No I'm not a religious man.

But God bless the 65535 row limit in Excel.

God bless intellisense. God bless spell checkers, to.

God bless really nerdy board games.

And God bless Jason Looney's snack cakes for links program.

So often we rush through life, never pausing to notice the little things. The taste of a flower. The feel of wet mud against the roof of your mouth. The sound of one foot clapping.

But it is these trivial things that make life worth living. Plus money, sex and liquor.

So, gentle reader, go softly into that warm inkernet. Tread lightly on the toes of your inner child. Be thinking, always thinking, as you are linking and wondering. Stay off the brown acid. Don't drink your bath water. And never lose your sense of wonder.

My wife tells me I need to develop 'self-confidence.' I need to build my 'self-esteem.'

I tell her that I reject these phoney notions, these cargo-cult deities.

What I'm after is the real thing: the adoration of millions.

After a talk by Bill McCarthy and Nick Randolph, I'm jazzed about the Snippet features of VB.net 2005. Check out the Snippet Editor Bill and others have been working on through CodeProject.

This is all specific for VB people... now that I've joined the dark side, I'll have to see what we've got in the C# world. Any thoughts?

Also, I'm wondering what features from the World's Second Simplest Code Generator can be pushed into the Snippet Editor, or something similar. (And conversely, what features from the snippet editor can be pushed into the World's "n" Simplest Code Generator?)

Have you seen Start.com? It's a webpage designed to act as your personal homepage, acting as a very personalised aggregator. As well as RSS feeds, it has 'startlets' which seem to be custom little AJAX plugins.

The team at Start.com are hiring. They ask "Are you jazzed about AJAX and DHTML?" I checked for a definition of 'jazzed' ('No definitions were found for jazzed.')

Thesaurus.com suggested many other more commonly used synonyms for 'excited':

On a different note: My friend and former colleague Alistair Speirs has started a blog. Sorry to 'out' you Al. Alistair's a pretty funny guy; an innovative coder and thinker (even if he does use a mac at home) (okay, maybe because he uses a mac at home)

Just met frank arrigo... he really does look like this:

He's one hell of a loud shirt guy.

Sort of like a bigger version of Danny DeVito. Heh heh heh.

Every time they mention a hole in the functionality, they say:

"Oh, that part represents an interesting opportunity for a community project."

For example there's no 'WorkItem Editor' -- but they hope that the people at TeamSystemRocks.com will come up with one.

Man, I wish we could say the same thing to clients.

"Sorry I left the General Ledger out of your Accounting Package. I think this presents you, the client, with an interesting opporunity for an outsourcing project."

Or I could say the same thing to my boss:

"Sorry I annoyed your clients and told them to take their business elsewhere, then got drunk in the office and puked in the staff kitchen. I think this presents you, my boss, with an interesting opportunity for a staff-turnover project."

Or to the good wifey:

"It's excellent that I forgot your birthday, our anniversary, the kid's birthdays; and I burnt down your mother's house! Think of it as an opportunity to visit single's bars and finally meet the forty-eight year-old divorcee, with an eye patch and scrufola, of your dreams. Lucky, lucky you"

secretGeek at Teched is brought to you by advantech software.

My first impressions on this stuff, in a lecture from Michael Leworthy, was 'hmmm sounds like they're making it easier for managers to be control freaks and harder for developers to actually get things done.

But something won me over.

When you attempt to check an item in to the version control system, you are told if your check-in violates the checkin policy. (e.g. you haven't associated it with a workitem, or you haven't run code analysis... this is all configurable and you know some people will go policy nuts). But, there is always no matter what, the option to over-ride and JUST CHECK-IT-IN ANYWAY.

Sure you have to provide a reason why you ignored the policy rules (e.g. 'The policy that i must make my manager a coffee before checking a file in, is rude and inapt'), and the policy-breaking check-in may cause an email to be generated for your manager, telling him or her what just happened -- but at least this humane hole in the process reflect reflects a kind of real-world philosophy that sounds much nicer than the old draconian software-enforced check-in policies I've seen elsewhere (I'm looking at you IBM).

secretGeek's ticket, accomodation and breakfast cereal at Teched is brought to you by the very intelligent folks at advantech software.

After blog mint:

If you need to hand-craft some html, and you don't have your favourite tools handy, try the Real-time HTML editor from SquareFree.

As you write html in the top window, it is instantly rendered in the lower window.

Pretty nifty stuff. I'm using it now.

See you at the Gold Coast, if you're there.

I'll be the weird little guy who looks like me.

p.s. I got Larked!

p.p.s The Gradient Maker has been re-vamped again -- better Firefox love, guaranteed.

Excellent! I just found out that the problem is fixed in the next version.

Screw the work around. I'm just gonna wait. Cool!

Not.

p.s. this relates to (a) Every product and (b) No products. I suggest you get comfy with the work around.

You're a programmer. I don't care how smart you are:

Life calls for rapid decisions on all kinds of objects.

Is this pizza is the one i want?

We make such evaluations so often, and on so many different objects, that instead of implementing a 'ToBoolean' function on every single custom type that our mind encounters, we create a static function (ToBoolean) which uses some very dodgy reflection to cast absolutely any object in the world into a boolean result.

It's a bad design. It speeds up processing, but at the loss of precision (and thus correctness) in the return variable.

And it's too convenient. The static ToBoolean function is so damn fast, and readily available, that we use it all the time. A slight bug in your work is distorted into 'absolute failure'. Infact, almost everything becomes a false. And when you should be throwing 'invalid cast exceptions' all over the place, you are instead buisly comparing apples with oranges.

This is a 'cognitive distortion'. This is the kind of stuff David Burns tells you how to get around. I wrote bout it a while back.

Watch out for it. I use this saying as an antidote: nothing is black and white, everything is shades of grey. Say it with me, geeky people: nothing is black and white, everything is shades of grey. everything is shades of grey.