What do you look for when you are seeing new software on the web?

Me, I read what it does, and then I take a look at a screen shot (if available, and it'd better be). A polished UI doesn't neccecarily means a polished application, but it helps :-)

It's much nicer to work on a good looking interface than on plain one, and the amount of work invested on the UI is usually 100% user-visible, while that bug that happen only on 2:00^AM every third wendsday usually isn't.

That was why I was so happy to find the DockPanel Suite¹ by Weifen Luo. It is very nice, and the demo application does a very good imatation of VS.Net, so I'm very excited to try it out.

¹ For such a snappy UI, it sure has a plain web page :-)

What he's doing there might give you nightmares.

Raymond Chen blogs about the simple act of getting the size of a directory, not so simple after all, if you take into account all sorts of obscure stuff like reprase points, hard links, sparse files, compressed files and file streams.

It remind me an article about file copying by Joel from some time ago.

"CCITT" -- Can't Conceive Intelligent Thoughts Today

"Yes, it's tough, but not as tough as doing comedy." -- Final words of Edmund Gwenn, actor, d. September 6, 1959 (When asked if he thought dying was tough.)

I'm on vacation and I'm currently hearing my favoraite song, and the volume is so loud that I can feel it in my bones.
Life is good... :-)

Again by Siriram, the post where I found Adam's.

Tyranny of the Geeks.

Adam Bosworth write about a talk he gave in ICSOC04.

The subject? Keep It Simple, Stupid!

"The engineering is hard, but the user model is simple and sloppy."

"A moving object appears to shrink in the direction of motion as seend by a stationary observer." -- Albert Einstein

"If it was easy, the hardware people would take care of it." -- Tech Support Slogan

Sriram Krishnan attempts to create lambada in C#, and James Robertson sneers at the attempt.
Peronally, I don't understand why she took the string approach even if she wanted to remain general. Delegates are perfectly possible to move a delegate around in a type-safe manner.

Here is a possible solution¹, it works for both static and instance methods.

     1: using System;

     2: using System.Collections;

     3:  

     4: namespace Lambada

     5: {

     6:     class Mai2n

     7:     {

     8:         private static string[] words = {"dog","cat","mink"};

     9:         delegate void StringDelegate(string args);

    10:         delegate string RetStringDelegate(string args);

    11:         delegate void IntegerDelegate(int i);

    12:  

    13:         private static void PrintInt(int i)

    14:         {

    15:             Console.WriteLine("Integer: " +i);

    16:         }

    17:  

    18:         private static void PrintStr(string str)

    19:         {

    20:             Console.WriteLine(str);

    21:         }

    22:  

    23:         private static string Capitalize(string str)

    24:         {

    25:             if(!Char.IsUpper(str,0))

    26:                 str = Char.ToUpper(str[0])+str.Substring(1);

    27:             return str;

    28:         }

    29:  

    30:         private int multiplyBy;

    31:         public void Multiply(int i)

    32:         {

    33:             Console.WriteLine("Multiply by "
                            + multiplyBy +": " + i*multiplyBy);    

    34:         }

    35:  

    36:         public static void Main(string[] args)

    37:         {

    38:             Mai2n m = new Mai2n();

    39:             m.multiplyBy = 2;

    40:             Map(new StringDelegate(PrintStr),words);

    41:             Map(new IntegerDelegate(PrintInt),new int[]
                             {1,3,5,7,11,13});

    42:             Map(new StringDelegate(PrintStr),

    43:                 ReturningMap(new RetStringDelegate(Capitalize)

                         ,words));

    44:             Map(new IntegerDelegate(m.Multiply),new int[]

                             {2,4,6,8,10});

    45:         }

    46:  

    47:         public static void Map(Delegate d, IList list)

    48:         {

    49:             foreach (object o in list)

    50:             {

    51:                 d.DynamicInvoke(new object[]{o});

    52:             }

    53:         }

    54:  

    55:         public static IList ReturningMap(Delegate d, IList list)

    56:         {

    57:             ArrayList al = new ArrayList(list.Count);

    58:             object ret;

    59:             foreach(object o in list)

    60:             {

    61:                 ret = d.DynamicInvoke(new object[]{o});

    62:                 if(ret!=null)

    63:                     al.Add(ret);

    64:             }

    65:             return al;

    66:         }

    67:     }

    68: }

Here is the output of the above program:

¹ Possible restrictions about no error checking, validation etc apply :-)

"A coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened." -- Fact of lifes

"Quality assurance: A way to ensure you never deliver shoddy goods accidentally." -- Tech Support Slogan

"If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee." -- Fact of lifes

Brad Abrams asks about a site for long bets, and get an answer in a comment that the site is call Longbets.org.

The curious thing about it that I run a cursory search and, naturally, there is a long running bet for a peace between Israel and the Palestinians because of some improvements in water technologies (didn't investigate the spesific technology).

Registerring isn't free, so I answer this arguement here:

The reasons for Israel & the Palestinians conflict¹ are much deeper than water conflict. The issue is deeply embedded within the culture of both people. The conflict is about land, and religion, a way of life and a culture. We live within two steps of one another, but we are very different.

To think that solving the water supply would end the conflict is to be hopelessly naive.

My bet?
There will be no resolution² to the Israel - Palestinians conflict in the next five years³.

¹ I'm using very neutral language here.

² Resolution defined as:

• Israel formally acknowledge a Palestinian state.
• Israel trasfer full responsability for the internal affairs of this Palestinian state, including in security matters.
• The Palestinians formally renounce the Right to Return
• The Palestinians stop the propoganda against Israel in all goverment controled media and in the schools.

³ By God, I so hope that I'll have to swallow those words.

Can someone explain me what is the purpose of the little thingie? I don't even know how to call it.

I'm currently reading Hibernate In Action, since there is no docmentation whatsoever (or nearly so) for NHibernate itself.

It's not generics, and it's not SQL Server Express, or anonymous delegates.

It's VS.Net 2005 ability to show me the content of unhandled exceptions that while debugging. VS.Net 2003 just show me an ugly dialog, with 2K5, I can check what the problem is, and in 99% it's just one second change.

I'm currently exploring NHibernate and I'm getting a lot of those exceptions, and it's annoying to stop debuggin, put try/catch blocks, read the exception message, explore inner exceptions and then make a single change, and then it works.

It makes a short task much longer than neccecary. Anyone knows about an add-in for VS 2K3 that does this? I would move to VS 2K5, but it doesn't support Resharper, and I'm addicted to it.