April 2007 Entries
The folks at The Golden Compass (advertising the upcoming movie) have an ingenious twist on the personality quiz meme. Obviously, I couldn't resist. The twist is simple: after you answer, let's give your friends 12 days to modify it. Well, here's your chance. My answers have me matched up with Hypatia, a badger. I've no idea what I'll end up with...
Technorati tags: Personal, Quiz, Golden Compass, Daemon
Steve Harman had a post back at the beginning of the month about stuff you'd tell a young developer. It's a reaction to a similar piece by Jeremy Allison. It's an interesting topic, so I thought I'd waste a few pixels on it myself.
If it's not what you love, don't do it
I wouldn't generalize this to other fields, but for software development, I think this is a good thing to keep in mind. A lot has been made in the past by career counselors and other gurus about "finding your bliss" or similar nonsense. I think that's mostly a crock. You...
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you know what's the best thing to do, but are unable to convince anyone else that you are right? Developers know that even simple problems have more than one solution. Developers who have worked on a team of more than one have probably been in a situation where they just knew that the team was heading in the wrong direction and that they had a solution that was more elegant, easier to program, and better to maintain. Higher profile developers often find themselves trying to explain their solutions to non-technical...
Good friend and Indie game developer Jay Barnson has just taken game development in a new direction: Developing in Public. He sounds a little nervous about it, which makes sense. Unlike those who have previously attempted this feat, though, I think Jay stands a good chance of pulling it off, and with good style.
There are two things that are likely to make this interesting. First, Jay's about ready to release his second indie game, Apocalypse Cow—So we're likely to see this through all the way to a completed game. Second, he's an honest and engaging writer.
It's that second that...
If you have the eye of a good copy editor, you might have noticed some volatility in the ole Tag Cloud on the right. I made some changes at the request of people on the SubText developers list and reworked some stuff—most of which is completely invisible. The biggest visible change is that I decided that assuming an even dispersion around the mean might work in natural statistics, blog post tags tend to be more of a declining curve however.
What that means is that most algorithms for displaying tag clouds use a formula that allocates about half their categories...
I can't say that I'm surprised. I'm pretty sure it was the marriage questions that pushed me over Malcolm.
Your results:
You are Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)
...
I just completed some SubText hacking and the results should be visible now. In addition to upgrading to version 1.9.5 (which should officially release here shortly), I implemented a new feature: Tag Clouds. I'd had enough of my feature envy from all the cool kids who had them, so I went and rolled my own. If you're at my actual site (as opposed to a feed reader), the Tag Cloud is off on the right.
This was a non-trivial feature to add. In an email conversation on the SubText developers' list a couple months ago, Phil Haack (semi-benevolent project dictator) indicated...
Apparently, I'm 7% more of an adult than my 13 year-old daughter... Your Total "Adultness" Competency Score is 86% Love: 89% Sex: 89% Leadership: 100% Problem Solving: 100% Physical Abilities: 67% Verbal and Math Skills: 100% Interpersonal Skills: 100% Handling Responsibility: 100% Managing High-Risk Behaviors: 100% Managing Work and Money: 100% Education: 89% Personal Care: 100% Self Management: 78% Citizenship: 89% Technorati tags: quiz, adult, competence
My birthday was yesterday (yes, on Easter this year—sorry about the title-pun). Every Saturday, we take the kids to one of our friends' house and play roleplaying games (currently alternating between D&D and Champions). Since three of us have birthdays within a week of each other, we tend to throw a little birthday celebration on the first Saturday in April. Jay Barnson, our DM and one of the birthday boys, has a post with the incredible cake the ladies put together for us this year. Check it out, they made us a battlecake! The cake was put together by...
Like many businesses, my current employer uses Microsoft Dynamics GP for our main accounting/inventory software. From a recent trip to Connections (the big convention for Dynamics), I learned that there were some cool data mining utilities available from Microsoft that we might be able to use. I love free stuff, and the opportunity to give our executives something to chew on for a bit (keeping them out of my hair) was one I couldn't pass up.
The Analysis Services install I managed to dig up (after much searching on Microsoft's Customer Source) went pretty easily. There are a couple of SSIS...
This is something of a public service announcement. I don't remember where I learned this, but here's a sure-fire cure for having a song stuck in your head:
Amazing Grace
Gilligan's Island theme song
Sing the words to one to the tune of the other. In your head or out loud doesn't seem to matter. It works every time (for me so far). The cognitive dissonance will wipe out whatever is there and neither song sets itself in its place. It's like a psychic reboot.
Technorati tags: song, stuck, cognitive, dissonance, cure, Gilligans Island, Amazing Grace, reboot