Requirements Considered Harmful
Micah delves into the dark side of requirement documents. I am glad he is taking on writing about some of the challenges we’ve faced in starting a new company. I’ve been planning to write about many of these challenges as well, but I wanted to give myself more time. Perhaps I was a bit too shell-shocked by all the difficulties to give it a proper treatment. Perhaps I was afraid I would violate the one blogging rule we have, don’t be stupid.
Read MoreThe Team Grows
A while ago I told you that I was starting a company with my business partner, Micah. Well the good news is that we’ve officially added another partner/employee, the indefatigable Jon Galloway.
Read MoreIs It A Hate Crime If It Happens In An Online Game
This article in Boing Boing about how World of Warcraft (WoW) moderators are warning groups not to adverties their guilds as “GBLT-friendly” (Gay, Bi-sexual, Lesbian, Transgender friendly) got me thinking.
Read MoreDynamic WHERE and ORDER BY Without Dynamic SQL
My friend Jeremy (no blog) pointed me to these two useful articles on how to perform dynamic WHERE clauses and ORDER BY clauses without using dynamic SQL. These were written long ago, but I had never thought to use COALESCE in this way. Very cool!
Read MoreWho Owns the Copyright for An Open Source Project
I Swear
If Visual Studio .NET 2003 completely crashes during one more debug session in the next hour (I need to be reasonable here), I am going to throw my freaking computer through the window (figuratively speaking).
Read MoreThe Developer's Guide To Copyright Law - Part 1
Developers Guide To Open Source Software Licensing
This is part 2 in my three-part series on copyright law and software licensing. Part 1 covered the basics of copyright law. With the background knowledge from that post, we are ready to tackle software licensing in more depth. After this, continue onto Part 3 of the series.
Read MoreI Won The Lottery!
Well today completes my 31^st^ trip around the Sun and what a Birthday weekend it has been! Every now and then I like to buy a Super Lotto ticket just for the fun of it. I have a solid understanding of math (I did major in it) and I know that the odds are pretty much zilch, but it is fun to think about what I would do should I win.
Read MoreBest Blonde Joke Ever?
I know I am a bit late to this, but seriously, I have to link to this. This is the best blonde joke ever.
Read MoreXHTML Conformance in ASP.NET 2.0
The key purpose of my last post was to demonstrate how the ASP.NET web controls follow the Decorator pattern when it comes to rendering and how developers can hook into that to customize the rendered HTML.
Read MoreGranting Commit Access to Open Source Projects
Every open source project has its own procedures for granting the all-important commit access to developers. Some require a set number of submitted patches (which Fogel, author of Producing Open Source Software, warns against). Others do not have any clear process and rely on the whims of those with the ability to add other committers. Whichever procedure your project chooses, it is important make sure make sure it is clearly published in a visible location such as in the developer guidelines.
Read MoreUsing a Decorator to Hook Into A WebControl's Rendering for Better XHTML Compliance
Man! What a mouthful of a title, but I think it succinctly describes
what this post is about. I will demonstrate how to hook into the
rendering of a control that inherits from
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl
using a
Decorator. In
particular, I am going to hook into the rendering of a Button
control
to stop it from emitting the language="javascript"
attribute.
A Word to the Wise About Spam Filters
If you are going to talk about a product named “Microsoft Money” you had better make sure your comment spam filter doesn’t barf on the word “money”. That just wouldn’t be nice to the helpful people with legitimate comments.
Read MoreSetting Up CVS Commit Emails In SourceForge
One key component of open source projects is getting others involved in code review. In fact, that has always been one of the promises of open source software that with the hundreds and thousands of eyeballs looking at the code, the quality will be higher. In practice this doesn’t necessarily work out because the majority of open source projects only have a few eyeballs at work.
Read MoreFrustrated With Microsoft Money
I really appreciate how Microsoft has really opened up many of its internal developer groups. I only wish this also applied to more of their consumer products.
Read MoreRunning An Open Source Project
I just finished reading the book “Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” by Karl Fogel (pdf available). CollabNet has employed Karl Fogel for the past five years to work on Subversion. Prior to that he has been involved with GNU Emacs and CVS development.
Read MoreMisperceptions of Open Source
Tim Bray writes to correct misperceptions of what “Open Source” is about.
Read MoreQuickstart Guide To Shell Services In SourceForge
Consider this a more advanced followup to my Quickstart Guide to Open Source Development With CVS and SourceForge.
Read MoreVista Could Be So Much Better
From reading other blogs, it seems many developers are unimpressed with the sheen of Windows Vista, the next version of the Microsoft operating system. There is definitely appreciation for all the improvements under the hood, but the out-of-box experience (at least in the betas), leaves much to be desired.
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