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May 31, 2006
Business Plan Blues
I'm working on a business plan today for like the third time. I really hate paperwork. Over the past few months I've come to realize that I might need to raise a little bit of funding or take on some...
Welcome New Blogs
Welcome to a few new blogs that signed up for batBack over the past week. my life is a blog by Ajay Abraham of Oman. Ajay -- I hope you like batBack! Welcome aboard. (Ajay has a really cool phone...
May 30, 2006
Science Stories
Optical invisibility may be possible - Scientists say that new "metatmaterials" enable radiation of all forms, including light to be bent around them, making objects invisible. One scientist said that invisibility devices may only be five years away. There's a...
May 28, 2006
Things I Learned At The Beach
Here are the things I learned at the beach this year:
May 27, 2006
What's Wrong With Internet Rating Systems
Is it just me, or do the current batch of internet tagging and rating systems suck? I've been studying and working in this field for years, and it seems to me there are several major problems with the current crop of tools.
Continue reading "What's Wrong With Internet Rating Systems"
Night of the Attack Clowns
Here's the latest in the "Here's Something For the New Guy" category for tactical teams, a patent for a launching device to catapult people onto buildings.
May 25, 2006
One More Move, and the Monkey Gets It!
I've been having more fun than a person should have over the past few months with Web 2.0, and you’re going to get a kick out of what I've been doing. Especially since it involves the impending death of a beloved Web mascot.
May 24, 2006
batBack Performance: Thanks for the Memories
For those of you who noticed that batBack is performng unevenly, I finally have an answer for you. I knew that with a cross-blog system I was going to run into performance problems. I just had no idea they would...
Continue reading "batBack Performance: Thanks for the Memories"
May 23, 2006
Uncle and an half step dad?
Are there no standards here? Is there some sort of standard naming scheme for family members? Certainly with all the work we've done with programming languages, databases, and computer technology, somebody has come up with a standard family naming system.
May 22, 2006
I'm Ready For My Close-up!
For those of you who are stuck in an office somewhere, thinking about the beach --- Yesterday we packed up and headed out. The drive was beautiful, and the beach is completely gorgeous at this time of year. There...
May 21, 2006
The Idea and the Thing
Early tomorrow morning we'll all pile into the family car and head out on our annual beach vacation. I pre-paid for the vacation last year, so we've had many months to look forward to it! Every week at least,...
OOP-Man versus the Forces Of the Octopus
Recently a reader told me that partial classes were good for cases where one class had to implement multiple interfaces. What are you going to do, for instance, if you have a class that has to implement seven interfaces, each...
May 19, 2006
Octopus Delay
In a couple days I will talk about the Octo problem....
May 18, 2006
Attack Of The Interface Octopus
During my recent rant about partial classes being a bad idea, a commenter said something like "Yeah, but I have a bunch of interfaces to implement in this one class, so of course class is going to get huge. Partial classes let me separate the different interfaces into different files"
How Big Should Your Class Be?
Digg picked up the article linked below. One of the comments was really insightful:
Partial Classes. Totally Stupid?
Is it just me, or is partial classes the dumbest thing to come out of Redmond in a long time?
May 15, 2006
Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls Of Plasma!
This week the British Ministry Of Defence released a formerly top secret report that says that there have been no UFO sightings in British airspace in the last thrity years that were truly unexplained.
Continue reading "Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls Of Plasma!"
The NSA: Spies or Cops?
I'm a libertarian. That means I believe that people should be as free as possible and I believe that the government should only interfere when absolutely necessary. i'm a big private property person, and I am for freedom and privacy to the ultimate extent possible.
May 12, 2006
Unusual Attitudes
When I was learning to be a private pilot, my instructor kept telling me I should learn something called "spins." When I asked him what a spin was, he explained that it was basically the airplane twirling violently around, hurdling toward the ground at high speed.
May 10, 2006
Season of Ranting
For those of you who are reading this blog from somewhere besides the United States, we're about to go insane over here.
May 9, 2006
Keeping your Mouth Shut
Anybody who reads me knows i'm not a big fan of government security. I think that the government security in many areas has created a crises in faith in the government. Something like 70% of people think the government knows...
May 8, 2006
Plato and OOP: Together Again
I'm taking my hour of exercise each morning and listening to a tape series about great thinkers in Western culture. Today I learned some about Socrates and Plato. If you are a C++, Java, or C# programmer, you should take some time to learn about those dudes who lived a long time ago and wore togas. After all, they're the ones who really created analysis and OOP.
How to Tell Somebody What They Don't Know
I'm a consultant. I'm supposed to know things. I study a lot -- read, watch, write professionally. I believe i'm doing a fairly good job of knowing enough to be valuable. I used to think that "knowing something useful" was the hard part. Now I believe that's the easy part!
Continue reading "How to Tell Somebody What They Don't Know"
May 6, 2006
batBack Roundup: Daniel hits a Grand Slam
We tracked a lot of fun articles last week on batBack on several blogs. Here's a recap of what you thought about articles across dozens of blogs in the batBack family:
Moon with a Screw Top was an article Daniel wrote on the blog WhatToFix.com It was a big hit! It swept every category. If you haven't read it yet, the readers like it a lot and you probably will too.
Continue reading "batBack Roundup: Daniel hits a Grand Slam"
China: The Mob Rules
I've just spent about 50 hours learning about the history of China, and I thought I would share with you some of my conclusions. Since China is headed towards becoming a world superpower, we all should understand a little more about the history of what's happened over there.
May 4, 2006
Tossing QuickBooks into the Sunset
I got a call from a nice woman at one of my software vendors last month. She mentioned that we had a sunset coming up. I love sunsets.
So what's this? Some romantic overture by a vixen at Intuit? I wasn't sure what to tell her -- I am a married man after all -- when she hit me with the big surprise.
May 3, 2006
Decisions, decisions
I turn 41 on Friday. (Woo hoo! Still alive another year!) but I have to pick my birthday present, and the choice ain't easy.
May 2, 2006
Are you a World-Class Idiot?
There's an old joke that goes that 1 out of 3 people are crazy. Take a good look at the person on your right. Do they look okay? Now, how about taking a good look at the person on your left. Do they look okay? If they do, then I've got some bad news for you.
We've got some changes to make.
May 1, 2006
Brian Pomeroy: Lost in the Ether
One of the trade-offs I'm always struggling to make as a programmer is how much instrumentation to put in my code. Instrumentation is when the program writes to a log or somehow keeps track of what it is doing while it is doing it.