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Thursday, January 31, 2008
I'm one of those people that enjoy rebuilding their machines every so often, either for performance reasons or just because I like to tidy things up. I rarely keep software installs around since there are usually newer versions by the time I re-pave my machine so this is my "must have" list of software I reinstall every time, in one easy place for my future self to grab the downloads from. General/Misc CCleaner - My favorite registry/file cleaner. I run it at least a few times a week. Trillian - Pretty much the one and only IM client. It supports
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Sunday, January 27, 2008
Being a good developer is about a lot more than just slinging good code. After you've compiled your application you've really just begun. One important step that some developers forget is profiling. If you're a .NET developer make sure you run FxCop over your code. It's a free Microsoft tool that checks your code both for performance issues as well as basic coding standards such as avoiding Hungarian notation, correctly casing variables and basic good practices. While FxCop is more geared towards framework developers it has some great performance checks and little insights into your code that can only make
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Remember that scene in Star Wars when Luke (or was it Han Solo?) cuts open that crazy goat-beast thing's belly and slides inside for life-giving warmth? Well the .NET guys have done the same today by making the .NET Framework Library source code available for nerdly enjoyment. When I was learning CodeGear's Delphi (still the best tool for creating native Win32 apps I must say) having the complete source to the VCL (the Delphi framework) was the best learning tool I could have asked for. Whenever I was unsure of how to code up a certain pattern I went trolling
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Just needed to reiterate my hate for the way ASP.NET WebForms munge the id attribute on rendered HTML controls. Seriously, there is nothing more annoying than going to write a little JavaScript and wanting to grab an element by it's id and you can't because it's been turned into "cntHolder1_cntHolder2_cxtPlaceholderArea98_lblButtonMaybe". It's obvious that whomever designed WebForms had never actually worked with HTML or CSS before. If someone has an easy solution I'd love to hear it but this is one of the reasons I'm so excited about ASP.NET MVC.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
My wife gets 'O', the Oprah magazine, and I have a bad habit of reading whatever is near me while I'm having breakfast and so found myself perusing an article where some celebrity such-and-such listed off the top influential books in their life which got me thinking of what mine would be. My list isn't as deep or grand as theirs but it's honest. 1. Stranger In A Strange Land This book shaped a huge portion of how I view the world, religion, relationships, how to treated others and as a reminder to always question everything around me. Oh, and
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Tuesday, January 08, 2008
My favorite tag editor is Mp3tag and I use it at least a couple times a week to populate the album artist field that both WMP and Zune seem to depend upon for proper organization. Instead of manually typing in each album artist field I use this handy script: $if(%band%,%band%,%artist%) Basically if the album artist field is already populated then I don't touch it, otherwise I transfer the value from the artist field into the album artist field. Mp3tag calls the album artist field 'band' but I don't let that stop me. If you feel like using it as well
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The media world is cannibalistic, books become movies, video games are based on movies, books are written for video games with every permutation in between. Granted a large number of these tend to be real stinkers but every once in awhile something is actually gained in translation. Over the years a few movies and books have really stood out as prime candidates for the video game treatment, some of which are below: "Ultraviolet" This 2006 movie came out to some pretty bad reviews but since I'm a sucker for anything Milla Jovovich I laid down my hard earned cash