Archives
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Going solo or taking a year off
There was an interesting little piece on MSN today about taking time off to do, well, whatever. I can't tell you how long I've wanted to do that, on my own terms. Now that I've been laid-off a number of times, not working isn't nearly as scary as it used to be.
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The EU and MSFT
What the heck, I'll jump in. Reading from Keith Warren and Frans Bouma, I think the two go to extremes in describing what they see as the issues surrounding the Microsoft and EU case. The reality is probably somewhere more in the middle.
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The shortcomings of GotDotNet
Craig Andera blogged about leaving GotDotNet, presumably its workspace feature, for SourceForge. The ASP.NET forum team also moved out of there recently. I'm surprised it took that long.
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Quality time with partial classes and ASP.NET
A couple of weeks ago I was rambling about code-behind and Whidbey. The reason for the rambling was that I was starting to think about how I'd build the next version of POP Forums.
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Need help on defining delegates
I'm at that point in my book where I need to write about delegates. While I do “get” delegates, it's really hard for me to put into words what they are. Every example I've seen in other books does a poor job of it, in part because the descriptions are so abstract that you end up scratching your head and wondering why you'd ever ever need one.
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The culture and experience gap in the .NET community
I've thought a lot about the culture and experience of the .NET community at large lately. Between the book I'm trying to write, the site I'm trying to maintain (about time to write something new for it!) and the communities I try to be active in (Sitepoint, as well as my own), obviously I think about such things quite a bit. Consider also a number of blog entries about who Microsoft should target with their tools, and the resulting elitist discussions.
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No progress is made without being unrealistic
If you've ever read Fast Company, you know that they have very brief pieces on "influential" people, basically including something important they have to say. Well, this one really stuck with me:
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Not the end of the world... not moving it forward either
Scott Hanselman makes the point that the slipped ship date of Yukon and Whidbey is not the end of the world. He's right that, indeed, this is not the end of the world. It's not particularly good for it either.
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The issue of Whidbey delay is not an emotional one
Reading this blog entry from Jason Mauss, I think he misses the point of all the complaining surrounding the Whidbey delay. OK, maybe not all of the complaining, but certainly my complaining.
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Working too much isn't a way to live
I read this post from Gus Perez, and to be honest I'm still shocked every time I read something like this.
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Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...
Siderant: Why the hell is it that my hard drive is still churning an hour and a half after I turned it on? I hate corporate environments.
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DevDays, Cedar Fair and Six Flags
Went to DevDays in Cleveland today. It was good to meet Alex Lowe in person, as well as local Steve Smith from ASPAlliance.com.
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Code-behind philosophy challenged by Whidbey
I've been playing with Whidbey and experimenting a bit, in part for the book I think I'm writing, and also to start fleshing out how I'll build POP Forums for Whidbey. I think I need to make a design decision from the start, but because of the new IDE's abilities, what was once obvious isn't anymore.
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Self discovery of your developer personality
I've seen various posts 'round here about the kind of developer personality you have. I've done some thinking, and I think by some people's standards, mine is not great.
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Hobbyist code monkey is tomorrow's enterprise architect
A post last night by Joe Bork in response to a post by Rory Blyth debates whether or not Microsoft should cater to the low-end programmers and hobbyists in the development of its tools. I take the position that Microsoft had better cater to these folks. If the point-of-entry to the platform is easy, it pulls brilliant people into our profession. We need more of those, because there are too many people running around who think because they have a degree in CS that they're experts. (Note: I think everyone should go to college, live on campus and learn about life, but that's a discussion for another day. The point is that college alone is not a measure of your capability, see these comments in Rory's blog. I'd never hire those people.)
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Judge sticking it to SCO
I mentioned in an earlier post today how I found the SCO lawsuits stupid. Well, the judge in the original case against IBM clearly feels the same way, ordering SCO to put up or shut up with “specificity” about the alleged stolen lines of code.
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RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and the art of the single developer
I'm sure there are other roller coaster geeks out there besides me, but not one game has ever consumed as much of my time as RollerCoaster Tycoon. Now we'll get it in 3D with on-ride POV, as Atari just announced the development of RCT3.
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SCO nonsense is out of control
I don't care that much about Linux, quite honestly, but this SCO nonsense is getting out of control.
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Is Ellison on crack?
Larry Ellison cracks me up. He wants information from Microsoft to fight off the blockage of Oracle's PeopleSoft acquisition.
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Getting the book published
I got a second round of editorial reviews from a certain publisher for a book proposal I did. Wow... the feedback was almost all positive, up from 50% thumbs down, with the remaining negatives really being differences in opinion (the various reviewers contradict each other on certain points). I'm supposed to have a conference call with the publisher later this week.