Archives
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Hard Code
"The trouble is that qaulity and value are wrapped in perception. Even if we built a product that precisely matched the spec with zero bugs, customers and reviewers might still hate it. If it doesn't work the way they think it should, it's junk. If it doesn't solve the problem the way they expect, it's trash.
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Silverlight Supercomputer
Dan Fay pointed to an interesting article on CodeProject about building a grid computing framework that runs on Silverlight. The proposition is really interesting. Imagine someone like the folding at home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) project providing and embeddable Silverlight widget that people can place on their sites to help speed genetic research... or how about a little widget on your page that takes some of the load off of your server to help offset high traffic volumes? Just imagine how many teraflops a site like MySpace could output on a given day. Google could potentially use something like this to index the web or calculate page ranks via MapReduce and eliminate a large chunk of their server farm.
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.NET Clipboard Problems Under VirtualPC
When performing Clipboard operations (SetDataObject, SetImage, etc.) in a .NET program under VPC, you may encounter the error "Requested clipboard operation did not succeed." This error turns out to be a major pain if you are doing dev. in a VPC like mine, because 99% of your calls will fail. Every once and a while, you'll get lucky and one will go through (it seems to work if you go to another application, cut some text, paste that text, then come back and use the clipboard in your .NET app).
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Sun Buys MySQL, Gets into Database Business
With their plans to acquire MySQL, looks like Sun is gearing up to go head to head with Microsoft on another front.
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Designing a Generic Database Layer
Some people like to automatically generate their database tier. Personally, I had enough bad experiences with ORM tools that I try to avoid them. After all, data tier code can be knocked out pretty quickly and it's always nice to know you didn't take any shortcuts. It's been a while since I've seen data tiers discussed, so I figured I'd pass along a modern approach that I have found works quite well and results in really clean data tiers.
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How Silverlight Will Change the Way We Build Applications
"...Don't make the mistake of tossing Silverlight in the same bucket as Flash. While they definitely compete in some significant areas, and both have real strengths in different areas, Silverlight 2.0 was created from the ground-up to be an application development platform equally friendly to designers and developers. If you're a .NET developer (or want to be), you'll find the .NET framework included with Silverlight to be extremely capable and powerful..." [1]
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Rails is a Ghetto
Zed Shaw, a former big time Rails dev, is leaving the community. He has a scathing rant of the community as a whole as well as ThoughtWorks. I must say that some of Zed's stories sound really familiar to when I was doing a lot of consulting work. There are a hell of a lot of bad customers out there that want you devote your life to thier projects, make them a ton of money, and not pay you back for your work. More often than not, it's because they don't really have any money to spend and they are simply trying to get rich quick off of some really bad idea, or some really poor execution of a fairly good idea.