Just my opinion...

I’m not sure how often I’ll need to post “place holder” posts like this one but I’m sure it’ll happen again.  I’m still blogging, I just haven’t had the time nor the inclination over the holidays and a recent busy time at work.

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer.  It is much nicer than using the WordPress online interface.

I will post something better soon…  Stay tuned.

Work pressures to move the schedule-progress slider to the right are mounting.  I still believe that the best tool to use for part of our project is still a functional approach but it’s pretty clear that I can’t develop enough expertise in the limited time to be a functional programming expert.  I also feel that I’m incredibly close to having the proverbial light “go on” too, so I’m still studying at home.  I just won’t be devoting work time to it in the immediate future.

I do know a guy that’d be a fantastic FP subject matter expert.  I wonder what I need to do to entice him back into this environment?

It’s been around a while, but the term “duck-typing” in the rhelm of dynamic types leaves me a bit uneasy for some reason.

I was reading my good friend’s blog and he had taken a personality test at the request of one of his friends.

During a bit of down-time at work today, I thought I’d take it as a lark. I also tried as hard as I possibly could to honestly access the questions and give the most honest answer I could. In several instances, I was a bit embarrassed with myself. I’ve always considered myself as not very “touchy-feely”, it seems I “feel” through things a bit more than I wanted to admit. Seriously though, I thought I’d have more than 0% on the feeling side of the “Thinking-Feeling” scale.

Shit, I could be Dexter.

Of course, an organization measuring your personality won’t tell you that you have the same personality as some total douche bag but it does say that I have the same personality type (INTJ – Strategist) as Hannibal Lecter.

That’s two serial killers mentioned wtih my personality type post…

Perhaps my family and friends should be a bit more wary of me.

…it’s a gripe.

I recently ran into a situation where I needed to interface to a Win32 API style dynamic link library (DLL). Since most of the work I do is in a managed environment, I had to write a way to “thunk” into this older library.

I first wrote an Active Template Library (ATL) COM wrapper for the library but because of even more aggravating reasons, I had to abandon that project. I’ve written literally dozens of these ActiveX server wrappers for calling older code from .NET so I assure you, the aggravation factor was high.

So, the next best thing is to access this older DLL using the platform invoke (P/Invoke) mechanism of the .NET runtime. Being a typical programmer and laziness being truly a virtue in our profession, I didn’t want to write all the P/Invoke function signatures by hand. Not to mention all the constants and enumeration declarations.

So, I finally decided to drop $60 on a tool that I’d seen a while back called the “P/Invoke Wizard“. Since I have all the source to the target DLL, it’d be easy, right?

WRONG!

I go ahead and do the online purchase (from another software professional) and expect to be emailed my registration key. Only to discover, at the end of the purchase that they will email my registration code in 1 to 2 days after some one verifies the purchase.

Are you fucking kidding me? How hard is it to do online credit validation these days? So, I get to wait until “whomever” at that office decides to send an email.

The tool itself is very useful, I’m certainly not bitching about that. I’m not even bitching that it could take 1 to 2 days to get my registration code (although, that is a bit of an annoyance). What I am bitching about is the fact that I didn’t know about the 1 to 2 day delay until after the purchase was completed.

Bitch fest off now… Just needed to vent a bit.

OK, you’ve got me. I’ve been a total slacker on this blogging shit.

I read the blogs of friends and continuously marvel at the amount of creativity and thought they put into those blogs. Me, on the other hand… Nada, zip, nothing.

I have no excuses, I don’t have to be creative – most of my content is technical. I do have new things to post, I’ve been working with Windows Communication Foundation of late and have learned considerably more about the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library. My development project has upgraded to the Enterprise Library 3.1 (previously we were using 2.0).

Stay tuned, I’ll eventually say something interesting.

Here I am over a month into my blogging experience and I’m already slacking off. I still owe a few colleagues an article on using XsdObjectGen with the XmlSerializer and the common problems that arise with non-trivial schemas.

Work is just consuming all my time but I promise to get new posts up soon!

I know I promised to post a couple times a week but the new project at work is consuming huge amounts of time on the front end. I’ve spent the last 3 days in the bowels of the System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer and an object model that I “auto-generated” with XsdObjectGen.

The whole XmlSerializer ordeal has provided me with enough information for another post but it will be a few days before I can get that edited and put up for all to see.

On a positive note, I got email from Brian Button and I might be able to get some great help on the ENTLIB part of my work project.

More often than not, it isn’t.

E=mc², that’s elegant.
F=ma, that’s elegant.

In science and engineering, elegant generally means “simple, obvious and effective”.

Last night, I was reading the book Essential Windows Workflow Foundation and began to think, “I need to understand this… Boy, I hope they don’t use the phrase ‘elegant solution‘ in reference to their own work. I need to know this and if they go there… I won’t be able to finish the book.”

Granted that’s a pretty drastic reaction to a pretty simple phrase. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a great idea and a much needed step in the right direction of software development, but it’s pretty complex.

Before my non-Microsoft development brethren pounce on me, I know it’s not a novel idea either.

So, why my vehement stance?

Easy. The word “elegant” is horribly overused in science and engineering. Going back to around 410 BC the word elegant can be applied to maybe 20 solutions. While we can debate the number of insights, inventions, theories, and solutions that warrant the word elegant, what is not up for debate is that we (scientists and engineers) have lost sight of what constitutes elegance.

I know I’m going a long way to rant about the subjective use of a single word. Perhaps my immature idealism gets the better of me sometimes.

One of my long time friends made the comment that he and I may be in a contest to see who “fizzles out first“. Being a person who knows me pretty well, his comment was more of an observation.

Most of the people I know, also know that I have a great history of ideas that get explosive starts but lousy finishes. In my own defense, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s because once the initial problems are all solved, I’m pretty much satisfied that the remainder of the execution is an “exercise for the reader“.

I’m going to make a committed effort here to maintain this blog on, at least, a semiweekly basis (2-5 posts per week). Given the way I work (my friends also know I have the attention span of a meth-addicted ferret) I could easily have 2-3 posts one day and go silent for a week.

Because I’m a computer programmer, much of what I post will be software related. It’s the only thing I can talk about and seem intelligent. I won’t limit my blogs to the topic of software development though. On rare occasion, I do have things to say on other topics.

So, as a classic fast starter, slow finisher, I accept the gauntlet thrown down by one of the best software developers I’ve ever met. Thanks, man. Maybe I’ll stay motivated.

Wouldn’t it be funny if you’re reading this 8 months after I post it… And it was my last post?

(NOTE: I’m also officially pissed that he thought of the name “Tardy Pessimist” and I didn’t.)