It’s Friday, so it is time for part 4 in the series that Time magazine calls "… a breakthrough in blogging." Ok, they didn’t say that, but I’m sure they would if this series was actually a breakthrough in blogging. Practice Dragon Management Dragon Management is a brand new approach to managing your peons that…
try-catch-FAIL
Month: <span>August 2008</span>
Using LINQ to elegantly initialize arrays FAIL
Whoops. I screwed up. As it turns out though, I’m not the only person who was mistaken. I’ve updated the post in question with a working way to populate an array of reference types.
The importance of testing
Grad school just started back for me today, so this is going to be a short post. Hopefully I’ll still be able to do three (hopefully high-quality) posts a week once things stabilize. I ran into an issue today where one of the systems that I maintain at my day job had been rendered completely…
How to run a software development company (INTO THE GROUND) – Part 3
I am really, really glad it is Friday. It’s been one of those really, really (not) awesome weeks. Anyway, here’s how you, too, can successfully take your software development ship and crash it into an iceberg, killing everyone on board! In a change of pace, I’m going to start putting a "why you shouldn’t do…
Using LINQ to elegantly initialize arrays
**CORRECTED 8/26/08: Apparently my initial code did not work correctly. This appears to be a widespread mistake, as I found about a dozen other people doing the exact thing I was doing with reference types. Corrected code and the non-working example are below.** I am tired of writing array initialization code that looks like this:…
Easy testing via ActiveRecord and SQLite
As I've mentioned, I'm a big fan of ActiveRecord. I like having all of my data-access related code stored in exactly one place. There's no separate mapping file to maintain, and if I'm really lazy, I can even let ActiveRecord generate the schema for me (yeah, that doesn't really work once you have to worry…
Using LINQ with ActiveRecord
One of the new projects at my day job is using ActiveRecord for data access. I’m a huge fan of ActiveRecord (and of all things Castle), but I like the fact that LINQ makes it very easy to do ad-hoc queries with a compile-time safety net. Unfortunately, ActiveRecord does not support LINQ out of the…
White spaces could shake up broadband access…
Opening up white spaces for broadband Internet access could drastically shake up the telco’s comfy stranglehold on US consumers. Google has thrown their weight behind the idea today with the launch of FreeTheAirWaves.org. I like what they’ve done for a couple of reasons. They are very up front about why they support the technology (it…
How to run a software development company (INTO THE GROUND) – Part 2
It’s Friday, so it’s time for part two of the on-going series of how NOT to run a successful software development company. Don’t pay your workers Times get tough. Maybe a contract didn’t get paid on time. Maybe someone made a gianormous accounting error (to the tune of $20,000). Hell, maybe you needed a new…
Using Windows Live Writer on Windows XP x64
It looks like Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that the Windows Live suite of tools shouldn’t install on Windows XP x64. Apparently we don’t need to do things like manage our blogs or something. Fortunately, there is a way around this: just install the technical preview release. Brought to you by Windows Live…