Copy and paste coders

Or cowboys as I like to call them

Actually, that’s a little bit harsh. Just because you have a tendancy to use your clipboard a little bit more than most doesn’t necessarily make you a bad programmer, although it might shift the odds a little.

That said, copy and paste coding is fast becoming one of the things that annoy me the most during my day-to-day software development job. I’m not going to pretend that I’m whiter than white and I can’t say that I’ve never done it myself, but that was a long time ago and I wasn’t as experienced as I am now. Plus I’ve been caught out by it, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t want it to happen again.

As more and more development libraries and APIs become available, Java developers are fast moving from being a skilled programmer, able to delicately craft and sculpt classes and methods, to a semi-skilled plumber who knows where to find the right libraries and knows a minimal amount of code to connect it all together. The problem is that these plumbergrammers don’t always create those pipe connections to the highest quality, instead choosing to copy the example from the API website or some newsgroup. No big deal, well not until the server room ends up getting flooded, the copy and paste coder doesn’t understand enough to know where the leak could be coming from.

Android updates and Vodafone UK

I’m getting more and more annoyed with the way which Vodafone UK is treating it’s customers with the Google Nexus One. When I bought my Nexus One, I bought with the understanding that all updates to the Android operating system would be pushed to my phone. Not only would I get the software updates, but I would get them first.

A year or so later and my phone is starting to lag behind the official Google releases. When I got my phone it was Android 2.1. Shortly after getting the phone I received the Froyo update to take the phone to 2.2. Later that year (in December 2010) the 2.2.1 update was delivered over the air (OTA) to my Nexus One. This was delivered two and a half months after the official release from Google, so I should have really seen this as a sign of things to come.

And that’s where the OTA updates finished. My Nexus One is still at 2.2.1 even though 2.2.2 (January 2011) and two Gingerbread releases (2.3.3 – March 2011, 2.3.4 – May 2011) have been pushed OTA.

When I put this issue to Vodafone UK, they explained that they couldn’t give me specific information about when software updates would be released, or what the releases would contain. When I pushed them further on Twitter about the updates, they explained that the Firmware would be customised by Vodafone UK and then passed back to Google to distribute.

I’m not alone in thinking that this process is a shambles and feeling that I was missold my Nexus One, there are many threads on the Vodafone forums where many people share the same feelings.

Many users have taken it upon themselves to root their Nexus One and apply the uncustomised versions of the firmware in order to escape the Vodafone UK release process. This is something I’d like to try, but it would (according to Vodafone UK) invalidate the warranty on my phone.

I’d like to see something done about this, with network providers being made to provide software updates to mobile phone owners if they happen within their contract period. I’m not sure that this will ever happen, but it’d be nice to think that operators took their customers seriously.