Lazycoder

How is your companys WiFi?

I’m pretty impressed with my employers WiFi. Right now I’m sitting outside by a fountain in front of one of our buildings and I’ve got a strong signal (3 bars in Apple Airport terms). The WiFi is secure all over campus. This morning I decided to have coffee on the rooftop patio of one of our buildings overlooking Lake Union. WiFi worked fine up there too. I’ve never had a problem getting on our network here.

hehe, from a slashdot thread on the Vista release

Re:some FFT [food for thought] (Score:3, Interesting)
by PurpleXanathar (800369) on Thursday July 28, @06:46AM (#13185017)
6. Feeding generations of inept developers. check. [re: C#, anything .net, VB, ...] … I wonder why anything .net feeds generations of inept developers and python or perl or java or any other language don’t.

Oh let’s return to the good old days where programmers had two big keys with 0 and 1 written on them and programmed opcodes like playing bongos..

Portland Code Camp

Portland Code Camp — Growing and Growing: “”

(Via Walt Ritscher.)

OK, that’s two places I’ve seen the Portland Code Camp registration listed as 290. (gulp). Luckily, I’m presenting at the same time as Scott Hanselman, Bill Vaughn, and Rory Blyth, so I probably won’t have too many people in my session. Which should reduce the amount of rotten vegetables hurled my way.

Unluckily, that means I’m going to miss their presentations. I’ve been told that all of the slides and code will be available after the code camp.

Mapping software lately

I stopped using Mapquest when it got me lost in El Paso. It was telling me to take a street that doesn’t exist.

My wife loved MSN Mappoint up until last weekend when it got her lost in REDMOND FREAKING WASHINGTON. That’s right, Mappoint couldn’t get her from the Group Health Eastside hospital to Ooba Tooba’s over behind the Ben Franklin in Redmond. Told her to take a street that doesn’t go all the way through. Google Maps led me right to it.

That’s the problem with most Microsoft products lately, they add all the bells and whistles but forget to make sure the basics are working. I mean, how does the QA team at Mappoint work? Can’t they at least drive around in their own city and see if their directions work?

New start website from MS

Start!

This is pretty nifty. I like the fact that it’s easy to add/remove items from the portal and also to move them around (you can drag and drop the items). I have some issues with the fact that a click does different things depending on the context. Sometimes it opens a preview, right or left click, sometimes it opens a page. The search is cool, including searches for RSS feed is a cool idea. It might be a lot, but a way to import an OPML file would be cool.

I’m dragging this one on to my Firefox toolbar.

Why I hate intellisense

Why would I hate something as ‘helpful’ as intellisense? Well, because it doesn’t always work and it leads to lazy developers.

other_dev: <input type=”text” id=”AEFUDate” class=”pdFormField” runat=”server”>
other_dev: no enable or disable
me: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/i/inputtext.htm
me: Disabled=true/false
other_dev: well, it’s not showing up in the autotype for some reason – even though controls on other forms do – dunno what the issue is.
other_dev: add this to the <%@ Control CodeBehind
other_dev: TargetSchema=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5″
other_dev: and it works fine
me: yay for IDE specific metadata!

Rather than doing some research and looking up the attributes, some developers would rather the IDE tell them what they should be using. If you interview these devs and ask them about the properties of an object or ask them how they use the object, they don’t know. When intellisense fails them, they run to find you;They treat you like their own personal living intellisense. BAH!