ides of march

Grok Headline matches for ides of march

Ides of March

Ides of March 03/15/2003 04:03 PM
Why do we say "Beware the Ides of March"? .. go learn something .. today's date .. Beware .. Ides

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beware the ides of march

beware the ides of march 12/29/2003 09:15 PM
AP: "FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers" I know this is kind of a case of the media distorting the facts, but still...isn't it kind of nincompoopish of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI fer crissakes!) to name almanacs and maps as part of a possible preponderance of evidence? And in other news--because nobody ever said you can't crosspost in your own initial post--in the future, tragically hip film grad students will write thesis papers about this Stepford Wives trailer.

New Julius Caesar Always Alert on Ides
of March (Reuters)

New Julius Caesar Always Alert on Ides
of March (Reuters) 03/17/2005 03:16 AM
Reuters - Sharing a name with the most famous leader of ancient Rome is not always easy when you're a modern politician -- especially on the Ides of March, when the first Julius Caesar was assassinated.

IDEs and their Projects

IDEs and their Projects 08/27/2004 02:07 PM
I just finished moving my project Zeppelin development over from NetBeans 3.6 to the 4.0 beta. It’s really very nice now that I’ve got it going. The problems were all in the Projects subsystem, which in my experience is often the Achilles’ heel of IDEs...

Java IDEs: Market Overview.

Java IDEs: Market Overview. 03/11/2003 09:43 AM

Computer World summarizes the Meta Group study by writing that Borland, IBM, and Oracle are the "clear leaders" while Sun and Jetbrains are the "distant challengers."

"Virtual Online" Work at Home Job Fair
Saturday, March 19th & Sunday, March
20th, 2005 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Central/Each Day

"Virtual Online" Work at Home Job Fair
Saturday, March 19th & Sunday, March
20th, 2005 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Central/Each Day 03/17/2005 03:02 AM
Via live online voice conferencing booths, this first ever Virtual Work at Home Job Fair offers individuals in the home based business industry a unique opportunity to represent their company's products and services to a global audience. [PRWEB Mar 16, 2005]

This Fortnight in Perl 6, March 7 -
March 21, 2005

This Fortnight in Perl 6, March 7 -
March 21, 2005 03/24/2005 07:47 PM
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with the resurgence of Perl 6 language questions, implementation decisions galore, and a new Parrot chief architect.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: March 20, 2005 - March 26,
2005 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: March 20, 2005 - March 26,
2005 Archives 03/27/2005 08:04 AM
sending his thug squad .. Amazing. Just out .. Talking Points Memo

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_03_20.php#005249
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March 02, 2005

March 02, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Gadzooks, we've been busier than ever here at Fog Creek World HQ. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to sell Mike Gunderloy's (excellent) FogBugz book alongside FogBugz itself, but since we've never shipped any physical products before, that meant a whole lot of new code in the online store for package tracking, shipping addresses, choose a shipping method, inventory stuff, etc. etc., and I'm now spending too much time trying to figure out shipping and debugging the packing slip code... the joke is on us, because the reason we wrote our own store code in the first place was because all of the off-the-shelf ecommerce packages were too focused on physical delivery and didn't have any kind of mechanism for selling downloads and licenses.

It's ok. I complain a lot but what I love about a software startup is that when you're bored writing code, you can fool around with stuff like the USPS web site and ordering padded envelopes.

Watch this site for a new five-part series on the process of creating FogBugz 4.0, coming soon!

On the right, the result of yesterday's snowstorm as seen from my living room.

March 28, 2005

March 28, 2005 03/28/2005 01:37 PM

This week, I'm going to be running a five-part behind-the-scenes look at the development of FogBugz 4.0. Each morning I'll post a new installment.

Today, in The Road To FogBugz 4.0 Part I, I'll talk about a couple of major features we added after listening to customer feedback, and why our mantra is to listen to our customers and ignore our competitors.

The march towards next generation Net

The march towards next generation Net 09/13/2004 08:29 PM
CNET Asia Sep 14 2004 0:45AM GMT

March 29, 2005

March 29, 2005 03/29/2005 11:33 AM

We use FogBugz extensively internally to handle company email, and the process of using FogBugz ourselves ("eating our own dogfood") motivated us to add Bayesian spam filtering, and a "snippets" feature to make it easy to enter common phrases and even entire messages in replies to frequently-asked questions.

In today's installment of The Road to FogBugz 4.0, a look at two new features that came out of dogfooding.

"March 2000"

"March 2000" 01/03/2004 07:07 PM

March tomorrow in NYC

March tomorrow in NYC 04/09/2004 04:06 PM

I've hardly heard anything about it, but apparently there's a rally and march planned for tomorrow beginning at 11:30 AM, a "global day of action on the first anniversary of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq." Here are the logistics for the NYC demonstration.

March 17, 2005

March 17, 2005 03/19/2005 02:54 AM

First of all, congratulations to the whole FogBugz team on winning the Jolt Award in the category of Defect Tracking Tools for FogBugz 3.1.

Also I'm honored that my book Joel on Software won the Productivity Award.

 

15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job

15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job 03/15/2003 09:42 AM
F@ck That Job -- "my answer to employers taking advantage of folks having a hard time finding a job in...

"March 2002"

"March 2002" 06/04/2004 05:03 PM

March 23, 2005

March 23, 2005 03/23/2005 03:24 PM

Hiring

Until now we've been hiring rarely and quietly, but lately our sales are so strong we can't quite keep up.

My old theory of hiring was to post a job listing on Monster or Craigslist and then sort through the massive pile of unqualified applicants in hopes of finding the needle in the haystack.

That hasn't worked so well. In the future I'm going to try putting up semi-permanent job listings for all the kinds of people we might hire on the Fog Creek website and see if that gets us a slower trickle of more qualified job applicants.

Filmmaker Wanted

We are looking for a talented filmmaker, student or experienced, to make a documentary about the software development process this summer. If you think you're interested, read on for more details!

Don't Marry Until March

Don't Marry Until March 08/17/2004 01:10 PM
Plan a big, fat cheap wedding, and start your coupling with extra cash, not debt.

PSP May Not Make March

PSP May Not Make March 01/06/2005 02:56 PM

A day after Sony said that they would probably launch the Playstation Portable in March, an analyst tells Kotaku that he still thinks it is 50/50. PJ McNealy says that a lack of stock and problems getting the necessary semiconductor parts could push the handheld back to a June launch. I'm sure Nintendo's sad.

PSP Might Not Make March [Kotaku]

Worst March Ever

Worst March Ever 04/01/2005 01:21 AM
I’ve been living here intermittently since 1983 and I haven’t seen a springtime like it. Sad...

March 31, 2005

March 31, 2005 03/31/2005 06:58 PM
Part Four: Out of every 100 calories expended by the Fog Creek team, just 2 calories are spent on actually writing new lines of code that ship to a customer.

March 30, 2005

March 30, 2005 03/30/2005 11:20 AM
To make FogBugz work on Unix as well as Windows, we needed a PHP version. Rather than do a one-time port, we built a compiler that automatically generates a PHP version from the ASP source code. Read all about it in today's part III of The Road to FogBugz 4.0.

March for Choice

March for Choice 04/26/2004 02:04 AM
March for Choice - Estimates range from 500,000 to more than a million in attendance. With an all-star turnout and a lot of pink, it is one of the largest events to take place on the Mall in Washington D.C.; but how much of an impact will it have on history?

"March 2001"

"March 2001" 06/04/2004 05:03 PM

PS3 due in March 2006

PS3 due in March 2006 05/28/2004 09:31 PM

March 25, 2004

March 25, 2004 04/09/2004 03:56 PM

Thanks to everyone who came to the open house last night. If you have pictures, send me a link!

We had an interesting conversation about how the imp edance mismatch between contemporary high-level programming languages (Java, C#, Python, VB) and relational databases. Since a huge percentage of code requires access to databases, the glue (a.k.a. the connecticazoint) between the RDBMS layer and the application code is very important, yet virtually every modern programming language assumes that RDBMS access is something that can be left to libraries. In other words, language designers never bother to put database integration features into their languages. As a tiny example of this, the syntax for "where" clauses is never identical to the syntax for "if" statements. And don't get me started about data type mismatches: just the fact that columns of any type might be "null" leads to an incompatibility between almost every native data type and the database data types.

The trouble with this is that the libraries (think ADO, DAO, ODBC, JDBC, embedded SQL, and a thousand others) need to be general purpose to be reusable, and yet what you really want is a mapping between a native data structure and a table row or query result row. Inevitably, you have to hand roll this mapping and wire it up manually, which is error prone and frustrating.

I think this is a fatal flaw in language design, akin to the bad decision by the designers of C++ that it was not necessary to support a native string type. "Let a thousand CString/TString/String/string<char> types flourish," they said, and then spent more than a decade adding new features to the language until it was marginally, but not completely, possible to implement a non-awful string class. And now we have a thousand string types (most large C++ bodies of code I've seen use three or four) and a bunch of really good books by Scott Meyers about why your personal hand-rolled string class is inadequate. It's about time that a language designer admitted that RDBMS access is intrinsic to modern application implementation and supported it in a first-class way syntactically.

Now for all the disclaimers to prevent "but what about" emails. (1) in functional languages like lisp the syntax layer is so light that you could probably implement very good RDBMS shims in ways that feel almost native. Especially if you have lazy evaluation of function parameters, it's easy to see how you could build a "where" clause generator that used the same syntax as your "if" predicates. (2) Access Basic, later Access VBA, had a couple of features to make database access slicker, specifically the [exp] syntax and the rs!field syntax, but it's really only 10%. There are probably other niche-languages or languages by RDBMS vendors that do a nice job. (3) Attempts to solve this problem in the past have fallen in two broad groups: the people who want to make the embedded SQL programming languages better (PL/SQL, TSQL, et al), and the people who want to persist objects magically using RDBMS backends (OODBMSes and object persistence libraries). Neither one fully bridges the gap: I don't know of anyone who builds user interfaces in SQL or its derivatives, and the object persistence implementations I've seen never have a particularly good implementation of SELECT.

The March Towards Micropayments

The March Towards Micropayments 06/28/2004 11:16 PM

March 09, 2005

March 09, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM
I was quoted in an eWeek story about the VB6 petition today: “And this is how Microsoft will lose their desktop monopoly: because some bright bulb at Microsoft thought Boolean operations should really short-circuit, no matter what millions of BASIC developers had been doing since the 1960s.”

Correction! This is a bad example, since the boolean operators I was thinking of (And and Or) were not changed to short circuit in VB.Net. I have no idea why I've been thinking that they were for so long. There are other, real examples of incompatibilities between VB and VB.NET, but short circuiting was not one of them.

"March of the Penguins"

"March of the Penguins" 06/24/2005 07:30 PM
Think you've got it bad? This emotionally wrenching documentary about the difficult life of the emperor penguin will put things in perspective. It may even renew your faith in love.

W3C Talks in March

W3C Talks in March 03/17/2005 03:05 AM
2005-03-14: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (News archive)

New PlayStation by March

New PlayStation by March 07/13/2004 06:56 AM
National Post Jul 13 2004 11:49AM GMT

March 02, 2004

March 02, 2004 03/06/2004 01:51 AM
Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test.

March 04, 2004

March 04, 2004 03/06/2004 01:51 AM

Save the date: Fog Creek Software will host an open house at our new office on March 24th, 2004, at 6:00 PM.

535 8th Ave. (bet. 36th and 37th), 18th Floor, New York

March 08, 2005

March 08, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Free Beer!

But first: if you're going the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, I'll be there on March 16th giving a speech. Now, the official topic of the speech is something about building communities with software, which is a good topic, but it's not going to be the actual topic of the speech. I am gaining something of a reputation for giving speeches which are not precisely on topic. Oh well. The actual topic of the speech is too hard to pin down. We'll look at pictures, I'll tell some jokes, and if the A/V works right there will be music too.

Next, if Southwest Airlines manages to actually deliver me on time, on March 17th I'll be in Silicon Valley at Software Development West where Software Development Editor in Chief Alexandra Weber Morales will interview me in a "fireside chat" format. I don't know if they are actually going to have a fireplace; we might have to burn twigs and promotional literature on stage. If you want to attend the fireside chat all you have to do is register for an "Expo Pass" which is free online until 3/10; onsite or after 3/10 it's $50.

And last but not least, Apress will host a pizza and beer reception on March 18th from 6:00 to 7:30 pm in Berkeley, at the Studio Rasa Gallery, 933 Parker Street.

March 14, 2005

March 14, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Apparently, the reason I was misinformed about And and Or shortcircuiting is that it was changed during the beta after a lot of people screamed.

A better example would have been the elimination of Set and default properties.

Understand, please, that it's not that people mind the changes.

Change is good.

Nobody thinks the Set statement was a good thing.

I once spent a whole day in Mark Igra's office (in 1992 Mark was the program manager for Object Basic which became VBA) begging him to get rid of default properties and the Set statement, kicking and screaming and using every rhetorical device at my disposal, but the Basic team absolutely refused to do anything that would break working code, and in those days, there was a tiny amount of working code from Access 1.0 that already used default properties and the Set statement, and it could not be broken. Mark was right and I was wrong and Set remained. By the way, I'm pretty sure default properties were Adam Bosworth's fault; I'll have to ask him this week at the O'Reilly conference. Adam was the designer of Access 1.0. They wanted to be able to say recordset("fieldname") to get the value out of a column, not recordset("fieldname").value.

But here's the thing. If you have a million line code base that's mission critical, as many companies do, and VB suddenly changes, as it did, you have a choice: keep using VB 6 or spend a lot of time (=money) upgrading to VB.NET. If you keep using VB 6, eventually new things will come out that will not be supported  from VB 6, and you'll be stuck using the yucky old VB 6 IDE until the end of time. Already most of the big component vendors are doing all the new components as .NET components, not OCXes.

If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform.

I'm heading off to California now. Remember, pizza and beer reception on March 18th from 6:00 to 7:30 pm in Berkeley, at the Studio Rasa Gallery, 933 Parker Street.

March 07, 2003

March 07, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

I just got back from inspecting the new Fog Creek Office, a sunny loft in the shmatta district, with the architect. It's going to make a really nice office when we're finished building it out, with private offices, a living room area, kitchenette, and, budget permitting, a pool table and plasma TV. Here's what I told the architect:

• private windowed offices are non-negotiable
• we need three times as many power outlets as anyone would think. I'm sick of power strips. I have ten things plugged in right at my desk. I specified 4 outlets every foot, is that absurd?
• I want to be able to pull my own lan, telephone, fiber, and cable TV wires. Even if they're exposed.

 

March 03, 2003

March 03, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

My latest article, “Building Communities with Software,” was sent to email subscribers earlier today.

If you did not get it and expected to get it, you're probably having problems with overenthusiastic spam filters. I got lots of bounces, mostly from Fortune 500 type companies, rejecting the message, because of "inappropriate content" or because their automatic filters had decided it was spam. Some of them complained about "taboo," other's complained about "hard core." Most didn't tell me. Such is the state of email today.

If you did not get the article and you want it, you can read a shorter, sanitized version online. But it still contains the word "taboo" so if that offends you you may want to avert your eyes!

March hares

March hares 03/06/2004 02:03 AM
Okay. Why is everyone - and I mean everyone - having a "I am too busy to do anything! Waa!" -day today? The good thing is that I am getting far less personal email today than normally, but then again, I wouldn't have time to reply to it anyway.

Why is the 1st of March such a special day?

(And yes, I am taking this time to blog even though I really don't have the time. Just had a two minute breather to make a cup of tea.)

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ides of march

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