Dangerous Podcasts

This is a note to anyone out there listening to Podcasts. Beware.

Any person with a mic and a recorder (both of which are on most iPods) can make a podcast. There are many podcasts made by people who really do not know what they are talking about. I’m afraid academic .net radio is one of those such podcasts.

http://www.academicdotnet.com/DesktopDefault.aspx

I just listened to the first 21 minutes (the podcast stopped there, maybe they published it wrong?) of episode 3 of the academic dot net radio show podcast. I honestly think they got more things wrong than they got right when they were describing things. I commend that they want to produce something to help student. That is great. But what I heard is truly a disservice to anyone listening. From describing what .NET is to the differences between VB.NET and C#, they got it wrong. Describing web services and soap, totally inacurate. The description of COM was also totally inacurate. And when the described Mono and its shortcomings they said “talking to Databases and Web Services aren’t there yet” !!!!! WOW?!?!? I’ve never had any issue with Mono and either of those things. AFAICT the ONLY part of Mono that is any thing short of .NET 1.1 compatibility is the lack of Windows Forms and of course the MSMQ and WMI parts of the base class library. They really did not understand how the framework is different from the base class library, which is very sad. Anyone who has spend anytime with dot net should really understand that difference. Maybe I’m a little bit too much of a langauge buff and I like formal definitions, but they were so bad that they were doing a disservice.

So if you happend to read this because you searched for dot net or dotnet and podcast, please don’t listen to the academic .net radio show. Go back and listen to Dot Net Rocks from episode 1 instead. Wait until those academic guys from Canada get their act together.

Also, as someone who spent 8 and 1/2 years as a student at a university and 6 years working at one for a total of 10 years being involved in academia, I expect more from something, anything, which calls itself academic. There was absolutely nothing academic about this show. Elementary or beginner would be better words. That said, I truly hope that they get their act together and figure something out and produce worthwhile content. I think it is an important hole which does need to be filled.

undriven

From digg, this article highlights a 33 year old man who never developed. He is gettng therapy and experiencing puberty and soon he will join the ranks of the rest of men whom are driven by only one thing.

My thought is: Don’t do it!

Man, if I didn’t think about sex every six seconds like the statistic mentions I could be much more productive. If I wasn’t distracted every time I looked at, or remembered a “sexy” woman, I could write way more code. I’d contribute to so many more projects it is sick.

Of course, I never would have met my wife, so I’d be miserable. Oh well, nevermind.

XML is NOT a design tool

XML is the replacement for bad oo models. Why do anything naitive xml? What are the gains? Nnne. Drawbacks? Speed.

This is a note I wrote myself while in a meeting with co-workers a few months back. At the time, I’d not used XML for much of anything as a programmer. Since then I have changed my tune somewhat. However, I still am of the belief that XML is still not the panecea that many make it out to be.

XML is NOT a trump card for all the other design methodologies. XML isn’t a design methodology. If you aren’t designing and you think it is OK because “we are using XML”, then you are doing something very wrong. (i.e. you are stupid)

You must know XML’s limits. Everything has limits. Know them. When you are using a DOM library and your 50MB XML file is taking 500MB memory and you plan to do this on every request to your webserver and handle 100 requests per second, then you WILL have problems, unless you have $$$$$$$$ for an awesome server. If you do have $$$ for an awesome server, give me a call, I’ll come make your app 100 times faster.

XML is in itself not the problem. The problem is of course people. People don’t understand, so they misuse; it is the same old issue. I’m not as crazy about it as these guys.

A commercial memcached

I just ran across ScaleOut StateServer which looks to be an ASP.NET specialized distributed memory server much like memcached.

It sounds like a great idea, but who wan’t to pay for such a tiny feature? It is tiny features like these that Oen Source has generally done a better job with vs. commercial software IMO. So, for ASP.NET, this could be a perfect point for Mono to provide yet another big value add over the Microsoft implementation. After all, memcached is already done. All that needs to happen is the application session state provider to be written which uses it. There is even already a Java API, so if one were very desparate, then IKVM could make it come to be usable in a very short time. Of course, being the looser that I am, I think I’ll go down the path of making it work directly with the memcached using the memcached protocol.

TODO: syslog->lucene searchable + web front, ubuntu, reciepe

it would be sweet to google ones logs.

automate this

– discover to which package you want to open a bug report to;
– open synaptic
– locate on synaptic your packageif the package has the ubuntu logo besides its name, it means this
package is in the “main” repository. So, for now, the bug report must go
to bugzilla.

if the package does not have the ubuntu logo, it probable came from
universe or multiverse repositories. In this case, you must report it
into malone, launchpad’s bugreport tool.

reciepe:

Pastry Dough
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp. baking powder
10 tbs. unsalted butter
4-5 tbs. ice cold water

Cut butter into the flour, salt and baking powder until coarse crumbs. Add water 1 tbs. at a time until dough begins to hold together. Shape into a ball, cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate. When ready, roll into a circl on a well floured surface. Lay over mat pie, trim edges, crimp and bake.

**Roll out left-overs and sprinkle with parmesean and herbs for a nice savory snack.
Welsh Rarebit
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp dry mustard
2 cups milk
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (preferably sharp)
Toast

In a sauce pan, melt butter . Whisk in dry ingredients and cook 4-5 minutes (forming a roux). Slowly pour in milk and Worcestershire sauce, whisking constantly until thickened. Add cheese a handful at a time, stirring continuously, allowing the cheese to melt through. To serve, pour cheese sauce over toast.

Bugzilla still sucks, Mono still rocks.

Yesterdays flame fest by yours truely mentioned that I found a bug in Mono.

The bug turned out to be not in XSD itself, but in System.Xml.Schema. As a result, I totally misfiled the bug, but no biggie, they had it all fixed up in no time.

Yes, they had the bugzilla bug all fixed up, and they had the bug fixed. It was fixed in well under 24hrs, possibly under 12, I’m not sure. All I know for sure is that it was damn fast response time.

Mono rules.

Bugzilla, just don’t do it.

Jorge won’t like this. I ran across a bug in Mono’s implementation of XSD today. Jorge always tells me to file bugs, so I attempted to do so. XSD is the executable which generates classes or typed datasets for mono from xml schema definition files. I found mono’s bugzilla after remembering that it was ximians bugzilla. I fetched my password because I had long forgotten it. I logged in. I queried to make sure this bug was not already reported. I started a new bug. I filled out the bug report with good, detailed information, steps to recreate it, my environment, etc.

The next part is where I went wrong. I assumed (uses assume, I am a user in this case, programmers should handle these assumptions). Yes, I assumed that I could put something good for the keyword field in the bugzilla Enter Bug form. I assumed that it would barf on me. It barfed on me. No problem just click back and remove that field. NO PROBLEM!!! Click back cleared the form data! I know it wasn’t my browser doing this. I can click back all the time on other sites. It is 31 days and a few hours from 2006 and usability is still the number one issue with open source. I’m not talking ubuntu desktop usability for my mom. I’m talking bug tracking usability for developers. Sure, all I have to do is spend another 5 minutes filling out the form again. But am I going to do that? Every other time in my life I’ve said fuck it, and I’ve simply closed that browser tab. It comes down to Jerry McGuire. Help me, Help you. Help me, Help you! HELP ME, HELP YOU!!! Even 2 minutes to fill out the form again is 2 minutes too many! So what am I going to do?

Well, I’ll fill out the form which sent me on an anger rampage. I’ll buy a new ipod because upon the form blanking out I threw my brand new 100GB iPod with Video into a wall and it shattered into 1000 (I counted) pieced. (yes, it doesn’t exist, i’m lying, I didn’t throw an ipod)

I’m considering filing a bug about bugzilla itself. *sigh*