posts

For your brand or business, the times for short term plays and long term plays can get mixed. Being able to do a new offering now, shows speed, quickness, agility, and time to market. All of which are valid characteristics for any business to aspire to, but I hope you do not go into ventures because you can, there is more at risk than just short term increased sales. Please play the long game even if there is pain in the short term.

Keeping a software team going, engaged, and motivated doesn’t take someone cheering to hype up the team. This would work about as well as cheering for someone working on a crossword puzzle, in fact it would have the opposite intended impact. Encouraging and motivating a cognitive basis team takes a different approach. Many seemingly innocuous actions can negatively impact a team, instead of focusing on what not to do, I wanted to go over what I feel are good things to do.

I had troubles keeping it going after my last post or two. I was asked by someone if it was a technical blog or a business related blog … I didn’t really have an answer for him. I’ve read articles talking about how best to grow your blog, to find your voice, to have a common message. So as not to confuse your audience.

There are a few different types of people who cook food. First you have the person who doesn’t actually cook the food themselves, they typically perform to go out and pay for this service. They don’t worry about many aspects to cooking, such as the act itself, preparation, tools (oven, pots, utensils). They typically enjoy the experience, what the cooks produce, and the presentation; and are content with being disconnected of the process.

I was looking through the NerdDinner source code, and ran across the <%: syntax in the views. I tried many different combinations of searching through Google and Stackoverflow, but I couldn’t find anything. I finally found the answer accidently while reading Phil Haack’s blog post. I kept trying to search for tags (including the words percent and colon) and the like, but it looks like Microsoft references them as a code block or code nugget.

I was reading about Harold Abrahams recently and was absolutely blown away by something I read in Wikipedia’s article (I have shorten it for brevity):

Abrahams won the 100m in a time of 10.6 seconds, beating all the American favorites. In third place was Arthur Porritt ... The Paris Olympics 100m dash took place at 7pm on 7 July 1924 (Abrahams and Porritt dined together at 7pm on 7 July every year thereafter, until Abrahams' death).

I was looking through some code the other day that generated web based documentation for a framework. They, of course, list everything in a table of contents layout with those being links to the actual files.

I am not sure how I ended up subscribing to ‘The Startup Success Podcast’, but I am very glad that I did. I have been listening to this for about three weeks now, and I have been passing up some of my other podcast subscriptions in favor of this one.

In the past I had read Joel Spolsky’s article over character sets. Occasionally I run into a problem where certain characters do not show correctly, but for the most part I do nothing about it as I can determine what the word or letter is suppose to be.

Recently I have begun working with Rhino.Mocks and I stumbled a little bit getting up to speed. My experience with mocks is from using JMock1 with a Java project. This is the first time I have used mocks on a .NET project so it took me a little bit getting used to the syntax.

I have just begun using Grails for Less Out and have been accustomed to using the ‘def’ keyword when declaring any variables. I really don’t have any particular reason in doing it this way, I just wanted to use the features of Groovy when ever possible … when in Rome.

This past weekend I was working on an Action which is passed a Command, the Command has a few constraints and one of them was:

static constraints = {
  name blank:false, nullable:false
}

I recently changed development machines and needed to setup TortoiseSVN again using SSH, and I ran into a problem where I could only access Subversion if it was the only authorized key. For my host I’m using Site5, but I’m sure this applies more generally than just for Site5. I already have another set of keys working for ssh, and that public key is the first line of my authorized_keys2 file (the ‘2’ is somewhat optional).

I regularly listen to ‘The Dave Ramsey’ on my iPod and thought his rant on gossip in the work place was a pretty good piece.

How do you incorporate a no-gossip policy at work? (mp3 download 5.54MB 6 minutes)

Although I feel ‘gumbo’ is a misnomer in this recipe, this is what my wife and I have been cooking for almost a year now. This is very similar to Qdoba’s (Qdoba Mexican Grill) recipe.

Today I was reading an article by Dave Nicolette and the following caught my eye: “Many people really, really want to curl up in the motherly embrace of Process”. I feel that typically most people do want this and therein lies the problem.

Earlier this year the New York Jets announced they had hired Rex Ryan as the new head coach. I have personally meet Rex on a couple of occasions so I have followed along and read many articles and comments about Rex’s decision. One gentleman in particular criticized for leaving the Ravens so quickly after the season was over; he felt as though the decision was made too hastily.

It seems to me this should apply to most people. I do not think I have lived by its standard, maybe it is now time for me to walk the walk.

I have begun (about a year ago) to appreciate quotes and saw this one tonight:

I have been using Maven for a while now and as such I have ran into my fair share of using profiles with Maven. As there are many other articles/posts about Maven profiles I will not be providing an overview here. I would like to delve into a particular area of interest when dealing with profiles and the activation aspect.

Just recently there was a post to the cygwin mailing list, I typically won’t post items like this, but I felt this was an exception to the rule.

There are developers using Maven which decide, for some reason or another, not to use a repository manager. As time progresses on they realize they need something more robust in order to manage all there releases, or possibly the team begins to grow in size. No matter the reason, there are times when a local Maven repo needs to be converted to a managed repo.

I have been working with Python and libxml2 for a bit now and have found out there is little documentation out there on how to get everything working together. Also as I have very little permissions on some of the machine I work on, I need to be able to have my own installation of Python without affecting the entire system. I have put together the following steps to follow for installing your own installation of Python using least privileges (without root access) for both Windows and Linux.

During a recent lunch outing a discussion came up about one of our clients who doesn’t have enough money for a particular technology related item, but other renovations are happening and people within the group are getting mad. Of course the discussion turned to what all was set forth in the budget and how the IT division was hurting. The typical response is all too common, “There is a pot full of money over there, but we can’t touch it.”

Almost on a weekly basis I get frustrated at other technical people because they do not see value in the things I see value in, or the miss the point. I am quick to judge them and point my finger at them for the blame. Through my recreational reading I have come to believe it is none other than my own doing.

This seems to do a pretty good job at comparing, as far as a feature matrix, three of the top repository managers for Maven.

The following link is a video I genuinely enjoyed watching and I felt I would share it as well. It is pertaining to the C# 4.0 Design Team, and I try to watch most of Anders Hejlsberg videos if I am able.

I just wanted to make a quick post relating to Maven profiles. I was trying some new things about with Maven the other day and decided to put these into a profile as to not disturb the normal build process. Upon performing some trial and error tests, I was getting some strange results. I wasted to much time on figuring out what the problem was, but for Maven it expects multiple profiles to be specified such as the following:

mvn -Pprofile1,profile2

I have upgraded to WordPress 2.6 which was recently released. Looks like there are quite a few new bells and whistles to check out.

Jeff Atwood has a really good post titled Don’t Go Dark. I myself sometimes get caught up in things like this. With the exception of code reviews (which I really do enjoy), I have a tendency to clam up when posting my code out for public viewing for things such as open source projects.

I always find it extremely difficult to come up with things to blog about. I have the privilege of working with some very intelligent people whom I genuinely enjoy talking with. A lot of times I point out how they should make a post about particular conversation. I have been told on more than one occasion that they are more of a verbal person than a writer. My nature is usually the same but I see that as a weakness of myself and I will be trying to rectify it as there is tremendous value in being able to communicate effectively in the written format as well. I will be using posts made by people I hold in high regard and give my own thoughts and spin on it.

The latest versions of Firefox, IE, and Opera support EV SSL, but still there is no sign of Safari … and this has been pointed out for quite some time. What in the world is Apple up to?

Many times I have needed to relocate a Subversion repository. This is relatively easy in Subversion, there is a ‘svn relocate’ command. A stipulation of this command is the new locations repository must match identical to the old repository.

I am four days behind, but Wordpress 2.5 has been released. I have upgraded my own Wordpress installation, now I just need to complete my daughters.

Just recently I bought a computer from a colleague of mine. It has been working like a charm since getting everything set up. And today I am installing Gentoo on another machine. So I downloaded the ISO from Gentoo and was attempting to burn it to a CD.

I have been working on converting .msg file to .eml files and I just couldn’t get anything to work correctly. I was wanting to have my small converter project work with Unicode. All the functions returned as though everything worked correctly, the only problem was that nothing was written out to the eml file.

The following command is the substitute command, you can learn more about this command by reading :help substitute (or if you prefer the shorthand version :he su). If you did the preceding you will notice that the help shows the substitute command as :[range]s[ubstitute]/{pattern}/{string}/ (the help also shows all of the possible flags, which I omitted here on purpose). Just in case you didn't know, since range is enclosed in square brackets that means it is optional. Also you will notice that the :s can also be spelled out as :substitute, I am sure that most people will prefer the :s syntax.

I assume that most people that use Vim know how to use the basic search functionality, such as / and ?. I am wanting to elaborate on those a bit.

While I am typing in Vim I do not let the text wrap, I put in returns manually. This causes problems when I came back to it later and add in some text within the middle of paragraph. The line will continue on to the right margin and the text will wrap, then when I have to adjust the line I have to fix all the following lines to be ended correctly on the right side.

There are numerous commands that can accept a range preceding the command as well as others that range can follow the command. As the name implies you can restrict a command to execute within a particular number of lines.

At one of my previous places of employment, I made a comment which made numerous of my co-workers very angry at me. I felt as though I was completely justified in saying it, but I soon found out how much I upset them.

I am working on learning the Zend Framework, and along with that PHP as well (of course). I stumbled upon a code snippet on the internet which I didn't realize would work. I have seen the use of the identify operator in PHP before but I soon realized I didn't know all that I should. So I dived into this topic a little bit more and soon found out that more seasoned PHP programmers aren't too fluent in the differences between the two operators and what is (and not) possible.

We all have good friends in our lives, and because of them we will usually learn from them or obtain habits from them. A gentleman I have known for my entire life uses this saying to end a phone call conversation. I feel this simple saying is something most people should live by. After all a bad person can do a good deed to ensure your trust if only for a short while. But a good person ... well ... is salt of the earth.

The balloon popups have been driving me up the walls lately and I finally decided to google and figured out how to turn it off. This mainly hits a nerve when my wireless drops out, or the ASP.NET Development Server starts up. Using the ‘Run’ command, type GPEDIT.msc, look under User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start Menu & Taskbar then bring up Remove Balloon Tips. From here I would assume you can figure out how to enable or disable this ‘feature’.

The other day I posted on the limitation on build numbers. Well Neil Enns has delved into this topic a little bit more, and I wanted to post about it as well … Why are build numbers limited to 65535.

I usually pride myself in figuring out any problems I may have while developing. Well one popped up the other day on me and I couldn’t figure out why, well I just changed a couple numbers just to get the build working again and continued on. I had many things to get done and I wanted to come back to this problem when I had more time.

I have been anticipating the release of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (formerly Everywhere Edition). They have just released it on January 11 2007. I have been watching this project the past few months, and I am looking forward to using this on an upcoming project I will working on.

Most programmers know how to use an explicit cast. In C# the way of handling is as follows: