March WAP Hares Ahead
Grok Headline matches for March WAP Hares Ahead
March hares
March hares
03/06/2004 02:03 AMOkay. 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.)
"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 AMVia 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 PMMatt 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 AMsending his thug squad .. Amazing. Just out .. Talking Points
Memo
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_03_20.php#005249
track
this site | 5 links
What's Ahead for C++?
What's Ahead for C++?
08/17/2004 01:14 PMThese days, Microsoft's C# gets the lion's share of the attention (and
ink). But Microsoft is continuing to work on Visual C++.
Don't Get Ahead of Yourself
Don't Get Ahead of Yourself
03/14/2005 06:07 PMHere are two things that cut so many good ideas off at the knees.
These two factors are the two biggest things that stop good ideas from
getting implemented and make programmers pause when they should forge
ahead.
1. The Urge to Generalize
Say you come up with an idea for a little transaction management
system — a tracking app that follows a sales transaction from
inception to closure. It works well for your company, but — you
think — if I unleash this on the world, then it has to be able
to handle other things, right?
I have to abstract the simple "Transaction Name" field away to be
able to handle "Buyers" and "Sellers" in case someone wants to use it
for third party brokerage, right? And what exactly constitutes a
transaction? I need to have an object oriented "Attributes"
sub-system to be able to handle any information they want to store,
right? Etc. Etc.
Pretty quickly, you've decided that it's just too much work to do
all this stuff you just made up and imposed on yourself, so forget
it.
I think programmers equate "The software doesn't handle that" with
"I can't make it do that because I suck." We never want to say no or
have to admit that our software wasn't designed to do everything. If
our image editing program can't also balance our checkbook, then we
have somehow failed and it's not worth releasing.
(In terms of content management, I've talked about the The Urge to
Generalize here. For some reason, I discussed it in positive
terms...)
2. The Fear of Expansion
So you get past the first hurdle with your little transaction
management system, and you're coding happily away. But then your mind
starts to look down the road....
You think, well, I should put something in here so the user can
indicate that an invoice was sent for payment. I mean, people don't
want to do double-entry, right? But then why can't this system just
generate the invoice....and track receipt of the payment...and display
aggregate customer sales figures...etc.
Before you know it you (1) have mentally evolved your simple app
into an accounting system, and (2) scared the crap out of yourself
because there are apps like Peachtree and Quickbooks that do this
better, and (3) thrown in the towel.
Why do we look at every app as always getting bigger? I appreciate
ambition, but the problem with this is at the end of every development
road is a bigger app that you're going to run into and encroach at
some point. Why can't we stop three-quarters of the way down this
road and just be happy with that? Do one thing and do it well. (Josh
Clark has been very good at this, judging from the comments on this entry.)
These two things have killed millions of good ideas before they even
got out of the starting gate. As programmers, we think too much,
sometimes. Your app (1) doesn't need to handle every possible
scenario, (2) encompass every aspect of functionaity, and (3) continue
evolving into a successfully bigger and bigger app.
If this little essay makes sense to you, read this
one from Joel Spolsky. Same concept from a little different
angle:
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It's
very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they
won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because
they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing.
They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have
lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't
contribute to the bottom line.
The Functionality Astronauts are just as dangeous as the
Architecture Astronauts.
March tomorrow in NYC
March tomorrow in NYC
04/09/2004 04:06 PMI'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 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 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.
Don't Marry Until March
Don't Marry Until March
08/17/2004 01:10 PMPlan a big, fat cheap wedding, and start your coupling with extra
cash, not debt.
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!
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 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.
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 14, 2003
March 14, 2003
03/14/2003 06:10 PM
AngryCoder: “FogBUGZ is very well
designed, and virtually bug free. Frankly, if you are in the market
for a defect tracking solution, you can’t do much better than
FogBUGZ. It is by far the best solution on the market right now, and
is also very attractively priced.” Thanks!
Joseph Jones, who wrote the review, didn’t like the perceived
lack of customizability in FogBUGZ. I hear ya. This was one of those
agonizing
decisions for us. It’s a tradeoff between implementing
features that make the sale, versus implementing features that, we
think, will make people who use our software love it, which helps in
the long term. At the time it was discussed in depth here on
Joel on Software.
Take, for example, a typical report a bug tracking package gives
you that shows you the number of bugs generated per day per
programmer. Typical bad managers will use that tool to punish
programmers with high bug counts or reward programmers with low bug
counts. As a result, every time a tester tries to enter a bug, the
programmer will argue about it. “That's not really a bug.”
“Please don't enter it, I'll fix it on the side for you.”
Eventually the bug tracking system subverts itself. That's not
FogBUGZ's fault, but there you have it. Nobody wants to use it, they
never upgrade, they don't buy more licenses when they get more
programmers, and we lose the potential word of mouth.
The current system, in which we expect FogBUGZ users to have
enlightened development processes, makes us miss out on initial sales
but it makes our existing customers happier. And they tell friends,
and they buy more and more licences, and all is good. We've found that
anyone who has been using FogBUGZ and moves on to a new job that
doesn't have bug tracking will recommend FogBUGZ at their new job,
which is one reason our sales are up by about 200% since last
year.
But this is all, to some extent, speculation. I can't prove
anything here. Design decisions are hard that way.
15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job
15-March-2003 -- F@ck That Job
03/15/2003 09:42 AMF@ck That Job -- "my answer to employers taking advantage of folks
having a hard time finding a job in...
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.
W3C Talks in March
W3C Talks in March
03/17/2005 03:05 AM2005-03-14: 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 AMNational Post Jul 13 2004 11:49AM GMT
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 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 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.
"March 2001"
"March 2001"
06/04/2004 05:03 PMMarch 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.
ides of march
ides of march
03/15/2003 05:14 PM Today is the
Ides of March. What is the
Ides of
March? It is March 15th in the ancient Roman calender, the first
day of the Roman New Year and the first day of spring. The
Roman calender
refered to days by names not numbers, thus each month has an Ide day,
although not always on the 15th. The Ides of March is best known as
the day Julius Caesar was assasinated in the Senate (44 BC) and made
famous by the
Shakespeare line "Beware the Ides of March". It modern
times it has come to symbolize
foreboding and bad
luck. Iggy Pop
sang
about it prophetically with todays current events, and in Rome where
it all started it's a good day to
Toga Party. Ides of March
Ides of March
03/15/2003 04:03 PMWhy do we say "Beware the Ides of March"? .. go learn something ..
today's date .. Beware .. Ides
track this
site | 6 links
"March 2002"
"March 2002"
06/04/2004 05:03 PMThe March Towards Micropayments
The March Towards Micropayments
06/28/2004 11:16 PMMarch 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 2000"
"March 2000"
01/03/2004 07:07 PMMarch 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.
Worst March Ever
Worst March Ever
04/01/2005 01:21 AMI’ve been living here intermittently since 1983 and I haven’t seen
a springtime like it. Sad...
March 02, 2004
March 02, 2004
03/06/2004 01:51 AM
Top Twelve
Tips for
Running a Beta Test.
The march towards next generation Net
The march towards next generation Net
09/13/2004 08:29 PMCNET Asia Sep 14 2004 0:45AM GMT
"March of the Penguins"
"March of the Penguins"
06/24/2005 07:30 PMThink 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.
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]
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 18, 2005
March 18, 2005
03/19/2005 02:54 AM
A few people who heard my talk at O'Reilly
Etech wrote reviews:
If you're in the bay area don't miss the pizza/beer reception
tonight at Apress 6:00 to 7:30 pm in
Berkeley, at Apress, 2560 Ninth St., Ste.
219.
PS3 due in March 2006
PS3 due in March 2006
05/28/2004 09:31 PMGrok Description matches for March WAP Hares Ahead
GrokA matches for March WAP Hares Ahead
March WAP Hares Ahead
