Eric Sink Says Nice Things About Me

Eric Sink, who among other things wrote "The Business of Software," says I seem to "really understand both technology and business at a deep level." Me? Understand business? Lord, no! The industry, I pay attention to, but I'm an insanely bad businessman. I've flirted with personal bankruptcy, been a VP …

more ...

Windows VPN breaks FTP?!?!?!?!

It isn't just Windows LiveWriter that got broken when I added a VPN connection, it's FTP! Un-be-freakin'-lievable.

more ...

VPN breaks Windows LiveWriter

I hooked up to a client site via VPN yesterday and broke Windows LiveWriter. At first, it asked if I wanted to dial a connection to the VPN target. No, of course not (never mind the whole "dial" aspect"). Then, when I deleted the VPN, LiveWriter started producing a "file …

more ...

SD Times Columnists Disagree On Ruby

Allen Holub's latest Java Watch column for SD Times says that Ruby is "certainly not" the next big thing in programming languages. He says "scripting systems (I'm reluctant to call them languages) like PHP and Ruby, ... are too Wild West to be trustworthy."

My Windows and .NET Watch column for …

more ...

XNA Game Studio: Return of the Demo Scene?

I'm thrilled that Microsoft is opening up game development to non-professionals. I believe that the destruction of a steady path from enthusiast to power-user to programmer was one of the great tragedies of the 1990s. But the idea that XNA will be "YouTube of video games," conflates "point videocamera at …

more ...

21,000 out of 51,400,000: Not Bad

That tail must be l-o-o-o-n-g indeed...

BTW, so here I am in the 99.96 percentile and my AdSense revenue is enough to buy a few lattes per month. Blogging is a marketing cost, not a direct income generator.

more ...

ParallelApply: Distribute Calculations Over Multicore / Processors

This code applies a BackgroundFunction to elements of an IEnumerable using the ThreadPool. If you don't know what that means, it's probably not of interest to you:

::: {style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; BACKGROUND: white; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Courier New"} [   10]{style="COLOR: #2b91af"}     [delegate]{style="COLOR: blue"} [void]{style="COLOR: blue"} [BackgroundFunction …

more ...

10 Years Since I Became An Independent

Ten years ago today I quit Miller Freeman, where I was an Editorial Director of the Software Development Unit (that is, a publishing unit that produced magazines on developing software) in order to launch 1711 Software, a company developing middleware for what would become known as massive multiuser role-playing-games.

Yes …

more ...

A Little Stymied

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to access the entirety of a blog post within my LiveWriter plugin. It's easy enough to embed an hReview in a post, but it's a harder matter to actually create a template. As far as I can tell, I can only edit the contents …

more ...

hReview LiveWriter Plugin: Piece of Cake

::: {#3FBB6C13-79A0-40b8-8A3A-160DEA9C52F3:02883555-b267-4c2f-90d4-6f77fe9f7526 .wlWriterEditableSmartContent contenteditable="false" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline; float: none;"} ::: {.hreview} 8/14/2006 10:48:27 AM by [[Larry O'Brien]{.fn}]{.reviewer .vcard}

::: {.item .fn} LiveWriter API :::

[]{.type style="display: none;"}

????? I take back my criticism. It is easy to write a plugin. (N.B …

more ...