tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-125367182011-04-21T16:46:16.457-05:00A place to talk about writing software, working as a consultant, and in depth analysis of Office Space.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.comBlogger751100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1148214649299405722006-05-21T07:30:00.000-05:002006-05-21T07:30:58.483-05:00

You should be automatically forwarded to my new URL in a couple seconds, but in case you happen to read my blog using an RSS Reader, my blog has moved. You can now find me at http://www.thecodingmonkey.net

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1147890950482102692006-05-17T13:35:00.000-05:002006-05-17T14:00:34.193-05:00

Scott Hanselman (recently added to my Blogroll by the way) points to this absolutely fantastic post:With the amount of crap being vomited up by his Ethernet connection -- all day, every day -- it's tough to walk away from the spigot for fear that he'll return to waist-deep water. Ethan reads his mail in real-time to avoid being greeted by a hundred-message pile-up when he gets back from lunch.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1147817070111905102006-05-16T16:58:00.000-05:002006-05-16T17:04:30.130-05:00

My boss at the consulting company sent me a questionnaire asking me to place 10 things in order of importance as far as what motivates me. There was a list of 10 things like base salary, time off, interesting work, etc. with fancy little combo boxes next to each one so I could put a number next to them. Someone in HR I'm sure put in a good amount of time figuring out how forms in Word

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1147463733458445502006-05-14T11:33:00.000-05:002006-05-14T11:32:44.400-05:00

OH. MY. GOD! It's the Code Monkey Song! This is a must download!Via The Sells Brothers.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1146059372961961932006-04-26T08:49:00.000-05:002006-04-26T08:49:33.023-05:00

I have another review up at BlogCritics.org, this time on Visual Basic 2005 in a Nutshell... "No, this is me in a nutshell: 'Help! I'm in a nutshell! How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell? What kind of shell has a nut like this?'"

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1145987890523912792006-04-25T12:55:00.000-05:002006-04-25T12:58:10.546-05:00

I absolutely hate, with a vengeance, any website that emails your password to you after you sign up for services with them. Email is not secure you jerk wads! And if I happen to be using Gmail, then that email you sent me, even if I delete it, will probably sit in their cache forever to be subpoenaed by who knows what agency somewhere.Here's a clue. I just had to type my password twice. I

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1145981200564949792006-04-25T10:51:00.000-05:002006-04-25T21:52:51.023-05:00

I felt like last weekend was cut short. Saturday was definitely the most gorgeous day out of the two, and I spent the entire thing indoors at the WI-INETA Deeper in .NET conference. I suppose I shouldn't complain, since it was free, and 4 out of the 5 speakers were pretty good. I even got a free book out of the deal (even though I'm getting a ton through BlogCritics these days). So why am I

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1144988486194879042006-04-13T23:21:00.000-05:002006-04-13T23:23:32.740-05:00

"... condemn and complain... and most fools do."- Dale CarnegieI have another review up at BlogCritics.org, on The Visual Basic 2005 Jumpstart from O'Reilly.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1144520340032908932006-04-08T13:18:00.000-05:002006-04-08T13:20:20.466-05:00

As Mel Brooks once said, "Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together." But we can certainly write. Check out my latest review on BlogCritics.org of the "C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition".

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1144419308159333152006-04-07T09:15:00.000-05:002006-04-07T09:15:43.683-05:00

Thanks to Virginia Postrel for pointing out this rather interesting post about the aesthetics of code:What prompted this post--and it's whimsical title--is a post by Jamis Buck titled Beautiful code, test first, which includes the following:"He was telling me how he feels like he has to sit and tweak his code over and over until it not only acts right, but looks right. It cannot be merely

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1144332508774110852006-04-06T09:04:00.000-05:002006-04-06T09:52:41.710-05:00

One of my favorite quick jokes is to talk about TLA's. Usually when I say something like, "Great, another TLA", someone will furrow their brow a little and look at me kind of strange. That's my clue that they don't know what TLA stands for. I'll then look at them with a smile and say, "That's a Three Letter Acronym". Usually there will be a pause, and then they'll laugh.TLA's abound in the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1144096923986481072006-04-03T15:36:00.000-05:002006-04-03T15:42:04.003-05:00

So this weekend, my client had a major software deploy to production. After all the months of development, and all the interim builds for testing, the final build number for the software that went to production was Build 69. Our build numbers start at 1, and increment automatically for each official build.Apparently, when the team business manager saw this, she asked the development team lead (

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1143676729224481442006-03-29T17:50:00.000-06:002006-03-29T17:58:49.240-06:00

Have you ever been in Windows Explorer, and while clicking here and there, you accidentally click and drag a folder into another folder? Pretty common right? No real harm... all you have to do is go in and move it back.Now imagine coming in to work one morning, logging in, opening Visual Studio, and finding out that your Visual Source Safe repository for your project is missing. After placing

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1143566214507854522006-03-28T11:16:00.000-06:002006-03-28T11:19:05.256-06:00

There is a reason why companies prefer Microsoft over Apple. The NY Times tries to bill legacy support as bad:As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1143412208724372262006-03-26T16:29:00.000-06:002006-03-26T16:30:08.753-06:00

As Joseph Addison once said, "There is no defense against criticism except obscurity." And with that said, you can find my latest review up at BlogCritics.org. It's a review of the new O'Reilly book, Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1143211438813968782006-03-24T08:41:00.000-06:002006-03-24T10:16:00.970-06:00

One of my favorite quotes about software is from Michael Sinz:Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.If you've programed in Visual Basic.NET for any length of time, you soon realize that this is a language that has to make a lot of child support payments. Yesterday I had to answer a question from a colleague about yet another bastard child

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1143062933517610222006-03-22T15:12:00.000-06:002006-03-22T15:28:53.536-06:00

One of the projects that I sometimes still get dragged back into now and then is about a week and a half from going to production. This is a fun time when the last of the defects are quickly being fixed, and testers scramble around to run the last of their scripts. Then you see a defect that is in code that you know has been working for a long time. After investigating the defect for a bit,

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1142605092353635462006-03-17T08:11:00.000-06:002006-03-17T08:18:12.426-06:00

Have you ever written a really bad joke or pun into an email, and not realize how awful it was until after you hit send? Yesterday, I happened to put this in an email response:Just wanted to make sure I didn't get lost in the void... orthe void* for that matter.If that person didn't know I was a geek before... he does now.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1142000575670625362006-03-10T08:22:00.000-06:002006-03-10T08:28:32.986-06:00

With out this guy, Dilbert would have never been popular:Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called 'monolithic insanity.'Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1141409652558870972006-03-03T12:14:00.000-06:002006-03-03T12:14:44.590-06:00

This seems like a good idea, except for what's included in the kit: For only $14.95, you can turn your own drab office space into 'dazzling digs.' That's the promise of a soon-to-be-released kit, Pimp My Cubicle. With a title spun off the popular MTV show 'Pimp My Ride,' the kit will be released March 14, providing office workers with gold pushpins, a mini disco ball, a dollar-sign paperweight,

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1141163784993375562006-02-28T15:54:00.000-06:002006-02-28T15:56:25.013-06:00

Here is a fun one. I got this error message when I opened up a VB.NET project in Visual Studio 2003 that was not part of a Visual Source Safe repository (or any source code control system for that matter):Made me double take.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1140641770722905772006-02-22T14:52:00.000-06:002006-02-22T14:56:39.926-06:00

Here is a compiler error I got while quickly throwing together a custom collection:Public Overrides Sub RemoveAt(index As Integer)' cannot override 'Public Overridable NotOverridable Sub RemoveAt(index As Integer)' because it is declared 'NotOverridable'Overridable NotOverridable?! Huh?! Yet another reason why Visual Basic really chaps my hide.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1140129052453412752006-02-16T16:30:00.000-06:002006-02-16T16:30:52.476-06:00

Why do people insist on touching your monitor when they're showing you something on your computer? Use the mouse, or a closed pen... but for God's sake don't touch the screen! You think I want your finger prints all over my monitor while I'm trying to work? Someone was just over by my desk and insisted on touching my monitor about 20 times (not an exaggeration), and now every other word I'm

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1139001065929876962006-02-03T15:04:00.000-06:002006-02-03T15:11:05.943-06:00

I made a wish a while ago looking for tag compliments. Now I've got a few more, now that I'm using del.icio.us more and more. First, I'd like them to improve their Tagroll feature so that I can limit the tags list only to show those that are included in a specific bundle. They already do something similar with Linkrolls, which allows me to only show links that have specific tags associated

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1138031143410653982006-01-23T09:38:00.000-06:002006-01-23T09:45:43.426-06:00

A friend of mine recently sent me an email (along with his resume), saying that he was going to be out of work in a couple weeks. The company he was contracting with was not going continue his contract, because apparently the project he was working with wasn't going forward. My consulting company is pretty good, and they offer a good referral bonus to consultants, so I'm usually pretty good

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1137518826447969342006-01-17T11:02:00.000-06:002006-01-17T11:28:06.026-06:00

I participated in a small group talk at my company last week on the topic of "Upgrading VB6 to VB.NET". The presenter had scoured the Internet looking for helpful information, and going over pros, cons, and typical problems that people encounter when converting existing code from VB6 to .NET. One of the issues he brought up was with short circuit logic. He found this article on The Scarms (

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1137086514644559682006-01-12T11:19:00.000-06:002006-01-12T11:21:54.660-06:00

When you run a company full of people writing software... there are certain things that an office should have in order to support its workforce. Sure things like pens, paper, computers, printers, desks and chairs are all well and good. But when your vending machines don't have any Diet Mountain Dew in them... can you really claim understand to understand those who work for you? Sheesh.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1136919641189506562006-01-10T12:53:00.000-06:002006-01-10T13:01:06.340-06:00

I ended my last client engagement at the end of December... and so now I'm sitting on "the bench". It's actually nice to have a quiet piece of time to do some training, try to finish up my MCSD, and most importantly to take a breath and gain some distance from my last job in preparation for my next.I thought I'd mention a few random things as I sit in my new cube:Having a cube next to a window

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1136394124610503122006-01-04T11:00:00.000-06:002006-01-04T11:02:04.636-06:00

Was reading the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Readme and happened upon this rather humorous note:Setup fails if the installation path is customized to path with more than 128 characters excluding the drive letter and the slashes. (We realize it is ironic to put this information in a file that is installed by setup, but at least you know that we know about the problem you have already worked around).And

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1135697660529909732005-12-27T09:23:00.000-06:002005-12-27T14:56:48.960-06:00

Among various other gift cards I received this Christmas, I got one from Barnes & Noble. I love books of all kinds... so I stopped by a store yesterday to peruse through the isles. As it turns out, I didn't buy any, but I did spend a while looking. My stack of unread books is still pretty high, and so I decided I needed to shorten the stack before I bought more. I always go through the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1135360566447920442005-12-23T11:53:00.000-06:002005-12-23T11:56:06.463-06:00

White papers available for download as an exe. Why? It's a white paper. Make it available immediately in one of the many many formats for transferring documents. What about Word format, HTML, PDF... any of those. If it's huge... zip it up! I don't want to have to run an exe just to get a doc. Who knows what else is in there. Besides, who doesn't have zip on their computer these days? The

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1135351168913653422005-12-23T09:19:00.000-06:002005-12-23T09:20:10.130-06:00

You won't find any of these courses where I went to school. They actually offer courses and labs having to do with... you know... your degree program. Here's some of my favorites from the list of the Most Bizarre College Courses:The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways "which scientific racism has been

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1134585244294427842005-12-14T14:29:00.000-06:002005-12-14T14:26:39.423-06:00

Yesterday I went to the local Visual Studio Launch Event in Brookfield. Everyone was there for one thing... the free copies of software. Specifically they gave away full versions of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, and SQL Server 2005 Standard (not time expiring versions). The talk they gave was... well... about what you'd expect. I thought I'd share a few impressions.First of all, I know its a

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1133923209453586302005-12-06T20:31:00.000-06:002005-12-06T20:41:36.650-06:00

I had this discussion with someone at work a few days ago. If you're a programmer, then you've seen the built-in data type char. So how do you pronounce that? I think most people pronounce it one of two ways:Char as in char broiled. In other words, pronounce it phonetically, which is how I pronounce it.Car as in automobile. This one kind of annoys me. The thinking is that char is short for

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1133632076423295542005-12-03T21:46:00.000-06:002005-12-03T21:55:58.910-06:00

I promised a couple weeks ago that I'd start a series where I would discuss little known features of the .NET Framework. In this first installment, I'll be talking about including resources in a .NET assembly. To be honest, I don't know why people don't use this feature more often than they do. Resources contained within binaries is not a new feature introduced in .NET after all... they've

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1133453601571980842005-12-01T10:13:00.000-06:002005-12-01T10:14:53.930-06:00

I've added Gooey Bugs to my Microsoft Blogroll on the right side. It's a tips and tricks blog by Jim Gries over in the Visual Studio team, and has some great debugging tricks and feature overviews, including new features in Visual Studio 2005 like Object IDs which are freaking cool!

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1133381052288664842005-11-30T14:04:00.000-06:002005-11-30T14:04:12.326-06:00

I don't blame you one bit as Flock is still pretty raw... but if you use Firefox, and also use del.icio.us, you need this plugin. You can read about all the features at the del.icio.us blog. Enjoy!

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1132607083961459572005-11-21T15:05:00.000-06:002005-11-21T15:04:43.980-06:00

First off, Slashdot points us to this very important bit of research... How to write unmaintainable code. Before you go there thinking this will actually be an informative article on good programming practices, think again. This really is an informative article on bad programming practices, and why you would want to use them. If you read this, and then say to yourself, "Gee, I should start

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1132423918720629682005-11-19T12:11:00.000-06:002005-11-19T12:11:58.760-06:00

I recently was talking to my brother-in-law about a whole slew of different programming topics. My brother-in-law in many ways has been a mentor to me in my software career, and is a brilliant software engineer (even though he doesn't have an engineering degree). He really needs to get back to blogging, because he could provide a lot of good insight. During our discussion, he brought up the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1132243505477711192005-11-17T09:58:00.000-06:002005-11-17T10:05:05.496-06:00

A couple days ago I blogged about confusion in the software industry over certain terms... and ended by talking about confusion with pronunciation of other terms. A friend of mine decided to send me links to a couple things on Bjarne Stroustrup's site that seem especially relevant. The funniest was his FAQ, which among other things explains how to pronounce his name:It can be difficult for

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1132091491734825482005-11-15T16:08:00.000-06:002005-11-15T16:07:13.786-06:00

I had a conversation recently with another programmer... which was a bit confusing... if only because we kept using terms that we thought the other would understand, but didn't because they understood that term to mean something else. Understand?Our industry is chalk full of buzzwords, paradigms, and models, and a lot of other things that generate confusion. So what are some of them?Object:

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1131215926102712802005-11-05T12:38:00.000-06:002005-11-05T12:38:50.676-06:00

I have a pretty general rule about my computer. I don't install two programs that both do the same thing on my machine unless I have a very good reason to. I find one program that does what I want it to do, and I learn how to use that program very well. Once I have decided on the program for my particular purpose, it is generally very difficult to get me to switch away. You have to make a

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130970162545715152005-11-02T15:59:00.000-06:002005-11-02T16:23:15.226-06:00

Today one of my project leaders came by and asked for help figuring out why one of our production systems that I helped work on broke suddenly. We hadn't touched the code in months, so we had no clue what would have suddenly changed. My initial thought was that because it threw an unknown exception at application startup, some needed libraries had been removed or something. After doing a

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130795871632724952005-10-31T15:51:00.000-06:002005-10-31T15:57:51.646-06:00

Those of you who've started to regularly read this blog, might remember the question I asked at the end of this post:Recently a friend turned me onto this site, called Despair which is just hilarious. Being a consultant, I was thinking of getting a small version of this to put in my cube. My question is... is that going over the line? Would it be unprofessional to have something so blatantly

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130511471652249122005-10-28T11:57:00.000-05:002005-10-28T11:57:00.543-05:00

Overheard the following conversation today:Developer 1: That's his presentation outfit.Developer 2: Not to be confused with his funeral outfit, or his interview outfit.Developer 3: What's wrong with interviewing in my funeral outfit?It's funny when you work in a software group... the way people dress is almost so standard, that any deviation is quickly noticed. If you dress up one day... you

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130506845843534992005-10-28T08:35:00.000-05:002005-10-28T08:40:45.870-05:00

Visual Studio 2005 has officially shipped! If you're an MSDN Universal Subscriber, and you have more bandwidth than God, then you should be able to download it right now. If you're an unlucky sap like me, you'll have to wait a few weeks before the boxed sets become available. I'll be going to a launch event here in Milwaukee early December where they're giving away copies of VS2005 to all

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130351043734096822005-10-26T13:56:00.000-05:002005-10-26T13:56:59.900-05:00

Charles Petzold recently gave a very interesting, and rare, talk to a User's Group... and asks whether Visual Studio Rots the Mind:Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio's insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1130179051247401222005-10-24T13:37:00.000-05:002005-10-24T13:37:31.253-05:00

No post about flair would be complete without an Office Space quote:Joanna: You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there Bryan, why don't you make the minimum 37 pieces of flair? Stan, Chotchkie's Manager: Well, I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself. Joanna: You know what, I do want to express myself, okay. And I

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129903532227545762005-10-21T10:44:00.000-05:002005-10-21T10:44:41.333-05:00

We'd like to tell you that you read it by mistake, and that you're criminally liable for what you just read. You are ordered to forget everything you just read, delete it from every one of your systems, then scrub your brain of all neurons that may have been imprinted with the memory of this message.Sound familiar? That's about what the typical email footer looks like that gets automatically

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129825826672261742005-10-20T11:30:00.000-05:002005-10-20T11:34:25.573-05:00

In case you haven't noticed... I use del.icio.us quite a bit. I have a growing list of links, and I also maintain my blog rolls using del.icio.us link rolls. For those of you that have never used del.icio.us, it allows to you add web links, and mark them with tags. You can then show different lists of your links using single tags, or multiple tags. Really, del.icio.us is based around

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129823756862523142005-10-20T10:55:00.000-05:002005-10-20T10:55:56.876-05:00

Scott Wiltamuth points to a new fresh interview with Anders Hejlsberg at OnDotNet.com. It's Part 1 of a two parter... but Part 2 is not up yet. I complained a while ago here about another Anders interview... and my complaints I think are still valid on this one.Interviews with him are always really generic (not to be confused with templatized), and tend to always cover the same bland topics.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129322751340698102005-10-14T15:45:00.000-05:002005-10-14T15:45:51.350-05:00

I was recently reviewing a use case for a project I'm working on written by a person in the business group who is really non-technical. The use case said:When the user tabs off of the [xxxxx] field, and the [xxxxx] is valid, add a pop-up window (non-Modal) to validate the number that was just entered.Non-modal? I've been writing Windows applications for approaching 10 years now. I've never

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129296945620069532005-10-14T09:30:00.000-05:002005-10-14T09:43:29.276-05:00

Forgive me for such a long post. When I first got the idea to write this, I didn't intend for it to go so long. Great plans of mice and men and all that. If you stick through the entire post, I do have a question for you at the end.You spend at least 8 hours in the office (at least those of us that work)... so it's natural that you want to fill your work environment with a part of you...

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129231173576190422005-10-13T14:12:00.000-05:002005-10-13T14:19:33.586-05:00

Via Engaget is this fascinating article on CNET about chip designers who design in art onto the physical circuits:More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs. In among the transistors and wire traces, he found something unexpected: Waldo. "When I first saw him, he was upside-down, and I didn't recognize his face," the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1129039989294614812005-10-11T09:13:00.000-05:002005-10-11T09:13:09.336-05:00

The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is. Is Matt right? Will we all be programming like this soon? (args of string many are they) Main is what they seek yet return they do not. Brace you must      Written it is, the Console. "Hello World" And I thought VB.NET was bad. I really stopped reading the Wayward Weblog a while ago after it seemed that he just stopped

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1128965817729083732005-10-10T13:02:00.000-05:002005-10-10T13:01:58.926-05:00

Recently there was an "Ask Slashdot" on Moving from a Permanent Position to Contract Work?"I'm sure many developers in salaried, permanent positions have been tempted by the self-management, flexibility and higher pay that are the perks of being a contractor, while at the same time looking nervously at the uncertainty and irregular income. So, to all those in the Slashdot crowd who've made the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1128612023599987622005-10-06T10:16:00.000-05:002005-10-06T10:20:23.613-05:00

You think the following conversation is funny. Of course it wasn't a real conversation... it was an email conversation... but anyway:Coworker: I'll be OOO - EAD Monday.Me: ASAP - WD OOO EAD RM?Coworker: Out of office - Essential Absence Day. It's the terminology that [Client Name] uses for personal days.Me: Great... another TLA.Coworker: Alright - what does TLA mean?Me: Three Letter

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1128048598895863952005-09-30T09:34:00.000-05:002005-09-30T09:35:22.256-05:00

I've recently been playing with the Visual Studio 2005 betas, including the new unit testing framework that they have included. First impressions with this sort of new offering are always big with me... and my first impression was that it sucks... and sucks royally. That's a bold statement I know. The reason I say this is because it is missing one huge, gigantic, extremely important feature

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1127931491487304972005-09-28T14:03:00.000-05:002005-09-29T10:48:21.033-05:00

There's been a lot of action recently in blogs over at Microsoft talking about C# 3.0. I won't even begin to discuss how silly this is since C# 2.0 isn't even out of beta yet... but anyway. The coolest feature to be included is something called Linq. If you even looked at C-Omega, then Linq ought to look very familiar. The basic idea is to allow you to inject SQL type language structures

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1127919563500890322005-09-28T13:15:00.000-05:002005-09-28T14:09:36.023-05:00

I've been out of engineering school for five years now. I think that's given me sufficient time to look back on my education as it's related to my career thus far, and to see how my education prepared me for my job. All I can say is that I was damned lucky to go where I did. I'm reminded of this after reading Confessions of an Engineering Washout on Tech Central Station today:I am an

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1126033385523191372005-09-06T14:02:00.000-05:002005-09-06T14:03:05.533-05:00

MSNBC has an article about a proposed update to the GNU Public License:The free software association said on Tuesday it would start adapting rules for development and use of free software by including penalties against those who patent software or use anti-piracy technology....The license needs to be adapted to a world in which e-commerce firms like Amazon.com have patented 'one click ordering'

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1123857710373705712005-08-12T09:34:00.000-05:002005-08-12T09:41:50.383-05:00

I have a really cool USB Keychain Hard Drive which I absolutely love. It happens to be USB 2.0, but works on USB 1.1 ports. Now then, my computer at home has USB 2.0, but my computer at work only has USB 1.1. Every single time I plug it in at work, I get the following popup from Windows:It's only mildly annoying, and usually I just clicked on the X to make it go away. But then I thought...

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1121445907677018422005-07-15T11:31:00.000-05:002005-12-09T13:44:19.250-06:00

I can't help it. VB.NET sucks, and yesterday I discovered yet one more reason why it's a poorly developed language. I was forwarded this link from a coworker on how using the equals operator to compare strings was significantly slower than using the .Equals method on strings. I couldn't believe it. How could they be that different? They call the same underlying code right? Unfortunately

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1119474601134057642005-06-22T16:06:00.000-05:002005-06-22T16:10:01.143-05:00

A man whose name you probably never knew died 2 days ago. A man who has influenced your life more than you think about day to day has passed. Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit, died at age 81 after a brief fight with cancer. He invented the integrated circuit instead of going on vacation while working for Texas Instruments... can you imagine a world where he did go on vacation

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1119014774817218202005-06-17T08:26:00.000-05:002005-06-17T08:27:04.683-05:00

InfoWorld has an interview with Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft TechEd 2005 in Orlando. (H/T to Eric Gunnerson). It's the standard Anders interview. Anders has been with Microsoft for about 8 years now (before that he was with Borland where he architected Delphi). He's been the man with the plan on C# and .NET for about 5 years now. All his interviews are the same, and it kinda grinds on me,

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1118347777667197052005-06-09T15:07:00.000-05:002005-06-09T15:11:10.650-05:00

Here is a comment I left in some code I wrote a couple months ago:' If you can understand this code... then I congradulate you. See me for a cookie.I'm not going to publish the code, as it wouldn't make sense out of context... but let's just say I had Hashtables containing Hashtables containing ArrayLists. I'm not saying it was the smartest idea, but it worked.Anyway, I had to make a change to

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1118258763524456382005-06-08T15:15:00.000-05:002005-06-08T15:18:04.663-05:00

Those who know me know that I hate Visual Basic .NET. This is not a passing hatred mind you... it's a pretty strong one. Unfortunately my current client is a VB house, so I have to use it every day. There are oh so many things I dislike about it, which I'm not going to recount all at once here. However, there is one problem with it that I want to point out right now, only because it led me to

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1118157739051237852005-06-07T10:16:00.000-05:002005-06-07T10:22:56.943-05:00

Chris Sells points writes about a piece of C# code that freaked him out:class Class1 {   static void Foo(object @this) {      Console.WriteLine(@this);   }   static void Main(string[] args) {      Foo("hi");   }}In case you don't quite see it... a keyword (this) is being used as a variable to represent something other than the current object. You can do this because placing the @ before a

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1118157382558452842005-06-07T10:13:00.000-05:002005-06-07T10:16:22.566-05:00

I'm looking over some code that I wrote just prior to going on vacation, and have been forced to say to myself "What does that mean?" I have variables that I'm not sure make sense in context, and I'm not quite sure exactly what they represent despite the fact that I added comments after their declaration. Even after I go over more of the code further down, I'm not quite sure it's right, even

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1117812100283129702005-06-03T10:11:00.000-05:002005-06-03T10:30:27.173-05:00

Honestly... I'm really not... though it may seem that way to some. One of my projects is in defect fixing mode. That of course means we get to wade through tester's descriptions of problems, and figure out what's causing them... or sometimes figure out if there is a problem at all. I'm a stickler for reproduction steps. Some may say I'm a jerk about it. If I don't see real steps to reproduce

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1117739181431133922005-06-02T14:01:00.000-05:002005-06-02T14:11:50.740-05:00

My current role at my current client has me doing a lot of explaining, designing, some teaching, and coding. These things I don't mind. What I'm not prepared to do is be a parent. The last two days since I've come back from vacation, I've felt like a parent. Allow me to explain. One of the projects that I'm working on is headed by a female technical lead, where I'm doing a lot of the design

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1117720042166185052005-06-02T08:47:00.000-05:002005-06-02T09:02:52.076-05:00

Joel on Software has an excellent article defending Hungarian Notation, which I highly recommend. It's an excellent article which gives examples of how Hungarian is still useful today. I'm a firm believer in Hungarian Notation, and still use it to this day (properly I might add) despite the evil looks from coworkers. The problem with Hungarian was that it was bastardized over the years. When

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1115822600861878662005-05-11T09:42:00.000-05:002005-05-11T09:43:20.866-05:00

I know I haven't posted here in a while... but I'm actually writing up a long winded wish for .NET generics. Stay tuned.

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1114832490263458582005-04-30T11:05:00.000-05:002005-04-30T11:05:23.463-05:00

I think I'll ease you all into the life a software engineer with a tail of requirements. Hopefully if you're on a well run project, you'll have a list of requirements that your software has to fulfill. The more detailed they are, the better things tend to be. Recently I was assigned to complete a requirement on a project which had fallen through the cracks. The project is nearing completion,

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12536718.post-1114831207405540472005-04-29T22:15:00.000-05:002005-04-29T22:20:07.406-05:00

For those of you who don't know me, I maintain another blog called The World According to Nick. I started that blog talking a lot about programming, and technology, but it gradually morphed into politics and current events. As that blog got more a political voice, I never felt right about posting real technical stuff because my audience probably wouldn't get it. So this blog will be my new

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00030804900292712902noreply@blogger.com2