Ness' Outpost

It is hard to ignore such a question – especally when the man asking it has written a book thicker than the Bible that sits on my bookshelf.

The talk gives some interesting insight as to why Visual Studio does the things it does. Why it is overly complex for someone who likes to poke into every source file and see not only why things work but how.

Drawing my own conclusions after reading the talk I find it exposes the abstractions we make as programmers. Some blindly follow abstractions, abuse and mis-use them while others don’t use this most powerful programming tool. It really is about balance and tradeoffs.

The article is pretty deep into the coding dimension and it’s quite lengthy as well, but if you are interested in programming and why your IDE does the things it does then make some time and get comfortable.

If you listen to or watch diggnation you probably know that registered and donating users get the content before the general public.

I saw this link on digg but now when I go back to search for it on digg they seem to have pulled the story. So are the guys being hypocritical since Alex is a confessing bittorrent hound himself?

Get your bittorrent client ready, this link will only be hot for the next few days until it is released publicly. Then you’d want to use the revision3 tracker.

I’m back safe and sound from my trip and I think the interviews went pretty well. Of course there is always room for improvement, they wern’t perfect and I felt my energy starting to fall as the day went on but overall a great experience and I hope to be offered a position with the WinCE team and the automotive group. I think that is a really interesting department that I can get excited about.

I’ve posted some pictures from the trip, they are not that great as I was more worried about preparing for the interviews than taking photos. The ones from the plane were “washed out” so I tried to doctor them with The Gimp to do some white balancing.

I made it safe and sound, but the de-pressurization of the cabin after being above 35,000 feet for 4 hours really hurt. A lot. My ears have just cleared up now and I’ve been in town for over 3 hours now.

I already did a little exploring in the drizzling weather. I’ve never seen so many shops that do “nails” or drive though ATM’s in my life. Other than that Redmond is a lot like the Niagara region, lots of trees turning color (no ‘u’ since I’m in America) beautiful nature scenes, a little more hilly but I haven’t seen any escarpments yet.

I should have had my camera out this morning as I was leaving Buffalo. I had the window seat and we took off just as the sun started to come up. There were some amazing shots of the city at night and the transformation to daylight, and I missed them all. Good thing I’m a better software developer than photographer.

Tonight, I’m going to watch the ball game, do some research on the groups I think I’m meeting with tomorrow and try to get a good nights sleep in a strange bed and timezone.

For my interview in Seattle, but I’ll be back Friday night. ;)

I’m packing my bags and charging all my electronic devices. The iRiver needed a good charge and a fresh upload of podcasts to get me through the flights and layover. My laptop is useless in general, the old Toshiba’s battery can only hold a charge for about 5-10 mins before the electrons stop flowing. I’m also charging up the camera so I can take lots of photos of the area. I’m sure it’s just like anywhere else, but it’s new to me. I guess the general idea is that I need some sort of little fussion reactor I can put in a container and have it spit out an infinite amount of electrons for me. That would be sweet.

I hope I get a chance to do some tourist stuff in Seattle, but the reality of the situation is I’m probably going to be so tired because of the time zone swings and the hectic interviews. We’ll see, only time will tell.

Today I had a second interview at Horiba in Oakville. I think things went pretty well again so I hope to come home to a job offer or another interview with them next week.

I’ve been sick the past few days which has given me plenty of time to blow my nose and watch TV on the couch instead of computing or getting outside.

That said I have a few observations about HGTV which is pretty much all about home improvement and “do-it-yourself” ideas.

• I detest decorating shows.

My main reason for the hatred towards decorating shows is the fact they don’t show the structural work for what is required for these projects. They are only concerned with the looks, sometimes the functionality and usually never the strength and longevity of the project. I guess people do decorate almost bi-monthly – but you shouldn’t have to because things are falling apart.

The one show I really do like is “Homes on Homes”. Mike Homes really shows everything. From the demolition to the framing right up to the finishing touches of dry wall and trim. He shows how to make some huge improvements, not some tacky lamp shade or how to pick colours for your walls.

By the way, never, ever paint brick fireplaces. It’s just a stupid idea you’ll regret, in my opinion.

I moved my repository from an ext3 partition on hda to a ReiserFS partition on hdb. This does three things for me.

1. Increases the speed and efficiency of my subversion server by using a file system optimized for many small files
2. Allows me to make backups within the same server in case of hard drive failure of either drive, but not both
3. Shift the load balance a little more towards the center between the two discs, although hda is much more loaded being the main disc.

I also had my interview at InterAutomation today and I think it went quite well. I hope to be called back in for a second interview. I would have liked to been able to present the interviewers with more technical knowledge of the lower level drivers and development but I just don’t have those skills yet. There are not many opportunities to write drivers for well specified hardware for average users like myself. A lot of the time, the process requires reverse engineering which multiplies the learning curve making it that much more out of reach to gain the required starting energy.

The company is a smaller engineering firm that provides a complete software solution for analytical testing of all types and configurations of motors. I think I would enjoy working at IA very much.

This article linked to from slashdot talks about “Urban performance legends, revisited”.

It’s all about memory allocation. Something I’ve been toying with in my latest C development. I’m not very happy with my current code as it mixes stack and heap allocations to create nodes. The article itself was a very good read up to the point were the word “synergy” was used. I cannot understand how IBM is so in love with the usage of such a hybrid word – and am happy that others have felt the same way to place this word in the “buzzword” category on wikipedia.

I do suggest you read it if you are interested in programming and software. Every program needs to use memory, even if you are so abstracted away from the memory management you don’t even realize it.
How you build and use ‘objects’ can hinder or benefit your code in OO languages. But don’t depend on the optimizers suggested in the article – know your language and write the code so the compiler doesn’t have to guess.

Today was an excellent day for booking interviews. I’m going to Oakville to see what looks like a really neat company that write software for testing vehicles. Their website has a lot of interesting looking toys on it.

Late this evening, but earlier in Pacific Time Zone I received an email inviting me to travel to Seattle for an in-person interview with Microsoft. The last time I was on a plane I think I was 2 years old, and I’ve never been West of the great lakes.

I’m really looking forward to Thanksgiving now and feeling much better about my job search.

This morning I was so excited to have received a letter from Australia. But there wasn’t a letter, just little pieces of plastic with some screening on them. That’s right, I finally have my pocket protectors.

I’m already putting them to good use now that I’ve started up a rewrite of my configuration code from my summer contract. I’m just sitting here waiting to hear back from employers – I might as well do something.

You can find my development ongoing at code.nesser.org. It is no where near done, in fact the Makefile will not even build the project yet, but I do have the linked list module completed and abstracted away from the storage. Now I’m working on persistant storage to and from a file. Next is the CLI parsing and calling the lower levels.

So as you can see I’m doing some bottom up development. Feel free to test and file tickets or suggestions in the tracker if you have some free time.