Technology

For fans of tech blogger Joel Spolsky and his website JoelOnSoftware.com, he is doing a net seminar with Software Development Magazine Thursday at 2:00 PM ET. He will be joined by three other speakers speaking on a variety of subjects. According to his website, Joel will be giving “a scintillating 24 minute presentation by me about social software, squeezed down to fit in 20 minutes, which will involve talking really really fast and leaving many proofs as exercises to the reader.” ([Via Joel on Software])

At long last and after much hoopla, Mono Beta 1 is out. I’m gonna try to play around with it this weekend on my ancient Linux box. Has anyone played around with it yet?

Mono Beta 1

Well, apparently those boys at Google couldn’t resist a delicious joke in their IPO filing:

If you take a close look at the form Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the exact value of its planned offering is $2,718,281,828 dollars, which some would immediately recognize as the mathematical constant e. E, for those not blessed with a Ph.D. and a job at Google, is Euler’s number, which is used as the base for natural logarithms.

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Another great funny for all of you geeks out there. We’ve all read the hundreds of essays on how to write good code, engineer robust systems, etc. Well here is one from the opposite perspective: How To Write Unmaintainable Code

[Listening to: Phonograph Blues - Robert Johnson - The Complete Recordings (02:39)]

This is a little technical post for all of you geeks out there. I’ve really appreciated some of the features of the WordPress blog engine. One of the really unique features is the ability to attach latitude and longitude information to a particular post and for it to display a link to one of the various mapping sites out there. However, I also really appreciate the various blog posting clients (Azure, wBloggar, Zempt) for creating and editing my posts. But none of these clients has the geographic tagging ability built into it, which is especially important for mobile blogging. The following hack lets you enter latitude and longitude as XML tags within the post content and they’ll be stripped out and turned into the standard GeoTags.

My colleague Peter and I have been swapping computer jokes/quotes this afternoon and here are the highpoints:

There are two types of programming languages; the ones that people bitch about and the ones that no one uses. -Bjarne Stroustrup

If I were chained to a bench and ‘perl’ was the only thing that could open the lock, I’d probably cut my hand off. -Gerald Penn

In C we had to code our own bugs. In C++ we can inherit them.

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Well people are sending me cool tools right and left. This one is a mobile blogging tool called Azure. This is free piece of software that is much more robust than the previous software that I used. Unfortunately, it’s written in Java which runs very slowly on PalmOS, but beggars can’t be choosers.

If you are looking for a great windows blogging tool, I’ve found it. Up to now, I’ve been using w.bloggar which is really a nice product. However, it is primarily designed to support users of Blogger.com. However, with this new product called Zempt, I can take advantage of the advanced options of the WordPress system such as multiple category posts and editing the post date/time. If you are a blogger, check it out..

Here’s another good story if not a little nostalgic. Apparently, the inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Delete is retiring after 28 years with IBM.

[Listening to: Please Call Me, Baby - Tom Waits - The Early Years, Vol. 2 (03:42)]

Once again I was beaten to the punch. I had been rambling and boring the hell out of my co-workers on this same subject about two weeks ago. But it looks like someone had already written a whole book on the subject and Joel beat me with the summary. However, this excellent piece points out that there are two radically different cultures between the UNIX (and I’ll even say Open-Source) developers and Windows developers in so far that they are solving two different problems. Finally a voice of reason in the Unix/Linux Rules, Windows Sucks shouting match. Read it here.