I leave it as an exercise to the reader...

When did this become a euphemism for "this is hard"?

I say this because I'm doing research on Visual Studio 2010 and one of the selling points is the Parallel Extensions for .NET. In a great many of the articles and tutorials I've found, the author goes through some totally brain dead examples that have no relevance to real life to show the basics. This is then followed by a discussion of some of the more interesting parts of the framework and then a paragraph or two about things you might try and finally something like "I leave it as an exercise for the reader to...." followed by something that might actually be interesting.

This is one of the reasons, by the way, that I prefer actual books to cobbling together a manual from various web pages. I know a lot of people say they will never by another programming book again because you can find everything you need on the web. I have not found this to be the case. And even when it is the case in a lot of instances one has to go through a lot of effort to cull the good nuggets from the pile of information you find. It's almost like panning for gold. Most good books do this for you already and the really good ones even include some decent examples of using libraries and techniques that have some relevance to real life.

I just needed to vent. Back to my research.

Working with outlook

I found a nice piece of software called Outlook Redemption. I had to process some msg files that I had exported and this thing came in handy and was super simple to use. For what I needed, this was enough to get going.

From time to time I'm still amazed at the software that is freely available to just get things done and move on with your life.

link with good info on posting to page

here is some information on posting to pages in facebook using the API

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=45796

NULL is a four letter word

I used to be a big fan of NULL. It represents something that isn't really there and in many, many cases it makes sense logically and mathematically. I even had a good way of explaining it to lay-people that didn't really get it. think of it like bank accounts and account numbers for those bank accounts. An existing account with a balance of zero is different than not having an account at all, right? This worked for most people to help explain the difference, especially in text fields where the value of some fields would be the empty string and others would be NULL.

Lately though, I've come to the realization that this doesn't really matter. You can explain this in a multitude of ways that make sense, but when Judy in marketing wants to send an email to all of the people that are not in the Accounting department, she doesn't care about NULL. As the more technically or mathematically inclined among us know, if the department field for somebody is NULL, in most databases it would not be comparable to a string because it has no value to compare.

Select * from Employees where dept != 'Accounting'

will not return the people where dept is NULL in most cases. And this is usually very bad in the real world.

I'm done with NULL if anything close to a reasonable default exists. It just eliminates so many real world problems. I know from time to time I've come across people on discussion boards that have expressed this view and for the longest time I've disagreed with that notion on principle. I know many others that have as well. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I finally get it.

Consider it the 8th dirty word, after fuck, shit, piss, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

Fun with HTML 5

I found a sample that had a simple particle system in html 5. I made one small improvement (pass in the type of particle to render) and changed it from raindrops to what could be a simple campfire. I like fire :-)

I put this up on a page here

test facebook like button

The cyclical nature of programming

Anybody who has been in this business for a long time knows that there are a lot of cycles in technology. Boom/bust cycles. Cycles where we process a lot of stuff on servers, then distribute it to nodes on the network, then move back to processing a lot stuff on servers. I'm sure there are others, but these are the two big ones that come to mind.

One thing I've noticed lately is that this is happening over on hacker news. Over the past couple of weeks there appear to have been a lot of links to items that I read many years ago. Some of them weren't even new then. Lots of Peter Norvig stuff. Some links to old Dykstra papers. That sort of thing. Things that should be part of the collective programmer consciousness, I guess.

I think this sort of thing is why we spend a lot of time rebuilding the wheel, as it were. You don't have to look to hard to find a large group of software folks that are convinced the credentials and formal schooling are waaaay overrated. But then you run into these periods where a large group seems to stumble upon some piece of writing or some paper and has to share it with the world, as if they've discovered something new and exciting and awesome. While I respect and love the enthusiasm of these sorts of things, I'm wondering how much overlap there is in these two groups. I would guess a lot. Maybe that's just my natural pessimism and cynicism kicking in.

I know that several well known people have lists of required reading for programmers. It just seems that these aren't very well known in the programming community at large. I've passed some of these around to various people. Some of them really bug me, however, because they are ephemeral. I know a lot of people, for example, that used to recommend one or more Extreme Programming books. Very enthusiastically. Now, they wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole. They've moved on to Scrum. And soon I imagine they will move to some yet unnamed flavor of the month. Mostly in an effort to collect more consulting revenue.

I think I'm going to start collecting some of these. I'd like to break this particular cycle. Here are a few that come to mind. They mostly contain basic fundamentals or things that have stood the test of time. They are the sorts of things that are, in some cases, part of the collective hacker unconsciousness. Eric Raymond has written about this hacker culture stuff and has done a much better job than I could hope to do.

Eric can be polarizing, but he has some great writings. No matter what side of the ESR fence you sit on, at least he makes you think.
How to become a hacker
Cathedral and the bazarr
The Art of Unix Programming

norvig.com - Just an all around smart guy with lots of good things to say.

Joel on Software - The forums on this site used to be GREAT. The business of software board is still pretty good. The older essays are definitely worth a read.

The Mythical Man-month. Fred Brooks. Classic book. Short, too, which is nice :-)

I'll add others as they come to mind.