Philosophical GeekPhilosophical GeekDiscussions about .Net, C-sharp, Cpp, code in general, design, and occasional deep thinking about what it all means. Also my current projects and lego building. Articles
5 Books to make you stupider
2008-02-29 16:49:00 Well, after a week of investigation, I’ve settled on a social network for books: Shelfari. It’s attractive, easy-to-use, easy to manipulate many books at once, they have a mobile version, and I have one friend on it (who invited me). Goodreads.com also looked nice, and it almost won. bookwormr.com, the one I originally found was just ... More About: Personal , Books , Sites , Make
Unit testing benefits programmers who are already good
2008-02-28 21:39:00 In order to kick my unit testing skills up a notch, I’ve been reading a lot about it lately. Today I had the thought: “Unit testing only helps already-good programmers.” My reasoning is that bad programmers are going to write bad tests, or not enough test cases, or bad test cases, or won’t take the effort ... More About: Philosophy , Testing , Good , Benefits , Process
Tip: Easily using WaitCursor
2008-02-22 17:31:00 This is really simple and probably common, but it’s a useful tip anyway. Say you need to set a form’s cursor to the wait cursor while you accomplish something. You would do something like this: this.Cursor = Cursors.WaitCursor; //do something this.Cursor = Cursors.Default; Of course, what if “do something” throws an exception? Then your cursor won’t be set back to the ... More About: Tips , Forms
Online reading list - bookwormr
2008-02-20 20:16:00 I found a great site I wanted to share with everybody: bookwormr. To explain: I’ve got 3 large books on my nightstand at the moment: Scotland: The Story of a Nation - Magnus Magnusson - Much of my heritage is Scottish, and I got intensely interested in Scottish history during our trip to Edinburgh last year. Code ... More About: Reading , List , Online
Dear Spammers?
2008-02-15 16:16:00 Thank you for your increasing interest in my blog, which is apparently slowly gaining in popularity with legitimate readers too! Unfortunately, my dear spammers, you are idiots. 100% of comments on this blog are moderated–99.9% are filtered before I ever see them. The rest are fairly obvious scams. None of your stupid spammy comments will ever ... More About: Personal , Spammers
Amazon Kindle + Audible = Killer-app?
2008-02-14 14:18:00 My wife sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle the other day, and asked, "Have you heard of this? what do you think?" I think she wants one. I have to admit that the thought of such a device is appealing. I have tried reading e-books on my PDA and BlackBerry occasionally, but other than ... More About: Personal , Tech , Killer , Audible
.Net Reflector
2008-02-13 16:58:00 Lutz Roeder’s .Net Reflector has been discussed on many blogs before, but I want to give it an additional plug. I recently had to emulate some C# serial-port code in our C++ app. The .Net SerialPort class is great, easy-to-use, and works well. Unfortunately, we’re using a C++ serial port library that does not support ... More About: Tips
Fighting Brain Rot
2008-02-07 20:28:00 Alex Shalman has a great post at zenhabits about how to avoid letting your brain decay into apathy and atrophy. It’s a great call to action, to find ways of self-improvement. I think the behaviors listed here dovetail very nicely with the attributes of highly effective programmers. By continuing to do as we always have, the ... More About: Philosophy , Tips , Fighting , Brain
6 Programming problems you don?t want in the interview
2008-02-01 17:00:00 1. Write out all floating point values between 0 and 1. 2. Write tic-tac-toe in Brainf*&$ 3. What is 2128 in decimal? 4. Solve traveling salesman in constant time (O(1)) 5. How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara (at a given instant, assuming constant, well-defined boundaries)? 6. Implement quicksort on a spherically linked list. More About: Programming , Funny , Interview , Problems
Offline this weekend
2008-02-01 00:07:00 I’m offline this weekend, so if you submit comments (which are moderated), they’ll show up sometime on Monday or Tuesday. Thanks! More About: Personal , Offline , Weekend
Solving "Unexpected Store Error" in Exchange
2008-01-30 17:52:00 Getting a weird COM Exception with the cryptic ID 0×8055001E? We’ve been struggling with this problem for over a year now, and we finally have a solution. We have some critical code that is contacting Exchange server via COM Interop and CDOEX.DLL to read some inboxes and process e-mails. About once a month or so, we ... More About: Tips , Store , Error
New look coming soon
2008-01-28 15:06:00 I’ve been wanting to change the look of this blog to be much more minimalist for a while now, and I think this week will be the week to do it. If you notice weird changes as you’re browsing, please bear with me. I’m also going to be reducing the number of ads on ...
Updated my favorite podcasts
2008-01-26 00:38:00 I’ve updated my list of podcasts with some that I forgot and some new ones I discovered while finding the links to the first ones. I also slightly reorganized the list (Added a business section) More About: Personal , Music , Film , Podcasts , Theater
Multiple-Item Clipboard a good idea?
2008-01-25 17:00:00 Jeff Atwood laments the single-item nature of the Windows clipboard, and points out utilities that can expand the capabilities to multiple items. I think that’s a great power tool to have, but I’m not sure having a multiple-item clipboard is really the best thing. I think one of the strengths of the clipboard is its single-mindedness. ... More About: Tech , Idea , Item , Good , Clipboard
Podcasts I listen to
2008-01-24 18:50:00 I got a 4 MB blue iPod Nano 2nd Genfor my birthday last June, and while I do have a few music playlists, I almost exclusively listen to podcasts. I can’t believe I went so long without one of these. Putting together the list below led me to some others that I might give a ... More About: Personal , Music , Film , Podcasts , Theater
5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers
2008-01-21 04:57:00 What attributes can contribute to a highly successful software developer versus the ordinary run-of-the-mill kind? I don’t believe the attributes listed here are the end-all, be-all list, nor do I believe you have to be born with them. Nearly all things in life can be learned, and these attributes are no exception. Humility Humility is first ... More About: Philosophy , Articles , Tech , Effective , Programmers
HostForWeb - best hosting company ever
2008-01-19 05:02:00 Ok, I have to give a quick shout out to my hosting company, HostForWeb. I’ve had my web-sites and e-mail hosted by them for about…5 years now? I can’t remember when I started, but a while ago. Today, I noticed that my e-mail was not going out through my domain via smtp. I quickly determined that ... More About: Hosting , Company
Word Count Plugin for Windows Live Writer
2008-01-07 16:15:00 I’ve fixed one of the biggest holes in functionality in Windows Live Writer. It’s simple, but essential: the ability to count words (and characters and paragraphs) in your posts before publishing. Windows Live Writer doesn’t really offer a way to extend the menu system itself, but you can create an “Insert…” plugin that just analyzes ... More About: Word , Plugin
Will someone please stop these people! (RIAA)
2007-12-31 19:37:00 Washington Post story. You can no longer put the CDs you BOUGHT onto your iPod. Technorati Tags: RIAA, digital music More About: People , Stop , Riaa
Easily Unit Testing Event Handlers
2007-12-28 02:48:00 In C#, If you need to unit test a class that fires an event in certain circumstances (perhaps even asynchronously), you need to handle a little more than just running some code and doing the assertion. You have to make sure your unit test waits for the event to be fired. Here’s one naive way ... More About: Event , Testing , Code , Unit
Infinity - Infinite Energy
2007-12-21 19:57:00 Power. Electricity. The Holy Grail of modern technology. I say this because the information revolution completely depends on electricity, whether it’s batteries, hybrid motors, or the grid. Everything we do depends on converting some naturally occurring resource into power to drive our lives. I was thinking about power recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The ... More About: Energy , Tech , Infinite , Infinity
Infinity - Infinite Storage
2007-12-19 15:36:00 Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.htm l] Ok. it’s ugly, but ... More About: Tech , Storage , Infinite , Infinity
DiskSlicer 1.2 Out
2007-12-18 03:12:00 I made some minor updates to DiskSlicer. Mostly, some minor bug fixes, but also I added the much-requested ability to delete files directly from the program. Go get it and enjoy! More About: Tools , Tech , Code
20 Things to do when the Internet goes down
2007-12-14 21:52:00 Even if the Internet connection goes out, your computer does not become a dumb brick. There were days these last few days where I didn’t bother turning it on. Then I realized all the things I could still do. (My home Internet connection finally came back this morning. I’m bit upset that they didn’t figure it ... More About: Personal , Books , Tech , Things
The Nerd Handbook
2007-12-13 21:28:00 Found The Nerd Handbook via Phil Windley. I sent it to my wife and told her she needs to read it. A highly-accurate depiction of nerds, I would say. At least in the generalities… Technorati Tags: nerds,humor More About: Funny
BugTracker.Net
2007-12-07 15:19:00 I’ve been meaning to write about this software for a while. When I started my current job, all software development was done by an outside contractor. I quickly took over, and that necessitated implementing a lot of tools and procedures to handle our large C++ and C# code base. Choosing Subversion for source control was easy–free, ...
Don?t delay your merging
2007-12-07 14:58:00 Another one of those lessons learned posts. I know I’m supposed to merge changes across branches often to minimize the pain, but I didn’t do it. Here’s the scenario: We’ve got 3 development branches: 6.3, 6.4, and 7.0 (the trunk). 6.3 and 6.4 are technically maintenance branches because we didn’t anticipate needing to them, but we ... More About: Merging
San Francisco Restaurants - Dining Guide
2007-12-05 19:37:00 We have another sponsor! MyChoyce.com is a free dining guide for the San Francisco area. And wow. It’s nice. I am really wishing something like this existed for the Washington, DC metro area. The site is attractive, easy to use. And they have menus! Awesome. You can search and filter by food, services, location, price. I’ve ... More About: Restaurants , Sites , Guide , Dining
Free Resume Review - Professional Service
2007-12-05 15:11:00 I’ve mentioned Free Resume Review before, but I want to now mention their paid services. In addition to their free offerings, you can make a payment and get even more options and services, including: Increased chances of securing employment. Our resumes have a high rate of success in landing interviews. A contemporary, stylish, unique digital resume ... More About: Service , Interview
No Internet at home
More articles from this author:2007-12-03 21:21:00 It is really hard not having Internet service at home. Really, really hard. It’s not that I spend every minute checking e-mail, but the lack of ability to check makes the desire that much stronger. It went out Friday night, sometime after 9 PM. I called Saturday morning, they sent a tech on Sunday night. He ... More About: Home 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
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