Jun 26 2008
So I ran into an interesting “gotchya” with C# extension methods tonight. And of course it happens at the 11th hour on a project that is being demoed at 9:00am tomorrow morning. Of course. Extension MethodsExtension methods are a really cool new feature of C# that were introduced in version 3.0 of the language. Essentially they are static methods t…
Jun 21 2008
When I first read Jeff Atwood’s latest post on his love of C#’s new “var” keyword I was deeply bothered that my co-workers would find the article and latch on to the argument as a justification for laziness. While I do understand his point of view I was bothered by the idea of var statements littered throughout the code base making things more diff…
Jun 14 2008
I need to blog this basically to toss it in my archive. There have been some interesting posts on the religious debate of static vs dynamic languages. I don’t know why I always get drawn into these lines of thought, but I do. (in fact I just added a “versus” label) I say drawn in because my underlying philosophy in all of these things is to choose …
Jun 13 2008
So I’ve actually started my blogquotes project which was intended as a widget style provider for random quotes (from a personal library) to appear somewhere on my site. I’m using the new Google app engine for this project and so far I have to say it’s pretty damn easy. From barely knowing python to having a django templated, gql driven tiny quote e…
Jun 10 2008
I am super excited about Google’s recent foray into cloud computing, the app engine. They are not first, I realize Amazon has been doing some pretty cool things with the S3 services and their computing services but the ability to simply and easily have an application that can leverage BigTable and GQL, google account authentication, image manipulat…
Jun 10 2008
The promise of the electronic office has been so damn close for so damn long now. I know there are thousands and thousands of people out there who now work primarily from home, but I remain on the outside looking in. (or inside looking out?) Visions of a city like Nelson or maybe Prince Rupert dance in my head, with me in my large solitary office o…
Jun 7 2008
My internal debate rages on… I have some C++ courses in the pipeline so I will definitely learn more than the basic understanding/grasp I have now… Still though. Currently I associate C++ proponents with old-school attitudes on the need for absolute control and a fear of newer levels of abstraction that are allowing increasing complex and large pro…
Jun 6 2008
I’m a graphing junkie, I have to admit it. So I was pretty pleased to discover that my power company (BC Hydro ) provides some interesting consumption graphs for month to month kilowatts per hour usage. I’m pretty sure my meter is only read every two months so some of the resolution is lost in this, but still it’s helpful. One of the more striking …
May 31 2008
I read a very fun book on my holiday in Manitoba this last few weeks. It’s written by a biologist who has turned to fiction with an eye to producing some good hard core science based fiction. I would compare his work to William Gibson and Arthur C. Clarke. The book is called “BlindSight” by Peter Watts, and I’ve added it to my LibraryThing, there i…
May 13 2008
I had to blog this, and yeah I'm going to be the billionth person to do so, but that's ok because no one reads my blog and it's basically just my personal public archive. (ppa?) This guy http://www.thomasfrank.se/sessionvars.html has managed to find a very clever place to store data within the browser without resorting to cookies, flash or anything…