Okay lazyweb --- try and implement the code that goes behind these two message boxes... and i don't want to hear anyone say "oh just wait till you get visual studio team system.".

I want real solutions, that work today. ;-)

I think a Visual Studio Macro could be enough to do it -- or a full blown Visual Studio Add In.

Please Lazy Web -- Save Me From Premature Shutdown or Check in!

Get another language under your belt, fatty

Why The Lucky Stiff's Online Ruby Tutorial

If you've got two minutes spare, then go to this website and get your hands dirty learning ruby. I'm not one of those crazed ruby fanatics, but this tutorial is just perfect. Well worth your time.

Also, javascript enthusiasts, check out NET WAR: Justin Walduck's AJAX strategy game.

Admin Foo!

I tend to pick on sysAdmins. It happened to me slowly over a long period of time.

They gripe me about little things. They reset the name of my computer without asking me. They run around unplugging things without telling anyone why. They complain when you take over a server and use it for your own purposes.

But adminfoo.net has set me right. This is a brilliant site helping admins do good.

GlyFx

Australian design company that makes great icons. They have some free icons here. (Recording this for my own reference as much as yours. Found via Larkware).

And in other net news...

This article on ajax is getting a lot of attention -- very few people realise it's a spoof.

Based on the work of Sean McManus. How to play and summary of the rules at the bottom of the page.

delay:400

Either of these shapes are good ones to start with:

Now a note about Sean McManus -- whose javascript i have modified for this page...

Sean wrote for various Amstrad magazines in the distant past. I recognise some of the screenshots at his website as games that I played back in the day.

Really good work. He says he was only a kid back then.

Instructions | Sean's Science & Technology resources
More games by Sean | www.sean.co.uk comments

TimeSnapper is largely written by Atli Björgvin Oddsson, who lives in Iceland.

But I wanted the chance to dabble in the code too -- so he set up a vault code repository. Vault has performed exceptionally over the long distances involved (see image).

You really can't get two people working further apart, unless you're willing to offshore your development to the moon. (Somewhere, i know, a web 2.0 company is planning on selling that very idea to some dull witted VCs)

(dragon inspired by trogdor the burninator, found via Harmony Steel.)

(Map of the world thanks to brave explorers who ventured out in bygone times and circumnavigated the globe, taking measurements along the way)

And as a longtime victim of microsoft sourcesafe, there was no effort involved in learning to use Vault. The more I look into it, the more I find interesting features I'm keen to play with. (For example, integration with Dragnet, the bug tracking system also from Sourcegear)(And I wonder what's in the email tab? (see image...)

By the way... Eric Sink DID NOT pay me to write this entry. Not that I'd object if he did.

I am damn excited about this! You're gonna like this too. I can tell, just from looking at you.

My colleague, Atli Oddsson and I have built a website at TimeSnapper.com, where you can download the updated and improved version of our winning entry from the Larkware developers competition.

(this new version is for the 1.1 framework, it has more options, and better help.)

In case you've arrived late in the game: TimeSnapper is a re-branded name for our tool called "Snapper" which is an "Automatic Screenshot Journal"

It sits in the background of your machine quietly taking small screenshots of everything you do.

Download it and run it -- all day every day. Put it in your startup, so you'll never forget to run it.

When it's time to fill out a time sheet, or review where all your time went, or work out why your machine crashed, -- TimeSnapper is the way to go.

When you're wondering when and why you started procrastinating this morning: TimeSnapper will show you where. It's scary the truths that TimeSnapper will reveal.

I seriously think that you, you, you and every other person in the world working at a computer should use TimeSnapper to keep track of what's really going on.

If you've got any ideas for what features to put into future versions, or if you have any problems (with TimeSnapper) -- contact us, or leave a comment below and tell me what's going on.

Lots of people ask the same questions about it -- so we've put up a list of FAQ.

It's been very fun and exciting putting together each of the things involved in this project. Quite different to real work. If you have ideas you're thinking of getting out into the real world I can only urge you to do it. One of my goals each year is to try and release something (anything) into the wild. This is the first time I think I've achieved it.

Best of luck. I hope you find it useful. (Or if not -- tell me why).

One thing every ajax developer needs: a 'waiting' icon to show that something is in progress...

Here's some examples, collected from around the web 2.0...

•  ...from BackPack
•  ...from Gollum
•  ...from Google Base
•  ...from TimeTracker
•  ...from I forget. Big though!

Articles that deal with the agony of a software lifestyle.

There seems to be a common thread amongst these articles... maybe I'm imagining things... they're all pretty damn interesting and well written pieces.

1. NADD - Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder

   "I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases"

2. Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

   "A lazy programmer will avoid writing ... repetitive code. ... It's best for the programmer to give up early and admit that it's always him and never the compiler who's at fault."

3. Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana - study

   "Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users"

4. Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

   "People lie... People are lazy... People are stupid."

5. The Cognitive Style of Power Point

   "PowerPoint slides don't have much information in them, and you're limited to a sequential presentation order." (summary via tim kraft's amazon review)

6. PowerPoint Remix

   "PowerPoint is standard... ...but bad. "

7. Why Specs Matter

   "Most developers are morons and the rest are assholes"

8. Worse is better

   "The programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use"

9. Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

   "To get IntelliSense to work right ... you must write your code linearly from beginning to end � just as if you were using that old DOS line editor, EDLIN"

I just emailed a project manager at a company I know, and the email bounced back -- telling me her mailbox no longer existed.

I was surprised -- and assumed it meant that the manager in question had left the company (they do have quite a high turnover at the moment)

Turns out, she'd exceeded her company's ONE GIGABYTE LIMIT on mailbox size, and emails were being rejected in the meantime.

Welcome to 2001 guys! Pity you got here four years too late, and Moore's Law has moved on since.

Here's the equation as far as I can tell:

1 GIG of hard drive space:
      $1.

Three hours of the manager's time cleaning up their hard drive space:
     $500.

Making it appear to customers as if your key staff have quit:

   priceless

What bugs you at software presentations?

Most people list complaints such as over-dependence on Powerpoint slides, small unreadable fonts, lecturers that talk too softly, or who mumble, demonstrations that crash.

My own pet peeve is a strange one.

What really bugs me is the phrase: "I'll Just Go Right Ahead And...".

A lot of presenters seem to punctuate their every movement with this phrase.

For example, the lecturer might be demonstrating how sql injection works. The talk will go something like this:

There's nothing all that wrong with the phrase. The problem is that if you start to notice it, then it will really start to irritate you. And when it really starts to irritate you, you will become ultra hyper sensitive too it. And then they'll say it again and you'll start to itch and tremble and you'll want to leap out of your skin and kill the lecturer. Then five minutes will go by where they won't say it, and you'll start to miss it. The suspense will start to kill you. You'll be sitting on the edge of your seat just dying for them to say it one more time. When they finally do, you'll find yourself standing up and cheering. Then you'll sit down quietly and keep taking notes.

So watch our for that one.

Finally:

How would the opening narration of Star Trek have sounded if Captain Kirk had been a Software Lecturer?

Strewth Ruth. Atli Björgvin Oddsson and myself won the Grand Prize in the Larkware Programming Contest.

How did that happen? I hear you gasp. Well, here's the story.

Back in April I had one of those dodgy little ideas that normally falls out of your head and dissappears forever (a DLITNFOOYHADF, or FOOY for short). Fortunately I had a notepad handy, so I jotted it down and soon blogged about it: The Automatic Screenshot Journal.

Some other time, Scott Hanselman blogged about getting a considerable prize ($2500 plus a copy of Visual Studio) in a competition even though his entry took just seventeen minutes to put together.

This was proof that very few people enter programming contests and that unlike the lottery, the odds are stacked in your favour.

When I heard about Mike Gunderloy's Programming Contest (via The Daily Grind, his weblog), I put out a call for someone else to write the Automatic Screenshot Journal.

Two people piped up: one, Charlie, said he'd give it a shot if time permits. Evidently time was short, I never heard from Charlie again. The other respondent, 'ABO' (who I now know as Atli Björgvin Oddsson) said he's already written a version. He sent it to me and it was fantastic. Very responsive, very light on RAM, only a few wrinkles: a good program all round.

I wrote back and told him it was excellent, I also suggested a few changes. But he didn't write back. There was just no word from him at all. I wrote again. I wrote from a different email account. I wrote persistently, but it seemed that ABO had left the world of the internet.

The deadline for the competition drew quite close. I was personally using 'Snapper' for putting my own timesheet together each week -- so i knew it was actually a helpful tool that every office worker in the world should have it on their computer.

So i emailed Atli one more time, this time from my work account. He responded a few minutes later and said he'd never received any of the earlier emails. It seems that gmail and hotmail are blocked by many an overzealous office filter.

Atli was very responsive about making little changes and went well beyond any suggestions I came up with. As he lives in Iceland and I live in Australia, our hours of operation don't tend to overlap very much (much like that movie Ladyhawke, although I confess to being slightly cuter than Michelle Pfeiffer). When I came into work each day I'd find a new version of Snapper waiting for me. I'd run it, check out the new features and tell Atli what I thought.

I started to put together an entry for the competition and I noticed that the program had to target .Net 2.0. (that was the main point of the competition). This was an issue as it currently used (the more common) .Net 1.1. Also, marks were given for documentation, of which we had none. I wrote to Atli asking if he could compile on .net 2.0, and I set about writing a short friendly user manual (link to pdf version of manual), in my best 'Joel Spolsky' style voice. When I heard from Atli the next day he said he'd compiled it against veriosn 2.0, and drawn the code into a single executable (it used to rely on a separate dll). This was extra good as it meant that we didn't need an installer for the package. With only a few days to go we entered the competition.

There were only about eleven entrants in the end, which is about what I'd expected. I would've been thrilled with fifth placing say, but grand prize is marvellous and not to be sneezed at.

Prizes include Code Smith (we use the free version at work) and Graphics Server .Net. Even the very cool book Visual Studio Hacks (cool... if you're a geek like me that is.)

So next time you see a developer competition, I suggest you do something about it.

As Woody Allen might have said, "seventy, eighty, maybe ninety percent of success in life is just showing up. " ;-)

Download Snapper from Larkware.com (requires .Net Framework 2.0)

Snapper User Guide (PDF, requires Adobe Acrobat Reader) from Larkware.com