somatose

google chrome software updates make everything else feel broken

2009-12-14T22:59:00.000-08:00

I am growing more and more annoyed at the Apple's and the Adobe's of the world who are constantly interrupting my work to tell me that there are updates waiting for me to install. Why do I have to manage this? Yes I know that I can go in there and tweak the settings so that I don't get annoyed... but why should I even have to do that? I would need to do that across every user account on every

build it (so it's easy) and they will come (make the right decision)

2009-12-05T22:59:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest lessons I think I've learned over the past few years is that you have to be very careful with what you make easy to do in a software system. When you are working within a preexisting system, it is very hard to work effectively outside the bounds of that system. Whether you are limited by time constraints, peer pressure, political decisions or just pure technical inertia,

way to go, LRO

2009-09-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

LRO does it again, water on the moon! That's so cool! NASA is important people, we're laying the foundation for future generations here. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html And of course finding water is not the same as finding lakes, but imagine the potential for fuel sources and or human sustenance. Water is damn heavy, and not something we can easily take

hanselman tools 2009!!

2009-09-02T20:58:00.001-07:00

Saw this on reddit tonight, hanselman has updates his legendary tools list for 2009. So what was going to be an evening of actual coding is slowing turning into an evening of trying out cool new tools that have made his list. (I’m writing this blog post in windows Live Writer after seeing it in the list) But what’s an hour or two of my time compared to the time that must go into compiling this

LRO sends us some underwhelming evidence!

2009-09-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

I remain a huge fan of projects like LRO, and personally still believe that the disbelievers are crackpots but I also have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by the photos listed here on NASA's site for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html Still, I'm excited "we're" (go NASA) going back, and if anything this just

lessons learned from online gambling - predicting scalability

2009-09-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

I work with someone who has spent a few years working for an online poker company who shall remain nameless. This company was responsible for a poker platform that supported both their own branded poker offering as well as being an engine for other companies who would layer on their branding. My colleague played an important role in taking their fairly well built existing system from thousands of

sometimes it's helpful to think about what NOT to do

2009-09-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

Came across this list of "anti-patterns" on wikipedia tonight. I'm tempted just to copy and paste the contents here but that would make me feel dirty. Definitely a good list though and something worth reminding ourselves of every once in a while when thinking about the systems we build. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

the rise and fall of myspace (and twitter)

2009-08-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

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-______/ A good read, and the level of

manager schedule vs maker schedule

2009-07-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

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've had tons of discussions around the cost of

performance tuning to an insane level

2009-07-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

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 pragmatic view of the spectrum of cost to deliver (

taking a step back/up/sideways (thebrain)

2009-05-11T22:39:00.000-07:00

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 have gone from one disjointed medium to another

Simple Extensibility in .NET

2009-05-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

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 more plumbing. If you are going all out and need

Transcendent Man!

2009-05-06T20:49:00.000-07:00

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-game of the singularity is fascinating and

From test spy to Verify() with Moq

2009-04-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

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 like a lot of other mock frameworks. In order to

silverlight 3 - after the high

2009-03-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

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 me "tuned in". If you are at all interested in

decision making : flip a coin then check your gut

2009-02-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

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... are you relieved or are you disappointed? Try

Flex data services limitations (FlexBuilder generated wsdl code sucks)

2009-02-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

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 more along these lines) http://

QWERTY Myth and the entrenchment of Flash

2009-01-31T19:54:00.000-08:00

This is a great article about the myth of how the best technology doesn't necessarily win. Granted, sometimes the best technology does not win, but there is a persistent and pervasive sense that the populous often chooses the "VHS" over the far superior alternative. The article addresses the VHS vs Beta debate directly as well as the victory over Dvorak by QWERTY. To encourage you to read the

Silverlight controls

2009-01-28T16:59:00.001-08:00

Silverlight 2 may not have the control set that Flex developers are used to seeing out of the box but there are a significant number of control vendors who are stepping up to the plate to fill the void. It seems as though Microsoft's strategy has been to get the Silverlight 2 runtime out as quickly as possible (and as lean as possible) always knowing that this type of extension to the framework

1 TB drive won't format using Disk Utility

2008-12-31T16:43:00.000-08:00

I just bought a 1TB external HD, the "Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus" this weekend on sale at London Drugs. A bit of an impulse purchase but I've been digiizing all of our dvd's lately into iTunes and had completely run out of space... The drive has a bunch of automated backup features I'll never use, so I skipped all the software and went to use the drive directly from Mac OS X. First step here is to

FlexBuilder 3 First Impressions

2008-12-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

Where we're coming from So at the beginning of the year I was tasked with evaluating a number of technologies for RIA development for the next evolution of my company's product. Up to this point we had been relying extensively on ASP.NET forms with a traditional post-back model that was responsible for a lot of wasted time and bandwidth. We've leveraged a lot of Ajax in the past few years,

FlexBuilder 3 Controls

2008-12-17T15:17:00.000-08:00

Controls included with FlexBuilder 3 out of the box below... check out some third party components here . Notes will be updated as I actually get a chance to put some of these to use. FlexBuilder 3 Controls Control Name Notes AdvancedDataGrid *Professional version only* + multi column sorting + grouping + tree view + printing support -- Still no paging support out of the box AlertControl

visual c++ lesson 0.0.0.0.1 precompiled headers

2008-12-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

I come from a background of managed memory and interpreted languages. I'm a big proponent of pragmatic approaches to problems and as little re-inventing of the wheel as humanly possible. I don't think the world needs another text editor, and I personally don't feel the need to write my own version of the stack I rely on for application development. (.NET Framework and IIS) This however gives me

ajax for mac lovers

2008-12-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

Another Ajax Framework : (or rather, an Application Framework) http://cappuccino.org/ http://cappuccino.org/learn/ Demo app built using it: http://280slides.com/ And a teaser for all those interface builder lovers out there : http://ajaxian.com/archives/nib2cib-use-interface-builder-to-design-your-ajax-apps I came across this in reader this morning and was totally blown away by how well the

C++ linking

2008-11-28T12:55:00.000-08:00

This is a post for myself, to basically bookmark the excellent work of someone else. My post is contributing practically nothing (maybe adding some context/weight for his article) but here it is anyway. ;-) http://blog.copton.net/articles/linker/index.html Despite not being an active user of C++ I really enjoyed this post. I actually feel a little smarter and better informed for having read it.