Software pundit Joel Spolsky finally added titles to his RSS feeds (among other site improvements) and it’s about time. The title “November 5, 2005” tells me nothing about what he’s saying. Love him or hate him (why choose one or the other. Choose both!), Joel is definitely worth reading.

In response to the White House asking The Onion to stop using the presidential seal on the website, the onion added a link to this to its front page.

Every day I look at my current code and go, “Damn, that’s some sweet shit!” But I also look at code I wrote a month ago and say, “What a freakin’ idiot I was to write that!” So in a month, the code I’m writing today will have been written by an idiot.

By now, every developer and his mother knows that VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 has been released. Prepare for the generics explosion as legions of .NET developers retrofit code, happily slapping <T> wherever it fits.

Well, like Mr. Sells and Dave Winer, I am ready for the ninth grade.

Just found out that Harriet Miers withdrew from the running for a position as a Supreme Court justice via The Onion.

The great people at WebHost4Life moved my database and web server to new Windows 2003 servers. They put them in the same server block and I noticed a significant speed increase in the time it takes my blog to load. This explains why my site was down this morning.

Eric Lippert does a great job of defining the term Idempotent. I’ve used this term many times both to sound smart and because it is so succinct.

Sometimes someone writes a post that makes you say, “Oh shit!”. For example, Jon Galloway writes that writing a windows service just to run a scheduled process is a bad idea.

Welcome to the new pissing contest.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. – Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA

Ok, I may have misfired with the last video, but this is truly hilarious. It passed the “Wife Test” (the last one didn’t).

I’ve talked before about the various physical pains that software developers face on the job. For me, it seems that my pain likes to migrate around my body. If I have pain, it almost always seems to be one at a time.

My Contact Me page works again. Sorry for the prior inconvenience.

UPDATE: For the most part, I think young Phil Haack is full of shit in these first two paragraphs. I definitely now think unit tests should NOT touch the database. Instead, I do separate those into a separate integration test suite, as I had suggested in the last paragraph. So maybe Young Phil wasn’t so full of shit after all.

You know you’re a big geek when a sequence of numbers with an interesting property just pops in your head. No, I’m not talking about myself (this time). Jayson Knight is the big geek as he noticed a pattern in a sequence of numbers that popped in his head…

In my last post, I didn’t explain the pattern to Jayson’s satisfaction and I had a typo in my proof that I have since corrected.

I noticed a recent check-in has added a TimeOut property to the RollBack attribute in MbUnit. Woohoo!

The problem with extremists is that they inevitably color the mainstream’s perception of a thing, whether it be a race, a culture, or a software development practice.

Open Bar