Jon Galloway has an interesting write-up on the latest changes to Google’s search algorithms code named “Jagger”

As I mentioned in my last post, my redesign was inspired by some of the lessons in this book, “Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm”.

After completing two of the three books I said I would be reading in 2006, I decided to apply some of the lessons from the book Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm by slightly redesigning my site.

While reviewing some code this weekend, I had the thought to do a search for the following string throughout the codebase, “catch(Exception” (using the regular expression search of course it looked more like “catch\s(\sException\s*)”.

When you hear the phrase, “use your head” you are typically being told to think. There are other uses of the head that are quite unwise. For example, trying to clear a soccer ball away from another player rushing in on the attack when you are a step too late. Unfortunately that’s exactly what I tried today.

Read an interesting quote today, though it’s been around a while. It serves as a follow-up to my post about bringing back the 40hr work week.

I have a really old Kodak photography book laying around that delivers various tips for how to advance from your typical crapola™ snapshots into something worth boring your friends with on Flickr after your last vacation.

Scott Mitchell reminisces about Websites Back in the Day. You mean like this one^1^ Scott?

Via Larkware News I noticed that Subversion 1.3 has been released. Looking at the release notes I noticed one thing in particular that caught my attention.

I happened to notice my dog Twiggy apparently admiring herself in the mirror. At one point she was right up against the mirror looking at herself. By the time I got my camera, she had decided to on a more comfortable vantage point to check herself out.

Yesterday I received a call from my very exasperated father who recently has been helping my Korean mother learn how to use the web and web-based email.

These days it seems that the 40-hour workweek is a pipe dream of of a bygone past (if it ever was a reality). This seems especially true for the field of software development which seems to glorify working excessively long hours like an old fashioned pissing match.

This is an eye opening and interesting account of how Tom Oward was able to data mine Amazon’s wish list database to get a profile of “subversives” based on their requested reading list. Makes you think twice before adding a book to your wishlist.

I’ll try not to bore you with the typical reflections of the past year. Yesterday it pretty much rained all day, ruining our NYE plans. But where one door is closed, another door opens. We ended up having a grand time at our friends place playing board games and drinking white russians. A toast to 2006!

So it looks like our New Years Plans have been derailed by the rain and the Fire Marshall event organizers as reported by the fire department’s blog. It stopped raining an hour ago, but the wet conditions and the sheer amount of electrical equipment needed for Giant Village has made it a safety hazard. Bummer.

In a blatant ripoff of Scott H, I am going to post the best of “You’ve Been Haacked” 2005 edition. This year, you laughed, you cried and when you were done, you came over and briefly glanced at my blog. But I took it in stride and continued to write, rant and rave… and this was the best I could come up with in 2005^1^.

While we’re on the topic of appropriate analogies for software development, my homie Micah writes a post about how certain analogies fall short, and he compares writing software to being an artist.

In some of my projects, I take a less purist approach to unit testing in that I allow unit tests to touch the database. In order to “reset” the database to the state it was in prior to the test, the code enlists COM+ 1.5 transactions via the [RollBack] attribute in MbUnit (there’s also one for NUnit).