#include <windows.h>

int PASCAL WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR args, int show)

{

  MessageBox(GetActiveWindow(), "Congratulations Charles & Deirdre!", "Many happy returns!", MB_OK);

   return 0;

}

Apple is apparently refusing to accept cash for iPhones. I have a feeling this policy will last less than 24 hours, as there's significant intersection among the set of people who would purchase iPhones and the set of people who will get into quite a snit about "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."

Update: Neil Bartlett points to this Wikipedia article that says companies can refuse cash if the debt doesn't already exist at the time of payment (as would be the case when purchasing an iPhone). That's what I get for getting my legal advice from 30 Rock.

I hate to be an American League fan-boy, but now that The Curse has been broken, the truth is that the World Series was pretty anti-climactic. (Not that anything could be as dramatic as the 2004 Sox-Yankees series.)

I love that The Dropkick Murphy's have become The Sound of Boston : they use I'm Shipping Up To Boston and Tessie at Red Sox games and a song of their's was featured in The Departed. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of drunken Micks.

Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3

One reason why it's very difficult to make a living writing about software development is that while traditional publications were deadline-driven, online outlets are marketing-driven. When there's a mistake about when a product will become available, an article in the pipeline can be delayed for an indeterminate period or even canceled entirely.

Such is the case with my article in which I was going to discuss context-sensitive / seam-based image resizing. I thought I was going to have an article finished by mid-October, but here it is on the verge of November and I still don't have the product. And, of course, that means that I haven't received a penny for the work I've done. And on the other hand, if I get a call tomorrow saying the product's ready, I guarantee the next line will be "... so we need that article in 10 days."

Naturally, this makes planning difficult. On the one hand, I need to plan my November and December and I can just say "yes" to some other clients. But I've already done a good chunk of the work for this article and I'd like my image-resizing code to see the light of day.

So... Such is the life of a freelance technical writer.

Must ... Resist ...  

Can't ... Stop ...

My nephew Jake went to a friend's bar mitzvah at the Radisson in Scranton, PA. Apparently, the cast of The Office is in town doing a little goodwill and presumably shooting some exteriors (although I don't know why they need to -- the scenes they've been using look totally like Northeastern Pennsylvania. (Sarcastic smiley tk) ). Jake spots Craig Robinson (Daryl the Warehouse Guy) tickling the ivories on the Radisson piano and snaps this EXCLUSIVE photo:

This might be better as a series of Twitter "thinking about..." posts, but since I don't really "get" Twitter, I'll jot down this nagging concern here...

I was reading this excellent post on Seven Essential Practices of Software Development [via Steve Pietrek] as I pondered how to convince my client to schedule the time to develop a "heartbeat monitor" and archive that will show the system's behavior over the past few days. I think that's necessary because the system is dependent on external service providers and there are assumptions about correctness and scheduling that, if violated, might lead to very expensive mistakes and lots of finger pointing.

Nor do the external service providers whole-heartedly embrace test-driven QA: there's no set of mocks of my team's system and mocks of their systems that can serve as a reference for developing new functionality.

While I'm convinced that investment in automation will pay off, the customer priorities are focused on new features. Why should we worry about all this Defense Against the Black Arts stuff when we're all friends?

In a sense I'm being defeated by the successes of my team, which, having moved to Scrum, have been rolling out new value regularly; now that we've established that rhythm, not delivering customer-facing features in the coming sprint is highly visible.

My ever-fitful comment system is apparently acting up, so from my email come these comments in reference to this post :

I wonder if "cron" would also be a relevant addition to mashup. One of the things I tried to achieve with a Yahoo Pipe and a Google Mashup was to consume several feeds on a regular basis, XSL-T them in another form and send the result to another URL.
Maybe this is too much for free mashup platforms as it would be process intensive.

--David Dossot

Update: John Montgomery tells me that there is a timer component in Popfly that might satisfy David's scenario.

and

Great thoughts on command-line "equivalents" for mashup operations.

Check out Orchestr8's AlchemyPoint for a mashup platform that provides both mouse-based and "command-line" modes of creating mashups. In command-line mode you can string together multiple 'actions' and 'conditions' to create quite varied mashups. (e.g., " email xx@xx.com all links in 'top stories' table if they mention 'Google' "). It's very Unix shell-ish and can provide some pretty unique results.

--Elliot Turner

IronRuby Program Manager John Lam regarding JRuby's Ola Bini:

LOB: If you and Ola Bini were bungie-chorded into a steel cage supplied with mauls, chainsaws, and a copy of Bentley’s “Programming Pearls,” which of you would survive?

JL: Well, Ola is quite a bit bigger than me, so he’d likely kick my ass in a steel cage match

The amazing thing is I couldn't figure out a way to incorporate that quote into the article I'm writing.

Update: Ola refuses to take the bait, too:

OB: He would probably win. Now, if you gave me Hofstadters "Gödel, Escher, Bach" instead, I might stand a chance.

 Sheesh. What's a guy looking for something interesting to say about computer programming to do?

I assume that this is a joke / conceptual art statement but it does remind me of the thought processes of young nerds that are so failure-prone: "If only I elaborate the logical inconsistency of the bully's statements, he will no longer have the temerity to call me names!"

On the other hand, Halloween is coming up.

P.S. I think I will keep this image handy in case I ever give a talk on exception handling. "You don't want to do a lot within an exception handler. The more complex your exception handler, the more possible it is to to create a defect or failure-mode within your exception handling process..."

Via Sue Schmitz comes the sad word that Alex, the amazing Gray Parrot whose cognitive abilities were literally incredible, has died. Supposedly (there I go with the doubt), he had a vocabulary of 150 words, could count recognize quantities up to 6, could identify 50 objects, understood concepts such as "bigger" and "smaller," and knew better than to call virtual methods within constructors.

I'm not surprised that Wikipedia has criticisms, but even there it only actually quotes one direct criticism, which in context (in the referenced NY Times article) is pretty clearly simply skepticism, not a repudiation.

Is this a strictly true statement? 

"One can freely download command-line compilers for all Microsoft languages and never use Visual Studio."

Specifically, don't you need VS to develop for Smartphones and / or Windows Mobile?

With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft's mashup editor, I'll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:

Right now, everyone's concentrating on what output the mashup editors can produce or what the component manipulation looks like. I think the winner of the mashup evolution will be the one that provides the most flexible suite of components.

I'm tempted to label as "shocking" the announcement that F# will become a product fully integrated into Visual Studio, but I suppose it would be hard for anyone to ignore stuff as compelling as this.

F# is a derivative of OCaml and is a functional programming language. Those who delve into my language-related or concurrency-related posts will be familiar with the concept that one of the great advantages of functional languages are characteristics that lend themselves to automatic parallelization. Microsoft is making more and more noise about functional approaches (Eric Lippert's "aside" that "Immutable data structures are the way of the future in C#." is telling.) and this endorsement of F# is another sign that Redmond is throwing its weight pretty heavily behind this approach.

F# has been well-received among the hardcore language nerds but you have to give Microsoft credit for getting out ahead of the market on this one. F# is a very different beast than the Iron* languages (Python and Ruby). This isn't Microsoft reacting to market demands, it's Microsoft putting a not-at-all-well-known language into the spotlight.

I know I should qualify this with "of course, it's terribly irresponsible. If someone had died, what kind of possible excuse..." etc.

But he didn't kill anyone, so I'll just point to the link:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=all

This must have been bitter-sweet. Sure, you want to get your rocket back, but talk about going out in a blaze of glory...

A well-written reiteration of the premise that complexity is an essential, not accidental, aspect of software construction. [via links for 2007-10-03 Bill de hÓra ]

[C]omputer-science grads saw their average starting salary offers grow by 4.5 percent last year alone. The new average salary for a job right out of college is now $53,051. That's the highest amount this decade.

Starting salaries surge for computer science grads [Ars Technica]

Interesting. I still think that the future is mixed-at-best for United States programmers (with our relatively high cost), but at least for now there's some good news.

The only thing that's worse than ignoring a cause is doing something absolutely trivial and patting yourself on the back about it. Apparently if you blog about the environment today, you've done your part. I think there was a day last week when you were supposed to alter your CSS style sheets to decry the slaughter of monks in Burma.

You want to do something for the environment? Don't blog about how much you love pandas: reduce your waste stream. You want to support the troops? Don't put a sticker on your SUV: drive a high-mileage car.

Philosophy Bites

In Our Time

I would say that these have nothing to do with software development, but there was actually a great "Philosophy Bites" on vagueness that touched directly on fuzzy logic (which I think Williamson dismisses too quickly -- I'm not at all sure that the absurdity that he says "follows from fuzzy logic" does, in fact, follow according to the rules of fuzzy logic).

"Citing Medicine" has issued a standard for citing blogs in academic writing, which would like this for this entry:

O'Brien, L. Knowing.NET [blog on the Internet]. Kailua Kona: [Larry O'Brien]. [June 2002] -  [cited 2007 October 13]. Available from http://www.knowing.net/.

The first thing I don't like is the "blog on the Internet" as the "type of medium." Why not just "Internet"? Or, if there's some legitimate distinction to be made between a blog and, say, a wiki or customized homepage or Facebook page, why not simply "blog"?

Worse, though, are the rules for date of publication [June 2002] and the availability block. Date of publication is the starting date of the blog, which in a sense parses logically, but that's like citing a television show as dating from the start of its network. But the lack of a permalink for the availability is terrible. To find a particular post, you have to find the main site, somehow navigate to the citation date, and seek the particular reference. Yuch. Permalink, people, permalink.

Between the semi-regularly broken CAPTCHA on my comment system and reports I'm getting from some correspondents, I may have been hard to get in touch with recently. Try lobrien -at- email for a day or two.