Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:20:17 GMT

Number 1 Sign Your Software Project Is Doomed

I noticed these three similar headings at Dzone (and elsewhere)

1. Top Ten Signs Your Software Project is Doomed
2. 7 Signs Your Project Will Never Make it to Production
3. Warning Signs Your Web Application Project May Fail

And I thought I should write down the:

Number 1 Sign Your Software Project Is Doomed:

1. You immediately clicked on and read all three of those articles because you had a strong gut feeling you should.

Sometimes, whatever you think you are -- that's what you are.

Read On...

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:22:18 GMT

'Reuse' Is Not Usable

First, here's my attempt at a greenspunism:

Bambrick's 8th Rule of Code Reuse

It's far easier and much less trouble to find and use a bug-ridden, poorly implemented snippet of code written by a 13 year old blogger on the other side of the world, than it is to find and use the equivalent piece of code, written by your team leader on the other side of a cubicle partition.

And I think that 'the copy and paste school of code reuse' is flourishing, and will always flourish, even though it gives very suboptimal results.

Let's look at some reasons why it flourishes, and some reasons why it's not so hot in the long run (feel free to suggest your own).

Read On...

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:53:36 GMT

Damn Lambda

The increasingly 'functional' nature of C# still confuses me at times.

An
anonymous function with
anonymous parameters set an
anonymous object to an
anonymous type with an
anonymous value.

Cancel or Allow?

~~~~anon.

Read On...

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:29:05 GMT

Powershell on Rails -- MonadRail!

Okay -- i've been going on about powershell a lot lately. And you want to hear about other things. I can accept that. Even the people on the bus seem to pull faces when i start spontaneously talking about powershell.

(An old lady on the bus this morning, for example, just didn't get it. --A universal parser! I said, but did she even smile? Not a smirk.)

Well, the reason for the powershell obsession is that I'm currently reading "Powershell in Action" by Bruce Payette which is a cracker! It goes deep into the language, as deep as can be.

And I've been thinking about using Powershell for writing websites. Rails-style, no less.

Read On...

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:59:03 GMT

Remove Duplicate Rows From A Text File Using Powershell

If your text file is already sorted... then removing duplicates is very easy.

(But remember, the Get-Unique command only works on sorted data!)

If the file's content is not sorted, and the final order of the lines is unimportant, then it's also easy....

Sort it -- and then use Get-Unique

(You now end up with a file that is sorted, and where every line is unique)

However... the case that one bumps into is always the tricky case...

Read On...

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:49:58 GMT

Is there a general solution to string templating?

String Templating seems to be a problem that gets solved over and over again. But is there a general problem underneath at all? And if so, can a general solution be designed, implemented everywhere and used with confidence? Read on for rampant speculation.

Read On...

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:02:13 GMT

Windows Updates Make Me Nervous

Rather surprised by the new 'updates are ready' message from Microsoft. Hmmm.

Perhaps they know just how much frustration we had on the home pc recently due to their dodgy updates.

(Fixed thanks to Scott Swigart)

Read On...

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:47:58 GMT

How Naming Works At Microsoft

Read On...

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:28:12 GMT

Remove empty lines from a file using Powershell.

I needed to remove the blank lines from a file.

Normally when I need to do this, I use a regular expression in TextPad. (replace "\r\n\r\n" with "\r\n"... and iterate) -- but TextPad wasn't available on this machine, and I couldn't connect to the internet to grab it.

So I fired up PowerShell and messed around with the syntax until it worked.

gc c:\FileWithEmptyLines.txt | where {$_ -ne ""} > c:\FileWithNoEmptyLines.txt

I don't know if that was the prettiest way to do it -- but I got the result I needed ;-)

The nicest thing was that I didn't need to look anything up -- I just tried variations until I got the result I wanted. I didn't remember the syntax of the 'where' statement or the 'not equal to' operator -- I guessed and got them right within one or two guesses. Nice language design, Bruce!

(I didn't even remember the command 'gc' -- but since i wanted the powershell equivalent of the 'type' command, so i entered 'alias type' and found 'Get-Content' is the powershell equivalent of 'Type' which i guessed was also known as just 'gc')

Read On...

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 04:09:19 GMT

A Faster Ruby.

[Devil's Advocate (Dvl) talks to Ruby Advocate (Rby). Inspired by ruby forum discussion, via Scott Hanselman.]

Dvl: Ruby has poor computational performance.

Rby: What? No it doesn't.

Dvl: Yes it does. You ruby people are in denial about the whole topic of Ruby's poor computational speed.

Rby: Denial? What? No we're not! Look over there!

Dvl: Yes you are. Try and say it with me "computational performance."

Rby: Comp... u... tay... What about developer performance, hey? Developer productivity is more important. Elegance, beauty, blah blah, love-ins, simplicity

Dvl: Well if Ruby developers are so damn productive, why can't they write a faster ruby?

Rby (covering ears and shouting): SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Read On...

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:01:28 GMT

There's Three Ways To Know Anything

Okay, so i've decided there are three ways to know anything. Maybe there's more ways. So, there are at least three ways to know anything. Everything.

Say you want to write really good .Net code: code that fulfills all your needs, does cool stuff, and works reliably. There's three ways.

Read On...

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:23:25 GMT

Test-Driven Hypocrisy? Who tests the test?

An oft heard mantra in Test-Driven Development is "if it's not tested, it's broken" and I have to admit that this slogan makes me cringe -- and leads to some of my own hidden objections to TDD.

"If it's not tested it's broken" -- okay it's a blatant exaggeration -- yet this seems to be lost on a lot of people. What it really means is something more like:

"If it's not tested with unit tests then it's unlikely to be tested elsewhere and hence we'd be making a fairly safe bet, to assume that it contains bugs."

But somehow this has less punch than the exaggerated mantra

"If tested it ain't, broken it is."

I like exaggeration -- hell, i probably like it a thousand more times than you do -- but i get annoyed when people take exaggerations literally.

For kicks, let's apply the principle literally and see where it gets us:

Say you write some code. Oops. You should've written tests first. Your code's broke.

So now you write code to test your code.

Oops, the code you wrote to test your code is broke. Fool! You didn't write any tests to test the tests that test the code that broke.

Stack overflow. Goodnight.

Discuss.

Read On...

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Agile and Test-Driven: A Marriage Made In Hell?

Agile and Test-Driven go together like a horse and carriage... or do they?

Thanks to an excellent series of articles at Raganwald, I'm currently rethinking some of my old prejudices against agile and test-driven practices, to see if i'll start adopting them as a more central part of my style. (Note: I'm not against either of these practices, but i'm certainly not a true believer)

Thus i've been trying to uncover my hidden objections, to see if they can be overcome. But along the way a few boggling conundrums have presented themselves. See what you think.

Read On...

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:37:43 GMT

Essential 'Programming' Skills for Non-Programmers

If you work in IT and you're not a programmer then firstly, welcome... I hope you enjoy the site ;-)

To succeed in IT I think there are still some 'programming' skills that will be worth taking the time to learn.

These are skills that won't die out quickly, and that will help you in general trouble-shooting and comprehension.

Okay -- maybe this is a pompous list... but I welcome any adds, edits, deletes. Here goes.

• HTML: Dare to 'view source'
• SQL: Learn to select, from, where, order
• XML: Learn what makes a document well formed
• Spreadsheets: Please learn to write formulae in cells
• Coffee: Now make me a damn coffee you admin nitwit

Read On...