http://thereifixedit.com/

I just wanted to post a quickie post here to link to a site that, while it's a great and funny site in itself, I was actually very surprised by how perfectly every single photo over there illustrates some kind of software system I've touched, whether recently or long ago.

For example,

 

This one reminds me of the countless number of memory leaks we have to put up with when garbage collectors fail or are absent.

 

And this one reminds me of ol’ Windows ME, racing stripe and all.

 

 

The ugly do-it-all “make this site your home page” portal web sites that cluttered the web just three years ago, Yahoo! being among them.

 

“We’ll refactor later.”

  

The company’s legacy software with broken APIs and/or endpoints we simply don’t have the resources to support anymore.

 

I swear this is a virtual photo representing every developer’s workstation at the office. It takes half an hour to boot our machines.

  

Manual deployment. It takes several of us to push a web site out to the servers, plus QA to approve the closure of the deployment ticket.

  

A very nice admin interface that no one but the devs will ever see. I wish we had an admin interface that spiffy and complete.

 

 

This is our dev server, a virtual machine on an overloaded VM host with limited RAM. We have CruiseControl.NET on it and it takes about 30 minutes for it to build and deploy to test/QA on a single run.

 

This is what happens when your business partner uses Java and you’re using WCF. Add SSL, and viola!

 

The Microsoft Office COM APIs.

  

(From udhay in comments:) Perfect example of the so called work-around.

 

.. Ohh this could go on forever. You get the idea. Have fun.

Despite what one may think when coming across this blog, with its boring shades of gray that, hey, I didn't design, I am nonetheless very highly appreciative of some aesthetic treatment given to my desktop.

A few years ago--actually, about a decade ago--one of the coolest things I'd come across on the web was http://www.webshots.com/. The collections there, I thought, were staggering. So much so that I thought it worth the $20 or so yearly fee to pay for the software and membership that gives me access to premium wallpapers. I had a love-hate relationship with it, actually.. every time I reinstalled my operating system or set up a new computer, whenever I put WebShots on it I had to remember to reconfigure it or else that annoying camera icon would show up on the system tray.

Recently I obtained a 30" monitor at work, which is wonderful, but the resolution on the thing being 2560x1600 I found pretty much any wallpaper to be a stretched, distorted eyesore. Even the Windows Vista desktop wallpapers didn't seem to give it justice. And I haven't had a Webshots subscription for a few years, but even if I did, most of their "premium" wallpapers are only half the resolution of my 30" screen. Then I considered snatching up "high resolution" photos off of Flickr, since some of those photos are truly phenominal, but I found myself wasting a lot of time since very high resolution photos seemed to be pretty scarce there.

So I scoured around for a good source of free wallpapers, and, wow, I was blown away by what I found at InterfaceLift.com. Now all my co-workers keep telling me that they can't stop staring at my screen whenever my desktop is showing. "Your wallpapers are really incredibly nice, Jon." Yeah, I know .. and I get to stare at them any time I want.

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/index.php?sort=ratings&w=2560&h=1600