Don’t click the link
June 30th, 2008A public service announcement, and experiment with the human psyche. I repeat: Do not click the link!
Fair price for consulting services?
June 28th, 2008My friend and colleague Kevin Powick recently posted a help wanted ad for consulting work: 30-40 hours per week at $35/hour over a period of about six months. One way to look at this is that for someone who doesn’t have a job that’s over $25,000 that they didn’t have before. Some people who charge more for their services consider this to be an indignant slap. I’m fascinated by the thought processes on both sides.
MV / Relational exchanges - Part 2
June 12th, 2008In the U2 forum there have been a couple questions on the new U2/DB2 .NET data provider from IBM. I thought I’d write up a couple quick notes.
Better Google Searching
June 1st, 2008I was writing a note to the Google QA department via their webpage to ask for better filtering for specific kind of trash results. Having some experience with custom searches and filtering it occurred to me that everything I was asking them for I could probably just do myself. As they say, if you want a job done right… OK, I’m going to start a little (?) pet project to create a better search engine using the Google API and freely available resources.
When we’re gone
May 28th, 2008On a somber note, we all know what a living will is, or a last will for distributing our worldly goods, but how many people have a will that helps those who come into our office to pick up the pieces when we’re gone?
C# coding - I’m getting lazy
May 27th, 2008Microsoft continues their effort to reduce the amount of code required for C# developers to accomplish certain tasks. The more I see of this the more I want. Somewhere between where we are now and the point where the system reads our minds and just does what we want, there is a place where guys like me can get the system to deal with housekeeping that’s time consuming and boring to code. I’m looking for that place…
Grandma, didn’t you read the manual?
May 20th, 2008I need to set this up briefly. I don’t just hang around in MV forums, I hang around in a lot of different forums. My latest venture was to the usenet forum microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general where people go to get advice with problems with IE. The mentality of the people providing responses there has just floored me. It makes me take a step back and consider this monster that we’ve all created called information technology - a monster that expects grandma to read manuals.
What is “The Linux Desktop” anyway?
May 8th, 2008In my last blog I mentioned there really isn’t such a thing as "The Linux Desktop". The topic was mentioned in a forum today so I thought I’d post a follow-up with some related thoughts and hallucinations - you can decide which is which. I apologize if this posting isn’t organized very well. I’m blasting this one out quickly and thoughts don’t always come in nicely organized paragraphs. 
The price for “simple”
May 3rd, 2008Dawn made a comment in comp.databases.pick: "I like to say that "it takes hard work to make software simple". That triggers a thought: as software evolves and user expectations increase it takes a lot more work to keep it simple. I don’t think some of my colleagues have embraced this concept.
Nebula MV ASP.NET Starter Kit?
May 2nd, 2008We’ve been putting together an ASP.NET starter kit which may or may not be productized. It’s a Visual Studio solution / template which includes the following features.