Lazycoder

Translating for the non-technical

a-medical-student-blogs-about-thinking-as-a-physician: “As Anthony matures as a physician, he will face a major challenge. How do you as a physician explain diagnostic tests, treatments and diagnoses in terms that patients understand?
As physicians, we have an obligation to “break it down” into understandable terminology. I spend much time on rounds developing analogies of disease so that patients will understand what we mean.”

(Via DB’s Medical Rants.)

This problem of translating of the complicated into the simple plagues programmers as well. We tend to “break it down” into simple tasks (e.g. “Try rebooting”) or come up with little analogies to explain what we are doing. (e.g. “It’s like I’m taking this whole row of numbers and flipping it on it’s side”). Clients I’ve worked for are often amazed and what I consider simple or hard to accomplish. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said the words, “Well, it’s not quite that simple.”.

In my current position I have a more interesting task. I end up translating medical jargon to the developers working for me and technical details to the docs due to my background in Biochemistry. It helps a little to understand ahead of time what the data will look like and how it will be used. Most medical data isn’t about the actual result, it’s about the presence or absence of data or even metadata about the number. Sometimes entire groups of lab results really just boil down to a bit datatype. Positive or Negative? Malignant or Benign?

(Actually there is no boolean data in medical data. There is always “Yes”, “No”, and “Unknown”).

I love pimp my code

Pimp My Code, Part 6: The Pimp Before Christmas

(Via Call Me Fishmeal..)

If you aren’t reading Wil Shipleys blog, and you are a programmer, you should read his blog. He has a series he calls “Pimp my code”, which is basically a public code review/code flogging. He not only shows what he would change about the submitted code, but he explains why he changed it. Sure it’s all in Objective-C, and you may not have any interest in Objective-C. But the explanations he gives could apply to almost any language. You may not always agree with what he is saying, and a lot of times the commenters don’t, but at least you understand why he made the change and why you disagree with him.

I wish more talented programmers would do things like this.

True

Overheard in the Office: The Voice of the Cubicle – 12PM Meeting with Devs (Con’td): “Web Developer: Nobody ever made money off the internet with a business model that required two hands!”

(Via http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/.)

Xbox 360 should have integrated with MSN Music

Xbox 360: Back to the Drawing Board

This was a no-brainer. Think about it, buy music using your Xbox 360 and Xbox Live and transfer it to your “Plays for Sure” Windows Media Player. Integrating MSN Music with the Xbox 360 would have helped Microsoft compete with Apple.

Oh man, I didn’t even think about that. That would have been a killer app for the 360. I suppose they can still add it, but does anyone really buy music from MSN Music? Has anyone ever bought music from MSN Music? Why MSN Music instead of Walmart or Napster? Back before I had an iPod, I bought a few tracks from the Walmart music store. I’ve gotten a gift card for the Napster music store and picked up 10 song from there. But I’ve never seen a reason to buy anything from MSN Music.

Scott Guthrie is the best thing going for ASPdotNet

I’ve given Scott Guthrie crap here for some of his grand pronouncements about exciting new functionality that Apache has had for years. But he does a really good job of interacting with the community. The latest post from him about the WAPU process is a good example of this. I’ve heard a lot of people say he has answered their emails even though he doesn’t know them from Adam.

VS 2003->VS 2005 Web Application Project Upgrade Tutorials Now Live

He’s also posted some excellent ASP.NET 2.0 tutorials.