So you have a team (somewhat like mine right now) which is inexperienced with TFS and not very sure about this whole branching, merging, shelveset thinggy and extremely nervous when using it. So, what will you do? Well you might try and train them, show them how to use it, write documents showing how to use it, have processes in place, try and use some tools to help, etc. But, what do they do? Well this seems to be along the lines …. 🙄 ...
It continues to surprise me that people who write software for a living these days (i.e professional developers) have no understanding of what byte order marks are and how they relate to different encodings. Most developers I interact with have no clue - including of course how EF BB BF differs from FF FE. Also so few of them have a understanding of linefeeds and how that differs from Unix to Windows. ...
I still don’t get Facebook – despite being on it. If I want to talk to someone I will call them, email them, text them, meet them, have dinner with them - get the picture? I am quite worried about the security and privacy elements of it – or rather the lack of it. Those who know me well (anyone?) :-) know I was not always this paranoid but after attending a few Security courses – I cannot bury my head in the sand anymore. ...
Premature optimization is the root of all evil; on the other hand we cannot ignore efficiency. - Knuth and Bentley
I have been using the Screen Clipping functionality for years in OneNote (if you don’t know what I am talking about then press the Win + S key – of course you need OneNote installed). It always copied it to OneNote, from where I would copy the image and paste it wherever needed. I did not know until today there is an option where you can select it to go to the clipboard as well. Duh! Why did I not think of checking this out sooner – bets me. ...
As some of you noticed my blog either looked different for at some point recently or for a while it was not even available and it was all a terrible mess. As you might know I am running this on Community Server 2007 (CS 2007); CS 2008 was released some time back I thought maybe it is about time that I upgrade to that. Now you would think that it should be a painless process – boy how wrong one can be! ...
If you got a fingerprint reader on your machine and are running Vista then think twice before installing SP1! About 7-8 months ago I got a new tablet ( Lenovo X61 ) which is a pretty sweet machine with Vista pre-installed and all was well until I installed SP1 and then the thing won’t even boot. I tried to get into safe mode but no luck; I tried repairing - but no luck. I got in the repair console and tried to manually “fix” the MBR, but not luck. 😲 In the end I was screwed - royally - especially as I did not have a backup. I did have my machine being backed up by WHS which is what I was hoping would save me (more on that later). ...
I have been seeing some unexpected application crashes with Visio 2007 and they usually happen when I close the application. I do have Office 2007 SP1 installed but that does not seem to have fixed any of them. The error seems to relate to one the COM add-ins but disabling that does not seem to resolve the problem. This particular error was a new one for me. After doing a lot of work on a Architecture document - when trying to save the document (for the first time) I see this error - not only is it not very inspiring but also scared the living daylights out of me. ...
Wise words from Jim (when teaching CDS ): “Keep it Sequential Stupid”
I think we need something like Rotten Neighbors for the UK ! 😃 What is it? If you have a rotten neighbor then you can tell the world about them. You can browse to your neighborhood and plot your own marker with a complete description Here is an example from in the neighborhood where I use to live in California. ...
This is a true story and happened on one of my projects (which shall remain nameless). Below is the feedback from one of the client as they were doing our code reviews. Line 66: there seem to be a few too many words starting with “f” in the salutations comment. [This is really picky – the commenting standard in this file has otherwise been really good so far.] And incase you were wondering what was the code in question, here it is: ...
This surely can not do any good? Jamie who created TestDriven.NET is involved in a legal dispute with Microsoft. This is not he Microsoft I know and work with on almost a daily basis! Hopefully common sense will kick in. On a separate note, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates - who is the saint and who is cut-throat villain of Geekdom? Cult of Mac at Wired has an interesting read on the subject. ...
I am quite surprised on how ignorant many people (like I was) are about understanding how the day-to-day activities contribute to Global Warming and the issues we face on this planet. As much as we wishes, unfortunately there is no backup or Undo feature 👎. To understand how our daily lives contribute towards global warming check out the Carbon Calculator and then read up on how you can offset those emissions and be Carbon Neutral . ...
Yes, it is one of the simplest rules of grammar, but I still get confused - I call it Writers Block . Technically my mother-tongue is Hindi , and I can speak the “street version” of it and while I can read it - you honestly don’t want me to. The fact that most fellow Indians around at that time are in splits and rolling on the floor might give you a clue. Well I am not particularly proud of that, the fact remains I suck at Hindi and no matter of dressing can fix that. On the flip side, my English is quite strong and for the most part I can read and write it just fine, some of my spellings and grammar sure can do with a refresher (hey but Word helps). ...
Oh man, this is so perfect after my faux pas on the Diwali greeting, which accidentally was emailed with everyone in the “To” line as opposed to BCC. Needless to say, Meenakshi was pissed! To BCC or Not to BCC
It is quite unusual for me to blog about non-technical things (other than the usual crappy joke), but there are certain thing which have a profound affect on me and global warming is one of those. Maybe it is the fact that I have seen the shortages first hand while growing up in India (and back then things were better that now, and they are just going to get worse), or maybe I have seen such a huge cultural difference between the Europeans and the Americans (having lived both in California for many years and for a couple of years now in London), or maybe I am just getting old - I don’t know. ...
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity. - Albert Einstein
The software that one uses for blogging is interesting - if you are a “serious blogger“ (now there is an oxymoron), then you are tied to one platform or “engine“. What if you want to move from that, what do you do then? Either you give up your existing blog and move to the new one (in the process losing all your old posts, etc), or you somehow convert the data from one to the other. For example. right now I am running a modified version of .Text on my blog. Never really bothered to upgrade to Community Server 1.0 (CS), now that CS 2.0 is out , I am thinking of moving to that, but there is no official path to move my data from .Text to CS 2.0. I could try and move it to CS 1.0 and then from CS 2.0 - a process which seems quite clunky. Alternatively, I could write a took myself which does that, but then do I have the time? Another interesting option seems to be Logahead , which boasts of the first AJAX blogging and does seem to have a few cool features , has anyone taken it out for a spin? (You can play with the demo here .) The problem though remains the same, how do I move my existing data to that new “platform”. ...
I have gotten so much spam using the comments that the only way for me to manage them is to turn them off. Yes I know there is an easy way to fix it where I ask for confirmation before a comment is posted but I have not had the time to change the code, test it and then upload it to the server. I might just upgrade to CS 2.o when it RTM’s. Till then continue using the the Contact page and mention the post in there as well. ...
We have just started to look for a house - why build someone else’s equity when you can build your own. I got to admit its a drag! And the fact we just started and people go on for months doing this, I don’t know how. It is just a big pain in the butt. My sympathies to all those going through the same thing. If you do know good areas in London where we can live please let me know? I need it to be close to Tube and preferably within Zone 2. ...
I don’t know if I should laugh or be worried (when I fly into Delhi next month), but it seems the brand-spanking-new ILS landing system for Delhi Airport is not only setup correctly, there is no one trained to use it (yet), with some people in the government claiming success. It seems like a page out of Dilbert and seems like déjà vu when it comes to IT projects. ...
WSJ has a very interesting story on how Microsoft had to restart a lot of Vista features from a clean code base and throw away a lot of work done on existing windows code base over the years; and from my point of view, the fact that it took this long is surprising, but as they say better late than never. ...
Well on one lovely weekend when there were clear blue skies (big deal here in London), I thought what better way to spend the day then mess up the MCE and stay indoors all day to fix it. And how does one go about doing that? Well here is what I did and lessons learned (hopefully) :). Firstly, just because there is a new update for the BIOS don’t be compelled to update it (as I did), remember the age old advice, don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. So, when I update the BIOS, which of course was not required, Windows for some reason did not like that and it stopped booting up - I would get a blue screen. Could not even boot up in safe mode, and the recovery console did not help, so all in all the machine was hosed if I may say. ...
I got this via a colleague of mine and thought I should spread the warning. I don’t forward chain letters, but send this link to other folks, what helps is the pictures, so you know what to look out for. UPDATE: Here is another story (by Guardian) send my a colleague which has pictures for the ATM for UK, where these scams have been around for the last couple of years. It is always good to see the pictures carefully and keep an eye out. ...
This recent post on slashdot got me thinking again. As you may or may not be aware of I work for Avanade , a leading consulting company - a company to which I am fairly new and still learning about. We a few weeks ago, internally had a interesting debate about what a companies policies should be about letting their employees blog. This gets even more interesting, with all the interest with EntLibs - we built it after all and we would like to help other developers out there. As more and more employees are getting fired about writing work related stuff, what is the solution? Is it writing anonymously? Well I don’t think so. If you did want to write anonymously then write it in a notebook (not a laptop, but the old kind - you know paper and spiral binding and the likes), not online! But, I think your company should encourage blogging, if they don’t, then maybe its time to move on. I was happy to know after the end of our discussion, Avanade did not want to censor what I write, they value the freedom of expression of their employees and also their point of view. So while we have blogs internally, which I don’t know if we are ready to share publicly or setup public blogs like msdn , we don’t have a policy on blogging (yet I suppose). Having said that one must use common sense on blogging, e,g, I won’t blog about any financial information, or anything about our Assets such as ACA.NET , etc - nothing which is not publicly available on the website, or any customer details, etc. But every now and them you do come across something which falls in a gray area - in such cases it is always safe to err on the side of safety - if you are not sure ask your legal and HR department. So, what is your companies take on blogs? Is there a policy? Are they encouraged like at Avanade or are they ignored completely, in the hopes they go away? ...