Head.SmackOnTable();

I have the following plugins installed for WordPress:

• Akismet
• Faster Image Insert
• Google Analyticator
• iMax Width
• Scissors
• Simple Tagging
• Simply Exclude – I use this so I can exclude the “links” category from the mainpage, and the rss feed
  
• Sociable Zyblog Edition
• SyntaxHighlighter Plus
• TinyMCE Advanced
• WassUp – ultimate live web stats
  
• WP Easy Uploader – this alows me to upload files and themes, without downloading them locally, connecting to the server via secure ftp and uploading the files manually – can give it a URL, and it will download and extract.

If you have any more decent wordpress plugins, let me know!

My Technobabble : ForEach, a simple but very useful extension method

This evening I was writing some code (Yay!) for an Xml based MEF catalog I am prototyping. I came across the need to invoke a set of methods on an IEnumerable that was returned from a LINQ to XML query. Unfortunately no such animal exists on IEnumerable.

This came in very useful, thanks Glenn – basically, I needed a ForEach to handle some lamda’s, on a Stack<T>, and this was very useful!

The comment of all comments « Freekshow

What does the line of comment add? Does it tell you anything that the code does not? Indeed not. Zero points. This kind of gratuitous comments is all too common, and if you have many of these, will you keep reading them? Will you not start to blank out the comments in your mind, thereby possibly missing the important comment that actually does explain a certain coding decision?

Finanlly, what I consider to be a proper developer, agrees that commenting is bad. His example image proves my point:

The comment literally does not add anything – the code signature says everything you need to know – List<Joke> GetMostPopularJokes – Im guessing that its going to get you a list of the most popular jokes.

Testing ScribeFire for Firefox…

While im writing a new project using vs.net 2008, Resharper cropped up a nice helper, saying I should use a lambda expression on my code, which made me think about how looping has evolved…

for (int i = 0; i < all.Count; i++)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(container[i].Count, container[i]));
}

foreach (Tag tag in container)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(tag.Count, tag));
}

container.ForEach(delegate(Tag tag)
{
tagCount.Add(new TagCount(container.Count, tag));
});

container.ForEach(tag => tagCount.
Add(new TagCount(container.Count, tag)));

Iv always thought lambda’s were gimmicky, but I do have to admit, they do look fancy and makes things like what im doing easier.

Well iv got a pet project, its creaing my own Automatic Numberplate Recognition System. Why? Because I think it will be very technically challenging to do it in the .net framework.

This is what I have sofar, from an image like this:

it picks up the following:

Not bad, if i say so myself. It needs hell of alot of work though.

Well here at my new place of work, after only being here for 5 weeks (I think), we had a company meeting in Brighton, and sofar its been quite well, but I guess I have to, as is my prerogative, complain about something.

Its about the information in the meeting, basically, its all interesting on a level, but totally useless to me. No offence to anyone, but I don’t particularly care how the design team is doing, or how much revenue we have coming in, or we lost this or that project – I know its all company information, and I work for the company, so I should be interested, but unfortunately, im not.

Joel on Software calls it the “Developer Abstraction Layer” – basically, I shouldn’t be fussed with any other information apart from what I need to get my program running. I dont need to know about how we missed the 5th Q targets for 34.6% of the projects last year, its fascinating, so is the fact that sharks are the only animal that dont get cancer. But, both facts are totally useless to me at work, so id rather not know it.

Im not saying I dont want to get involved at all – give me tidbits, then if I dont ask for more information, dont take it personally. I know it sounds really harsh, but to be really honest, im not that fussed with office politics etc, I just want to sit down, write damn good code, and be proud of it. Sometimes, if I am really passionate about something, I will get involved, or if I know of a different way of doing things, then I will voice my opinion. But in circumstances where, in a company meeting, loads of people tell me stuff that will not impact my work, and being forced to sit through that for a morning, thats just a waste of time in my opinion.

I have a feeling if my boss read this tomorrow morning, he will fire me. Good thing he dosent have his laptop with him.

Im gunna do a full post about this later, but for the time being, its time I declared to the world that I love Resharper 4.0 and im going to marry it.

A reason for this:

Simplicity! Beauty! And it works!

A couple of weeks ago, I was a retard, and made my keyboard drink some pepsi. Realising I was a moron, I ran it under a tap (after unplugging it), but it still was rather funky to type (the R key would do tab, then r…and tab would do 5 tabs in a row before simulating someone pressing the caps lock).

So I decided to decimate it and see what was up.

Heres whats inside a top of the range Microsoft Natural Keyboard:

After cleaning it out with compressed air and making sure the membrane thingy (With all the dots and the lines thing) wasnt stuck to the keyboard base (As it was with the R and tab keys), I put it back together.

After an hour of looking where I missed a screw out, I managed to put it back together, and its working perfectly!

Its even worse when your car is doing it while your pegging it down a dual carriage way at 50mph…

Not sure what happened – I could remember smelling something burning, but I didn’t think much of it (I had both windows down, so could have easily been that) – then I notice my windows start fogging up – that’s not a good sign – and then I see white smoke rising out of the air vent next to the wind screen – that’s an even worse sign.

So I panic, pull myself off the road in a safe manner, and call MINI emergency services – half an hour later, a BMW mechanic in an estate pulls up behind me and asks me questions about the car, then starts sniffing around the engine. After muchos trouble shooting, he works out its a heating radiator leak, and the smoke is the antifreeze burning on hot engine parts – he said that would also explain why the floor mats are wet (never figured that out).

He arranges me to take the car to Cooper Wimbledon to have it serviced, which they promptly sort me out and basically steal my car and run tests on it and violate it in ways I never thought possible.

2 days later, they ring me up and say Its all done! Yay! They had to replace the heater matrix, the radiator, and did a coolant replacement for all the coolant that went burny burn. And they valet’ed my car, and washed it for free!

Its nice and shiny now!