Category: General

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. Perhaps he meant email? And maybe their email server was down? And let’s…

I’ve had some time this weekend to tinker around with NUnit. Part of my role on the NUnit dev team is to make sure everything is working on Mono/Linux. Up until now, NUnit works, but only on the console. That’s now starting to change. I was able to get the GUI and toolkits to compile,…

I’m not normally one to post political stuff here, but this particular story quite amazed me. It seems that the New York Times published a report last week that the Bush Administration was tapping into the international banking transfer program to track international wire transfers without a warrant. But the Bush Administration didn’t want the…

Recently I updated some of my configuration files on my Gentoo box. When I brought it back up, X had died and eth0 was failing with “configuration not set for eth0”. After about an hour of searching for why eth0 wasn’t coming up, I paused and stepped back from it. I realized that my USB…

I’ve been at several organizations, both large and small, who keep the same chant over and over that offshoring is the key to getting your software cheap. When it comes up, it never seems to be to be a good solution, and so far that’s panned out. None of the offshored projects have succeeded. That’s…

Recently, we had a core NUnit test failing on Mono/Linux. It was expecting the CultureInfo to be set to a certain pattern of string (xx-XX, or [a-z][a-z]-[A-Z][A-Z]), but when I ran it, it was coming back blank. Since CultureInfo is something that is usually read from the underlying OS, I inquired on the Mono list…

During the time off with the new baby, I was able to catch up on some reading. I came across two great articles that are worthy of reading. The first is from Esther Derby. She wrote an article on the Scrum Alliance site entitled 7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Begin Coaching. It’s a…

It’s always amusing to me when people find out I build software for a living and get this, “Well, that must be hard!” expression. The funny thing is that bulding software, fiddling with bits on a computer, isn’t terribly difficult. If I need to add 2 numbers, any language will do that, and even if…

I just started a new project for a web site (non-work related) I am very excited about. One of the things I have to do is make a call to the Yahoo Maps API to Geocode some information. I wanted to wrap the functionality into a class to make it easier to call from my…

Last week, the big news was about Congress voting on the Net Neutrality act, which the telecoms say is vital to keep the internet from having a total meltdown. One of the favorite targets of the lobbysts is Google. Why? Well, according to them, Google and other content providers are getting a “free ride”. For…