Musings, Rants, and Humor

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

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.

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.

Look What Santa Brought Me!

Russell Ball — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 16:19:00 GMT

Don't be jealous, but I finally got an official T-shirt from my favorite political affiliation.

I also got a bunch of chocolate covered espresso beans in my stocking interspersed with all the coal, so you can expect those late night blogging sessions to continue for a while.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised that Santa still gives out coal. Sure, it makes economic sense due to the falling coal prices in 2007, but hasn't he heard that coal has been labeled "Environmental Enemy Number 1". If had read the homework that I assigned him last year, then he would know that coal plants produce more radioactive wastes than nuclear power plants and contribute in a significant way to poor air quality, acid rain, and global warming.

Very uncool Santa.

My theory is that the jolly old elf is getting tired of it being so cold in the North Pole, so he is doing his part to bring warmer weather to his homeland and perhaps even increase his real-estate wealth in the process by creating new beach front property near his workshop.

Get with the environmental program, Santa! Next year I expect to see some clean, renewable energy source in my stocking and not any more of this black environmental poison that you keep leaving me.

On Communal Douche Bags and My New Business Model

Russell Ball — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 08:04:30 GMT

I just caught up on my Fake Steve Jobs reading and I am now convinced that Microsoft's approach to the blogger problem completely lacks imagination and style. When faced with the likes of Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery, Microsoft takes the sissy approach of hiring them and keeping them so busy on cool projects that they use up most of their blogging wiggles and focus their remaining writing energy on sharing about the projects they are feverishly working on.

By contrast, it appears that Apple prefers to neutralize bloggers through the more direct and manly approach of bribery and intimidation. According to Fake Steve Job's latest post, Apple just pulled the legal equivalent of sending him a fish by listing all his assets (including his kid's college trust funds) in a legal correspondence while urging him to consider the potential serious consequences that his blogging activities could have on himself and his family. When that didn't work, they apparently offered him a half of a million dollars to just shut up and stop writing about them.

If that is true, then all I can say is this. Well played Mr. Jobs.

The idea of paying someone to shut up is pure genius and I officially predict that this trend will spread like wildfire in the coming year and be applied to all sorts of personal and business scenarios. I know I would have gladly paid several people to just stop talking this last year. In fact, I can think of a few instances where I would have taken a second mortgage on my house in order to silence my former HR director during a few rather lengthy company meetings.

That brings me to my new business plan. I've officially given up on ad revenue for my blog and stopped waiting for the marquee job offer from Microsoft. Instead, I've decided to start courting Apple hush money by trying to effectively harness the power of my obnoxious blogging tendencies.

The next part is addressed to RSJ (Real Steve Jobs) and his mafia-wanna-be legal entourage:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I've been following your recent public relations strategies and I would like to officially apply for some hush money.

To prove that I am serious in my request, I will give you a taste of some of my crazy blogger antics and conclusively demonstrate the grave threat that I pose to your company. Here is a sample of what you have to look forward to unless a very large suitcase full of hush money finds itself on my doorstep soon.

My super-secret apple sources inform me RSJ is really an alpha douche bag of epic proportions. I'm not talking about one of those fancy French, sweet-smelling contraptions that pleasantly tickle your insides with an easy and refreshing flow. I mean that he is like the cheap, defective, puss-filled and bacteria-laden, communal douche bags that get hooked up to fire hydrants and violate your insides with 500 lbs of brutal, prison-sex force. You be the judge. Can you tell the difference?

I ask you Mr. Jobs...is a measly half million bucks really too much to ask for in return for sparing you the aggravation that a constant barrage of these kinds of insightful criticisms would cause? Think about it.

Yours Truly,

Caffeinated Coder

On the off-chance that my new business model backfires, I would like Apple's legal goons to note the following as they compile a list of my assets for their threatening letter. Unlike FSJ, I haven't gotten around to setting up a college fund for the kids yet and the only boats I have are currently floating in my bathtub. Also, my most valuable asset consists of a rather extensive porn collection. Unfortunately, the individual items within said collection are well worn so you will no longer be able to go by the mint condition price when determining their value.

I certainly hope that FSJ isn't pulling our legs with this story. Life isn't nearly as much fun when sane people are in charge.

*UPDATE* - It appears that FSJ was really funnin' with us after all. Well played FSJ. As far as RSJ is concerned, my offer still stands for the hush money. It won't be long before people are standing in line to pay me to shut up. You'll get a better deal if you start negotiating now.

Vil: Dead as in Doornail?

Russell Ball — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:49:46 GMT

I spent some time last week working with Vil, a free code analysis tool that can be used to locate potential quality issues and high risk areas in your code. While working on it, I learned all about various code metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, eCouplings, and LCOM (Lack of Cohesion in Methods) and experimented with setting appropriate thresholds for each.

I also incorporated all the required command line switches into our Nant script and even dusted off my XSLT skills in order to create a custom stylesheet to summarize the results and display them nicely on our main Cruise Control report. To my surprise several of the other developers at work seemed genuinely interested in the potential feedback we could get from this tool (people can only get so excited about cyclomatic complexity).

There was one major problem. All the fun I was having was restricted to one small dll. This is because Vil has a built-in limit so that a license key is required when you try to analyze a dll that has more than 100 types in it. The website indicates that all you need to do to attain this license is to send them an email. I did that. Twice. That was two weeks ago and I still haven't heard anything back yet.

Vil is free, so one could argue that I am just getting what I paid for. I guess I figured that since Vil was incorporated into the WebDashboard for CruiseControl, it was established enough to be a safe bet. I was wrong. The last update on the website was two years ago and it was only a vague promise of a new version that would support the 2.0 framework. The new version never appeared and the current version seems to be from mid 2004.

I'm not even sure why the creator of Vil decided to include a built-in limit since the license to unlock it is supposedly still free. Perhaps he had some intention of eventually making it a commercial product or maybe he just wanted to keep statistics on larger customers. If it was an open source project and the source code were available, then I wouldn't mind digging through the code to remove this restriction myself. But there is no source code to be found.

A Plea to the Project Owner: I understand there are plenty of good reasons to abandon a project that you weren't making any money on. However, if you are calling it quits, could you please make one last altruistic gesture and either release the source code or else publish one last version without this restriction? It seems like a lot of work to have spent on an otherwise decent tool only to let it fall into oblivion because of this license issue.

Recommendation to Potential Vil Users: Don't bother investigating this tool unless you already have one of the fabled golden license keys. I'm migrating back to NDepend instead. I've already worked with NDepend and think that it is a far better tool, but I gave Vil a try because it seemed like it would be a lot easier to integrate into Cruise Control due to the built-in support.

Request To CruiseControl Developers: Please remove Vil plugins and stylesheets from the next version of Cruise Control. It's aggravating to spend time getting it to work only to later have to abandon it because it only works with trivially small projects.

OK, Rant complete. I feel better now.

Side Note: Apparently the phrase "Dead as a Doornail" is a very old expression and can even be found in a few of Shakespeare's plays like Henry IV. Based on a quick google search, it appears that nobody really knows why doornails are any more dead than all the other inanimate objects (for example house nails). I saw a few weak guesses, but no explanations that were really compelling. I guess language is as uncontrollable and mysterious as the internet.

The Hundredth Monkey Effect

Russell Ball — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:01:37 GMT

This is my 01100100'th post (that's 0x0064 in hex for you script kiddies). That means that I get free reign to wax nostalgic and talk about deeply philosophical, thought-provoking topics like...monkeys.

For those of you who are not well versed in inspirational parables, the hundredth monkey effect refers to how an idea can spread like wildfire once it reaches a critical mass of people. The name originally comes from a research study involving monkeys and sweet potatoes that was supposedly done by a Japanese scientist in the 50's.

I would go into more detail about what the monkeys were actually doing with the sweet potatoes, but apparently the scientific observations were severely distorted by the historical equivalent of a big literary and pop culture game of telephone so I won't bother. Besides, inspirational parables are rarely concerned with mundane things like scientific fact, so I'll simply gloss over that aspect of the story for now.

So what exactly is the reason that I am suddenly fixating on monkeys?

Am I trying to somehow justify my participation in the great blogging echo chamber by pretending that I am helping to build a critical mass of gooey coding goodness that will eventually spew forth over all developers?
Is it simply because this was the first interesting thing that I found when I googled "hundredth"?
Or...is it because I just really, really like monkeys and am trying to save my blogger proceeds up so that I can buy a hundred of them?

Although number three is technically true, I would probably have to pick number two as the correct answer, which means that all of this was simply a ruse to segue into some boring retrospective blather. I can't believe you fell for that!

So here are my one hundred posts' worth of hard-earned distilled wisdom that I will now impart:

The three things I've learned from my first 100 posts:

While one hundred posts seems like a lot to inflict on poor unsuspecting readers who are just trying to goof off a little at work, it is nothing compared to the unholy torrent of posts unleashed by a certain Israeli wordy bastard who has 3,000 posts or the Canadian upstart who is approaching 800 posts.
Contrary to what I had been promised, blogging did not yield wealth, fame, a cushy Microsoft job, or women's undergarments being thrown at me on a regular basis.
The FCK editor scores off the charts on the suckage o'meter. It would have been nice if someone had told me about Windows Live Writer 6 months ago, so I could have avoid some formatting grief while blogging

Now...the three things I promise for my next 100 posts

To post whenever I feel like it.
To post whatever I feel like writing.
To ignore rules one and two when it suits me.

Seriously, I know my blog could use a good SEO makeover along with a tad more professionalism if it is ever going to make it to the big slashdot show, but the last time I checked I was doing this for fun and if it ever stops being fun then I reckon I'll pack it in.

That being said, I do have about 100 different topics listed on my short-attention span idea list along with a dozen half-finished draft posts, so I have a good feeling that I just might make it to my 11001000'th post sometime next year...that is unless I am banned by some tyrannical mad Canadian blogger first.

An Open Letter to a Certain Delusional Canadian Blogger

Russell Ball — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:42:52 GMT

I just noticed a reference to yours truly in one of D'Arcy Lussier's recent posts in which he talks much smack about his plans to overtake Chris Williams (a.k.a Blogus Maximus) for the title of wordiest bastard on GeeksWithBlogs.

It was bad enough that his weirdo Knuck references forced me to google both Toque and Tim Horton or that his absurd suggestion that I would soon want to immigrate to Canada to be closer to the new "Blogger King" caused me to spew coffee over my monitors. But he simply crossed the line when he vowed to ban me for life from GeeksWithBlogs if I don't pay him proper respects by awarding him another coveted CaffeinatedCodey award.

This offends me almost as much as Canadian fart jokes.

First of all, I can't be intimidated into submission by anyone other than my wife who currently has enough pregnancy hormones surging through her body to drop a large elephant.<Pre-emptiveDisclaimer>No honey, I'm not in any way calling you fat.</Pre-emptiveDisclaimer>

Secondly, what makes him so special that he can demand a prize that many have killed for without first offering up a princely bribe like all the previous winners. Justice Gray (a.k.a Justin the Metrosexual), for example, offered me a lifetime supply of "Nair For Men" along with his super secret exfoliation recipe. Rory Blyth offered first to make me a God and then to help disguise me as a forest so that I could escape the clutches of the Evil New Orko Seclorum. Most of the other winners offered me vast sums of their blogger wealth, which thanks to the new tech bubble now dwarfs the paltry chump change held by the oil tycoons.

So D'Arcy, I leave you with the following classic parable to ponder while you search the frozen tundra that you call home for a bribe worthy enough to secure you another Caffeinated Codey.

An American, a German and a Canadian blogger were sitting in a sauna when suddenly there was a beeping sound. The American pressed his forearm and the beep stopped. The others looked at him questioningly. "That was my Blackberry device he said. "I have a microchip under the skin of my arm."

A few minutes later a phone rang. The Japanese fellow lifted his palm to his ear. When he finished he explained "That was my iPhone, I have a microchip in my hand."

The Canadian felt decidedly low-tech, but not to be outdone, he decided he had to do something just as impressive. He stepped out of the sauna and went to the toilet. He returned with a piece of toilet paper hanging from his butt. The others raised their eyebrows and stared at him. The Canadian finally said "Well, will you look at that! I'm getting a fax."