Caffeinated Coder

What Are You Still Doing Here?

Russell Ball — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:00:19 GMT

If there is anyone left who missed my last post on GeeksWithBlogs, I moved my blog to a new location at caffeinated.com.

For those of you with RSS Readers, please change your feed subscriptions to use my new feedburner location. I do not plan to do any new posts on GeeksWithBlogs.

Dear GeeksWithBlogs, Let's Just Be Friends...

Russell Ball — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:39:36 GMT

Yes, it's true. I've packed my bags and am moving to a new location.

For those of you with RSS Readers, please change your feed subscriptions to use my new feedburner location. I do not plan to do any new posts on GeeksWithBlogs with the possible exception of a few redirection reminders.

For the rest of you, you can see my shiny new blog on caffeinatedCoder.com. It may not look like it, but I've spent quite a few late nights over the past few weeks dusting off my PHP and CSS skills so that I could get my new WordPress blog up and running. With thousands of plugins and themes to choose from, my blog tinkering days have just begun but you can see the"good enough" version here.

I want to thank Jeff Julian and John Alexander for letting me try my hand at blogging on GeeksWithBlogs over the last six months. I've had a great time and have appreciated feeling part of a large, healthy blogging community.

I also want to give a special thanks to Max Pool at codesqueeze for all the help and advice he has given me over the last several weeks. I met Max at the Alt.NET conference in Austin this past year and was impressed with his passion for blogging and his deep knowledge of the black arts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and internet marketing.

He's given me dozens of resource links and plugin suggestions and I've used his site as an inspiration while I was setting up my new blog. For a good demonstration of his expertise and some practical tips on how to increase traffic to your blog, check out his Blog Setup: 40 Practical Tips.

In conclusion, GeeksWithBlogs...it's not you..it's me. I just think we should start seeing other people...

So long and hope to see everyone at the new location,

-Russ

Rory's Minions Rout Canucks in a Landslide

Russell Ball — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:05:06 GMT

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The 2007 Caffeinated Codey Showdown is officially over and the votes have been tallied.

Despite an early lead by the Canadian contingent (Justice Gray and D'Arcy Lussier), Rory Blyth rallied the troops and surged ahead to win both the Best Blog Humor and Most Fun with Multimedia categories in a landslide. Justice still dominated in the Best Post Title category and the anonymous ALT.NET Pursefight blogger edged out Fake Steve Jobs to claim the title for Best Technical Satire.

Congratulations to the winners! I will email Justice and Rory their Despair.com gift certifcates shortly. Unfortunately, I don' know who the ALT.NET Pursefight blogger is, so I'm going to have to hold on to this award for now until the secret identity is finally revealed.

Lessons Learned from this Inaugural Contest

I like the idea of rewarding bloggers for their creativity with novelty gifts. I am going to try to do this on a monthly basis by including a poll at the end of each Caffeinated Codey award post and then giving an actual prize to the blogger with the most votes. I would also like to open up at least one slot each month for a submission from a guest Caffeinated Codey judge and award them a prize as well.
Rory, the "independent web-based community writer", doesn't like being called a blogger, having his last name spelled incorrectly, or being publicly associated with any of his former techie cohorts for fear of being made fun of by his new writer friends. I apologized to him for so carelessly misplacing that 'e' at the end of his last name, but I fear that I am now on the Rory's poopie list and have given up hope of ever making a cameo appearance in his creation story. I just know I would have made a great Sandwich henchman...
Although my contest probably had a better voter turn-out than most local political elections, it was kind of sad to see the votes tallies struggling to make double digits for the first several days. Luckily, Rory's minions swept in and nudged the vote tally up to a slightly more respectable number. The good news is that there is nowhere to go but up in terms of readership.
"Integrity gets in the way of selling out." When you are busy rallying the minions, don't distract them with choices. If all else fails, threaten them with death by pulmonary embolism via excessively long and boring posts. These are all sound pieces of advice dispensed by our resident "independent web-based community writer". I know that I personally will take them all to heart if I ever decide to run for public office or engage in any other equally shady undertaking,

A Call To Action

Do you want to be a guest Caffeinated Codey judge? Just pick a post from this month that you like, come up with a silly award name, add a touch of sarcastic commentary, and send it to me. If I publish it in the January 2008 Caffeinated Codey post, then I'll throw some swag your way.
I got no love from Despair.com in my quest to attain contest sponsorship. Although I've had some encouraging conversations with people from Jetbrains, I am still looking for sponsors to supply prizes for future contests. If you know anyone with swag bestowing powers, please send me an email with their contact info so I can start begging them for free stuff.

Thanks again to all the nominees for producing such amusing content.

Mystery Solved!

Russell Ball — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:03:41 GMT

In my last post I hypothesized what could have caused Scott Bellware to disappear from the blogoshpere so quietly and abruptly.

I admit that I was leaning towards one of the options that involved alien abduction, but then after doing a little detective work I uncovered this little bit of photographic evidence.

Apparently Scott was just playing hard-to-get with Microsoft as a bargaining tactic. Well played, sir!

Has Scott Forsaken Us?

Russell Ball — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:39:38 GMT

Imagine my surprise the other day when I discovered one of my Scott Bellware links was broken. Panic quickly set in when I went to CodeBetter and noticed that his blog was no longer listed on the site.

I did notice that my Bellware feed hadn't been updated in a while, but I figured he was just taking a break after the comment section of one of his recent posts devolved into the equivalent of a Jerry Spring episode. I had no idea that he was going to pack up his bags and leave codeBetter for good.

What is even more puzzling is that he left without so much as even a Sam Gentilesque farewell rant.

This leads me to believe that one of the following things has happened to Bellware:

Scott is busy founding the "bald is beautiful" cult which he will then lead on a suicide mission to shave Justice's wild, lustrous mane of hair.
He is busy being the mysterious anonymous blogger for the Alt.NET pursefight blog**
He has taken a job at Microsoft.
He has been abducted by aliens.
He has been abducted by aliens working for Microsoft.

If aliens are somehow involved in this equation, the only thing I ask is that the next time there is a break in all the anal probing action, could they please be so kind as to republish all of his old codebetter postings somewhere else?

Scott may have not been the most tactful blogger in the world, but he also had some pretty thought-provoking ideas at times that would be missed in the blogosphere.

**Justice - no fair hiding the identity of the real Alt.NET pursefight blogger if really know who it is.

Guest Blog Post History

Russell Ball — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:01:08 GMT

My official "homage to Justice Gray" guest blog post has just been published. Besides providing me with some of the most fun I've had in blogging yet, this post also inspired me to finally learn some basic photo editing skills (beyond just cropping and resizing) so that I could provide some appropriate visual aids to go with the post.

Many thanks to my lovely wife for sharing some of her image manipulation prowess with me and to the creator of paint.net for providing such an awesome free tool. I apologize in advance to all future victims of my new multi-media skills. Your safest bet is to quickly do a google image search and promptly remove any photos of yourself that you find floating around on the internet. Consider yourself forewarned.

I also wanted to thank Justice for encouraging me to write the guest post and for producing such entertaining content on his blog. To get inspiration for this post, I went back and read many of his older posts that I had never seen before because I only started subscribing to it this year. I found a plethora of truly excellent content that I linked to in my guest post.

By the way, if you've never tried historical blog spelunking before (reading all or many of the posts from a single blogger in one sitting), I highly recommend it. It gives you a unique appreciation of the writer and person that you just don't get when you are bouncing back and forth between a hundred different writers every day.

With any luck I will totally dominate on his contest and perhaps even earn one of his coveted "Potential Friend of Justice Gray" certificates that he offered Martin Fowler.

2007 Caffeinated Codey Final Showdown

Russell Ball — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:45:16 GMT

The regular panel of judges used to select the monthly Caffeinated Codey winners are all far too hung over to competently decide the overall winners for the year, so I've decided to let the nominees fight it out pollDaddy style and then actually award the survivors real prizes for a change.

Rules

I have selected 4 categories with 5 nominees per category. All the nominees were either previous Caffeinated Codey winners or else featured in one of my review posts this year. For now, all of the categories revolve around humor, but perhaps if I can secure some proper sponsorship then I will do a second iteration that is slightly more technically focused.

In order to choose your favorites, click on the Vote link next to each category below. I apologize for not embedding the polls directly in this page, but the Jeff Julian and Subtext project team were wise enough to prevent me from entering script tags in the source page, so I had to settle for low tech polldaddy links instead.

The nominees with the most votes in each category as of 8 am on January 10th will be declared the official winners and receive full bragging rights for the entire year. But that's not all...

Prizes

The four lucky winners will also each receive gift certificates to one of my favorite shopping destinations, Despair, Inc. I'm not sure about the exact amount of the certificates yet because I am trying to get some official sponsorship from this most excellent site, but if all else fails I'll at least hook the winners up with the cheap-bastard $10 gift cards so they buy cool stuff like this.

Ok, enough with the chit-chat. Let the games begin.

...and the Nominees are...

Best Blog Post Title [VOTE]

Evan Hoff for Off-the-Shelf RAD is for Pimps, Hookers, and Johns--not Marriage [Sept CC]
Justice Gray for Javascript raped my dog, and other falsehoods. [Sept CC]
Roy Osherove for Do you like Boobs? [Sept CC]
Ben Sheirman for Don't Make Squirrel Burgers [Oct CC]
Max Pool for Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!" [Nov CC]

Best Technical Satire [VOTE]

Philipp Lenssen for What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? [Nov CC]
Sean Hederman for Review: Windows XP. [Dec CC]
Anonymous author for Alt.NET Pursefight round-up for 20 December [Dec CC]
Fake Steve Jobs for (Daniel Lyons) Breakfast with an Apple lawyer [Dec CC]
Justin Etheredge for The Programmer Dress Code [Dec CC]

Most Fun with Multi-Media [VOTE]

Justice Gray for Audio highlights of .NET Rocks with Jeffrey Palermo & the MS MVC [Audio: Dec CC]
D’Arcy Lussier’s for If Book Publishers Were Smart 2 [Photo (Book Cover): Aug CC]
Rory Blyth for Neopoleon Goes YouTube - The Neopoleon Thanksgiving Special [Video: Nov Post]
Anonymous Alt.NET pursefight authors for Weekend round-up for 22-23 December: Alt.Netcracker Edition [Photo (Oren & Laribee dancing nutcracker suite): Dec CC]
Russell Ball for Scott Guthrie Gets an Image Makeover [Video: Oct post] - Sorry, I just couldn't resist slipping this one in.

Best Blog Humor [VOTE]

Scott Hanselman for Caught in the Act [July CC]
Justice Gray for What DevTeach 2007 is missing at DevTeach 2007 [Aug CC]
Eric Sink for What Microsoft Doesn't Want You to Know about WPF [Aug CC]
Mark Miller for My Last VSLive Session Ever? [Oct CC]
Rory Blyth for A New Religion - A Neopoleon Religion [Nov post]

I hope everyone enjoys rereading these nominations as much as I did.

A special thanks to all the bloggers who were nominated for helping to lighten up a sometimes overly serious profession. Good luck to you.

The December 2007 Caffeinated Codey Winners Are...

Russell Ball — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 23:51:19 GMT

It's time for the next installment of the monthly Caffeinated Codey awards, where the link love flows for my favorite posts from the month.

For Most Obsessive Blog Comment Recovery Operation...Eric Sink for his post Be My Support Group. After losing a lengthy blog comment due to a random Firefox error, Eric describes his multi-hour effort to recover the data using a packet sniffer and some url-decoding. Eric has long since joined the dark side of the force (business and marketing), so can you imagine what he would have been like back in his hard core developer days?
For Best New Anonymous Blog Satire Site Devoted to a Single Mailing List ... the collective monthly posts on the ALT.NET PurseFight site. Besides being a fine piece of satire, this site also serves as a decent Cliff Notes for those of us who can't find the time to read all 56,000 emails a day that are generated by the hoards of geek prima donas lurking on this monstrous mailing list. Please God...let the anonymous author of the site be Scott Bellware. I promise I'll stop playing kitten bowling if you mess with everyone's reality in such a deliciously ironic way.
For Best Placenta Humor...Rory Blythe for his post Video: Burfday Sucks - A Expose of Birfday Suckage by Rory - Part One. Rory does another brilliant YouTube comedy schtick on the meaning of birthdays. This guy REALLY hates any acknowledgement of his birthday, which is why I am going to personally organize a nation wide letter-writing campaign to declare Rory's Birthday a national holiday next year. I have also already completed the tech specs for a state-of-the-art birthday bot that will spam him with cheerful birthday clichés in every language over every known communication channel next year. There's no need to thank me Rory.
For Best Virtuoso Display of Sarcasm... Sean Hederman for his post Review: Windows XP. I was left in awe of Sean's superior sense of sarcasm after reading this biting parody on Microsoft's latest operating system. By pretending that Vista preceded Windows XP, Sean artfully makes his point that Vista has some serious issues while simultaneously causing Maalox sales to soar in Redmond.
For Best Christmas Hoax...Fake Steve Jobs for his series of posts that culminated in Breakfast with an Apple lawyer. In order to highlight the recent ThinkGeek controversy, the fake Jobso pretended that he was being threatened and bribed into shutting down his blog by Apple legal goons. His Christmas Eve confession sparked much spirited debate between the embarrassed duped readers and the smug know-it-alls on whether or not he had pushed the boundaries of satire too far. I know I was personally devastated as I watched hoards of Venture Capitalists suddenly lose interest in my brilliant new business plan.
For Best Journalistic Researching Effort...Rob Enderle for his post Is Apple Rotting from the Inside Out? Rob was one of the people who took Fake Steve Job's post a little too seriously and posted some harsh public accusations against Apple without first "checking his sources", which is a nice way of saying that he posted his diatribe two days after FSJ publicly confessed to it being a hoax. I guess professional journalists aren't held to the same researching standards as hobbyist bloggers. The comments on this site are brutal, but thoroughly entertaining. You know you've screwed up big when you're last name is combined with tard to form a new popular word (i.e. only an Endertard would do something that irresponsible).
For Best Audio Cliff Notes...Justice Gray's post Audio highlights of .NET Rocks with Jeffrey Palermo & the MS MVC. After several pleasant months of relative silence, the "Master of Metrosexual Mischief" has once again emerged on the blogging scene to accost us with his unique brand of humor. In this post, he distills a one hour dotnetrocks episode on the MVC framework into 7 second remix of truly inspirational narcissism. Well played sir.
The Personal Hygiene Exposé... Justin Etheredge for his post The Programmer Dress Code. It provides disturbing virtual photo album of some of the most influential computer scientists in our field. After reading this post, I've decided to stop bathing and doing laundry as part of a concerted effort to enhance my professional credentials.
For Most Frightening Glimpse into the Potential Future of GeeksWithBlogs... D'Arcy Lussier for his post An Open Letter to Jeff Julian: Please Review My Expectations. D'Arcy causes mass hysteria with this post when he threatens to ban me for life from GeeksWithBlogs. The state department is currently leaning on the Canadian government to deport D'Arcy to Turkey so he can languish in a prison as proper punishment for his heresy.
For Best Web 2.0 Holiday Cheer... James Dellow for his post Christmas 2.0: An interview with Barney Twinkletoes from Santa about Enterprise Web 2.0. It just wouldn't be Christmas without elf social networking sites and mashups involving Elf! Maps and the CRM Naughty or Nice database. You'd better be good this year or your name will appear in Santa's naughty RSS feed.

Once again, congratulations to all the winners. Hopefully we'll meet someday so you can claim the alcoholic or caffeinated prize beverage of your choice.

In case you've missed the prior award ceremonies, you can find them here.

Twitter: The Future of Blogging or Digital White Noise?

Russell Ball — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:08:02 GMT

I have a confession to make that will probably seem scandalous to all of you hip technophiles.

I just don't understand the allure of Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms.

I definitely see how Twitter could be a formidable weapon in the social networking arsenal of a teenager, but I am just not convinced that it is a positive development in the professional realm.

It's not that I don't value formats and technologies that encourage conciseness and lower the barrier to entry for publishing. By eliminating the overhead and expense associated with traditional paper publishing, blogging has allowed people who are competent writers and have interesting ideas to produce compelling content that otherwise would have never been made public. Likewise, the concise format of blogs makes content much more accessible to readers who normally aren't willing to devote the time and effort required to read books.

Some people think that micro-blogging holds that same relationship to traditional blogging and thus democratizes publishing even further while making content even more accessible.

I would argue there is a point where communicating becomes too easy and quickly loses its intrinsic value.

For example, every time I've visited the GeeksWithBlogs Twitter stream page, I often see Tweets like these:

Driving to work...
Waiting for my computer to boot up...
Thinking about having a burrito for lunch...
Watching TV commercial...
Just scratched myself...

Even if it were my friends and family who were sending me these types of updates, I would still probably set up some junk mail type filters to rid myself of the noise. The fact that these are all coming from people I don't know takes my level of disinterest to a whole new realm.

I might be able to justify spending time on Tweets if they offered brain candy-like entertainment such as this:

Was attacked by a band of ninjas. I dispatched with them quickly but got ninja blood on my new shirt...
I just took a dump on boss's Lexus. Suddenly I feel much better about having to work this weekend...
An old girlfriend just called and said she was pregnant. I pulled the old 'no hablo ingles' trick on her...
Police are chasing me. Looking for a place to hide-out for the night...
Those scratch marks that Joe's wife left on my back last night still sting...

Alas, I only saw one Tweet that had much entertainment value today.

"taking coffee away from a developer is like taking away a dominatrix's whip. You just don't do it.". dredding.

Otherwise, Twittering just seems like a lot of empty mental calories that is sabotaging my struggle to improve my signal to noise ratio.

Given the current direction of blogging, I expect micro-blogging to soon be overtaken by the next logical step, which I'll call "quantum-blogging". This will allow people to finally blog without expending any effort whatsoever. These next generation twitter devices will be able to auto-generate content based on input from built-in physical sensors. Here's a glimpse at what you have to look forward to:

3:03 Caffeinated Coder farts.

3:05 Co-workers complain about a funky smell. Caffeinated Coder pretends not to hear

3:06 After checking their quantum twitter feeds and confirming their suspicions about the source of the bad smell, co-workers throw heavy objects at Caffeinated Coder.

3:07 Caffeinated Coder is forced to relocate his workstation to a small, dark, and noisy server room closet.

3:08 Caffeinated coder is cursing and smashing his twit... [transmission ended due to twitter device malfunction]

So what is the moral of the story?

Writing something of value is difficult. Writing something of value concisely takes true talent. Writing something of value in less than 140 characters is probably an act of folly.

I Would Listen in a Car... I Would Listen in a Bar

Russell Ball — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:19:19 GMT

Ok, maybe not in a bar...but I would definitely listen to DotNetRocks here and there. In fact, I've listened to most of the 300 episodes of this popular tech podcast over the last few years. I don't burn through quite as many shows now that my commute time has been dramatically reduced, but I still listen while driving, running, vacuuming, grocery shopping, painting, mowing, and shoveling. I am especially grateful to the show for helping to keep me in the good graces of my spousal unit, since I am much less likely to neglect tedious household chores as long as I have one of their episodes loaded on my mp3 payer. For that, I promise to hand deliver each of them a good bottle of scotch the next time I am able to make it to a conference that they are attending.

If you haven't already listened to the 300th episode in which Carl Franklin interviews his co-host, Richard Campbell, I highly recommend it. Richard is a talented story teller and shares over 30 years of some seriously geeky and entertaining stories. I especially liked the story of Goliath, the 1972 20MB Hewlett-Packard Hard Drive that spews forth deadly flying disks and giant car eating magnets. I was so absorbed in this episode that I missed my turn on the way home and finally threw in a few gratuitous errands so that I could finish listening to it.

Kudos to Carl and Richard for consistently producing such high quality content. I sincerely hope that they make another 300 episodes.