bob-ak.com

Scott Hanselman’s 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

A great site for hi-tech Windows developers. Check his Tools List for Windows-based applications used for programming.

Sometimes you happen to come across a great tune – this one happens to be from an Iranian artist living in the US. There are lots of awful/average Iranian ‘rappers’ out there but this is truly amazing.

The Pascals (last fm link)

A 15 member Japanese band who play a range of instruments from violins and harmonicas to ukeleles and toy pianos. Pascals is a mini orchestra led by Rocket Matsu on accordian and pianica.

The Defectors (last fm link)

60’s Inspired Garage-punk band from Denmark – formed in 1997

Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby (myspace link)

Wreckless Eric is an antique English pop musician, He lives in France with Amy Rigby, a collectable, delectable American pop musicienne.

This article on how we came to comit to the QWERTY keyboard layout was written back in 1997. It’s a good read if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Here’s an excerpt captures the mood:

Commitment to our spouses, our children, and our careers is held to be virtuous; lack of commitment is a common criticism. Yet commitment should be seen as morally neutral. After all, what one is committed to might be either good or bad; commitment to a destructive relationship, an unsatisfying job, or alcoholism deserves no praise. Often, commitment can mean nothing more than an involvement that has outlived its original justification. All of us have at one time or another felt trapped by such a commitment, longing for a happier, though uncertain, state of existence but fearing the short-term pain required to reach it.

Read the full article here.

This is short movie about what developers can go through while building applicationsg is absulotely spot on and gets a thumbs up from me!

From develop-one.net.

I was trying to find information about a book called The Age of Conversation when I came across the main site promoting the book and read a post on how thet intended to promote the book on a particular day and wanted to get their readers to help this happen.

This is the gist of what they planned to do:

1. Buy the book – pretty obvious as to why!
2. Blog about it – yes!
3. Twitter Commentary – if a certain keyword is used when twittering, the site Twemes.com will pick it up and you cab track its popularity
4. Trackback or Comment on a particular post written by them – “everyone can follow the conversation and help promote exposure on social sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc).”
5. Stumble, Digg and Reddit the posts & tell/email all your on-line friends to do the same
6. Post to the main other social networking sites like Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Facebook, Technorati and Ma.gnolia (search engine for searching blogs), Furl, BlinkList, Newsvine, etc.
7. And finally keep talking: “Get on ooVoo, iChat, Aim, or where ever you like to talk, and start talking”

Many good points on how to tackle difficult programming jobs gone wrong.

There’s mention of Richard Whitehead‘s book “Leading a Software Development Team” which I should deffo have a look at very soon.

Read the full post here.

From a discussion on reddit.com.

A modern version control system has three clear benefits over the “folder backup” method.

1. File space. Let’s say your code changes 10% each week. Under the “folder backup” method, each week you’re saving 100% of the code. Using a proper VCS, you’re only saving 10% of your code. I know hard drive space is cheap, but it’s not free and I never seem to have enough.
2. History. The key to VCS, in my opinion, is being able to document your changes in more granular level than a file called “Changelog.txt” that might not get changed whenever you work on your code.
3. Bug-location: Let’s say you find a bug in a method. You search the history for that file and let the VCS runs the diffs for you.
4. Complete freedom to change code. You don’t have to worry about breaking something, or removing possibly useful code. Before I moved to VCS, I used to comment out old code liberally but keep it ‘cos I might need it. This quickly becomes a PITA.

That being said, I’ve got some caveats too.

1. You’re still going to want to backup the version control folder
2. You’re entrusting your entire code base to a program that may itself be buggy. You’re going to want to make sure (a) it’s reliable (no bleeding edge releases) and (b) you understand how to work it

Popular systems:

• Git
• CVS
• VCS
• Subversion
• TLA
• Darcs
• Mercurial

GIT seems to be very popular.

Article on How to set up a personal home Subversion server.

A collection of photos by the National Geographic shows the “glorious past of a conflicted nation”.

Click here to see the full collection.

The palace of Ardashir I Firuzbad in Fars province south of Shiraz

From htmlist.com by Edgar Hassler.

I started getting “serious” about development because I had a desire never to write lengthy, wandering streams of code again.  It was not for any reason but unadulterated laziness—the kind that so overpowers the better senses as to force a person to spend hours in a chair with the express goal of not spending hours in said chair.  It’s a wild, consuming laziness that seems to know no bounds.

Read full post here