chris carter's web log

Recursion Deep Dive

Fri, 29 May 2009 11:27:28 GMT

Giles has the easiest way to understanding recursion posted here. perfect.

Online Software vs Desktop Software

Mon, 25 May 2009 02:00:54 GMT

I just started writing on a blog I've had for awhile, http://chrisjcarter.wordpress.com. I've decided that's where I'm going to put non-geek related stuff.

The wordpress tools for blogging online are cool. But there's one thing that never changes with online tools like this:latency. After clicking a save button, I have to wait....and wait.....and wait. I frickin HATE waiting.

Waiting Sucks

That's why I like fast hardware. People have laughed at me for worrying about compiling taking 5 seconds versus 10 seconds. It's only 5 seconds, right? This means that every 12 compiles costs me one minute of time. Every 120 compiles costs me 10 minutes...see where I'm going. I'd bet that I compile somewhere closer to 250 times a day or more. That's 20+ minutes I end up waiting per day, I prolly average 6 days a week of that. That's now over 2 hours per week that I'm waiting for my software to compile. 50 weeks a year, that's 100 hours now spent waiting. Say you charge 50 bucks an hour. Do the math. That's $5,000 you just lost in possible revenue OR worse, that's $5,000 dollars that was billed to a client who, unbeknownst to them, paid for you to wait. F**k that.

OK. That was a sort of rant but c'mon, waiting sucks no matter what picture you paint. Is there a blogger client that allows you to very simply input content offline, and if you "happen" to be connected will publish it? That sounds simple, but my requirement for the tool is that it works like I do.

WYSIWYG? Nope

Oh, and I don't care about WYSIWYG editors. My content is simple, by design. Paragraphs, links, emphasized text occasionally, and some embedded images and/or videos. That's all. I don't need much. I'm using markdown in my online editor for this blog right now and it's just OK. It's better than FCKeditor for me because the WYSIWYG thing isn't needed for me, but that editor kicks ass and it's free(so if you want wicked awesome editor check it out).

Latency

I hate clicking the save button on this blog or the other one and waiting longer than a nano-second. I want the confidence that I can click save and keep working, and know that my shit was saved and I can continue working.

Random Post

Yes, this was a little rant-ish. I'm mostly setting up the requirements for what I want to build in terms of an offline blogging client, in wpf. I start my 21 days in two days. During that time, there will be some crazy software being built.

nVidia Windows 7 Drivers

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:22:04 GMT

huh, looks like nVidia is ready for windows 7.

It's a good thing, the machine running Windows 7 has an nVidia card and it keeps randomly rebooting, i'm taking a stab that all i need are nVidia's driver versus whatever Win 7 installed(hopefully they are different or this is a waste of time).

My First SSD Is In The Mail!

Tue, 19 May 2009 02:22:34 GMT

Woo hoo! So my laptop hard drive is VERY unstable, so I decided today that instead of waiting until it goes bye bye I'd better replace it. But since solid state drives are all the rage I decided to get one.

Then I saw this crazy ass drive via engadget. It's only about 3200 bucks more than the drive I bought today, but man it's wicked awesome. And get this, "item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping" ... ya think?

Breaking The Silence

Sun, 10 May 2009 10:46:44 GMT

I've been quiet just over two months now. I've basically had writer's block. So this is my attempt at curing that block, rambling.

I've been running Windows 7 on my laptop now for about a month and liking it alot. Friday night I installed the Release Candidate(build 7100) and that went without a hitch. I installed all of the tools I use on a daily basis by Saturday morning.

My laptop hard drive now makes a buzzing sound, so I'm in the hunt for a new drive, and I think it's time to check out a solid state drive. Windows 7 plus all of my tools eats up about 30 gigs, so I'm shopping for a 64 gig SSD, newegg has a few in the sub 200 dollar range that look appealing.

I stuck beta 4 of Firefox 3.5 on this machine. Just remembered that now I have to get the latest beta of FireBug which is supposed to be quite an improvement over 1.3. As always, I applied the fix for the slow loading pages in firefox when viewing pages delivered by Visual Studio's internal webserver.

I'm also thinkin of converting one of my two desktop machines into a backup device. Not sure what all this entails, but I'm always in need of a good backup strategy. I'm thinkin of converting my home network to a gigabit ethernet. Since huge terabyte size drives are relatively cheap these days, I want to get a couple of those and raid it up. I want to write the software that does the backups, it would be a fun side project if nothing else.

There. Silence is broken.

Having Nothing To Say

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:07:45 GMT

Sometimes I go through periods where I really have nothing to say, so I don't. I'm still working on the blog software for this site. My code is public, you can find this software and some other stuff I've written here: http://svn.chrisjcarter.com/public/

I just realized too, that as I'm writing this I have no way to preview the post. Since I'm a noob with Markdown I want to make sure that the post is working correctly. It's 9:29 in the AM, how fast can I add the preview.

....it's now 4:59pm. I actually added the preview fairly quickly, by 9:50am it was good to go. However, I noticed a bunch of bugs, so took care of those too. Many of those are fixed but I also found a bunch of usability issues I need to fix.

One is the ability to preview while i'm typing. The other is auto saving, I hate hitting the Save button. I also can't delete anything, that would be handy. OK, back to bug fixes.

Test Post - Nothing To See Here

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:59:17 GMT

Test Post - Nothing To See Here

A New Beginning

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:12:27 GMT

This is my attempt at curing a case of Analysis Paralysis that I've had for awhile.

I promised myself that I'd rebuild my blog by the end of Feb so here goes nothing. I've been procrastinating for awhile so I figured if I pulled the plug on the old software, I'd be more motivated to do the rewrite. I'll be slowly adding content back in and trying to come up with a good design.

Castle ActiveRecord Configuration: The ProxyFactoryFactory was not configured

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:32:54 GMT

After updating to the latest Castle trunk and trying to run a simple ActiveRecord test I got this error:

In hind sight the answer to the problem is in the exception message, but I searched google anyway. Here's a description of the IProxyFactoryFactory change that causes the above exception. My updated config looks like this now(note the proxyfactory.factory_class addition)

<activerecord isWeb="false">
  <config>
    <add key="connection.driver_class" value="NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver"/>
    <add key="dialect" value="NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect"/>
    <add key="connection.provider" value="NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider"/>
    <add key="proxyfactory.factory_class" value="NHibernate.ByteCode.LinFu.ProxyFactoryFactory, NHibernate.ByteCode.LinFu" />
    <add key="connection.connection_string" value="ConnectionString=${pantera}"/>
  </config>
</activerecord>

27000 Requests Per Second

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:05:21 GMT

WOW

HighScalability.com has a good post on the Digg scaling strategies. Man that would be fun to have that challenge, how do you handle 27000 requests per second? crazy.