to having Plugins a few iterations from now, but it’s definitely the crux of garnering conversions for me at least.

Then, if you should decide you want notifications to be made as a callback, you have to have a server with a recognised SSL certificate.

The other thing then is that when punters place an order, it doesn’t actually get debited from them till you OK it, which in some respects is good, except you end up writing a load of stuff just so you have an automated system to deal with incoming orders (or their charging anyway) but unfortunately, you then spend a bloody AGE debugging it because some XML is malformed or you forgot to use the sandbox URL or the database query went wrong or the Google server thinks your server has Bad AIDS.

Actually though, once it is set up it does work quite well so that’s a bonus, but the initial faffing, especially having to get a certificate issued off GoDaddy.com is big ole pain in the arse.

Still, there we go, never mind.

Meanwhile, C++ developers tell the C# developers they’re idiots who have everything done for them, C# devs respond with a middle finger and/or fuck you.

OK, sorry, I’m biased, I hate Java, but nonetheless, you can get into an arguement very easily nowadays about why C#/Java/Ruby/Perl is or isn’t shit (except for Ruby and Perl, they’re shit coz I say so.)

But the thing is, whilst I very well COULD produce something in C++ that was made for the .net platform, I don’t want to because I don’t need to.

If performance is critical, or I just don’t want to end up with a series of P/Invokes the size of a cancerous testicle then I will opt for C/C++ and if not, then the managed platform wins the day because it saves me a lot of time.

There are of course exceptions, Java is the devil because its so bloody slow… the tradeoff between developer time and CPU time is inexcusable, you can usually do the same thing in C# at almost the same development time cost with a lesser CPU cost (usually dammit)

So, next time you want to get pissy about a programming language l suggest you stop and think… and if anyone asks, I was joking about Java, my trading platform is written in Java and it survives.
Not perl though, perl is shit.

Now, I’m sorry to be ranting about Perl, but I absolutely despise it; it’s that type of language that you have to install a bajillion things in order to run someone’s script, and invariably, all their script is doing is some menial rubbish that lets you manipulate a file or whatever.

Then you download it, and you find you’re missing some packages, so you then load up the ActivePerl package manager to see what you can find, and it’s not there, so you spend ages Googling for the right package which is some obscure crypto library that you then find you can’t use because it has 5 other dependencies that you’ve got to acquire first.

Don’t get me wrong, I like swiss army knife languages, I just don’t like perl, because it’s so utterly horrible… and if you say to yourself “OK, this is crap, let’s port it” then god help you; the language is absolutely vile, it’s the bastard child of PHP, C and food poisoning, so if you want to port it, you need to continually find out what is doing what.

So please, please, if you’re writing something that’s going to take a few minutes to write, do it in something similarly fast that doesn’t require everyone to fart around to get it working; C#, hell, even Java will suffice.