Work Quotes

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
—William Faulkner, interview in Writers at Work, 1958

Yes, yes, yes, I do see that there is a real dilemma here. In that, while it has been company policy to regard policy as a responsibility of management and administration as a responsibility of admin, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy.

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.

Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak.

How to build a company? an analogy

The method consists of,

1. Put all the candidates in a warehouse.
2. Provide 200 bricks each.
3. Do not give any guidance on what to do.

After six hours, go back and check what they did.

Follows the analysis of results;

1. Those who counted the bricks hire as Accountants.
2. Those who counted and then recounted the bricks are Auditors.
3. Those who have arranged the bricks in a very strange, hard to understand manner, put them in Planning, Design and Production Control.
4. Those that broke the bricks and are trying to paste them again should go to Information Technology (Development).
5. Those that are sitting chatting or are clueless send them to Human Resources.
6. Those who have already left the premises are the Managers.
7. People who are looking out the window staring into infinity are responsible for Strategic Planning.
8. Those who are talking to each other with their hands in their pockets showing that they have not even touched the bricks and would never do that, greet them with great respect and put them on the Directors Board.
9. The ones that have raised a wall and hiding behind are the Marketing Department.
10. Those who claim not to be seeing a single brick in the room and that bricks were never there are lawyers, refer to the Legal Department.
11. Those who claim that the bricks are a mess, without identification, without standardization and with wrong measures, put in Quality Control.
12. Those that begin to call others ‘comrades’, release them immediately before they create a union.

Trac plugins that could be useful

We know about plugins which provide peer code review (trac-hacks.org/wiki/PeerReviewPlugin), agile (trac-hacks.org/wiki/AgiloForScrumPlugin)

But I was trying to find a twitter like plugin on Trac where people can put their own updates J found some below (useful) 

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/NewsFlashMacro - Somewhere daily scrum /meeting highlights can go.

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/VotePlugin - Could vote for tickets / milestone.

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AnnouncerPlugin - Users can subscribe for modifications on other tickets.

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/StractisticsPlugin  - Shows Trac/SVN updates statistics.

http://willbarton.com/code/tracgantt/ - Gantt chart generator.

http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/CruiseControl - Trac plugin from which we can access continuous build process (you may also want to explore http://bitten.edgewall.org/).

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TicketChartsMacro - Ticket stats in Bar, Pie, Stacked charts.

And

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracFacebookPluginsMacro - WOW.

No programmers in heaven

Pair programming parody

WPF Circular Progress Control – Part 2

In the previous post (WPF Circular Progress Control – Part 1) I tried to explain about drawing a circular progress control.

In this post we will see how to animate the control so that we get the rotating behavior. Ohh there goes we need animation to rotate the control.

Before we apply the animation, we apply the rotate transform to the path we created earlier, RotateTransform rotates an object by a specified angle. We apply RotateTransform to the RenderTransform of path control, Render transforms are typically intended for animating or applying a temporary effect to an element. 

<Path Stretch="Fill" Name="pathCircular">

      <Path.Data>

            <GeometryGroup>

                  <EllipseGeometry Center="20,20" RadiusX="20" RadiusY="20"/>

                  <EllipseGeometry Center="20,20" RadiusX="15" RadiusY="15"/>

            </GeometryGroup>

      </Path.Data>

      <Path.RenderTransform>

            <TransformGroup>

                  <RotateTransform Angle="0"/>

            </TransformGroup>

      </Path.RenderTransform>

      <Path.Fill>

            <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0.3" EndPoint="0.3,1">

<GradientStop x:Name="GradientStop1" Color="Black" Offset="0"/>

<GradientStop x:Name="GradientStop2" Color="Transparent" Offset="1"/>

            </LinearGradientBrush>

      </Path.Fill>

</Path>

Now we need to define the animation, we need to animation on ‘pathCircular’ object and its ‘RotateTransform’ property.

We define a DoubleAnimation, which updates the value of a property over a period of time. But this would mean that we will be able to specify the value of the property only once, however what we need is to be able set the value of the property twice after certain time interval. For this we need to define DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames.

By using DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames not only can we have more than two of target values but we can also control the interpolation method of individual DoubleKeyFrame segments. There are three types of DoubleKeyFrame classes, one for each supported interpolation method: LinearDoubleKeyFrame, DiscreteDoubleKeyFrame, andSplineDoubleKeyFrame.

We use  SplineDoubleKeyFrame, Spline key frames like SplineDoubleKeyFrame create a variable transition between values according to the value of the KeySpline property. Each key frame has a target Value and a KeyTime. The KeyTimespecifies the time at which the key frame's Value should be reached. A key frame animates from the target value of the previous key frame to its own target value. It starts when the previous key frame ends and ends when its own key time is reached.

<Storyboard x:Key="rotateAnimation">

      <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames

            BeginTime="00:00:00"

            Storyboard.TargetName="pathCircular"

            Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[0].(RotateTransform.Angle)"

            RepeatBehavior="Forever">

            <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0"/>

            <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.5" Value="360"/>

      </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>

</Storyboard>

OK the animation is implemented and applied to the control, now we need the events to start and stop the animation. Here we can define a routed event and in XAML we can define trigger to begin and stop the animation.

<UserControl.Triggers>

      <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="local:CircularProgressControl.StopEvent">

            <StopStoryboard BeginStoryboardName="rotateAnimation"/>

      </EventTrigger>

      <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="local:CircularProgressControl.StartEvent">

<BeginStoryboard Name="rotateAnimation" Storyboard="{StaticResource rotateAnimation}"/>

      </EventTrigger>

</UserControl.Triggers>

Now we need to define these events in the code behind.

StartEvent =

    EventManager.RegisterRoutedEvent (

    "StartEvent",

    RoutingStrategy.Direct,

    typeof (RoutedEventHandler),

    typeof (CircularProgressControl));

StopEvent =

    EventManager.RegisterRoutedEvent (

    "StopEvent",

    RoutingStrategy.Direct,

    typeof (RoutedEventHandler),

    typeof (CircularProgressControl));

 
What we can also do is define a custom dependency property , on update of which we can raise start / stop animation events.

/// <summary>

/// Gets or sets a value indicating whether this instance is in progress.

/// </summary>

/// <value>

///   <c>true</c> if this instance is in progress; otherwise, <c>false</c>.

/// </value>

public bool IsInProgress {

    get { return (bool)GetValue (IsInProgressProperty); }

    set { SetValue (IsInProgressProperty, value); }

}

/// <summary>

/// Using a DependencyProperty as the backing store for IsInProgress.

/// This enables animation, styling, binding, etc...

/// </summary>

public static readonly DependencyProperty IsInProgressProperty =

    DependencyProperty.Register (

        "IsInProgress",

        typeof (bool),

        typeof (CircularProgressControl),

        new UIPropertyMetadata (

            false, new PropertyChangedCallback (OnIsInProgressChanged)));

/// <summary>

/// Called when IsInProgress is changed.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="inSender">The sender.</param>

/// <param name="inEventArgs">The

/// <see cref="System.Windows.DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs"/> instance

/// containing the event data.</param>

private static void OnIsInProgressChanged (

    DependencyObject inSender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs inEventArgs) {

    bool newValue = (bool)inEventArgs.NewValue;

    if (newValue) {

        (inSender as CircularProgressControl).RaiseEvent (new RoutedEventArgs (StartEvent));

    }

    else {

        (inSender as CircularProgressControl).RaiseEvent (new RoutedEventArgs (StopEvent));

    }

}

There, we have the control. Now we can use it in other views, bind IsInProgress (Boolean) property with presenter property and it’s done.

Cheers

WPF Circular Progress Control - Part 1

There are various ways to show progress on status bar, with new trendy ways the user wants to see visual progress not only with the status text but with something more. Here is where WPF animation comes to picture.

I came across such a requirement where the operation is in process has to be notified to the user in terms of black arc rotating, this Is what I termed as Circular Progress Control. Off course circular progress control can be anything where the progress indication is circular (like ‘dancing lights’ arranged in round fashion).

First this was to develop the control which looks like

There are many ways to do this but on higher level there are two,

1. Either to create an image
2. Draw the control using WPF (uses vector graphics)

I was thinking to draw the control using path as it would have vector processing but I decided to read pros and cons.  Following is what I understood (source http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms748373.aspx)

Vector Graphics

WPF uses vector graphics as its rendering data format. Vector graphics—which include Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Windows metafiles (.wmf), and TrueType fonts—store rendering data and transmit it as a list of instructions that describe how to recreate an image using graphics primitives. For example, TrueType fonts are outline fonts that describe a set of lines, curves, and commands, rather than an array of pixels. One of the key benefits of vector graphics is the ability to scale to any size and resolution.

Unlike vector graphics, bitmap graphics store rendering data as a pixel-by-pixel representation of an image, pre-rendered for a specific resolution. One of the key differences between bitmap and vector graphic formats is fidelity to the original source image. For example, when the size of a source image is modified, bitmap graphics systems stretch the image, whereas vector graphics systems scale the image, preserving the image fidelity.

The following illustration shows a source image that has been resized by 300%. Notice the distortions that appear when the source image is stretched as a bitmap graphics image rather than scaled as a vector graphics image.

Differences between raster and vector graphics

Thus the way to first step was clear, create the control using WPF, I decided to use Path geometry for this. WPF provides a number of ready to use “Shape” objects, Path is one of them. Each Shape object supports

• Stroke: Describes how the shape's outline is painted.
• StrokeThickness: Describes the thickness of the shape's outline.
• Fill: Describes how the interior of the shape is painted.
• Data properties: to specify coordinates and vertices, measured in device-independent pixels.

Path class enables us to draw complex shapes; we can describe the layout using geometry objects. Thus for our case we needed an arc, a thick arc. We can have two concentric circles and then use LinearGradientBrush to have two colors gradients in it, black and transparent. For all this we need to update Path’s Data and Fill property, such as.

<Path Stretch="Fill" Name="pathCircular">

      <Path.Data>

            <GeometryGroup>

                  <EllipseGeometry Center="20,20" RadiusX="20" RadiusY="20"/>

                  <EllipseGeometry Center="20,20" RadiusX="15" RadiusY="15"/>

            </GeometryGroup>

      </Path.Data>

      <Path.Fill>

            <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0.3" EndPoint="0.3,1">

<GradientStop x:Name="GradientStop1" Color="Black" Offset="0"/>

<GradientStop x:Name="GradientStop2" Color="Transparent" Offset="1"/>

            </LinearGradientBrush>

      </Path.Fill>

</Path>

Here in the path geometry we drew two circles using EcllipseGeometry which are concentric: this becomes the data for Path object. Now in order to get black and transparent color gradients we ‘Fill’ it construct a LinearGradientBrush with the colors and specify the start point and end point.

After this what we get is something like this,

So that’s it we have got the control we needed using vector graphics.

To animate it, in next post.