Miscellaneous
Politics: Morality isn't math
I don't do this often, but this is an exception. My apologies to the people who just want to read about tech, I'll soon resume the regular topics.
Oh, and just to clear the records, I served for 4 years in the IDF, and I am still a reservist. I haven't been activated, and this post contain my own thoughts about the current situation. I assume that this post is going to be a hot topic. I am going to keep comments open until someone invoke Godwin's law, at which point the discuss will end.
There is a term that was...
Secrets of Successful Software Development: The Build Bunny
Without a proper build bunny, you can't really get anything done. Here is Yosi, my Junior Build Bunny (there is also Shraga, the Senior Build Bunny), getting training on Rhino Service Bus:
Secrets of Successful Software Development: Code Review With Teeth
Rose perform code review on Rhino Service Bus: Rose: "Huh! You want me to look at that code?"
The worst checkout experience EVER
I swear, I was just about to back away from the entire thing. It started with me trying to create a new account. I had to go through about seven screen to do so. Then there was the big warning about gmail accounts not being acceptable, then there were the mandatory formatting of address & phone numbers, to match what their system wanted from me. I kinda of like their licensing agreement. Argh, that is so stupid. I am trying to give you money, why are you trying so hard to make this hard on me?
Not a Production Quality Software
A while ago I worked at a bank, doing stuff there, and I was exposed to their internal IT structure. As a result of that experience, I decided that I will never put any money in that bank. I am in no way naive enough to think that the situation is different in other banks, but at least I didn't know how bad it was. In fact, that experience has led me to the following observation: There is a direct reverse relationship between the amount of money a piece of code handles and its quality. The biggest bank in...
[Politics] Unforgivable, Unacceptable and Unforgettable
I don't generally comments on politics in this blog, but this is something that I cannot ignore. I was just watching the evening news, and I saw Ehud Barak, Israel's Minister of Security, state (for the record!) that the goal of the current government is to reduce the number of missile launched on Israel to 10 - 7 a month. Allow me to repeat that. The Minister of Security for Israel, as part of answering an inquiry for parliament, has stated the official position of the government. And that government goal, the thing it strive for, is to to have...
A Subtext feature request
Okay, Subtext is a great software, tested in the only real test that matter, in production. I am using it for a log time now, and it has given me very few problems, that is the hallmark of truly great software. It does what it needs to do, and it doesn't bother the owner with the details.
Phil Haack, and the rest Subtext gang, has done a great job in creating a zero friction tool for blogging.
It is missing one thing, however, I would really like to have a breathalyzer test as an optional security measure for the blog. I don't...
The definition of a good project
One that you enjoy writing, all else is secondary.
Yesterday I did some 7 hours of development on this project, then gave a demo of R# that took over an hour. When I came back to the hotel, I was still pumped from what I was doing today, so I found myself at 22:30 PM writing code for the project that I am currently working on. I find myself writing code at odd hours often, but usually I am able to put down whatever I am working on without much trouble.
Right now it is 5:30AM, and I am up again, and...
Who stole the time?
Allow me to share my schedule for the last two weeks. Monday - Flying over from Israel to Texas Tuesday - Wednesday - Client engagement Thursday - 2 Workshops - total time > 6 hours Friday - Sunday - KaizenConf Sunday - Flying to NJ Monday - Friday - Client engagement, compromised of ~ 6 - 7 hours a day coding, and 1.5 - 2 hours teaching That explains, I guess, why I spent the entire weekend doing everything except touching the IDE or even checking email. It happens every so often. I believe that it is called resting....
Election Night in NYC
I spent election night in NYC, and was in Times Square when CNN announced that Obama won. I don't have any emotional attachment to any candidate, but from the looks of things, just about everyone in NYC was cheering for Obama. The excitement was literally visible in the air.
I saw people dancing in the street and crying when the announcement was made. I also got to watch both candidate speeches, and I think that they did a good job (based on watching a single speech from each). Obama can talk. Watching his victory speech, I was impressed not by the...
Annoyances, Grievances and other things that bugs me
While renting a car, I was presented with the option to pay for the tank refill up front (with something like 20% off the standard price at most gas stations). On the face of it, it looked like a really sweat deal, but a little bit of thinking has shown that the only way that I come out ahead in this scenario is if I return the car with the fuel car empty. In any other scenario, I paid for a full tank, but the company doesn't have to fill the whole tank. Case in point, by the time that...
Why I hate traveling
Just arrived at the motel after just over 25 hours on the road. Yuck!
Some random thoughts along the way:
The US remain at the top of the list of countries with the most obnoxious entry procedure.
If the hotel says its address is on main street, I expect to find the bloody entrance on main street, not hidden in some side street.
Driving an SUV is fun from the comfort side of things, but a PITA from the point of view of driving, parking or managing them.
I like the ability to lose my way to...
Who is up to do something on Tuesday evening in Dallas?
I am going to be in Dallas for a couple of days, and Tuesday (28th) evening is free. Anyone up to organize a little get together there?
It might work, but is it good enough?
Note, I am explicitly not asking if this is optimal. I am asking if it is good enough.
There is a tendency to assume 'it works, and that let sleeping dragons be. This is usually correct, my own definition for legacy code is "code that makes money". As such, any modifications to it should be justified in terms of ROI.
The term that I often use for that is technical debt, by no means my own invention, by a very useful concept. This allow me to explain, in terms that makes sense to the client, what are the implications of letting working,...
API Design
There are several important concerns that needs to be taken into account when designing an API. Clarity is an important concern, of course, but the responsibilities of the users and implementers of the API should be given a lot of consideration. Let us take a look at a couple of designs for a simple notification observer. We need to observe a set of actions (with context). I don't want to have force mutable state on the users, so I have started with this approach (using out parameters instead of return values in order to name the parameter): public interface INotificationObserver
{
...
Rambling, 2nd October
This is a post that I am going to post just to clear my head.
The Mac sucks. There is no good blog client for the Mac. The blog client situation on the Mac is about as bad as the difference between Lotus 1-2-3 circa 1990 and Excel 2007. I am writing this post in MarsEdit, and I have to do HTML by hand. Yuck!
I also used Blogo and Ecto, and none of them really come close to what I need. I don't think that I am too demanding. I need to ability to write the posts using WYSIWYG,...
Wacky Traveling Schedule
Well, I spent almost two hours yesterday just getting things organized for the coming couple of months. It was only when I actually sat down to start making reservations that I figure out what I had set myself up to. 2nd Oct - 16th Oct - London, there is a ALT.Net beer night on the 14th that I am looking forward too. 27th Oct - 29th Oct - Dallas. 30th Oct - 2nd Nov - Austin for the ALT.Net conference there. 2nd Nov - 15th Nov - New Jersey. 16th Nov - 22th Nov - Sweden, for Ørdev. Oh, and...
Amazon EC2 now offers RDBMS
That is pretty amazing, since that was a big pain point for developing for EC2 powered systems. They support both Oracle and MySQL, in addition to SimpleDB, which is a non relational DB. From the looks of things, however, there is a significant difference between the Oracle and MySQL offerings. MySQL is a DB limited to a single machine. They talk about the ability to dynamically scale the machine (which sounds just awesome) from small to extra large based on requirement, but not about multi instance databases. Oracle, however, does have this ability, and it is supported on EC2. So...
I refuse to be an [type] developer
Recently I was asked, in two different situations, what kind of a developer I am. I refused. I am not a C# developer, or a database developer, or an agile developer (I don't even know what that means). If pressed, I would admit that I am mostly familiar with the .Net platform, but I am not going to limit myself to that. I don't even believe that trying to put such tabs on people is useful.
Getting things done, my way
When I was in the army, I used to have a notebook (that is a physical one, made of paper) and I wrote just about everything there. I stopped doing it when I realized that I never read it. I don't do to do lists. I can barely manage to handle task tracking with a bug tracking system, and that is because even I recognize this as mandatory. This is about how I manage to do things. It is likely not applicable for anyone else. Currently, I use my inbox as the master todo list. And I...
Impressive
It doesn't take a lot to impress me. All you have to do is show me something that I didn't think about, or do something that I consider difficult and valuable. If it is just difficult, it is not really interesting, and if it is valuable but obvious, it is not really impressive. If it is not valuable, there is no point in spending any time on it. It seems like common sense, to me. But I had four different occasions recently where I was shown things where I got the strong impression that I was supposed to be...
The implications of Google Chrome
So, Google is coming out with a new browsers, while at the same time they are also responsible for a large part of both FireFox and Opera's budgets. I think that this is a very interesting development. In particular, because Google thinks about the browser as a complementary offer to what it does, or as a baseline platform, not as the actual end result. This get really interesting when you think that in this scenario, Google can leverage what are effectively Killer Applications in order to migrate people from one browser to another. If YouTube worked...
Recursive Meta Programming
I am currently writing a DSL that is used to meta program another DSL that is used to to do some action (it is actually turtles 7 layers deep, but we will skip that). It gets to be fairly interesting, although trying to draw that as a diagram is... a bit challenging. Oh, and there are at least a few parts that rewrite itself. Ever tried to do incremental method munging? That is when you take code from several places and start applying logic to where to put it. Only useful because of a lot of interesting constraints...
A legacy of conspiracy
Contrary to popular opinion, I have not been kidnapped, nor have I been hit on the head, nor have I started to seek that kind of job security. I gave a talk about legacy code and refactoring, and I needed something concrete to talk about. Unfortunately, most legacy code is too intertwined to be able to extract out in order to talk about it in isolation. So I set out to write my own. To all the people who assume that I don't live in the real world, or that I don't deal with legacy systems... well, I...
Looking for a WPF dev
I am currently working on an interesting application, basically, rule engine, data + DSL, and other fun stuff. Unfortunately, here is how the UI is right now: Yes, the disclaimer is in the UI. Therefor, I currently looking for a WPF dev / designer. I am currently in New York, but there is no location limitation. If you are interested, please contact me.
A new meaning to async communication
I took this picture about a year and a half ago on my phone, while visiting a client. I then email it to myself. I don't think that it arrived, and I forgot about this. This has just landed in my mailbox. It says, in Hebrew: "Mommy said that you can't put collections in the session on Hibernate will beat you up". I don't ever own the phone this picture was taken on. How the hell did it arrive?
HibernatingRhinos.com status
As you know, I had a server crash, that took down the server, and result in a very trying times trying to contact support. VPSLand support insisted repeatedly that all the data was lost and that there isn't anything to be done about it.
Somehow, however, a technical person got involved. The first time I heard about that was when I got an alert for a full disk in the hosted server, which made me hopeful. A few hours later it was up again. I hurriedly logged in and backed up everything that I cared about to both S3 and locally....
Heading to New York
I intend to arrive to New York today, and stay there until Sep 5th or so. As usual, if anyone wants to meet for drinks, talks and bits, I am game.
Tools matter
A few hours ago I responded to a mail message that had:
The scenic route is also the poor-man's route...
Pushing a Typemock purchase at the current state of things won't bear any fruit.
I have run into similar sentiments with regards to ReSharper, dotTrace, RedGate's SQL Compare, etc.
I am not sure how to respond to such a statement, because it the underlying assumptions are all wrong. Let us do the math.
TypeMock (enterprise) costs 500$. That is the most expensive version they have (although if you ask nicely, I am pretty sure they will agree to raise the price)....
VPSLand.com - Support nightmare
Let me start by stating the scenario. hibernatingrhinos.com is down. The server is compromised, dead, whatever. I don't know what actually happened to is, but it is no longer bootable. I don't have complete backups. That is totally and completely my fault. I am an idiot. That is not the point of this post. I should have had backups, and ensured that they work correctly, no arguments here. What I want to talk about now is the support experience that I got from VPSLand. We can start with this bad news: Just...
A note to Amazon
I just uploaded a bunch of files to Amazon S3. From the point of view of the actual service, I have no complaints so far. From the point of view of the user experience, however... the situation is appalling. Not having a standard SDK for the major platform is stupid. Yes, you have SOAP / REST api, so what? I am not going to deal with them. I don't really want to. I want an API that I can use from the get go. At the very least, you should have someplace where you list the community contributed...
And the wrong way to go about getting help is...
I got an assistance request for Rhino Mocks directly to my email about forty minutes go. As usual, and as outlined here, I asked that the question be sent to the relevant mailing list. I get a lot of such requests, and that it my standard response for most of them, when they are on the list, other people have a shot at that, and the answer is a searchable record. If you want to something more, we can discuss my rates. Anyway, I am getting of lot of such requests, and I am perfectly fine with redirecting them...
Why are you showing such a contempt for my time?
This post just went over the line... I mean, how do you expect me to respond to such a message? In the old tradition of, don't give the man a fish, here is how you find out. There is this tool called Google. You can s-e-a-r-c-h things there. I used the advance technique of putting the search terms in the text box and clicked on Search. Here is the result: The third result, surprisingly enough, is from my site. You can see it right there in the link. Clicking on...
The secret of pretty diagrams
Is not really such a big secret...
From annoyance to laugher in two seconds
This is a screen shot from NDepend (I have a review forthcoming), I run it on a code base, and I went through the issues it found. These rules are things that I disagree with. So I clicked to modify it, and I got this, which had me laughing. I like the spirit.
In Belgium Next week
I am going over to Belgium next week, to do some work. Bart Reyserhove is organizing a beers night there. Where: Sint-Gorikshallen: Sint-Goriksplein 1, 1000 Brussel When: Tuesday august 5th @ 21:00 hours.
High performant way for waking REALLY fast
Precondition: Extremely sleepy.
Solution: Go to a coffee shop, order their strongest coffee, add lots of sugar. Go to the table and take a sip. Spill the coffee on top of the hideously expensive MacBook Pro.
Result: Instant wakefulness.
The MBP seems fine, and I am using it to type this, but that was a big scare.
Email is unreliable, asynchronous, communication channel
Just a reminder to myself, for the last couple of days I am starting to see time lapsed threads in Gmail. Specifically, a reply will arrive my mail box much earlier than the originator message. Sometimes the difference is measured in days. Considering that I am much more prone to use Email for IM discussions than IM clients, I find this highly amusing. It is also a good reminder of what we can tolerate such an unreliable communication protocol for something so essential. I am currently building my Producing Production Quality Software presentation, and this bring to bear...
Googling is a requirement
Here is another thing that annoys me. Some people ping with questions that are trivially answerable by a Google search. If you want to ask me something, consider Googling it first, not doing so shows lack of respect for my time.
Why I will not code review your code...
Like this post, this is a post that is here to serve as a statement of intention, and to clarify my position on the matter. Recently I had started to get quite a few requests for reviewing applications, frameworks and components. They all come from well meaning people, who often has very interesting code that they would like a second opinion on. That is wonderful, except that I am most probably not going to be able to do this code review. There are several reasons for that. I just don't have enough hours in the day to...
Looking for server backup
I have a VPS server that I am hosting some personal stuff on. I would like to have backup for that, since I know it will bite me in the end. I am talking about backing up SQL Server (very small) and a few directories. Anyone can recommend a good online backup solution? Preferably one that I can install and forget about? I am already using Mozy for backing up local machines, and I tried using that on the server. Unfortunately it doesn't work on virtual machines, which really annoyed me. Any recommendations?
Looking for something new
I am done with SvnBridge, and am now looking for another consulting gig. Please drop me a line (by email, not comment) if you are interested.
I, too, broke the compiler
And here you thought I was writing code that was hard for mere humans to understand! I write code so complex even the compiler breaks down and cries!
Zero Mail Bounce arrived!
This is the first time this year that I had zero unread emails!
Nostalgic: Reading old posts
I just read a few of my posts from 2004. They are... an education. I forgot how I was then. My project at the time was creating a writable configuration file API and rambling about bad OSS is.
New project blues
I hate starting new projects. I realize that this is a fairly uncommon opinion. Most developers that I have met loved going into new projects, starting from a blank slate. I dislike it, because early on in a project, there are all too many things that are still moving. There is a big amount of work that needs to be done before you can see real results. Here is a typical graph for the time per feature. The first steps are the most frustrating ones. You work for a long while before you can...
Deep Fried Bytes: RoosterLaidAnEggException
During the MVP Summit we gathered in the hotel and had recorded one of the discussions that went there. It was hilarious, and now it is online. Listen to the interview war stories, and check the bit in the end.
Observations on writing
It took me two months to write 5 pages, then I started from scratch and wrote the whole chapter (~30 page) in two days. Reading is so much harder than writing. I went over what I wrote so far, and it is painful. Taking time to just write things might be a mistake, as this proves:
DSL Course in Austin Next Week: Canceled
Due to low amount of attendees, the DSL course that was suppose to run next week in Austin had ben canceled.
Choose the appropriate medium
I recently started using Tweet, which also means that I mostly watch conversations go past. It has made me feel even more strongly about selecting the appropriate medium for discussion. You cannot have a meaningful discussion in Twitter or IM, the conventions and limitations of the platform. Email is a better medium to expression complex concepts, but voice or video are far better methods of communication. Obviously, nothing can supercede the quality of discussion face to face, especially in open space format. The other side of the coin is the cost of this interaction. ...
Playing with numbers
For some reason, it looks like it is a good day to be impressed by numbers, here it the most interesting one...
And here is the reason you don't want to use the file system as your database:
An apology
Note: If you don't know about what I am talking about, please ignore this post.
A few days ago I was in a meeting with a Microsoft team, showing a few of the MVP a new product. I was there to give feedback to the team, and I am afraid that I did no such thing. In fact, I blew up. I acted in a completely unprofessional way, and I certainly did nothing productive. I was about as unproductive as possible, and offensive to boot.
To the guys in the team, I am sorry. No excuses, I am supposed to be better...
Off to see the wizard
Or, to be rather exact, to the MVP summit and to the ALT.Net Seattle conference.
SvnBridge - Fast, Faster, Fastest
This is really getting ridiculous: It turn out that through a series of simple, logical steps, the local version of SvnBridge has become Mass Downloader for TFS. The end result is that checking out or updating tends to be very fast. I can't get those speeds from native Subversion!
Ayende.com, Inc
For a long time, there has been rumors about this blog and other action carried on under the pseudonym "Ayende Rahien". More specifically, we refer to allegations of a team behind the "Ayende Rahien" persona. We are now pleased to announce that after 3 years of unparallel success, the Ayende.com startup has received its second round of funding, and are now able to go public with the results of the experiment. The entity known as "Ayende Rahien" is an AI simulations, built by Ayende.com Inc as the first wave of AI Sourcing. (Think outsourcing, but without having to...
Attack of the virtual machines
I just found out that I have too many virtual machines around. Right now I am working on three plus the host machine. I have the Mac's Windows 2008's Fusion VM as well, come to think of it.
Annoying
To record a full screen cast and realize 90% from the end start that the microphone wasn't recording.
What do you think?
I played a bit with Expression Design and go this logo: Update: Andy had some good suggestions:
Note to Babylon: I don't installed rude programs
Here is the installer for Babylon 7, and the reason that I won't be using it.
Welcome to 2008
Well, this weekend I made the jump to 2008, both as my operating system of choice and Visual Studio 2008. This move was perpetuated by ReSharper being mature enough on VS2008 to make me happy, mostly, and by being really happy with testing Windows Server 2008.
A newbie MacBook Pro owner impressions
A couple of days ago my MacBook Pro has arrived. I didn't have much chance to play with it until today, but right now I am trying to see how compatible we really are. I haven't really ever used a Mac (short demo sessions on other people's doesn't count) so it is an interesting experience.
I can tell you right now that my biggest worry, the keyboard layout / shortcuts, is probably going to be fine, since I seem to be getting the hang of it without too much problem.
However, I am literally a newbie at this, and it is very...
Email habits
Gmail just flagged me as a spammer. Apparently I am sending bulk email. All I was doing is going over the threads in the ALT.Net list
On Security - From the physical perspective
(Image from Boing Boing) I don't generally comment on such things, but in my recent trip to London, I had to go past the Heathrow Airport, and I found the security measures there... excessive. Especially in light of several other... observations that I made while in London. Those observations match across several countries (Canada, UK, Denmark, and I am pretty sure that it will match what I will find in USA). This is not an attack on the UK, this post was merely sparked by my recent trip there. You could say that I have a professional interest...
Rose - Because I don't have any cat pictures to post
Well, apparently is is customary for bloggers that do not have anything to post to put some pictures of their cat. I don't have a cat, but I have a this shy little dog that I adore, her name is Rose. Of course, that doesn't really give you any sense of scale, so here is her standing up, I am a big guy, her nose topped six feet by a fair margin. (about 1.85 for the civilized among us). And, of course, the other side, here is her after I let her know that I am...
Geek Dinner at London, Tuesday, 19th Feb, 19:00
First, I want to thank Howard van Rooijen for setting this up. It is going to be at the Lowlander, Covent Garden, at the 19 Feb, Tuesday, at 19:00 The address is: 6 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RR or use Google Map. You are welcome to drop in. Please comment here if you plan to arrive. And thanks again to Howard.
Is Google Groups suffering outages as well?
For the last day or so I am having problem accessing files, registering to lists, etc. Anyone knows something about it?
Amazon S3 Outage
Amazon has released (scroll all the way down) some details about their outage. It is light on details, but it gives enough information to guess a few things. Apparently, there is an authentication services that handles both account validation and authentication of request. Since authenticated requests requires some cryptography, they are significantly more expensive than unauthenticated requests. Since the authentication services also handle account validation, and since that is done per request, swamping the authentication services with costly authenticated request has overloaded the capacity of the authentication services and cause many account validation requests to fail. As I was reading...
Random Musings
Okay, this is just a train of thought about a few things. I just finished submitting a couple of chapters, and I feel very wrung out at the moment. For the last few weeks I have been too busy to do much of the things that I usually do. First there was getting ready to quit my job, with a last minute project to finish. That took most of my time in that regard, and I let the book project slid too far behind schedule. This week I spent most of my time writing, and it was bloody well...
Ask for anything but time
Looks like my MacBook Pro laptop will take some time to arrive :-(
The good news is that I got it with ~350$ discount. I ordered a 2.6Ghz model, but the store had it for the price of 2.4Ghz. They will respect the order, but apparently this means that I have to wait 2 - 3 weeks to get it.
Next week I am going to start traveling, and the prospect of of doing so without a laptop is creeping me out. I scrounged a laptop for the travel, but it is probably not a development one. Should be interesting.
Travel Plans
It looks like I'll be doing some traveling soon. 18 Feb - 20 Feb - I am going to visit London. I got the 18/19 evenings free, if someone want to meet up and have some fun. 23 Feb - 11 Mar - I am going to be in Seattle. Again, anyone who want to meet up, I am game.
And now it is only me
Yesterday I left We!, today I handled the last remains, and now I am free. Interesting feeling, and I do miss the car so very much... This also puts me in the interesting position of being laptop-less. This is less comfortable than I thought it would be. I have a week or two before I can get my new laptop. Following quite a few recommendations, I got a MacBook Pro 17". I'll report about it when I get it. Current task, and the reason that I don't have much time, writing the book. It turns out to be much harder...
Things to avoid when having fever...
Do not listen to audio books, unless you want some really scary hallucinations. I spent this weekend dreaming I was in the Known Space, rebelling against the Pupeteers. I spent the weekend in bed, not in a good way. If you emailed me, it would take me a few more days to catch up, I still very exhausted.
Looking for a new development laptop
I am looking at getting a new laptop. This is something that should serve as a development machine, and I am getting tired of waiting for the computer to do its work. As such, I intend to invest in a high end machine, but I am still considering which and what. Minimum Requirements are 4GB RAM, Dual Core, Fast HD, big screen. Video doesn't interest me, since even the low end ones are more than I would ever want. Weight is also not an issue, I would be perfectly happy with a laptop that came with its own wheelbarrow....
Is plagiarism the best compliment?
They say that plagiarism is the best compliment, although I have no idea who they are. It was brought to my attention that this book seems to have lifted more than a few answers directly from my post, not to mention that nearly all the questions are lifted from Scott Hanselman's post. I don't know if Scott was asked about it, but I certainly wasn't. I skimmed a bit in Google books and I couldn't find any credit section. I really don't like it.
Making diagrams for dummies
I have been getting a lot of questions about how I make the diagrams for the blog. I got some very strange suggestions from people, from having a full blown art department dedicated to producing those to drawing the diagrams on physical paper and then taking pictures of that on a wooden table. The truth is far more boring, I am afraid. I generally use the following tools to produce the diagrams: Google Image Search Power Point MS Paint Visual Studio I use visual studio's class diagram designer to create the class diagrams, usually from empty projects, not...
Changing the Zoom Function for Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000
I just found about this, a hack that let me actually get useful functionality from the useless key directly in the middle of my otherwise wonderful keyboard.
I feel it in my waters
A few days ago I was listening to a recording of a design discussion, and I was at two minds about what was going on in my mind when I said some of the things that I said. I found myself in the odd position of both remembering my reasoning and listening to them as an outsider. It gave me some insight to the way I think. It is not really an analytical process. There is a lot based on the taste of the idea. I am sorry, I am not sure how to express it in any other way....
Panic Attack
I went to sleep with the computer still playing. A few hours later, I woke up from a highly disturbing dream that I refuse to disclose, to find out that for the last hour or so, I have been hearing a WPF conversation. I'll leave any association between these two facts to the reader. But to top that, I found out that on VS 2005, I don't have ReSharper installed. I had to run around like a headless chicken for a while, just to get to grips with that. Then I installed it again (removed previous version to install the...
Pattern madness
For the last few hours, I wrote: Layout Layout Decorator Layout Registry Layout Decorator Resolver I am looking back at it right now, and I made a vow, Thou Shall Not Write an ILayoutDecoratorResolverFactory.
DevTeach Withdrawal Woes
I'll wait for the next time I am at DevTeach to reach the final conclusion, but something fishy is going on when I am getting back from DevTeach. When I got back from DevTeach Montreol, I found out that there has been zero commits to the source control repository in a week. Now, back from DevTeach Vancouver, I find out that they went and sold the company (Hebrew link) while I was gone.* * doesn't really matter to me, I made the decision to move away a while ago, but still, it was a major surprise.
Tasers
Steve is talking about tasers and taser related deaths. I remember when we got a few tasers. The rules for using them were pretty strict, they were considered as firearm for all intents and purposes. Using them as a method to "subdue" people once they are handcuffed would fall under the category of torture. I can just imagine what I, personally, would do to anyone who tried that, and I would be the only first step in the chain. Then, of course, you have the nice legal situation where we literally had to get a doctor's permit to use it....
Cause and effect
Cause: Running barefoot on wet porcelain. Effect: Pain. Consolation: Good thing that I am padded. Ouch!
Justin is giving away books
Justin is appernately decided that it would be a good thing to pass on the trade secrets to just about anyone. He is giving away some interesting books.
The other side of open source
While most of the people working and using open source are fun to work with, there are some people who are... not. A discussion on the nature of OSS development had turned into an exchange of stories about the "I'm using your stuff, you owe me big time." characters that appears every so often among the otherwise great communities. Some of those encounters range from the one who thinks that I work for them: "I run into this issue with your stuff, I need you to fix it by Wednesday." The blackmail attempts are almost amusing: "If you...
Must resist... decoding
Rob Conery has posted an interesting poem, I wouldn't really mind, except that he posted that in binary, which meant that I really had to figure it out. Can you resist the urge 1110111 1101000 1111001 100000 1100100 1101001 1100100 100000 1111001 1101111 1110101 100000 1101101 1100001 1101011 1100101 100000 1101101 1100101 100000 1100100 1100101 1100011 1101111 1100100 1100101 100000 1100010 1101001 1101110 1100001 1110010 1111001 100000 1100100 1100001 1110100 1100001 111111
ReSharper: Showing the flag
And this if for the guys from Jet Brains, for making such a good and essential product. Now all I need is an IDE from them, and I would be happy. .
Funny Halo 3 Review
I just sat there and watched it in facinated horror, it is hilarious. Go watch it.
Undue Process
Yesterday I was at a meeting. One of the main subjects was me. To be rather exact, my time. Apparently there is not enough of it to go around. And I used the old fashion "stay out of trouble" method of telling all the project managers to go and have a fight among themselves and let me know when I need to be where. That might have been a mistake, they started to talk about what kind of process they would use to splice up my time. If an "Oren Requisition Form" that needs to be signed in triplicate appears,...
That magic chant
Teaching right now, I gave the students the task of doing low level binary file writes. I haven't done that sort of thing in years. It brings to mind doing C++ programming in '99. It certainly made everyone very quite, but I got to the point where I am practically chanting "System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes()" at them. 9 times and counting, so far.
How to practice diplomacy: Playing on the nature of truth
So today I practiced diplomacy. We need to integrate with an application that has reached its end of life. It was suggested that since both applications are written with .NET, we can just take the code and build on top of it. I said that I would need to see the code. They sent me the documentation and a link to the current site. I read it, I thought about all the things that I am not going to say. Here is what I did not say: I found three SQL Injection attacks just by reading the documentation, I...
Murphy and the Law of Time Division
This is something that happens so often I go mad of it. I had to leave the office at 12:00 to go to a customer, and I wanted to finish a feature first. I arrived early and started working on it. Three hours later, I didn't even got started, I was busy fixing stupid assembly version errors, and tracking down dependencies that somehow got lost. Finally I resolved the issues with the abrupt manner of 5kg Hammer and went to fiddle with production databases. The idea is to move anxiety to other people. It worked, eventually, but I had...