http://www.codenamegenerator.com/

For the record, my new project is now named “Fuschia Tadpole”.  

Clearly this guy is not using PowerShell or the DLR!

The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and will continue to set) the progress of software development back by decades. Why?! Let me offer up a parable; I will call it “The Plank.”

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

to read more about Johnny Lee, visit his website

Each founder received a bonus of $1,723, for a total of $1,724.

Weird.

(via Andrew)

A bit of light relief for my friends in the industry who might be feeling a bit down these days.

Sub prime crisis explained

From Yahoo! Finance article here (bolding mine):

Rieva Lesonsky, co-author of "Start Your Own Business," and senior vice president and editorial director at Entrepreneur magazine:
Lesonsky’s best advice "was from the owner of our magazine, Peter Shea," she recalls. "He said, ‘Housing prices have gone up — get a second mortgage and pay off your debt.’ I did, and I’m debt-free."

Remind me never to read Entrepreneur Magazine.

The place was flooded with media attention and the event itself was quite fun and lighthearted. Here are a few stories from around the ‘net covering the event (and featuring yours truly):

MTV Overdrive
ABC World News Tonight
NYTimes BITS Blog entry

Here are my Flickr photos from the event.

[via donncha]

Now, from a practical point of view, this scenario is ridiculous because even if there was a God I am sure he could not give a rat’s tuckus about programmers. Try to run with it anyway! If God asked you, which language would you pick? Be careful! You may be tempted to pick C. The thinking might be that with C you could simply start over and recreate the other missing languages! Sorry, God said no. Pick the language and that’s it for 40 years. Are you really willing to write all your shell scripts, database queries and XML transforms in C for the next 40 years?

Maybe you’d pick LISP? Certainly an improvement in many respects over C but what would happen to all those real-real time systems and 3D first person shooter games if everything became LISP? Could you live with yourself after the 100th multi-car pile up on the freeway after the GC kicked in on that embedded controller in charge of the ABS brakes!?!

Yes, this is a stupid question but trying to answer might teach you a thing or two about what you value as language user/connoisseur.

On my knees, in pain, a broken man with nothing left in me than the last breaths of a dieing geek, I reached over and, with my last utterance, said, “Bloody Microsoft Press” and I fell unconscious on the floor.

Well I lived to tell the tale, and the nurses are pretty nice here in A&E too. I’ve just seen the doctor, and it has been explained to me that I had attempted to lift this : dead-weight. Apparently, this is not a book, but is in fact nothing other than a heavy weight one would benchpress in the gym. Furthermore, I’m the third person in the hospital this week! Some other happless techy attempted to pick up this Its gotta hurt, at 2704 pages! The doctor said it was like the guy had attempted to lift a small goat, without the appropriate warm-up.

So, it seems Microsoft has realized the health implications of us geeks spending all of these hours sat in front of our computers “burning the midnight oil”, and has gone into producing books the size of small farm animals, with which we can actually use to keep ourselves fit. If, when the cold chill disturbs you from the screen in the dark of night, when everyone else is in bed and you’re still on your computer, dont think its time to go to bed yet. No. Pick up your latest Microsoft Press “book”, get down on the deck, and start to benchpress! In fact I’m sure you could manage a whole workout from just two Microsoft books, but do make sure you work your way up with the lighter weights, first, and dont end up in A&E like me!

Nurse??!!

Please compose and record a song extolling the virtues of your Web site in which the lengths of the words can also be used as a mnemonic for at least the first 50 digits of pi. In other words, the first word has three letters, the second word one letter, the third word four letters, and so on.

Well Andrew, from Songs to Wear Pants To received just such a request. His response, entitled “I Am The First Fifty Digits of Pi“, is a tour-de-force of clever, silly and creative songwriting.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/03/wsj_teaches_kids_new_slang.html

“Bucketing – it’s not just for vega anymore!”

However one spot in particular struck me as fairly anomalous. Let me zoom in on it for a closer look:

What’s that dot sitting there off the east coast of Africa? Who are you, o reader, out there in the middle of the Indian ocean?

Visual Studio cannot debug because debug target “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE” is not an EXE file.

to access loanstudent loans 4a loans d constructionact loanstudent loans aessloan bank 52 loan mortgageloans home for ads90 home loan100 stated loan

At Soft Summit, the premier conference on software value management, you’ll
hear keynotes from:
Lars Rabbe, CIO, Yahoo!
Peter Graf, SVP, SAP
Mark Kvamme, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Fred Amoroso, CEO, Macrovision
Kelly Perdew, Winner, “The Apprentice”

People need to just stop with this whole Reality TV thing. Really.

zoom all the way in…

“Nine nine nine nine nine nine nine”
“Who’s that?”
“Our random number generator”
“Doesn’t sound very random.”
“That’s the problem with random, you’re never really sure.”

-a Dilbert cartoon

Then you can read this:

Oryx and Crake

take a look at the paper, especially the diagrams. it’s genius.

I think Hungarian notation is great. In fact, it should be used for everything, not just code development. For instance, see how much clearer things are if we prefix all nouns with a ‘n’, verbs with a ‘v’, adverbs with a ‘d’, and adjectives with a ‘j’. Vdoesn’t nthis vlook jbetter?
Nthat’s dnot dreally jenough, though. Jplural nnouns vshould dreally vhave an nindicator, “pl”. plnsubjects vshould vhave a “sbj” and sbjplnobjects vshould vhave a “obj” nprefix. Nwe vcan vuse “tr” for jtransitive nverbs, and trvuse “int” for jintransitive nverbs.
Jour plndocuments vwill dthen vbe jmuch jclearer.