"the thing I am not doing - coding it - is exactly the part that is missing for the estimate to be good: knowing what trouble I'll get into while coding. Usually this trouble comes from me not thinking it through carefully enough and I'm missing something that ends up giving me trouble, or some functionality I'll be reusing doesn't work just the way I think it does, and my approach is wrong. I can't know this without coding."

"What we want is some product that can mostly just keep running by itself, and it will generate some ad-based income from the traffic alone - or perhaps by subscriptions. All we'd have to do is get the service up and running, and keep it running."

I saw this Cheat Sheet for using Windows PowerShell (MSH / Monad) to help people who are used to cmd.exe to easily move to this new syntax.

PowerShell is really great for doing complex tasks with it's object approach to data, but there seems to be somewhat of a learning curve to this syntax. I haven't looked into it, but just from looking at these examples it looks like a confusion of cmdlets and pipes and switches, and this "$_" thingy.

So, dir is now replaced by get-childitem (dir still works though as an alias). That's ok, its a more general naming convention. But what you could do easily in cmd.exe now seems a bit more tricky. Sorting by date was "dir /ad", now it onvolves a pipe and a where statement and this $_ thing, and becomes "get-childitem | where { $_.MshIsContainer }". Quite a handful right there.

It seems a lot more general and powerful, though I'd have to read up on that syntax before I could get anything done with it.

Here's an example from the same page of a dir function that sorts by name with folders on the top:

function dir {
   get-childitem $args -force |
   sort @{e={$_.MshIsContainer}; asc=$false},
        @{e={$_.Name}; asc=$true}
}

Which is the same as "dir /OGn" in cmd.exe

I like the fact that the F1 help in Visual Studio 2005 uses online help so I don't have to install that whole huge library, and it can be updated without me installing it all over again.

But why is it so incredibly slow to open? I press F1, and first it takes a good while for the window to appear, and then it takes what seems like forever to locate the page. And in the meantime there is no indication to whether it has found the correct page, so I might end up getting help on something irrelevant.

It's actually a lot faster to just google whatever I'm looking for, even though I'm still ending up on the same msdn2.microsoft.com site. And that's a shame, because F1 is actually very useful as it can locate the help pages by the context I'm in. But I'm just ending up not using it anymore.

"it's really good for my sanity to have some moments of solitude and be working on my own little projects. But now the problem is I'm getting isolated from what's going on in the rest of the house. I'm all alone on a different floor, sometimes with headphones on, and the door closed to keep the heat in"

"In the shower today, to my amazement, there was a bottle that I could actually read."

"I thought I would do some research of my own to see if I could find anything interesting. Expecting to read through a lot of material with little hope of finding anything substantial, I was quite surprised to find great value from the very first paragraph."

"I am a developer, and I can tell you what motivates me. It is actually not hard to do, or even expensive. I'm largely self-motivating when I'm just allowed to be. I am a developer because I love to develop software, and if I'm not being held back I will do just that, and do it well. If developers seem unmotivated there is probably something in their way that needs to be removed. If I'm just allowed certain benefits there is no need to spend money on bonuses, I'll still be doing more than I'm paid for."

"The good thing about this book is that it doesn't just state a fact, explain it like its common sense, and move on. It provides background information and references to studies and scientific experiments that actually prove that this is the case. This is about facts, not just some good ideas.

"After a while we started adding more advanced math operators. These are SQR (square), SQRT (square root), POW (power), and MOD (modulo). It was at this point we started losing players. Remember that the rule of whole numbers still apply, so SQRT(8) is not allowed."

"In this world we don't have to work within the constraints of a contract. We control all the aspects -- the quality by how we design, test and bugfix, the scope by what features we decide to include, our time of release, and our resources. We just need to find the optimal balance so we can deliver valuable features with high quality at a good speed to a reasonable cost. Otherwise we just won't be profitable."

"I've actually managed to grow up a little, and in the process my interests have widened. I'm still somewhat of a geek, but that's not my whole world anymore."

"Me and some close family were nervously waiting in the clinic's visiting room when two nurses with a stroller appeared proclaiming "Here's your baby boy!". We all rushed up to see the newborn. It was the most incredible feeling to see him and hold him for the first time."

"It can appear at the most inappropriate times. Like when you are really into a good flow - your mind is working at a racing speed, juggling huge amounts of information in short term memory at once. Local variables, program states, architecture, threads, locks, possible race conditions. Your whole problem domain is in your head. You'd just hate to lose that focus now, and spend the next fifteen minutes just regaining the overview."

"The usual scientific focus on this phenomenon revolves only around the impact it has on travelling at light speed. But there are so many other activities that are far more compelling to do in such a "time-pocket". Just realize that you get to spend all the time you want without actually spending any time at all."

"I must admit, I'm not very interested in the different brands of shampoo on the market. To me, it doesn't really matter much if I end up washing my hair with Dove, Naturelle or Fructis. I leave the shopping for haircare products to my wife. That also means that I don't really know much about how the different bottles look, I just want to find one that states Shampoo on the front of it. This is where the problem arises. I can't read it!"

"I had to have something bigger, more roomy. With the baby coming soon I'll need the space to get the stroller in the back. So I went and bough a station wagon."

"There are laws of nature. And as we know, laws of nature can't be broken. One of these laws has to do with management, and in my case that means software management."

"A technical document should help the reader to understand your thought process and your conclusions, the problem you are solving, how it will be solved, and why it was solved that way. Only with this information can another person really understand the technical decisions that the document describes, and implement the specification by intention and not only by letter. This kind of communication is impossible if the author of the document was simply filling in some text for all of the sections, and jammed in his class diagram."

"We are used to counting with our fingers. We have been doing this from we first learned to count. This is quite useful in many circumstances, but the number of fingers are quite limited - 10 fingers in total per person. What if you want to count beyond 10? Do you start using toes? Or another person's fingers?"

"Once you have, even if you didn't intend to, made public an interface - and there is even a remote chance that some funny customer with his own twisted ideas of hacking together a list of studio equipment or whatnot, would be using it - then that inteface cannot change."

"This diagram shows the project lifecycle called JIT-D, Just-In-Time Development."

I was on this Parent Preparation Course yesterday. This nurse was showing how the baby would go upside-down and jam his head down the birth canal. Then on his way out he would have his face down, twist his shoulders, get his head out, turn the head to the side and wait for the next contraction before popping all the way out.

I hope junior was paying attention, because we won't get to practice on this before the big day...

"The time it took me to browse the websites just ended up in that I just didn't take the time to read the news, and so I didn't waste time on it. Now it's so tempting to open my aggregator every now and then and piss away some minutes of my time, and losing my focus."

It's springtime, and I'm starting to wake up from my winter daze.

But I'm not the only one waking up. So are the ants. And now they are marching into my house looking to steal my stuff. So far I haven't found anything missing, but by what they said on the Discovery channel the little creeps are amazingly strong. Who knows what they'll manage to bring home to their queen.

I'm feeling quite safe about the heavier stuff like my stone coffe table, but the kitchen chairs and microwave might be more at risk. And lets just hope they can't manage to open doors. I don't want them going for my computer.

I'll have to get some poison laid out today.

"It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice."