piehen

They did release a doc after the last major redesign. There's a copy at http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/usability_bbc_redesign_the...

edit: tried to make myself sound less like a bot!

This is really horrible stuff. Reporters frustrated that the stand-off isn't like in films ("Are you SURE there's no shouting and imploring people not to do things?!"), harassment of a poor women, reduced to tears as her elderley mother is trapped in her house surrounded by snipers, BREAKING NEWS as a van speeds by ("Oh, it was a dog van"). What is it now? 6 hours coverage with 20 minutes worth of actual developments?

24 hour rolling news has it's uses, but flogging an armed horse isn't one of them.

Pay-wise, worst I ever had was my first job as a kitchen porter at a 'local' hotel. £1.60p/h and it was a 3 mile walk to get there (buses were once every 2 hours and 2hrs wages). I once did a 22hr shift with one half hour break when the other 2 KP's failed to show. Earned just over £20 after tax for that :) The minimum wage kicked in a year later and would nearly tripled my pay if I hadn't quit.

Worst otherwise: cardboard box production line. Worked on the gloriously named ZOR-D machine. It had a speed dial that went up to 21 but anything over 8 resulted in instant jamming. Of course the floor boss would always run over and turn it right up to prevent slacking. Cue 40 minutes unclogging machinery. Worst part though was washing your hands at breaks/end of day. You'd have thousands of tiny paper cuts and applying water would cause what we knew as 'involuntary fisting' (ooh er!). Your hands would clamp shut as the acids reacted.

I enjoyed both these jobs considerably less than my current work.

I'll second PuTTY & Filezilla. I have used WinSCP in the past but I remember being a little flaky.

As for IDE, Zend Studio looks pretty rad. I actually use an old copy of Dreamweaver 8 for the very sensible reason that I like the syntax highlighting colours (and I could never really quite bother to alter them in any other IDE). It just looks really nice and I feel happier coding in it! Before that I used Ediplus 2/3 which is nice lightweight editor, kinda similar to Notepad++.