June 2009 Entries
I just read this post by Joel Hughes. I agree with the sentiment, but I would disagree with his categorization of languages. Joel lists, Interpreted, procedural Compiled, procedural Functional, concurrent From a learning perspective, it doesnt matters if the languages are compiled or interpreted. Programming style and the typing system are more important. The way I have tried to keep my skill set relevant is by ensuring that I have at least a rudimentary understanding of, An imperative statically typed...
I am a long time Firefox user and advocate but I have recently decided to move to Google Chrome as my main (non development) browser. Excessive memory usage has been a longstanding problem with Firefox. Up until now, i have endured the memory penalty for the sake of a number of near indispensable Firefox add-ins (the multi-machine bookmark synch functionality in XMarks is top of this list). I have, however, found that recently, perhaps as a result of the ever increasing number of media rich and JavaScript heavy websites, that the memory usage in Firefox...
In a number of recent projects, Microsoft seems to have consciously adopted a more open approach to the development of developer related tools, languages, and frameworks. The canonical example is ASP.NET MVC, but there are others (MEF, Iron Ruby, Ajax Control Toolkit). Each of these projects has the following characteristics, Early release of beta source code to community During a prolonged beta phase, there was active participation in the community by a key individual (the ‘Program Manager’) from Microsoft - Phill Haack for ASP.NET MVC, Glen Block for MEF, etc. ...
After trying various HTML based solutions for syntax highlighting, I decided to go with the javascript based SyntaxHighlighter to pretify source code on my blog. SyntaxHighlighter runs in the browser, supports multiple languages, and has a LPGL licence (the author, Alex Gorbatchev, accepts donations via PayPal). To install SyntaxHighlighter into Subtext, you need to link to the SyntaxHighlighter Javascript files in Subtext \DTP.ASPX. You can either download the js files and copy them onto your webhost, or link to a free hosted version on the SyntaxHighlighter site. If you want to host the js files yourself, ...
After much trail and error, I finally managed to get SubText 2.1.1 working on GoDaddy (actually the instructions in this blog post are accurate and easy to follow - my problems were of my own making). I have been meaning to start a blog for a while. I agree with Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that its important to exert some control over your online presence - from the show notes for StackOverflow podcast 52, Joel notes that if you’re shy about putting things online, you are letting other people control your...