Archives
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Geek License Plates
I've noticed a couple of geeky license plates lately, like Kent Tegels' :
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Fawcette and other TechPubs: The writing is on the wall
Knowing the struggles that people like myself, Mike, Don (and others) have been through with Fawcette recently - in terms of Fawcette's financial (and some say ethical) difficulties - it got me thinking about what times might be like for people running a magazine and/or conferences in the information saturated world we live in today. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that these publications are losing subscribers and revenue. I believe they are also facing a multitude of other challenges in terms of how to deliver and sell their content. Are some rags going to be forced into only distributing their content via less expensive channels like RSS feeds and web publications? How much longer will printed magazines be financially viable for technical content?
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RSS Security: Password Protection
As a developer, many times things are not as easy as they seem.....yeah, I'm used to that fact now.
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Research & Development - Or Just Development?
Something I've been thinking about lately, is the “R” side of R&D. At many technology organizations you hear about budgets for R&D. But what exactly happens as aspects of research? Is research comprised of proof of concept applications? Is it research done on target markets for your product(s)? I've heard (but only seen a little) of Microsoft's research labs. What goes on there?
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The Yukon and Whidbey slip: Take a deep breath and count to 10
Like many other bloggers, yesterday morning I read the news about Tom Rizzo saying Yukon and Whidbey probably wouldn't get released until the first half of 2005. I felt like blogging about it right away but, thought it might be better first to hear what other people had to say. Not that their opinions would sway mine, but I thought perhaps more “behind the curtain“ information might be brought forth.
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Now accepting name submissions...
I've finally decided what my next project is going to be, but I haven't been able to come up with a name for it yet. This is a hobby project - just for fun and self-education. I've decided to build a “fantasy sports” framework - something that can allow you to sort of “configure” any kind of fantasy sports leagues using a common framework. It would probably have to be hooked up to a stats engine or service. I'm still working through the architecture ideas in my head. I envision it as being to fantasy sports what .Text is to blogging. Anyway, I need two names.
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Raising the bar for web application GUI's
I saw the new “MSDN” style look that foO implemented on one of his sites and it made me think that this might be a good chance for me to share with the rest of you some screen shots of a new web application called “EVS“ my company has developed recently. We decided to go for an Office 2003 look with our menus and toolbars. Since we can count on IE 5.5 or later being the browser used to access our application, we used the 2003 widgets from Ed Boelzner. Our icons were done by Ivan Boyko of VisualPharm. Has anyone else done a sophisticated web UI lately? If you have please send me some links or screenshots - I think it would be fun to compare notes. I've been really into playing with Paint Shop Pro 8, Photoshop CS, and Illustrator CS lately, along with different CSS filters.
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Awesome Sharepoint community site
Today I came across this site, run by Mike Walsh (who I think is a Sharepoint MVP - or should be). I think it's great how he “dogfooded” (if that's a word) Sharepoint itself in making the site. He's even recently published an RSS feed on his site for his blog that is filled with even more helpful Sharepoint information. My guess is that experienced Sharepoint developers have already discovered this site but, for those of you new to Sharepoint or that want to learn more about it, I'd highly recommend Mike's site and blog as resources.
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Taken by surprise...
The other day I had been thinking about how perhaps there is something to be said for hiring less experienced developers because of how sometimes older, more experienced developers are said to be “set in their ways”. Then I thought, “Why not ask someone who's hired a fair amount of developers?”. So that's what I did. I asked Joel. What surprised me more than his answer however, was the discussion it sparked. About 70 posts in one day. Mr. Spolsky must have even more fans than I thought.
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Now if only they had a page like this for Visual Studio.NET...
If you're anything like me (and most other developers I've talked to) then you'll appreciate this:
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angryCoder on installation recommendations...
My friend Jonathan Goodyear (a.k.a. “angryCoder”) posted an article today about some annoyances he encountered while installing MSN Messenger. Working from home for the last 2 years, I have been using IM and video conferencing software more than ever. Having been a user of several different instant messaging clients over the last 7 years or so (starting with ICQ) I'm surprised how it seems that none of them have really “got it right” yet. It seems that each one brings with it both good and bad (or lacking) features. Even a couple of years ago when Trillian came out, it only took a couple of weeks until I went back to using multiple IM clients. I would use a single IM client if it could give me the following:
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ObjectSpaces only supports SQL Server?
Last week I was reading this article by Dino about ObjectSpaces. In it he mentions:
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Security through obscurity...
I was talking with another developer recently about distributed web application architecture - security in particular. He told me about a classic ASP (3.0) web application he had done before. The entire web application consisted of one .asp file and several COM DLL's. The one .asp file had contents like this:
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Since developers usually aren't designers too...
I found this and thought it was just too cool not to share. For those of you out there that want to come up with a clean, visually appealing color scheme for a website (or anything really) this can definitely be helpful. Looking at this, one thought that came to mind was, “Building this as a WinForms app would be a really good way to exercise my GDI+ skills”.
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Hello Blog World
I guess it's official now. I've committed to keeping a blog. I had thought for a while that I didn't need a blog but, I've found the temptation to be too great. Too many great thinkers and developers out there that I'd like to be able to read and comment on my thoughts. So, here it is.