Archive for February, 2005

Humanity to others

Sunday, February 20th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

I was taking a look at the progress of the Mono WinForms roadmap and I thought I might consider contributing a few controls of the missing, but since mono is primarily developed on linux and that Cairo (the vector graphics library) seems to be primarily developed on linux as well, I’d better pick up a linux distribution. Now, I’ve run Linux (excuse me GNU/Linux) before and to quote the Hot Shots movies: I am no stranger to pain. Now, the great question in linux-land is: which distribution? So picking pseudo-randomly by asking in my irc channel, I came up with the answer: ubuntu, as no one had tried it yet in there.

Here I am, running ubuntu (which means ‘humanity to others’) and while it was pleasing to set up compared to RedHat 2.0 (yes it’s a while ago), there are some shortcomings and I have had some soundcard woes as I have multiple soundcards, but those are tales for another time. Overall I am pleased at the progress, but there is still some way to go to get to the usability levels I am used to from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but granted, I have a lot of choice and it is rather interesting to hack away on the themes.

Now, if ONLY there was an IDE in lieu with Visual Studio I might even consider adopting this thing for more frequent use. But what is the customary thing to do in linux-land, yes, write it yourself! Let’s see, I might get enamoured by GTK# and feel like taking a stab at progressing MonoDevelop. Only the future can tell.

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Atomic Cellular Dysfunction

Thursday, February 17th, 2005 | Development, Personal | No Comments

It isn’t that my organism is self-destructing (much) that I’ve picked this rather funky topic for today’s post, nay, it is far more sinister and dark – it is the topic of a contest that I participated in, together with Noah Adler last month, a contest that was about creating a game in 48 hours to the theme: Atomic Cellular Dysfunction.

We managed to create, within the 48 hours, a lovely game in style with the games of the 80s that we have both grown up on and loved, so without further ado, we bring Atomic Cellular Dysfunction to the world. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed PacMan and the other great games of our time.

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Reengineering

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

So I’ve been reading a bit lately as I’m heading an analysis on a restructuring of our enterprise systems and a true pearl in the lines of books I’ve consulted lately has been Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns by Demeyer, Ducasse and Nierstrasz. It details ways to go about reengineering object-oriented systems, the phases you progress through, what you need to remember, things to consider. It is a very pragmatic guide and even though the systems I am looking at reengineering aren’t object-oriented, sadly, then it provides an ample amount of information to not only get you started in a good way, but to remind you that there is more than a technical aspect to this, it is as much a sociological process when reengineering a company’s systems.

In order to avoid grief and possible litigation and other interesting things I am not going go into the enterprise system, why it needs reengineering or other things, so don’t ask about it.

So if you’re in a likewise position of looking at your company’s systems and figuring out what went wrong and how to go about fixing it, this book is an absolute treasure of information. Much recommended if you’re filling out an architect position.

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Zoom zoom zoom

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 | Development | No Comments

I was featured on Sara Ford’s blog and the VS 2005 News blog for my involvement with writing the VS Editor Zoom Add-In, which is an add-in bringing Word’s zoom control to Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 December CTP so far.

I hope some of you may find a need for some zooming.

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Enterprise Architecture

Monday, February 14th, 2005 | Development | No Comments

I just finished reading Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, the last Christmas present I still had to finish. I can’t seem to help feeling that it misses its audience in part with its narratives, depicting different aspects of enterprise programming, and even then all of a sudden go back to text-book descriptions of atomicity in transaction handling for threading. Very odd.

As usual, Fowler notes that he just records the patterns he has witnessed and everyone experienced in enterprise architecture will know these already, and it is rightfully so, so no mark against him there. Now, the Java crowd seems rather enamoured by the OR-mappings and being from that crowd, Fowler recounts those patterns. I am rather ambivalent on its merit, both the book’s and OR-mappings’, so I think I will settle with suggesting this book to newcomers to enterprise development, as a quick introduction to some of the more recurring patterns in the field.

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