I agree with Don Dodge in his post The Next Big Thing doesn’t exist…says IBM. Innovation and disruption will continue to fuel big things. I will go further and say that some of these things will even be big by IBM’s standards.
Don Dodge’s post is made even better by mentioning us! Alex Barnett notices and says he needs to find out more about Digipede. Alex, what do you need to know?
I am trying out Shannon Whitley’s FeedLinx email subscription service for publishers.
First, the Verification link.
Then, the new subscription icon:
I’m also adding this to my email subscriptions page.
I made a few minor changes to my blog:
I think it is a bit cleaner now.
Like many startups, Digipede started before we had office space, employees, a Web presence, and of course, any real hosting service. At the time, I ran several FreeBSD servers for my friends and family distributed all over the place. These all supported primaries and secondaries for DNS and mail, Web sites, and other services. This is where we originally hosted all of the Digipede services. Well over a year ago, we moved email and our Web site to a hosting company. One thing that we left in place was DNS.
The FreeBSD servers were a bit of a hobby for me which I recently quit.
Those of you who tried to access the digipede.net domain over the weekend know where this is going.
It slipped right past me that I was still hosting Digipede’s DNS. As a result, Digipede appeared to go dark over the weekend.
Ouch.
Luckily, the Digipede DNS secondary was still up and running (though its slave zone data had expired). Once Nathan realized what was going on, I was able to update the existing DNS secondary while starting the propagation through the registrar of the new DNS servers.
I’d like to say this is all “business as usual” in a startup, but it was completely my own fault. My apologies to anyone affected.
Tags: Digipede
It looks like my feed reader just duplicated all of my posts — I don’t know if that is because I updated to WordPress 2.0.1 or if it is because I changed the # of items in feed.
Other than that, the blog remains the same.
Tags: blog
I’ve played around with IE7 a little. It completely hijacks RSS. For example, clicking directly on my RSS feed link on my blog normally gives you the nicely formatted FeedBurner view. I like this view: it looks good and explains RSS to novices. It also lists several readers that a user might want to use for reading RSS. IE7 gives a different view (i.e., the IE7 Feed reader), of course gives you no options, and asks if you want to subscribe to the feed.
Of course, this is probably a benefit to IE7-only subscribers since the unsubscribed / subscribed views are virtually identical.
I could find no way to import OPML into the reader, ensuring that I wouldn’t really try it out. I also could find no way to export OPML. Maybe this is hidden somewhere in some common Feed tools, but I couldn’t find them. OPML can be imported / exported using the Import / Export wizard — clicking on the “+” icon brings up the menu from which to select this (I guess I was blinded by the strange / docking / undocking behavior of the Favorites pane).
The IE7 blog talks about the “OPML game” and how this new Windows RSS Platform solves this problem.
Dave Winer points to an article that discusses this very “problem” of importing / exporting OPML. He wonders if the author believes that people only run software on their desktop.
Don’t worry, Dave, I’m sure that Microsoft will sync the subscriptions with Microsoft Live! 😉
I met Chuck Berg, the chair of the SDForum Windows SIG.
He is speaking February 1st on Getting Started with Visual Studio Team System. I’m sure it will be an interesting talk and a chance to take advantage of his real experience getting it up and running.
If you make it to his talk, try to convince him to blog about his experiences — I’ll subscribe.
I will be attending VSLive! next week in San Francisco.
I probably spend most of my time in sessions on WCF, WF and Atlas; but haven’t quite decided yet.
If you plan to be there and want to meet up, contact me through this blog or at robert at digipede dot net.
In Perils of a poor Computer Science Education — Part I, I said that I basically agree with Joel Spolsky in his post, The Perils of Java Schools. I do, but I can’t give the impression that this is the only path to being a great developer.
At UC Berkeley, the classes used Scheme, assembly, other languages, and primarily C. The very first course was nearly all functional programming using Scheme. I think using Scheme had three main purposes: to teach recursion (duh), to expand the students view into other programming models, and take the hot-shots down a peg — it leveled the playing field (a little). Most of the rest of the program was C. Here we used C for nearly everything including, of course, the complex data structures. Yes, lots of pointers.
So were the Scheme, C, and pointers necessary to help me become a developer of production-quality code? How often have I written a hash table for production? Rarely, but I’m way better at what I do because I know how to implement a hash table, and heinous balancing trees that I can’t even remember the names of, and how to debug at the machine level, and what a functional language is, etc.
That said, managed or scripted code is the way to go for 90% of the applications written today. Pointers aren’t so important and the data structures are covered by the frameworks. Clearly this kind of coding doesn’t demand the old-school Computer Science graduate. Merely great C#, Java, PHP, etc. developers run the gamut from important role-players, team members, to team leaders, etc.
I think the most important thing you can learn as a developer is to be flexible. Think outside of the constraints of the languages and tools that you use. If it helps you to learn a different language to enable this, do so. If it helps to go deeper into the runtime environment (e.g., deeper into the CLR or the Java runtime or the compiler / assembler, etc), do so.
Flexibility — that is the practical lesson of the Computer Science program.
Tags: c#, Computer_Science, Java, JavaSchools
Miscellaneous blog changes:
If you wonder why I blog about these things: it is mostly so I can track changes in case a problem is introduced.
Tags: blog
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