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Design decisions that can ruin your day.

Fri, 2010-02-12 08:19 — jlopez

I ran into three really bad design decisions this morning while trying to work with a virtual machine, the sum total of which consumed hours of my day for what could have been a fifteen minute project. 70-persistent-net.rules in Ubuntu, the networking command line in Sun's VirtualBox and Sun VirtualBox's hard drive "manager".

Star Trek Online Beta - A Klingon in a Federation World

Tue, 2010-01-26 20:55 — jlopez

I normally keep this site dedicated to work related posts, but I needed *somewhere* to post the result of the beta ending event.

It has become something of a tradition for MMOs that are ending beta to have a special event. It serves two purposes. First, the testers get something special to experience, something that probably won't be repeated again in the normal operation of the game. Second, it attracts a huge number of the testers at once, a great way to ensure that your scaling can handle a real world load.

A workaround for a very annoying SQL Server 2005/8 parameter sniffing issue

Tue, 2009-12-08 14:54 — jlopez

If you do a search for “SQL Parameter Sniffing sp_executesql” one will find a very large collection of confused posts. The most common problems is that a query that runs fine in the query analyzer takes many orders of magnitude longer in code. Those who have dug deeper will find that if they rewrite the query to define variables and set them prior executing, the problem vanishes in code.

A software package a day: AdBlock Plus

Mon, 2009-11-16 13:55 — jlopez

I mentioned before that I’m using Privoxy because I prefer Chrome as my primary browser. That said, Firefox remains my second line browser and AdBlock Plus is simply the best ad blocker out there. Recommended. As I said before, I white list sites I want to support (and which don’t provide an alternate revenue model). The reality is there are some sites I use obsessively and only block the most obnoxious advertisements from.

Algorithmic Performance and Functional Programming

Mon, 2009-11-09 11:53 — jlopez

I have been doing more and more functional style programming, thanks mostly to the support for the style that C# 3.5 provides. There are some performance hits to be taken by using such a style, but for the most part they have been acceptable “percentage increases” over the non-functional code. However, there is one thing that I have been noticing as I adopt a more and more functional style and that is that I tend to write more and more “generic” algorithms that take a large class of types and work with them in a more abstract way.

A software package a day: LINQPad

Thu, 2009-11-05 15:34 — jlopez

If you are doing virtually anything with LINQ, you owe it to yourself to get LINQPad. The basic program is free and makes experimenting with LINQ actually fun. For a few dollars you can register it and get auto-completion as a bonus. Frankly, I would have registered it without any perks because it is just so addictive.

A software package a day: Storm

Thu, 2009-11-05 09:30 — jlopez

In an earlier post I mentioned Storm. While I recommend Basecamp for those who don’t mind spending a small amount of money every month, there are plenty of projects where even a small outlay might discourage using a tool to organize the project. Others won’t like Basecamp as the data is “in the cloud”, which means backups are a challenge.

A software package a day: HTML Validator

Wed, 2009-11-04 12:15 — jlopez

Yesterday I talked about Firefox’s Web Developer package. One point I wanted to make clear is that it is a great “kitchen sink” for getting started, but also that there are better tools for doing specific tasks. One of those “better tools” in the CSE HTML Validator. The program does all of the validations that the “Tools” menu in the Web Developer does and more. I have been using it to clean up web pages for many, many versions now and if my goal is to do more than a few pages worth of validation I reach for it first.

A software package a day: Firefox Web Developer

Tue, 2009-11-03 09:40 — jlopez

If you do any web development at all, you need to test in multiple browsers. I find a good solution to this is to rotate my “primary” browser each day, so I use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera  and Safari in sequence over the week as my “main” browser for working on sites. The advantage is that I sometimes note things that are not working as expected in one of the less common browsers and then can revise that piece of code to work correctly across all the major browsers.

Nuked Users

Mon, 2009-11-02 14:15 — jlopez

The number of spammer accounts was so high that I have pretty much nuked all accounts except those I know personally. If you had an account, feel free to sign back up (there is now a captcha on the signup, hopefully that will stem the flow in the future).

Automated signups fortunately rarely influence the site as I have comments set to be moderated unless I authorize a user. If you want to be authorized, simply comment with something sane a few times and I will unblock the moderation.

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