Posts Tagged “miscellanea”

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Read recommendation–perspective on skills series

  

Josh Coffman over at Computerist Solutions is running an interesting series of interviews, asking people a few short and concise questions about their coding habits, preferences etc. Quite insightful, and he’s bringing in interesting people who are extremely bright, very experienced, or both. And (at least until now) they are as polyglot as it gets.

The worst job description ever

  

The following screenshot is taken from what is probably the worst job description I have ever seen. And be reminded that I used to work for the HQ of a large recruitment firm, been a recruiting manager and technical screener for candidates, and that my wife has years of experience in HR. I have seen my fair share of crap, but this is the worst of it

My eyes are still bleeding, be warned before you click to the fullsize image.

image

the only missing acronym is WTF

jQuery pwned by Microsoft

  

Just read it on the InfoQ weekly e-mail:

image

It does not mean much, but I did find it amusing.

Should I do this performance optimization?

  

Writing software is all very much about tradeoffs.

Performance optimizations usually comes with a cost attached to them. First, improving the performance of a given piece of code can be difficult. It could require a lot of experience, deep algorithmic thinking, and then some. It would cost money to deliver it. And it would almost always result with more complex code, or at least complex to grasp by other developers. This will lead to bugs that costs more money both in terms of business loss, and time spent fixing them. And the ongoing price of maintaining a non-trivial piece of code.

 

Even a bigger problem is to understand whether the “fix” you are about to create and apply to your “problem” is actually going to fix it. You would have to have a comprehensive and accurate performance monitoring tools, and spend some time experimenting before you go about fixing things. Just to be sure that the new code will actually perform better than the old one.

 

Then there is even a bigger problem. Are you 100% sure that the problem you think you have, really is your problem? Did you measure (see comprehensive and accurate performance monitoring above)? is this really the bottleneck of the application?  assuming you are to improve this bit by X percent, what would the global effect on the system be in terms of this X?

 

After answering all these questions, you would be able to answer the toughest question of all. Is there a real benefit to the business in this? With the above questions answered, you will be in a good place to get this one answered also.

 

What ticked me off into writing this is a post on Ayende’s blog about a certain perf optimization. The discussion listed there in the comments is way too shallow to my taste. In short, Ayende has pointed out to an article of a group doing something, and he analyzed their ROI coming to the conclusion that they were wrong. His calculations may be correct or not, but at least he looked at it from a business perspective. Then the comments just go on and on about how people are not thinking through, how they are doing stupid things, etc. etc.  the funniest thing is that from the looks of it, many of the commenters never have read the said article, and/or they are definitely not very familiar with the technologies mentioned in the article, thus they should have very little option to judge the article writer’s decisions.

 

 

So there are to morals here:

  1. Doing perf optimizations is difficult, mostly on the business side of things. Consider carefully.

  2. Bashing others’ decisions without understanding their problem space (and solution space) is childish and borderline stupid. Grow up.

You are not a cmd window

  

A screenshot between Oren Ellenbogen and another college or ours:

 

i_am_not_cmd

Three Simple Steps to Improve Your Writing

  

Basically, she’s right. Her post is nothing more than a great read

New home for kenegozi.com

  

I’ve just completed moving my server from GoGrid to http://softsyshosting.com/ (thx to Mike Nichols for the tip).

GoGrid were great. They have a very good customer service, the control panel is amazing and the options and flexibility are simply great. However the price was simply too much. I’m now getting twice as RAM for half the price, and since I do not plan to expand to multiple instances anytime soon, the flexibility and load-balancing options of GoGrid are simply shiny but pricy.

 

Now since I had very little time to spend on the move, and since it wasn’t a straight xcopy thing (as it’s now on IIS7.5 and I needed to do some tweaks to the blog engine), I stopped creating any content until the new server was up, and DNS was updated all across.

 

Expect new posts shortly.

Delver.com on private beta – get your invitation url here

  

If you ever have wondered how would a social shopping experience could look like, now you can get first taste of it.

 

http://www.delver.com is just that, and we are now on an invitation based closed-beta phase. If you want to be of the first ones in, and help shape the future of social shopping via early user feedback, drop me a line (in comments or email) and I’ll send you an invitation URL.

Fix Windows 7 Start menu Search

  

Suffer.End()

 

http://www.troublefixers.com/fix-windows-7-start-menu-search-problem/

 

I wonder why the hotfix mentioned is not pushed to auto-updates. This was a real pain in the neck without the search thing. I like to fire up things as fast as possible, which mean “no mouse” and also “no searching with up/down arrow keys”

Rendering error pages with error StatusCode with IIS7

  

Took me a while to solve this, so I hope it will help some other sorry arse one day.

  Scenario Wanting to render an error page programmatically in my web app (say a fancy 404 page that can’t be served as a static content, as it might contain the current user’s name, etc.)

I catch the error in the app (Monorail, so I use a Rescue, but do whatever feels good), render the markup, and set the ResponseCode to 401.

  Problem IIS will render it’s own static 401 ( or any other 40x/50x ) page

  I did check that customErrors section is set to off, as it used to work in IIS6 just fine

  What I missed out IIS7 introduced the httpErrors section (under system.webServer of course), which is used to tell it what to do with custom errors.

The sub-key I was looking for was <errorMode> with the value set to Detailed.

So, adding

&lt;system.webserver&gt;
   ...
   &lt;httperrors errormode=&quot;Detailed&quot; /&gt;
   ...
&lt;/system.webserver&gt;

made my problem go away. Also notice that you might need to allow setting that value in your web.config, by going to c:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config, allocating the declaration of the section named “httpErrors” and set its overrideModeDefault attribute to "Allow". 

Better late than never – IDCC video - Beautiful Teams and Code Leader by Roy Osherove

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It took me a while to get to it, but now you can watch the great talk by Roy Osherove on team leadership, from IDCC conference last month:

The quality is not the best, to say the least. I’ve been using a cheep Canon digicamera, and it’s the first time I’m uploading any video, so please concentrate on the amazing quality of the content, not on the crappy visual

Windows live wtfs keep on coming

  

Following an email offer (again – with weird RTL/LTR issues), I clicked on a link to

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowslive/products/photos-share.aspx

 

here’s what I got.

 

Live photo share wtf

 

Even clicking on “Explore Windows Live Photos” brings back to the error page.

 

arrrgghh

Evil swodniw

  

Funny stuff.

The snapshot below was taken from an email I got

And still, the bi-di business has gone completely south.

We’re at 2009. bi-di is a problem solved for quite some time now. 

 

LTR_RTL_WTF

Programmer Competency Matrix

  

I just got an email from a friend (thx Zeev) which simply contained a single URL:

http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-content/uploads/Programmer%20competency%20matrix.htm

 

Couldn’t come at a better time for me. We’re in the process of hiring new extraordinary people here at SHC Israel, and this matrix helps formalizing the things we want our candidates to know.

 

so, if you believe you’re a log(n) on quite a few of the fields, then please ping me

HAALP – In need of good SOA books

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hi guys and gals. I’m in need of a good SOA book, especially in relation with highly scaleable web applications.

What it should  not contain:  - HowTo use a specific technology/vendor tool/etc

What it should contain - detailed stuff about best practices, pitfalls, etc.

 

please drop a comment of send me an email

 

10x, K

And if we’re at it – RSB/MT/NSB

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Has anyone did a detailed comparison of MassTransit/RSB/NSB and is willing to share?

MSDN Killed my using directive

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I’m now sitting in a certain lecture by a well known MS speaker.

The title is “ASP.NET Hidden Gems”, but that’s not the point.

During the presentation the dude is showing nice things like Custom Build Providers, Custom Expression Builders, Virtual Path Provider (that’s a nice one), Session State Partitioning (nice), and other stuff.

This is all great and cool and nice and blah blah blah.

However, now he’s just showed how he’s using a CustomBuildProvider to “make data access more efficient”, by setting a custom build provider for data-set xsd files, creating cleaner Data objects instead of TypedDataSets.

That’s a very nice thing.

However, his demo code, splashed over two 100” mega screens, included a use of SqlConnection and DataReaders, without using “using”.

heck, he didn’t even dispose the objects on “finally”.

I mean - WTF?

That’s the reason I hate DEMO codes. People in the crowd is looking at that, and then they go ahead and write the same code in their day job. And then I get called in to fix it.

Was it so difficult for the guy to write better code? heck, the “using” keyword would have eliminated at least 4 lines from the demo, so it would even be more presentable.

I simply don’t get it.

New design to my search page

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I’ve revisited my google-ajax-enabled search page (at kenegozi.com)

homepage

It can still look better of course, but it is much better than the former one.

Now I need to revisit my blog’s design a wee bit …

btw, I use this page as the home page on all my browsers. It makes googling much faster and productive, and you are all invited to use it for your search needs. I try to keep it as lightweight as possible so it would load as fast as possible. Suggestions etc. are always welcome.

Be a Cathedral Builder

  

From Andy’spost:

you want your developers to be Cathedral Builders not Stone Cutters

Well one should not only strive to hire Cathedral Builders for his team, but also to be one himself.

So how you turn yourself into a Cathedral Builder?

It’s simple. Just be one.

So don’t whine on problems with the code/methodologies/technologies/etc. Instead you should come up with proposals and solutions for these problems.

You don’t have to be radical (we need a web server running Erlang), and you shouldn’t be negative (our methodology is crap. we need to act differently). Small incremental steps, and elegant solutions that integrate well with the current assets of the team, are likely to be accepted and valued by your team leader and managers.

How Did I Get Started In Software Development?

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I’ve been tagged by Mike Hadlow (Great blog - subscribe to it now, what are you waiting for?)

Ok, let’s go.

How old were you when you first started in programming?

My dad is one the IT dinosaurs. He have been doing the Punched card dance from early stages of public sector computing in Israel, and I guess I must have inherited the passion for programming. Before I got six, he bought me a ZX-Spectrum, alongside some BASIC beginners book in Hebrew and threw me into the deep water.

After a few months of getting comfy with the language, I’ve learned to read English and got my first serious programming book, one the tried to teach things like code reuse using GOTO and GOSUB.

I also had to learn some Assembler as the ZX’s BASIC was pretty much limited.

zx_spectrum

What was your first programming language? BASIC, as noted above

BASIC

What was the first real program you wrote? A simple yet effective word processing application, written in Turbo Pascal 5.5. I was about 16 then.

This word processor was for the sole purpose of aiding my older sister go through Law School. I needed a way to type and printing her seminars and there was no built in WP in MS-DOS but edlin.exe back then, and no Internet to download a WP from.

At 18 I wrote another program in Pascal, aimed at keeping track of membership payments for a local Bnei-Akiva Branch. I learned the hard way that building a DB engine by hand without any theoretical background, and without ever hearing about terms like “SQL”, “Relations”, “Transaction” and the like, is not a simple thing to do. By the time this application had enough features I have already left to recruit to the IDF, so it never got into production.

turbo_pascal

Then there was a gap of a few years during which I didn’t program until I was 24, and I needed to write my third and forth applications. They were in ACCESS, VBA and VB, written as part of my jobs in the army as a logistics officer. I needed a better inventory manager than the old MAGIC based that my unit had, and a better solution for keeping track of vacations utilisation of the staff.

There you go. Not only the first one, but the first four.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

What was your first professional programming gig?

After leaving the army, I taught myself C#, HTML and ASP.NET, registered as self employed and ran a few projects for a few clients. The first of which was a simple VBA based automation for an import/export dealer in the aviation industry. The application was automating the read of RFQ emails, looking up for matched data in their propriety Interbase driven DB, and then exported a report containing highly probable sale items. They liked it so much that they started adding features, and other business-helping apps. They still are a valued customer.

An interesting note here - the last time I have updated or fixed a bug on the first application was almost two years ago. And it’s still in daily use, so even though it’s coded in a way I’d call blasphemy today, with all the VB-ness scattered around, I still am very proud of this piece of code, as professionally it is rock solid, and not too difficult to maintain, and from business prospective it had a huge benefit for the client.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

I would have started even earlier :)

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Be open to criticism. If you program alone, then try to share as much code with the community as you can, by participating in open source projects. The best place to learn is from your own mistakes, pointed out by others.

I can certainly testify on myself, that I’ve learned a lot more when I was part of teams where I was not THE tech leader, be it on paid gigs or on OSS.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming? During University when I took “Introduction to Algorithms” (learning part I of “Introduction to Algorithms”) I had to build a Red-Black tree representation. Back then The only language I know well enough was VB, but I had write it in C++. I did know the basic syntax from my C background, and some vague knowledge of pointers and memory allocations, but that’s about it. The project was supposed to be written by a team of three, but I then decided that I had to learn C++ decently and write this alone, so I sat down for a long weekend, got myself a copy of the STL to learn by example, and produces a working generic RB-Tree implementation using Templates to allow generic keys in the tree.

When I sent it over to the other team members, all they had to do was to smoothen up the rough edges.

Again, it wasn’t very pretty, but I did prove a point to myself, with that little exercise.

Who am I calling out? In order to make the propagation of this topic even faster, I decided to tag 9 people (!):

On babies, entities, controllers and confidence votes

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The Sharks Here in Israel, there’s a reality/documentary TV show called “The Sharks”.

It’s about people who have some kind of a business idea, and are looking for investors.

Each entrepreneur gets a few minutes to present their idea and business plan in front of 4-5 well-known Israeli businessmen, trying to get their support in return for percentages of their project.

One can differentiate the totally bad projects with possibly OK projects, simply on the basis of a proper preparations. Some projects are simply vague ideas that popped up on someone’s head, without any business plan of any kind.

Then you have the projects that comes with a detailed business plan, market research, pricing policies and what-not. These are of course the ones that the Sharks (potential investors) show interest in. The interesting bit is that most of the times, instead of asking strictly business related questions, they tend give more importance to the actual usability of the proposed product/service/whatever. They try to get in the head of the potential consumers and look for Achilles’ heels from the user’s point of view.

Solving consumer problems The point is, that you cannot create a product or service to solve problems that you think that people have. You have to solve actual problems that potential consumers are facing.

Paraphrasing DHH from a presentation lately, “It’s not Rocket Surgery”. You should simply solve people’s problems, otherwise they won’t be interested.

self consumer Who is the better consumer than yourself?

Example: There’s this person I know, who will sell you baby carriers. They look very simple in first glance, but then you see that it’s actually pretty useful - it’s adjustable, you can re-use the same carrier in several carrying positions (low, high, front, back), and it’s comfortable for parent and baby. The thing is - she didn’t wake up one day with a crazy idea, hoping it’d match someone’s needs. She made one for herself and her baby, making it better with time, and then thought - ‘hey someone else might like it’

Going back to DHH and his presentation, he states there clearly that the whole RubyOnRails thing was simply something he needed for his day job, so it became very useful, as the consumer (himself) was giving him direct feedback during the development process.

Same can be said on many OSS projects, like NHibernate, the whole Castle stack and many more.

I can testify on AspView, which I created to make my day job easier and more fun, as I disliked WebForms and my employer insisted on ASP.NET and C# all around - that was my best shot. I got immediate feedbacks from the consumer (myself and my team members) so it stayed focused on solving consumer needs.

Demonstrate trust in your tools You should be trustworthy. I evangelise the use of good tools, and I name the Castle stack, NHibernate, Rhino Commons, and more as good tools. I can do this whole heartedly since I use these very tools for my day jobs, on paid projects, not only for pet projects.

And if you are not a consumer Take ASP.NET MVC. This project is being internally run by a team of developers, who their day job is to build this tool, not to use it. On the surface it presents a major problem, no consumer feedback.

The way they chose to solve this problem was pretty simple. Expose as much as you can to the public. Push potential users to play with the API, experiment with use cases, build extensions, whatnot. Continuously grab community input, incorporate it in the product, and get new feedback. All that has started from the earliest stages by ScottGu, then Phil Haack. The while team seam to be everywhere, from mailing lists to ALT.NET conferences, getting consumer input and building around it.

The outcome is that they can focus on solving consumer problems, and the progress of improvements is amazing. It got to the point that I have no problem at all with using ASP.NET MVC, even though I’m an active member in MonoRail. Personally I prefer MonoRail, but I really see ASP.NET MVC as a viable option, and recommend it as a possible solution.

Opposite examples Take the Entity Framework. I’ve been hearing about this beast from 2005. However being able to get the feel of it took way too long. Meanwhile it appear that a lot of stuff has been introduced into it, that might not even be interesting to consumers, while rendering fixing the consumers’ problems more difficult.

And as for trusting your own tools - I’ve heard once that Visual Source Safe was never used internally for development within Microsoft. I also don’t really believe that there is a single public major website under Microsoft’s umbrella that uses SqlDataSource, heavily customised GridView components and other widely demo-ed Webforms stuff.

Confidence Technologies like Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, not to mention the more experimental stuff like IronXYZ and F#, find their way into community review, and even to internal production use. Microsoft are voting confidence in these products, so do I.

ALT.Microsoft So as far for the notorious Vote of No Confidence in EF, I never have joined it as it simply make no sense imo. It simply does not interest me enough to even vote. They way I see it, EF belongs next to WebForms, while MVC/IronXYZ/F#/etc are legitimate ALT.NET

Cuz ALT.NET is not about opposing anyone. Definitely not MS - hey these guys brought us the CLR and BCL.

It’s also not about being the freedom guerilla fighters fighting the evil Corporate. Not at all.

I think that ALT.NET is a great idea, just like XP (Extreeme Programming), and like XP it has a bad name, as it implies ‘niche’, ‘alternative’, ‘scary’, ‘elitist’, ‘vane’.

It’s not.

It’s about good tools, built to help make us developers work better, and have more fun during. Parts of the DevDiv are as ALT.NET as it gets.

Laptop advice

  

I’ve been looking at getting a new laptop lately.

Currently my options are:

Dell Latitude 830 (15”)

Dell XPS 15”

Sony Vaio CR (14.1”)

I’ll probably go for a 8300/7500 cpu.

Centrino 2 rigs on Sony site are only for 13” and 16”, and I’ve seen none on Dell’s site

My main concern is with the clarity of the screen.

I am very happy with my Toshiba screen (Tecra A3 15”, matt, 1024X768). I don’t like the new trends of high resolution (tiny fonts) and glossy screens (I want to see my code, not my face. I’m too damn pretty - it’s distracting).

Any input is welcome

Name That Code quiz

  

A cute programming languages quiz.

It’d show you 12 snippets of code, and you’d have to guess the programming language the code is written in.

 

If you have only started coding in the late 90’s then you’re in trouble.

heck, even if you have started on late 80’s. I mean, really.

 

As I’ve been exposed to programming from a very early age, on the first half of the 80’s, and my father being and old time punching-cards hacker, and I also tend to reach for the new stuff these days, I managed to score a nice rounded 12/12 100 points.

 

Can you?

 

Name That CodeOnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Live, from Vista

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My poor old laptop has had a lot of problems lately, priming at ignoring any network connection yesterday and having many problems with svn and git sessions when the network was on, so I decided to re-install.

 

‘twas 1am, so I thought ‘what the heck - let’s try this vista thing at last’.

 

It was surprisingly a smooth experience. The initial setup identified almost all of the drivers, but the sound-card and the SD card reader. However, the auto updates (which took over an hour cuz there was apparently a lot to update) took care of the sound, and I got the SD driver from Texas Instrument’s site.

 

What I had to install to make the machine workable for day-to-day work:

still missing (no time) but essential:

 

btw, since I’ve installed VS2008 without going 2005 first and without the full SDKs, I ran into a problem with NAnt 0.86b1 - complaining about missing .NET 2.0 stuff.  It appear to be a known bug in NAnt, that has been fixed back on late 2007, so I’ve just switched to a nightly build of 0.86b2 and the problem did go away.  I need to make sure that it won’t affect my Castle build.

 

Didn’t have much to say here. I consider it a test post (see if Writer will work from Vista) but it beats the crap out of "TEST POST PLEASE IGNORE" …

That's the way to hire

  

There’s this startup company named DotSpots. They are hiring, and as a Fizz-Buzz test they have come up with challenges for prospective candidates to solve.

I currently am not into looking a new employer, but just for the sake of the puzzle, I wish I had some spare time to knock off these challenges. On first look they appear to require some sort of a backtracking greedy algorithm, so that could have been a great opportunity to get messy with F# …

(via Roy)

Javascript WTF

  

This is a piece of screenshot that you probably hopefully won’t see on sites I’m involved with:

document.write WTF

Daily Error WTF

  

Error - The current browser is either too old or too modern

All I wanted was to find a decent hotel in Barcelona, with the aid of my buddy Firefox

(from http://www.mygrouptour.com/)

Quote of the day: We Should Never F**king Deploy on a Friday

  

No explanation is needed

On Flying, Driving and Programming

  

Let’s talk about these three activities, or rather on aspects of them.

Assuming one want to get from London to Cambridge, by car. The directions would be something like “Take the M11 to north, leave at Junction 12 toward Cambridge and you’re there”.

One might require slightly more explicit instruction, such as “To get to the M11, you’d need to leave the M25 on junction 27”, or “On junction 12 you’d want to turn to the right toward Cambridge”.

At no point would someone need to be told to “Turn the steering wheel to the right” or “Do not forget to use the clutch when changing gears”.

When driving, there are:

When flying a small aircraft, there are several things that affect it’s movement:

There’s the Elevator which affects horizontal shifts, controlled by the moving the stick backwards and forwards.

There are the Ailerons which generates rolling motion, and controlled my moving the stick sideways.

There is the Rudder which controls the nose position, and controlled by kicking pedals with the pilot’s feet.

And on single motored aircraft, even changing the engine’s speed affects the “steering” as the radial movement of the propeller is inflicting different airflow on the wings, causing a slight difference in the elevation.

However, flight directions include things like “Fly to point A, use bearing X, keep altitude Y”. At most, a flying student would be told to keep the aircraft’s Nose at a specific position in the Horizon.

I remember that in flight school, when we were being taught about simple manoeuvres, the language used by the instructors was of the implicit intention kind. However, there was a guy that kept asking “so what am I supposed to do with the stick now?”. He of course was one of the first to be kicked out of there.

All of the above apply to programmers, too.

In forums and mailing lists, sometimes someone asks a question, that gets answered with the needed intention, but that someone keeps asking for the exact mechanics. For example:

Q: How can disable the controls on a web page after a certain button click?A (implicit intention): Hide the whole page with another, transparent element.

Q: How do I do that?A (explicit intention): Use DOM manipulation and DHTML to add a div with the size of the entire page, positioned over the page.

Q: How do I do that?

A (more explicit): some pseudo code.

Q: I tried to run this code you’ve sent but it throws errors. Can you please send me the correct code?A (mechanics): function disableControls() { … }

You get the point, right?

If not?

a. When asking for help, expect to get the intention. That usually should be enough.

b. If you really can’t figure out the code (at least to create an ‘almost working’ implementation) out of intention, then you probably are in the wrong business.

As for infrastructure - a driver does not have to know anything about Newton’s Laws of Motion. However a professional racing driver has to understand the basics of that in order to be as good as he needs to. And definitely not being troubles by the angle of the steering wheel. That should become naturally. Just as transferring intentions into working code should come naturally for a programmer.

"Don't use bold, please use strong, cuz if you use bold it's old and wrong"

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Another quote:

Please don’t use table even though they work fine,when it comes to indexing they give searches a hard time

and also

Check in all browsers, I do it directly, You got to make sure that it renders correctly

This should be in the curriculum for any webmasters 101 course

Documenting Castle, or Thank you Symon Rottem

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We, at Castle, are occasionally getting bashed at the lack of documentation. I think that the area most users are complaining about is Windsor and MonoRail, (as these two are evolving in the most rapid way).

My personal view on the matter is that since the whole Castle stack, and especially MonoRail and Windsor, are all about “zero friction” and “Convention over Configuration”, the easiest way is to lay hands on sample or oss code and apply that you your solution.

Anyway, in the Alt.NET uk thing that was at Conchango/London last month I’ve met one Symon Rottem. It appear that this guy know his way around tech-docs, and he had picked up that errand, and started putting effort in improving the overall documentation level for Castle, especially the User-Manual part (as the API actually is being generated and is quite good).

I’d also recommend his (young yet promising) blog. It’s on my Google-reader blogroll for quite some time, and I really need to add “Import OPML” to my blog so I’d be able to update the blogs list on the side panel here.

I'm Back Online

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Last Thursday I was informed by the organizers of alt.net UK conference that they have managed to squeeze me in, so I immediatly booked a flight to London, and have attendet.

I was superb, and I’ve written a few posts, but since I was not online during the last few days I had no chance of publishing ‘em. Hopefully they’ll get during the next few days.

A lot have also been piling up on my MonoRail and AspView “desktops” so I appreciate the patience of the users, and I promise to do my best to keep up with the requests and patches being sent to me …

Yet Another Supercool Macbook Edition

  

I wonder. Would this babe come with a T7700, 4GB and a 7200RPM?

HOWTO: Make Windows Live Writer Output XHTML Markup

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Problem:

 

Possible causes:

Setting XHTML output manually:

 

Thanks Mr. Joe Chang, from the Windows Live Writer team, who have pointed that out for me.

A Call for Improvements on Windows Live Writer

  

I’m writing this very post on Windows Live Writer.

In case you’d ask, I’m using the latest public version, which is not a Beta anymore (I think):

WLW version

I’ve also just recommended WLW for a new blogger.

however, there are still some annoying things here, that I might’ve liked fixed.

How I wish it was an Open Source product …

Comments are temporarily off

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Sorry.

I need to do that, at least for a few days.

If you want to leave a message, mail me:

blogat the-domain-name-of-this-blog (without the www part, of course …)

A new .NET blog in the sphere

  

Ithink I’m going to like this one, since he showed some (simple but interesting) ILDASM output on his second post.

Found him through JoeyDotNet.

UPDATE:

The link to D. P. Bullington’s blog is now fixed.

Hidden Networks Promotion - Find Developers Where They Hang Out

  

The idea behind Hidden Networks is great.

They’ve added that simple job board (here, on the right. If you’re on a feed reader, go the HTML version and look it up) that shows openings near the reader’s (that’s you) location.

That way, recruiters gets exposure on the places where developers who are interested in Learning New Stuff hang out.

If they read Ayende (or me), then you might want them for your team.

And now - there’s a promotion code.

Quote that: 100OFF0710

And get a 100$ off your first ad.

This offer is good until the end of the month (31/10/2007).

The uncool wedding invitee, or, blogging on an old PDA

   , 

It’s time to reveal one of my major handicaps, that didn’t make it to my “five things you didn’t know about me” list:

I can’t dance.I hate to dance.I won’t dance.

Therefore: I am getting bored at weddings.

Yesterday at a wedding party of a good friend of ours, I found myself sitting at the table by myself, with only my old PDA to accompany me.

So I wrotea post about the new release of AspView.

I would’ve written that one, too, however the PDA went low on battery, so I’ve had to find something else to do.

That was, drawing some domain design concepts for a portion of my new project at Music Glue, not on napkins, but rather on the back side of my checkbook …

When we went home, the happy groom and bride hugged and thanked Sarit who was dancing all night like a party animal, and then gave me The Look. Yep, That one. That say “You’d better leave a fine present as no happiness came from your’s tonight”.

Must I install the new version?

  

Needless to say that I did not like that message at all:

Must install new version

I liked the old UI better. Why can’t I continue use it, and just skip the new stuff?

It was a craic*

   , 

Just been back from a few days in Ireland, where I went with Sarit for a vacation, and for getting to a clearer state of mind. At least on that level it proved to be very productive,as I came back with more than a few solutions to problems I’ve been facing ,and even some new ideas for expanding the line of servicesthat we, at Music Glue, can provide.

Just so you’d understand how muse-ful can Ireland be:

Waterfall at Wicklow

and:

View from Valetia Island

(All pictures were taken on a Canon S3 IS Camera - a perfect thing for a photo-newbie like me)

I’ll upload some more pictures in the next days. Actually, I guess it is high time I’ll get me a proper image sharing service subscription.

Any recommendation of a free (or low cost) ones?

I guess my priorities would be:

High availability;

Fast;

Easy to use (allow multiple uploads, allow easy post-upload tagging);

More pictures to come …

*Craic: Irish word for fun/enjoyment that has been brought into the English language. usu. when mixed with alcohol and/or music. source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=craic

Typing Speed (or, Do I Need Resharper For Text?)

  

I’ve just tried the type speed test that I hadread about on Aaron’s blog.

My results (not excelled I’m afraid):

YOUR RESULTS ARE: Number of words typed: 145Test duration: 3 minSpeed: 48.6 words/min. (243 keystrokes/min.)Error penalty: 10Accuracy: 93.1%

For my defense I’d add that although I’m typing English since I was about 6 years of old, 90% of that typingwas inside of some kind of an IDE, and it was in languages such as BASIC, C and Pascal, rather than English. Only on the last year when I started blogging, the last half of a year when joined the Castle community, and the last couple of month of working at Music Glue, have I really done some proper typing in English…

So, maybe I typed slowly, but it was maintainable and testable.

Happy New Year Everyone

  

Some of you might know that it’s Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) tonight.

I wish you all a great year, filled with happiness, joy, and high quality code. May you need not debug code horrors this year …

A year of improvement and becoming better at being who you are, and what you do.

Happy New Year

And thank’s to Idan Gross (WWW.IDANGROSS.COM) for the lovely picture.

On Scheduling (and More)

  

Just read Joel Spolsy’s interview at ACM Queue (through his blog).

I especially liked part 3 where he explains about Evidence Based Scheduling.

For example - why overestimated tasks won’t cover for underestimated tasks:

But when you think about software tasks, when things go wrong, they take three or four times longer than expected. If I told you I’ve got an eight-hour feature, it’s about eight hours of work. Now, could it take eight hours? Yes. Could it take six hours? Sure. Could it take two days? Definitely. Could it take a week? Yes, probably with a 10 percent probability because you’ve discovered some huge problem, and it’s a new thing you have to write code for, and you just completely forgot about it and it’s going to take you a week. Now, could it take zero? No, that’s impossible. Could it take negative 32 hours? It could never take negative 32 hours. You can go over 32 hours; you just can’t go under by 32 hours because that would cause you to go backwards in time.

Well said and written down, I’m going to show that to the next manager who’d insist on a months long schedule, based on hours long tasks.

To Disable, Or Not To Disable (Comments)

  

I used to get a lot of spam through pingbacks/trackbacks, so I turned them off. Actually, on my current blog engine, they are not even implemented.

Reading this post from Joel Spolsky, I am thinking about disabling comments altogether (I do not get many, anyway), so if anybody would like to comment, she’ll send me an email (to ‘blog at mydomain-name’) or use a “contact me” form, and if it will be something worthwhile, I’ll do a followup post with the important comments that my alert reader has sent me.

What you think? (you can say that in an email, and even through a comment ;) )

Things I Learned About Software

   , 

Following Scott’s post, here are my listings (is four okay?):

Fourthings I learned about software (in University, not College):

  1. If you’ll help a friend with a red-black tree implementation in C++, he’d eventually help you with an assembler precompiler in C.

  2. Software Engineering is the only course where you can write a fully working program, with no compile warnings, with all tests green, and still get 60 out of a 100. (I’m sorry that my printing method was named ToString, while supposedly in ADA I should name itPut to keep convention with the language)

  3. The good looking gals usually do not attend CS classes. If they do, they take DB Basics and DBMS implementations.

  4. Watefall / BUFD is the ONLY WAY to manage software projects. I’ve had a 6 points course that dealt almost only on that. And they gave me 10% off the grade for doing a final design document without the proper fonts and colors.

Three things I learned about software while not in the university:

  1. A code you write alone is bad. At least get someone to do code-review, and at best, pair program, or open-source your code so it’d get looked at.

  2. You can either eat Pizzas,or have a loot of sugar-loaded-coffe mugs. If you do both, you’ll get fat. (that ofcourse, unless you are a gal who attended a non DB related CS course, and then you’re screwed anyway).

  3. O.O. languages is not the only way to go. Static typing is not always the best thing. Javascipt is actually a programming language.

  4. Scrum / XP / TDD / IoC / DI /MVC / UnitOfWork

I am using live.com from the wrong reason

  

How strange.

After the GoogleReader failure last week, now it seems that every google site is down. I cannot access google.com, google.co.il, gmail, reader, or calendar. my own search page that uses google ajax search api is down, too.

So I’m bound to use live.com for now. Not too bad it is, however a bit slower than google.com, and way slower than my own google-driven kenegozi.com

image

I hope gmail will be back soon.

UPDATE:

google analytics is down, too. It’s making my blog uneasy.

Just a thougt. Is it happening only here?has my router started disliking google to the point of refusing network connections?

UPDATE:

google is back, alive and kicking.

I can finish the email I’m was working on when it went down, and finally send it. Smashing. (hey - it’s 3:30am here, so cut me some slack)

That Old Marshmallow Maze Spell

  

That’s why Steve Yegge is my favorite blogger.

I say that one should not only know WHAT he’s talking about, but one should also know HOW to say what he has to say.

Yellow error page, on a microsoft site

  

No, it’s not a hosts file hack, but rather a true incident of yellow screen in one of microsoft’s sites.

Happened to me last week,I think while trying to log into hotmail.

Shut up I hack you

  

It’s so funny. Almost chocked on my dinner over that one.

Would you have notified the poor bustard of his mistake in time?

I say it’s a clear case of Zabasho.

(found it on Roy Osherove’s blog).

LOLCODE

  

A rather different programming language

http://lolcode.com/

Funny.

(from codeproject’s lounge)

Meetup vs Google

  

This one made me laugh. Apparently, meetup is trying to convince potential employees that working for them is even better than working for Google.

One of the best recruitment ads I’ve ever seen.

If they were not java-ing, I’d even consider applying …

A little excerpt:

G: At Google, after you consume all the Google Food you can eat, you will enjoy Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.You will not be forced to interact with those without ample access to Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.

M: At Meetup, there are no options when flushing the toilet.You will be forced to interact with the un-cleansed and un-oscillated.

G: At Google, a few Googlers wish they were at a fast-growing company where they can personally still make a huge difference.

M: At Meetup, some Meetuppers wish we had a toilet like the Googleplex.

(saw it on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

Google Maps vs. Microsoft Live Maps

  

My dear Sarit is going this Sunday on a business trip to IBM offices at Budapest, Hungary.

So we sat today to get some info on the hotel she’ll be staying at (Mercure), and the distance from there to the main attractions (a.k.a. Shopping Malls).

Since I was already on a live.com page (I signed her up to a new messenger account since she likes the messenger UI), I went to look for the address on maps.live.com.

The first thing I have noticed is the slick design and cool UI features. It just looks good.

So I went on for the search. Typing the exact address “1052 Budapest, Váci utca 20, Hungary” (note the explicit inclusion of the words “Budapest” and “Hungary”), sent me here: focusing on the funny part:

Hmm. not so promising.

Without further ado, I found myself typing “maps.google.com”.

The same old boring/ugly/simple google-y look.

Now, typing the same query in the input box gave me:focusing on the place itself:Ta Dam.

I then tried it with different typos. The “Did you mean” thing worked like a charm.

Once again, it seams that MS is concentrating the efforts on the slick UI and cool features, while google is more concentrated on the actual service.

I’d say it’s clearly a knockout.

btw, the shopping mall turned out to be VERY close:

I’ll be joining her next Friday for the weekend. Anyone for the good thing to see/do on Budapest? (I’m going for the less toured and more exciting things)

Backing up a hosted SQL Server DB

   ,  , 

As you already have probably noticed by now, I did some renovation on my blog.

Among other things, it is now being served froma SQL Server database, rather than form the daBlog xml files.

One caveat of this, is the fact that backuping the blog’s content became much harder. Since I have no access to db backups, I neede to find a way to generate the INSERT scripts that will enable me recreationg the content if it would be needed.

My first try-out was the Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard, that I saw at Scott Gu’s blog

This tool is meant to create the script form a local dev db, in order to make it run on the remote one. Actually you can make it run on the remote one, nd save the generated sql file locally, for backup purposes.

I tried it up, but it send some nasty .NET break dialogs.It however managed to create A script, that I’m yet to check for it’s usability.

Nice tool. But I’ll look for something that is pure t-sql so it’d be easier to run (maybe automated every once in a while)

The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation

   , 

Another dumb error message.

While installing ActiveWriter, it asked me to install DslToolsRedist. Trying to do so raised the said error message. I was on my way to shot the admin, but then googled a bit, and found out on http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/tm.asp?m=8872&mpage=1that it is caused by prior installations of he same product that was not fully removed from the registry while uninstalled. Searching “DSL” in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\ showed me that a previous CTP left some dirt in my registry. Removed that key, reinstalled DslToolsand the ActiveWriter magic could finally started.

And the award for "The Best SQL Where Clause" goes to ...

  

It’s real. I took it from SQL profiler on a production database, ofa very popular HR software.The query should search for people withgiven name and surname.

WHERE(1=0OR ( Name= 'Ken Egozi' )OR ( Name= 'Egozi Ken' )OR ( Name= 'Ken Egozi' )OR ( NameLIKE'%Ken Egozi%' )OR ( NameLIKE'%Egozi Ken%' )OR ( NameLIKE'%Ken%' AND Name LIKE '%Egozi%' )OR ( NameLIKE'%Egozi%' AND Name LIKE '%Ken%' ))

A good laugh what I like for my birthday. (according to the Hebrew Calendar, it was yesterday)

We are hiring

  

Moran has decided to move on, so now we’re hiring a new teammate for my team.

What do we do?The team is an in-house startup (which means that we have no V.C. no our back, and the funding is based on the other branches of the corporate - so we havea kind offreedom to do really exciting stuff, and use cutting edge technologiesthat WE choose). We are currently working on several websites that lives in thearea of public-content and social networking. Call it web 2.0 if you like. The team is small and intimate, and contains the corporate V.P. Business Development, me, and you. In addition to our main line of work, we also do some maintenance for the corporate’s IT systems, mainly on the integration of our recruitment site (www.gotfriends.co.il) with the inner H.R.system, HumaNet.

Where are we located?We are placed at the Diamond Exchange Area, in Ramat-Gan, Israel.

What technologies we currently use?- On the client side: cross-browser valid XHTML, Javascript (using prototype.js, script.aculo.us, YUI and other cool js libraries);- On the server side: Castle MonoRail, which is an ASP.NET port for RubyOnRails, with AspView as view-engine, and Castle ActiveRecord over NHibernate for OR/M. The main language is C# 2.0, but any CLI compliant language is okay (that means currently VB.NET and Boo, and also PHP5 and Ruby since they now have compilers for .NET in alpha/beta stages);- On the DB side: SQL Server 2005;- On the source control management: Subversion, with TortoiseSvn;

What will you do?You will become in charge of one of the websites. That means that you’d know it’s architecture, it’s ERD, it’s Javascript hacks and whatever. You’ll be a part of the decision making process for the site’s development, and the main coder for that project. In time, you’d do code-reviews on my work, just as I’ll review your’s. You’ll investigate new technologies to incorporate in our development process.

What you’ll need to know to be productive on my team?- Javascript, to the level of prototyping;- C# 2.0, including Anonymous Delegates, Generics and Reflection;- Strong OO knowledge and concepts;- Design efficient and normalized DB schemas.;- SQL to the level of complex nested queries, advanced SQL 2005 features (WITH, PIVOT, etc.), and complex data constraints using triggers;- ActiveRecord and MonoRail, including Hibernate’s HQL language;You’d have working skills with all of the above, and master at least two.

Who are you?You are a person with a passion for coding. You have high learning capabilities, and you really believe that you are, or can be, a Great Developer. You always seek to learn new things. It is probably not uncommon for you to try and find a better queue algorithm while you’re at the supermarket line to the cashier.You are not afraid of new programming languages. And most important, you are a easy-going and friendly, and able to remain like that even when on tight schedule or afterdiscoveringa horrifying bug in your code, at 10pm.

What you have done so far?You did some web development., and know your way aroundXHTML, DHTML, Javascript, etc. You are proficient in a mainstream high level language, preferably one of those:.NET (C#, VB.NET, Boo), ruby, java orpython. You are skilled with at least oneServer-Side technology, be itASP.NET, J2EE, PHP, RoR, or ASP3. You haveGood SQL skills. Not only CRUD stuff, but alsoknowledge of a mainstream DBMS DDL, nested queries, triggers, system tables, etc. MS-SQL Server 2005 is preferred. It will be nice if you have some experience with ActionScript or any other Flash language.

How do you apply?Just send me an email, to “kene AT sqlink dOt com” .

What it takes to become a "great developer"

  

Oren has blogged about his “10 rules” for that.True words.My 0.02$ are:11. Believe in yourself and in your ability to become a “great developer”.12. Be able to accept changes. 13. Be able to accept that the solution you are familiar with is not the “silver bullet” for every scenario. 14. Do not be afraid of new technologies - there are programming languages without curly brackets, and they be a better solution for your problem.15. Set high standards for yourself.16. Motivate yourself to keep those high standards. You can either start a blog, initiate a tech-y startup, or marry someone with a Polish mom. Anything that would drive to to excel.

Nullable Object Must Have a Value

  

Must it? Are you sure?

Well, this is a screenshot taken today by my colleague, Moran Benisty (aka the localhost blogger):

Nullable object must have a value

Trackbacks are off

  

Sorry. To much spam.

Wireless Enregy Transfer

  

I’ve read an interesting post today on Scientific American.

They say that researchers are after a way to deliver power wirelessly to devices.

So in the near future I’ll be able to use my laptop without worrying for power supply cords. Just turn it on and start to work. no need to dim the screen or scale down the cpu.

Israeli Bloggers Dinner

  

Omer Van Kloeten has initiated (with Ayende) an Israeli Bloggers Dinner.

If you’re intersted, leave a comment on his post.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

  

A nice page made available by NASA is showing an astronomy related picture each day.

I liked today’s and yesterday’s pictures a lot.

Walking on the safe side

  

Here is a warning that IE7 poped up on me on hattrick:

This website wants to run the following add-on ‘MSXML 5.0’ from ‘Microsoft Corporation (unverified publisher)’ …

huh?

How many pixels do you need? (or "my pixel in bigger than yours")

  

For all of you HDTV / 10MegaPixel Cameras / 22” 5000X4000 screens - you should read this about the human eye’s resolution

It relates nicely to the single pixel camera thingie.

On Wheels and Squares

   ,  , 

On a small debate with a friend, about weather he should design and implement a Data Access Layer himself, or use an existing framework, I came across a piece by Ayende about 25 Reasons Not To Write Your Own Object Relational Mapper.

I’d like to add a quote from Code Complete 2 about programmers who are reluctant to read (and use) existing solutions to known problems (on p. 823):

… even if you want to reinvent the wheel, you can’t count on success. You might reinvent the square instead.

It’s definitely not a Dave Barry kinda funny punch line, however it’s very much to-the-point.

A trip to Rhodes - Preface

  

I’ve been on a trip to Rhodes for the last few days, so no progress on Monorail or any other technical stuff was happening, but I do have a few pictures to share. It would take some time to post, since I have some projects that needs some working on, but eventually you’ll be able to see the great pictures (taken on my lousy nokia phone’s camera) and read some (not so funny) stories.

Good Agile, Bad Agile

  

UPDATED:The linkes that was reported broken are now fixed. I hope.

Steve Yegge has done it again.

I mean, he is starting another war, after the one he started on his notorious post: “Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns”.

Now he’s after the Agile stuff.

You can agree with him, or disagree, but you must accept that:

a. He is a very funny writer,

b. He has a point. If you think the opposite way, you should be familiar with hisarguments, in order to know yours better,

c. It seams great towork for Goggle, eve though he insiststhat he’s not working as a recruiter.

I’dwarmly advise onreading his blog rss-ly, so you won’t miss any of his witty stuff.

Voidclass2 theme on dasBlog 1.9 - fix for the comments

  

I’ll describe here the fix I’ve applied to the VoidClass2 theme, that was supplied with dasBlog 1.9, and that I use here.

The problem: When viewing a post with it’s comments, the comments and the comments box (where you can add new comments) are hidden way down the scroll. You click on “view comments” and you see only the post, until you’ll scroll a bit downward.

The reason: The theme uses css positioning instead of table positioning, and the sidebar (the one with the blogroll, categories view, etc.) is floating over the main content area. The good thing is that when the sidebar has ended, there is a lot more room for the content, but since the comments are taking a 100% width of the content area, and there is no room (since the sidebar takes some room), the comments are pushed down below the point where the sidebar ends.

The solution:

Edit the CommentViewBox.ascx file (on the blog’s root):1. Fixing the “add comment” area width - note the new width value (highlighted): <TABLEclass=”commentViewTableStyle” id=”commentViewTable” cellSpacing=”1” cellPadding=”1” border=”0” runat=”server” width=”70%”>2. Adding a class to the comment area’s div - the new stuff is highlighted: <div runat=”server” id=”commentViewContent” class=”commentViewContent”>

Edit the style.css file from the theme’s folder, and add the following text: /* Fix by ken egozi - comments view didn’t fit in the content area // needs a fix in CommentsViewBox.ascx too, for the “add comment” section */.commentViewContent {width: 70%;}Now it should be fine.

lemme know if it didn’t work out for you.

Using Windows Live Writer for the first time

  

on dasBlog 1.8 it didn’t work for me for some reason, so now I’m tetsing it on 1.9.

The features are cool. It’s nice to work offline on my desktop, but have all of the css as I’m writing directly to the blog’s page.

I’ve downloaded a few Code Highlight Formatters plugins. The one that seams less buggy is Highlight4Writer. It’s Nice, and I could easily edit the template it’s generating, to add a div with class=Code so it’l get the nice CSS I’ve applied for code blocks.

This is a test:

class Test { void JustASimple(string test) { to = test; ThePlugin(); } }

EDITED: It’s buggy, too. all of the line brakes and spaces was removed when I moved to Html View and back. I’ll have to find another one.

Now I’m testing CodeFormat from ThinkStar.de

   1:  class ThisIs

   2:  {

   3:  void JustAnother(string test)

   4:      {

   5:      }

   6:  }

A lot better. I’ve added some stuff to my theme’s style.css file, like removing padding and marging from <pre> tags, and applying all of Code class attributes to the generated CodeFormatContainer class. I like the line numbering option, too.

Trying some aspx stuff:

   1:  &lt;asp:TextBox runat="Server"&gt;&lt;/asp:TextBox&gt;

less cool, but still works.

I’d like to teach it Boo and brail. Hope to have a little time for that.

Now I’ll add an image and test the upload ability:

Ken Egozi - That's me !

Like a charm, and note the nice drop shadow.

tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW

DasBlog 1.9 - (almost) working

  

So I’ve had some issues with perrmisions.

I’ve had some issues with the forms authentication, I’ve changed the path attribute to /Blog and it screwed everything up. changed back to “/” and now it works.

I’ve have to do 3 more things, all related to the theme.

  1. Setup the google analytics thingie into the hometemplate.

  2. Fix the annoying thing with adding comments. I guess the textboxes are set to width=100% or something like that, and since the right colums seams to be floating and taking some room of the main div, the “add comments” section is pushed downward and it look “buggie” (hey, I wanted to add a comment but I see an empty content page. Oh, I should scroll down, Hmm Silly me.).

  3. Do some styling.

I like this theme for it’s relatively clean HTML and css based positioning.

Finally - DasBlog 1.9 is out

  

I’ve mention before that my current DasBlog installation isnt very stable. Some of my readers have complaints about slow responsiveness, problems with commenting and other stuff that do not work as smoothly as should.

I was on the verge of trying something else (.text or even implementing a light blogging engine as a MonoRails showcase), but I’ll give DasBlog 1.9 a shot, since it has loads of features that I do not have the time to implement right now, and I do find DasBlog as a darn greatpiece of code.

You can find a detailed post on the matter at Scott Hansleman’s blog.

So, my site canbe unstable for the next few hours (days?) untilI’ll finish the upgrade (including the backup of the current folders, and uploading the new version on a96kbits upload stream from Israel to the hosting farm located at Seattle, WA. I hope the files can swim all they way up there :) ).

Without furture ado - let’s the upgrade begin

0.999... equals 1

  

Here’s something for your mind to chew on for the weekend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_0.999…_equals_1

in other words: output ‘true’ if 0.999.Equals(1) btw, does this means that Boo == Bp?

OOP vs. Functional languages - the epic story

  

Argueable, but smart and funny.

If you’re into Programming Languages, read this. You can agree or disagree, but it would open your mind. Even if you won’t be convinced, you’d have better arguments to stay on your way.

btw, ppl there seam to imply that all the said arguments are valid for C# as well as Java, but I think that C#3.0 is going in the right way to be more dynamic, yet robust and strict enough to be standartized among different developers.

Prime Math and the Base 6 pattern

  

If your’e into mathematics, then This postcould be of interest for you.

Computer Science and Math go together, so I thing it’s interesting. However, for the ppl that are really into math, this thing is kinda like the simplest databinding for us IT developers … Let’s hope that the hardcore mathematicians somtimes get all excited about some something that’s trivial for us …

The Programmer's Bill Of Rights

  

Take a look at the Programmer’s Bill Of Rights by Jeff Atwood.

Couldn’t agree more.

I’t all about productivity.

Found it on Ayende’s Blog

System.Net.Mail.MailMessage.AlternateView - strange documentation

   , 

Check this out.

I’ve wanted to send emails, and have messages with both plain text and html views. A quick look at MSDN have braught this up, and it looked good. Waydago MSFT - good work.

However, a strange exception occured in runtime, and after a little check it was obvious that the constructor used in MSDN’s doc is just NOT THERE.

This guy also had the same problem, and someone there pointer out the solution. There is a static method to create an instance of a AlternateView from a string that represents a message’s body. It’s called CreateAlternateViewFromStringand It’s nice to have it.

Mistakes in docs are exceptable, however, the guy braught it up last January, and MSFT didn’t fix the doc until now.

Strange it is.

Atlas naming game

   ,  , 

There is a nice post about naming the Atlas package, at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/ssmith/archive/2006/08/16/Atlas_Naming_Game.aspx

There are some funny comments there, so do not miss.

And that is my comment:

“I think that too descriptive names suck.

I’d go with any non-descriptive name, such as the ones MS uses as codenames (I loved Avalon and so on).I believe that from the marketing point of view, non-descriptive catchy names ar far better than the others.It’s like dice.com and monster.com doesn’t include “job” in their name.

But since MS are determined to use descriptive names, at least they should concentrate on the “what” and not on the “how”.so “Async XmlHttp Enabled Web Apps” (AXEWA ?) is bad, while “Dynamic Web Browsing” is better.”

Test Driven Development (TDD) - a beginning of a series by Oren Ellenbogen

  

My mate, Oren, has recently started digging deep into TDD, with the coaching of Roy Osherov, and started giving his insights on his blog.

As Roy mentiones on his blog, Oren’s way of writing about his experience with TDD, is clear and enjoyable, therefore I’d recommend on reading is upcoming posts on the subject. It’s going to be fun, I promise.

updated:The link to Oren’s first post was fixed, and I am adding two more links: to the series preface, and to the second post in the series.

l3end

  

I’d like to recommend on a rock band named Bend, from NY city.

Established by a friend of mine, Yoav Erez, they make great indie rock music, and they’re on a struggle for a first album.

From AcidPlanet.com: “Bend spent the winter of 2006 fine tuning its songs about love and life, building on the British pop influences of bands like Coldplay and Radiohead, who inspired the band’s inception earlier that previous year.”

Their website is at http://bend.cc.

So listen to their demos on their site and on AcidPlanet, MySpace and Stage.co.il, and if you’re in NY city, try to catch a show. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed

Hacked !

  

I’ve just been hacked !! I feel sooo important …

Gosh, my site is hacked

Tech-Ed 2006 in Eilat, Israel

  

Just got back from Eilat.

It was my first-time at a Tech-Ed event and I’d like to thank my bosses at SQLink that gave me the opportunity to go there, after only about half a year in the company.I am very impressed by the level of the organization. Everything there as ticking to the second, from the gr8 sessions, through the transportation system, and of course, the famous beach party …

I went there with my Manager (Moty), my CTO (Roee) and my colleage (Oren). We’ve all learned a lot, and had some fun (check Oren’s blog for details in the next few days - He brought a magical non eating batteries kind’ a digital camera along with us).

It was my first experience meeting the MS people that actually have a lot of influence on the way we all code, being the ones that design and implement core features of the development frameworks, and even of the programming languages themselves.

I’ll update this post once I’ve settled from the trip (including a lot of petting to my 3 cats …).

I’ve also had a little time there to draft some messages I’ve wanted to post here during the last two months. I hope I’ll upload some of that during the upcoming weekend, and the week that follows. I hope. That I will post, not that the week will follow, cuz weeks usually follows weekends, but I do not usually post more that one post a week. I hope, too, that this would change. Not the week-following-weekend-following-week thingy, but the posting habits of mine.

Googled up first. That's a first !!!

  

I’ve just checked activity on the blog, using the blog’s backoffice, and I’ve found out that google searches came up with this blog for some people searches today. I’ve picked one of the searches, and found out that I was first on google !!!

Thumbs up !!! To me, and of course, to newtelligence guys who’ve designed and wrote the dasBlog engine.

And if you do not believe me (I find it hard to. Not generally of course, since I’m a decent reliable person most of the time, but the matter of the little googled I’ve surprisingly gained), attached here is a snapshot:

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