I am now testing an HTC Desire Z. Compared to Windows Phone 7 it is much more a nerds phone, and I love the jungle of apps available, but WP7 is so clean and easy so declaring one to be better than the other is just not possible – usage scenarios have to decide the road to follow…
The image shows my office view.
Did you ever feel like Pooh when you try to explain the latest greatest thing you’ve coded, discovered or invented?
“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
– Pooh’s Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne (source: http://www.great-inspirational-quotes.com/winnie-the-pooh-quotes.html)
Well, I guess you could say that it’s the whole reason behind Open Source.
I’ve given up on my old blog, which was also WordPress after something happened at my hosting supplier (http://one.com) which blew up both access to the old link (http://persistent.hejndorf.dk) and updating via Windows Live Writer.
The latter has really improved my blogging life, and I find it essential by now so the blog just had to move.
So here is the cheese back with all the old stuff in its new surroundings at http://phejndorf.wordpress.com.
Kathleen Dollard has a really good editorial in the May 2007 issue of Visual Studio Magazine – I very much encourage you to read it here.
It’s main point to developers is that we have to find each our niche – or perish. The golden age of the IT-hero, the single developer who is fluent in all technologies available on a PC, has come and gone. Time for Mr Know-it-all to retire.
This is a very comforting observation. I recently made a list for myself of all the methods, technologies, products, acronyms, CTP’s, etc that I really thought I needed to look further into – just on the MS stack. It was rather terrifying, because there is more, even today, than I will probably be able to fit into a whole lifetime, even at at fairly shallow depth of knowledge.
One could argue that MS suffers from Googlemania, with new products popping out of every hole and crevice seemingly at random. But it is not necessarily a bad thing, we must simply accept that as a new world order, and reap the benefits from the information age where choices are limitless.
So what we have to do as developers, I think, is to pick and choose – and then mix and match: become much better at integrating in teams (preferably agile, of course), and acknowledge that others may know more about specific issues than we do ourselves.
Becoming teamplayers is for the developers, but management must also be aware that hiring “a programmer” (or even worse, a so called IT-expert) who can parachute in to solve any IT-problem is no longer an option. Again running self managing, cross-functional teams is the answer.
A certain granuralization is already observable in the job-titles we developers have. It will be interesting to see when this specialization will begin to manifest itself in other areas such as Computer Science, where universities (at least around here) seem to think that it is still possible to churn out M.Sc.’s who are simply “IT-experts”.
As Amazon has only had a day for scanning my site in order to evaluate what offerings, based on the content of the blog, might interest you, my dear reader, I still leave it the benefit of doubt. For example Amazon currently thinks that a “Fond of Flora – Petunia Pickle Bottom Diaper Bag” is just what a reader of the Persistent may need, which I find highly intrigueing…
Update: My, my, now it’s the Anxiety Disorder Workbook!
No, in my opninion not really. As long as the ad’s stick to the subject, so to speak, I think they’re ok.
I’ve just added an Amazon advertisement of the type they call an Omakase link. It does sound a bit like Kamikaze, doesn’t it, but to according their FAQ it means “leave it up to us”, so that’s what I will use to begin with. The Omakase link should scan the web-site and come up with items that are relevant in the context of my site, and the users preferences. So far, about 10 minutes into the program, I’ve seen it suggest pedometers and Pokémon games, which seems a bit off target, but that is probably just the artificial intelligence engine training, or???
I will also try to make Amazon links whenever I refer to books or other stuff of relevance in the future. I think of this more as a service than advertising.
When I looked at Microsoft Live Spaces it was a completely different matter: I would never allow my blog to uncritically peddle whatever someone else, like Microsoft, seems fit. In their case it is apparently mainly dating services, which are really out of context for this blog. Talking about ill placed advertisements, by the way, Microsoft also recently took some flak in this country for beer advertisements on Messenger, which is of course very widely used by kids!
What to do when driving in your car, mowing the lawn, cleaning the house and all the other things that leave spare brain-cycles available? Well, since nobodys invented SETI for brains (yet), my answer is: strap on any old MP3 device and listen to one of the really interesting tech podcasts available.
My personal, absolute #1 favourite is the Scott Hanselman/Carl Franklin combo Hanselminutes. This podcast combines very varied, very interesting content for developers, good sound quality and a good dialogue format which makes listening almost like talking to a very clever colleague.
The Ron Jacobs Arcast is more for the Architect, and a not so much on the detail, but there have been some pretty interesting shows here (though I could do without the hip style and artificial applause). Carl Franklin is also the guy behind the DotNetRocks series, but these shows are, to put it mildly, a lot less to the point than Hanselminutes. At times we even have to get the MS Campus gossip, but then again you can just skip that.
My favourite portable listening device is an elderly HP Ipaq 1900 – this device has the distinct advantage that you can fast-forward very quickly with the pen. If you want to come back to the middle of a 1 hour show, it’s so much easier to just point at where you wat to start, than to keep the fast forward button on an MP3 player pressed for a an infinity of seconds. Strange that the Ipod or some such device doesn’t feature a touch screen. Heck, even a Nintendo DS has one.
For the car I just got a new, inexpensive radio that will play both CD and USB and SD-cards. With the price on SD being next to nothing these days this is my favourite, as my portable also has an SD slot, thus making the update very easy.
So, folks, grab yourself some of the really interesting, inspiring, instructive podcasts and make good use of that time spent (no, I didn’t say wasted) on the daily chores.
Having had the Persistent Weblog on my to-do list for over a year, I’m back in the blogosphere, hopefully with stuff that might interest those who happen to come by.
To start with, let me quote from a story that, true or not, is a really fascinating read: The story of Mel. It contains one of my favourite quotes:
“I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal.”
Even with the advent of OO, patterns, code generators, pair programming, reviews and all the other innovations, this still holds true in my opinion. I still think that many solutions bear some heavy fingerprints of their authors individual style, or, as Bernoulli remarked of a mathematical solution Isaac Newton produced anonymously, “tanquam ex ungue leonem” (we know the lion by his claw).
Software (as well as other intellectual property) piracy is a bad thing. Though – in contrast with musicians, writers and other artists – the programmers right to lifelong income from a stroke of genius is usually a lot more limited.
What bugs me, however, is reading about the “losses” that piracy incurs. Today I saw an IDC figure rating it at $33 billion in 2004. Didn’t these people ever go to business school? Didn’t they ever hear of supply and demand curves? Everybody else knows that when the price falls towards zero, then demand grows towards infinite. So even if software piracy could be 100% wiped out, the software industry could never gain 33$ billion in extra revenue.
Rather (economic theory again) people would substitute with products at a price that closer matches their marginal value (as in: when the price of butter rises we buy margarine instead). So, to the dismay of software vendors, for instance the more the price of MS Office and the cleverer the copy-protection gets, the more people will turn to alternatives such as Open Office – or, as we are already seeing – the traditional suppliers will segment their products by customers and price.
I’m sure that both the industry and their customers, with the aid of market forces, will find the right balance – but that the cost to the industry 33$ is a lie that probably only politicians will ever believe.
I really like the idea of technical debt in which (I quote Martin Fowler): “…doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice.”
This is the choice that we make every single day, often under the immense pressure of some manager trying to get the feature set of a Mercedes at the price of a Hyundai. Ah, the myopia of short-term managers. But then, of course, it is also the responsibility of the IT-professional to document and inform about or even recommend technical debt when it is appropriate – who should pay for a full featured web-interface where a console application could really do the job.
Do look up the link here
