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.

Back when I were a wee lad, typin on an amstrad PC 6128 with feet not reachin the floor, my geeky brother convinced my father to buy the magazine 'amstrad user' once or twice.

Our favourite regular feature was called something like '10 Line Marvels' -- these were programs, written in basic, just 10 lines long, that did extraordinary things.

It would take more than ten lines to describe the marvel that those programs represented. Can you imagine, for example, a ball bouncing around the screen? now imagine it in ten lines. impossible. (hint, it relies on a trick)

This was in the days somewhat prior to including a DVD on the cover of your magazine. Two gig of code was slightly unthinkable. Ten lines of type-it yourself was just do-able. (Type-your-own roulette wheel programs were pretty darn impossible to compile... jeb got there in the end ;+) )

Anyway, ten lines of my code, these days, is mostly whitespace and comment. So i'm not gonna try and marvel you.

This ain't gonna be marvelous

Here's a table-less 3 column CSS layout in ten lines. The only reason I mentioned the above reminiscence is because this happened to fit into ten lines, exactly. Hint: the nasty trick is that you specify the right column before the middle column.

Example of how it is expected to look:

Credit due to pixy for their 3 column layout, which informed this one (in just 120 lnes). And due to my skinnyband limitations, i haven't tested this in the flaming-fox.

(Later: I've found something about these '10 liners' (for the Amstrad CPC) see Sean McManus's Article... (quoted below):