What makes a workplace (part 3)

Managers

• Protect you from politics and other stuff
• Set appropriate boundaries
• Respect
• Honest and courageous
• Encouraging

As Rob said, I want my manager to "go into bat for me". They should be my advocate, saying "Dave, what can I do to help you do your job?". They're off dealing with all the other stuff so that you can get on with your job.

Likewise I think you want a manager that keeps you informed of things that are relevant, so that you aren't left out of the loop.

I mention "Honesty and courage" in that they need to have the guts to tell the "big" bosses the truth. The last thing you need is the CEO being told "everything is fine, yes we'll make the deadline" if that's not correct – everyone loses when that happens.

What makes a workplace (part 2)

Continuing my thoughts on what makes a great workplace..

Tasks

• Interesting
• Challenging
• Useful

Whilst there are always times when you can't avoid some tedious or annoying tasks, for the most part I want to be working on stuff that I find engaging.

I've also found that there's nothing like working on something that is appreciated by the end users.

Australian Weather Radar Gadget v1.2

It's been a few years since I've been able to update the Vista Sidebar Gadget that I wrote which displays the radar images from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It's worth noting that while the sidebar doesn't exist in Windows 7, you can still add gadgets to your desktop.

I'm now hosting the source code on Google Code, and I've released a minor update to reflect some changes to radar locations:

Added:

• Sydney (Terry Hills)
• Norfolk Island
• Emerald (QLD)
• Bairnsdale (VIC)
• Perth (Serpantine)

Removed:

• East Sale

I've had a few reports of a memory leak when people run the gadget for extended periods of time. I think this may be an unfortunate side-effect of the way the gadget uses HTML. Maybe re-writing the gadget using WPF or Silverlight might help with that.

The gadget can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery from here (currently 1.1 but hopefully 1.2 will be approved shortly), or go to the Downloads page of the Google Code site.