Aug 7 2009
This is a great post on how myspace rose and fall and how the same thing applies to Twitter (and I’d imagine Facebook as well) Some really good thoughts. Getting popular before you have your mission can forever trap you into that identity vacuum where popularity is everything. http://codybrown.name/2009/08/06/myspace-is-to-facebook-as-twitter-is-to…
Jul 23 2009
Popular comp-sci essayist and lisp hacker extraordinaire Paul Graham recently posted this article on the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. This is really inline with my own views on this issue and really sums up a big problem we have where I work with meetings being scheduled with the makers and the impact that has. We…
Jul 22 2009
Ok, so I have to admit that I’ve been one to disregard figures around performance when arguing with co-workers over the merit of managed code vs C/C++. I’ve even used the argument that statically typed languages like Java and C# offer more hints to the compiler that allow for optimizations not possible in unmanaged code. I still have a fairly pragm…
May 11 2009
Around 2003, 2004 I had a bit of a mild obsession with organizing my life into digital form, creating as many mappings as I could from my everyday existence into some kind of digital form. This of course included ideas and thoughts, writings and paintings, music and movies, friends and bits of information about those friends etc. This amass of data…
May 8 2009
I’ve used this approach a few times when I essentially need a really simple plugin / provider model within my applications so I thought I’d jot down the relevant details here for posterity using an old project for adding post commit hooks to subversion. Consider this a somewhat simplistic approach, not suitable for production code without a bit mor…
May 6 2009
I read the singularity is near last year and really enjoyed it, despite a few misgivings for Kurzweil’s ego and some dubious use of statistics. One of the things I found myself really intrigued by was Kurweil himself and this movie looks like a fun look at the man and his ideas. Do I believe him? Part of me wants to, definitely. The ultimate end-ga…
Apr 30 2009
Moq is now my favorite unit testing framework for .NET, and a great poster child for the power of the lambda expression support added to C#. If you are not doing unit tests or Test Driven Development you should, and if you already are and have not checked out Moq, you should. My tests previous to Moq were using NMock, a very handy tool that looks l…
Mar 25 2009
I failed to convince my manager at work that sending me and a few members of my team to MIX was a worthwhile expense in this economy. So instead I spent a couple days this sprint with http://live.visitmix.com/ on one screen and visual studio in the other. I have to say, Microsoft did an amazing job with MIX in terms of getting me excited and having…
Feb 18 2009
I once heard an interesting anecdote about how to make a difficult decision between two paths. When you find yourself spinning, alternating between one choice and then the other, it can be helpful to simply assign each choice “heads” or “tails” and flip a coin. When you reveal what side the coin landed on pay attention to your emotional reaction… a…
Feb 12 2009
The post saved me a ton of time. It’s a bit embarrassing for Adobe in my mind to ship something this buggy. I was seriously running into these issues within an hour of trying to connect Flex to our .NET Soap based services. “MyMethod can’t return an object of with the type name MyMethodResult."You’re fracking kidding me right? Wow. (and there are m…