I’ve just about finished reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. He’s a humor writer with a penchant for interviewing odd people. In the book, he discovers a checklist for determining whether someone is a psychopath. Throughout the book, he notes which checklist items a particular conversation with an interviewee triggers, even when that person is clearly not a psychopath. He gets kind of carried away with it, which is pretty funny.

It’s kind of easy to start doing it yourself, too.

We’re... [More]

The article Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) includes this passage, right at the top.

“The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as significant and to be celebrated.”

I can’t agree with this facile lip service to political correctness.

How can it be a huge moment when nothing has changed except for the genitalia? The ideas are the... [More]

Overview

We discussed ABD in a recent article ABD: Refactoring and refining an API. To cite from that article,

“[…] the most important part of code is to think about how you’re writing it and what you’re building. You shouldn’t write a single line without thinking of the myriad ways in which it must fit into existing code and the established patterns and practices.”

With that in mind, I saw another teaching opportunity this week and wrote up my experience designing an improvement to an... [More]

We’ve been doing more internal training at Encodo lately and one topic that we’ve started to tackle is design for architecture/APIs. Even if you’re not officially a software architect—designing and building entire systems from scratch—every developer designs code, on some level.

[A]lways
[B]e
[D]esigning

There are broad guidelines about how to format and style code, about how many lines to put in a method, about how many parameters to use, and so on. We strive for Clean Code™.

But the... [More]

Politics in America

When a politician sways with whichever wind blows hardest, it’s called triangulation. They try to find the combination of positions most likely to yield enough votes to win election. Those of us who don’t run for office call it being dishonest and unprincipled.

Americans have been told for years that such judgment is idealistic, that in real-world politics, there is no room for a person with principles. We are even happy to see our candidate doing what we interpret as... [More]

The article .NET Core, a call to action by Mark Rendle exhorts everyone to “go go go”.

I say, “pump the brakes.”

RC => Beta => Alpha

Mark says, “The next wave of work must be undertaken by the wider .NET community, both inside and outside Microsoft.”

No. The next wave of work must be undertaken by the team building the product. This product is not even Beta yet. They have called the last two releases RC, but they aren’t: the API is still changing quite dramatically. For example, the article Announcing .NET... [More]

Spoiler alert: This was the answer to the acrostic puzzle linked above.

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

• Lots of bug fixes and improvements for the Winform UI and German translations with the release of Punchclock on this version. (QNO-5162, QNO-5159, QNO-5158, QNO-5157, QNO-5156, QNO-5140, QNO-5155, QNO-5145, QNO-5111, QNO-5107, QNO-5106, QNO-5104, QNO-5015)
• DateTimeExtensions.GetDayOfWeek() had a leap-day bug... [More]

History

Before taking a look at the roadmap, let’s quickly recap how far we’ve come. An overview of the release schedule shows a steady accretion of features over the years, as driven by customer or project needs.

Timeline

The list below includes more detail on the releases highlighted in the graphic.[1]

• 0.1: Proof of concept with metadata, PostgreSql (data and schema-migration) and Winforms UI
• 1.0: First customer product with PostgreSql, DevExpress Winforms UI and Reporting
• 1.0.5: MS-SQL driver... [More]

The summary below describes major new features, items of note and breaking changes. The full list of issues is also available for those with access to the Encodo issue tracker.

Highlights

• Metadata builders are more lightweight now and have fewer restrictions on their API. (QNO-4994)
• Improve support for plugins (QNO-5189, QNO-5190, QNO-5196)
• Improve and clean up expression library (QNO-5174, QNO-5176, QNO-5182, QNO-5183, QNO-5184, QNO-5188, QNO-5198, QNO-5205)
• Improve schema-migration tools (QNO-5179... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

1. The Smashing Machine (2002) — 5/10
2. The Chocolate War (1988) — 6/10
3. Cool Hand Luke (1967) — 8/10
4. The Hustler (1961) — 8/10
5. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945) — 7/10
6. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) — 7/10
7. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946; released in 1958) — 6/10
8. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay − Part 2 (2015) — 5/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Go ahead. Open earthli.com on a small-screen device. Get out your phone. I’ll wait.

Pretty cool, right?

I mean, it’s not rocket science, but it involves no small amount of work to come up with a design that works at both very wide and very narrow screens. Sure, I could have used Bootstrap, but then my site would look exactly like everyone else’s. Also, earthli’s stylesheets and components are much simpler and easy to use than Bootstrap.

Not only that, but with the redesign and the continued... [More]

Encodo published its first C# Handbook and published it to its web site in 2008. At the time, we also published to several other standard places and got some good, positive feedback. Over the next year, I made some more changes and published new versions. The latest version is 1.5.2 and is available from Encodo’s web site. Since then, though I’ve made a few extra notes and corrected a few errors, but never published an official version again.

This is not because Encodo hasn’t improved or... [More]

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of almost 1100 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Auf der anderen Seite (2007) — 8/10

This starts the story with a Turkish widower Ali, who lives in Germany.... [More]

Don Quixote (1605)

by Miguel de Cervantes

I liked part two even better than part one. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book with a bachelor who is very familiar with it, questioning and probing to determine that it reflects the truth…but not too much of the truth. This part is really very nicely written and the... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]