In the months leading up to Christmas ’09, I was pondering what to buy for my kids. Instead of the normal brainless and easy gifts like transformers, gi-joes, and barbies, I wanted to get them something that matters, something that will benefit them. As I browsed around the internet, I came across microscopes, chemistry kits, [...]
Recently, I’ve been reading the book Coders at Work, where author Peter Seibel interviews lots of well known developers. One of the questions that he often asks is whether they have tried Literate Programming, an idea introduced by Donald Knuth in the 70s. Although most of them say no, some of them have tried it [...]
I was recently surprised to find that MySpace had open sourced a distributed “MapReduce Framework” called Qizmt (http://qizmt.myspace.com/). From the site’s description: MySpace Qizmt [kiz-mit] is a mapreduce framework for both developing and executing distributed computing applications on large clusters of Windows servers. This has been a topic that I’ve been interested in for a [...]
When Dave asked me for some help with a little side project of his that he was researching, I jumped at the chance. The requirement was to execute a powershell script programmatically and pass in some parameters that were gathered from a simple form. I had been wanting to learn more about powershell since it [...]
I wrote a post over on the nGenSoft Blog talking about how to gain Static Access to Request-Specific Data: As we have all come to learn in the last decade plus of web development, web applications are inherently stateless. Unlike their native client cousins, every request must be treated as if it was done in [...]
After declaring my love for extension methods in the last post, it only seemed appropriate that it would come up again in an answer I gave to a stackoverflow question. The question stated: In ASP.NET Web Apps , events are fired in particluar order : for simplicity Load => validation =>postback =>rendering Suppose I want to [...]
I love extension methods, ’nuff said: public static class ServiceProviderExtension { public static T GetService<T>(this IServiceProvider provider) where T: class { return provider.GetService(typeof(T)) as T; } public static K GetService<T, K>(this IServiceProvider provider) where T : class, K where K : class { return provider.GetService() as K; } public static K GetService<K>(this IServiceProvider provider, Type [...]
I suppose I should have expected there to be “an app for that”. But I’m pleasantly surprised that there is a free wordpress app. Sweet. Thaat being said there seems to be a bug with posting pictures taken from the app. That’s ok though, still pretty cool
If you’ve been keeping up with the new developments in the web world, no doubt you’ve heard about Web Workers. A new technology for browsers that will let you take advantage of the client’s true multi-threading capabilities. Currently, it’s only supported in Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and some of the latest nightly Chrome builds. I [...]
There are many different types of productivity, today I’m going to talk about the things that you do on a day to day basis. A few years ago, I found myself unhappy with my level of productivity and decided to figure out a way to manage my time better. As one would do when trying [...]