rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
January 27, 2006 at 9:16 am · Filed under Web 2.0
And a thanks to Dave Winer for organizing the event. Sorry to say, I still haven’t met the man. Had a good time at the dinner last night — met many interesting people:
- Scott Mace: working on the swamp of calendar formats so we can actually have shared calendars that work.
- Scott Rosenberg: look for his coming book (in November) on the Chandler product.
- Sylvia Paull: talked about what to blog and what not to blog; what to look forward to as a parent; and about nerdliness.
- Jay Cross: talked about all sorts of things . . . he pointed out that Vista is going to be a bonanza for training companies.
- Steve Hill: has a cool idea for geographically distributed events.
- Edward Piou: cool to talk to a FreeBSD user for a change. FreeBSD rocks!
And a shout out to the enigmatic Dr. Chadblog (aka Chad Williams) — didn’t get a chance to talk this time.
Tags: Blogger_dinner, FreeBSD, Vista, Web2.0
January 26, 2006 at 11:09 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
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.
Tags: Atlas, VSLive
January 24, 2006 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
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
January 24, 2006 at 8:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous blog changes:
- Updated my picture. I heard that I looked too clean-cut in the old one.
- Added the askimet plugin. My spam comment problem has gotten out of control. In the last few days I’ve gotten over 2000 spam comments. Cheers to Matt et. al. at Automattic for making this so easy.
- Added explicit About and Disclaimer links — these were there all along, just buried.
- A new, better, Digipede graphic.
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
January 23, 2006 at 11:43 am · Filed under .NET
The Digipede Network has been chosen as a finalist for the 2006 Codie Awards.
Thanks, SIIA judges!
Update: Dan has a more complete description of the awards, here.
Tags: Codie, Digipede, grid
January 20, 2006 at 12:27 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
As you may know, Windows Live Messenger is in an invitation-only beta. I can’t imagine this is terribly exclusive, but I have some extra invitations.
There is information about Live Messenger here. I will say that it is, by default, more orange than the previous one. This is a great benefit. Unlike Michael Arrington, I like the color orange.
If you would like one, contact me through this form: Contact Me.
Note: I have no more invitations!
Tags: Live, Messenger
January 19, 2006 at 1:31 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Earlier today, I posted on upgrading to Visio for Enterprise Architects. It occurred to me that it might be helpful to quickly document the newer versions of Visio for the developer.
- Visio 2002 is from the Office 10 / Office XP family.
- Visio 2003 is from the Office 11 / Office 2003 family.
- Visio 2003 for Enterprise Architects is part of the Visual Studio .NET 2003 release. It was built on Visio 2002 and can be installed along side Visio 2003.
- Visio for Enterprise Architects is part of the Visual Studio 2005 release. It was built on Visio 2003 and cannot be installed along side Visio 2003.
Hope this helps.
Tags: Visio, vs2005
January 19, 2006 at 10:06 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I have made a change in my RSS feed. Several months back I thought I would experiment with FeedBurner Item Stats. To get this feature to work, you turn on the Feed item link clicks (“clickthrough” tracking) feature.
This allows publishers to track clickthroughs from their RSS feed. This is accomplished by redirect-links added by FeedBurner. My permalink was replaced with a redirect that increments a counter and then redirects the user back to my site.
Cool.
However, I recently noticed that some links to my posts were linking through the FeedBurner link and not directly to my own permalink. This greatly skews the per-item stats, because I cannot tell the difference between actual RSS click-throughs and other links. While this makes the stats less useful, a bigger problem is it seems to disable automatic trackbacking.
So, I turned it off. My feed is full-text anyway, so I don’t really care about clickthroughs.
If your news-reader caches posts (and therefore the item link), those redirected links will now link to my nicely-formatted FeedBurner RSS page. Not so perfect, but good enough.
Tags: blog, feedburner
January 19, 2006 at 9:49 am · Filed under .NET
I just upgraded to the latest Visio for Enterprise Architects. We use it primarily for modeling the Digipede Network database and generating DDL. The upgrade worked without a hitch. Be sure to do the following:
- Uninstall Visio 2003.
- Install Visio for Enterprise Architects.
- If you are going to work with database diagrams, create a new blank one. Then check the Database/Options/Drivers dialog and make sure your driver is set correctly (e.g., to Microsoft SQL Server) and that your driver settings are correct. If you don’t do this your existing database diagrams won’t be read properly.
Now for the first time in recent memory, I have only one version of Visio on my machine. Now where are those Office12 discs . . .
January 18, 2006 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
In a picture here, you can see a part of AT&Ts new ad campaign.
Reading through the comments, some bloggers seem to like it. Others don’t. Robert Scoble humorously suggests that blogging has jumped the shark. Tara Hunt says to AT&T, kiss my RSS.
Outside of my office is a “Close friends delivered” billboard. Aren’t they just saying that they provide connectivity?
The way I see it, if this is the “Year of RSS” it must also be the year of blogging which implies more silly ads by the big companies.
At least now your grandmother might ask you what a blog is.
P.S.: It seems there is no consensus that this is the year of RSS. Maybe it was last year and the year of the blog was the year before that, I don’t know. Anyway, it sure is hitting mainstream now. Heck, I’m even doing it 😉
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