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.

It’s not only when using new libraries do copy and paste coders run into problems. In my experience, copy and paste coding is usually done for a couple of reasons. In the first instance, the coder is asked to extend a class or method to do something new, maybe for a new content type. The new functionality works in pretty much the same way as the existing code, so the exisitng functionality is copied into the new location. Maybe we get a little  bit of refactoring at this point, but don’t expect to see too many variable names change and worse still, you might only see content types change so that the variable name is no longer consistent with the underlying content type. The code runs and does what it’s supposed to do. Job done.

The other main reason I’ve come across for using the copy-and-paste pattern is to add a piece of functionality to code using a “tried and tested” method. I put quotes around tried and tested, as in most cases it’s not been tested that much and it’s more “seemed to work last time” code. Reuse of code, or a developers library, isn’t necessarily a bad thing but in most cases the code in question isn’t exactly bullet proof and might not be suitable in this instance.

And this brings me to my biggest bug-bear with copy and paste coders. It seems that some copy and paste coders (and I’m not going to say all) don’t really think about what they are doing. Just because something worked last time, or worked in a particular scenario doesn’t mean that it’ll work again and doesn’t mean that it’s applicable to the current situation. Everytime you hit that Ctrl-C Ctrl-V keystroke it’s likely that you’re doing something wrong and the stuff that you’re producing isn’t really the standard that it should be.

I’d like to extend this to code found on the internet. Google and StackOverflow are pretty much the Utimate development tools if used correctly, however copying code from the internet usually comes with a few downsides. Jeff Atwood looked at this problem on his blog and though I’m not really sure how viable adding a GUID to each code snippet on the web is the right way to go, I agree with the points that he makes. Code found on the internet has usually created to demonstrate a particular purpose and might not be production ready. If you take it, you won’t get any updates that the original developer makes and you might not even be copying the most recent version.

However on the flip side, whatever you’re doing it’s likely that somebody else has already done the hard thinking and got something up and running before you and fixed all the niggly issues you’d find developing it yourself. And chances are that using StackOverflow or Google and the right search terms that this code is going to be easy to find. If the site that you’re taking the code from has a particularly large audience then it’s probably going to get a more thorough code review than anything you write. If it’s taken from a blog, or other social platform, the comments around the code will give you an indicator of quality.

So the next time you head for that copy and paste keystroke, just think about what you are doing. Is it really the best option? Should you be refactoring this into a new class? Is there a better way of acheiving your goal? I’ve found that the majority of the time the answers to questions should lead you to another solution and stop you hitting Ctrl-V. If you still think that you must, make sure that you understand what the code that you are copying is doing. There’s not much worse than a developer that doesn’t understand their own code.

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.

I recieved a fish tank for Christmas, however it was a hoodless version. After losing one fish (he was a jumper) and having to top up the water email every day I decided to look for a condensation tray for the tank.

The manufacturer doesn’t offer this sort of accessory so I customised a standard condensation tray to fit. It seems to work well and the tank doesn’t lose (as much) water.

It’s not perfect but it does the job!

The HTML5 specification shows how videos should be included in a HTML page, however it doesn’t specify the container that should be used to display videos. Unfortunately for developers and content creators the makers of the most popular browsers can’t agree on a standard format either. Apple, the makers of Safari have decided that the H.264 is the way to go, and Microsoft seem to agree, with Internet Explorer 9 only supporting this format.

Mozilla and Opera have opted to throw their weight behind the Ogg Theora video container mainly due to the cost of licensing the H.264 codec and in the spirit of all things open source.

Until recently, Google Chrome had fixed on the H.264 container however they decided to remove support for this codec in future versions of Chrome and will instead back their own horse, WebM. WebM has the backing of Mozilla, and they have indicated that they will add WebM support to the upcoming Firefox 4. In my opinion, this probably kills Ogg Theora as a online video container.

Until all browsers support HTML5 video and the majority of people online are using these new browsers, there will be a need to include a fallback option and most people are reverting to flash in the case where the browser can’t play the videos using the formats supplied.

All of this means that content creators must create multiple versions of their video content if they wish to move to HTML5 video. The big push for content creators to support HTML5 video is coming from Apple. Their iDevices, the iPad and iPhone, won’t play flash video (which is probably the leading way of showing video content online at the moment) leading to sites to move to HTML5 video. There are many gotcha’s in moving to HTML5 video, not least that all content must be encoding twice, once in H.264 (IE, Chrome now, Safari, iPad, iPhone) and then in another format that allows it to be played on other browsers (Firefox, future Chrome releases, Opera). And then of course, you still need to have a flash fallback player for older browsers. So what would I go for? – Well probably H.264 and WebM in the long run but realistically you’re going to need Ogg Theora as well for the time being.

This leads to some very hairy HTML code, and rather than go into it here, I’ll just point you over to Video for Everybody, which has some excellent examples of how to include HTML5 video in your own pages. It also has solutions to most of the common problems when including HTML5 video.

I’ll stick to updating this whenever I learn something new or something that I think is worth sharing.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

I’ve only just ported the code, but I’m thinking that the first version should be online to play with in the next couple of weeks all going well. I’ve shown an earlier cut of the functionality to a few people, and they seemed to like it – so now I need to focus of getting rid of the bugs and styling it up. And coming up with a name and logo…

Suggestion of how to remove it please, reply to @stevebennett with #getmycanout. Buying a bottle of diet coke (on the row above) is not an option because as we all know, everyone hates diet coke.

In the spare time that I’ve had, I’ve tried to get some more work done on the wireframes for the the main functional page of the site. It’s opened me up to a whole world of div and css nightmares and I’m not even thinking about cross browser compatibility at the moment.

Work has been pretty challenging recently as my team gears up for a major new release. It’s a pretty intense, yet at the same time exciting time that we’re working in, so I’m hoping that everything goes well over the next couple of weeks and we get the new stuff out on time. I’m not as hopeful as I was at the start of the week, but even so, I still think we could just pull it off!

I’m away for the next week, so they’ll be no real update to speak of. Finally, good luck to England in the 2010 World Cup that starts today!