June 2009

Incremental Progress

June 30, 2009

If you have a dream about achieving something, one of the biggest illusions you can have is to wait for the right circumstances to open up so that you can start working on your dream. This includes stuff like: I will do it when I find the time. I will do it when I don’t have any […]

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Software Development Blogs

June 29, 2009

Jurgen Appelo has the latest edition of the top developer blogs up. Surprisingly, I have jumped from 149 to 127 despite having a couple of months where I hardly wrote anything at all, and also after a move to WordPress that seems to have dropped my RSS subscribers by half. I have been noticing the reduced frequency […]

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How Communism Broke People

June 29, 2009

via Shafeen, here is an article originally published in 1982 about a trip to the erstwhile Soviet Union by Edward Crane of the Cato Institute. But if it is hard to describe the economic wasteland of Russia to someone who hasn’t been there, it is even harder to describe what their totalitarian system has done […]

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Natural Things To Do

June 22, 2009

I am an advocate of programmers starting their own blogs so that they can share their thoughts on programming and software development. But this is not necessarily a natural thing to do because writing is different from programming. The natural thing for a programmer to do is to write programs (duh!). So when you interview […]

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WordPress Move

June 17, 2009

I changed my hosting from Blogger to a hosted instance of WordPress. I hope this does not result in a deluge of posts to your blog reader (Google Reader does that sometimes). Thanks for continuing to read my blog. If you are not yet subscribed, you can subscribe using a blog reader at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thoughtclusters or […]

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Entrepreneurs Today

June 4, 2009

Matt at 37 Signals writes: The term entrepreneur feels outdated. It’s associated with people who work brutal hours, invest their life savings, and risk it all on a dream. But these days, you can do a ton with just a little. You can build a business by working just a few hours a week. You can […]

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Meaningless Definitions

June 4, 2009

OK, take one guess as to what this could be: _______ is a design philosophy that leverages existing investments in the creation of flexible solutions that are more responsive to your business needs. Apparently, this is Microsoft’s definition of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). Does any technology market itself as saying that you need to ditch your current […]

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The vi Paradigm

June 3, 2009

While eating, I sometimes use Google Reader. While a book would do as well, each blog entry is only a few paragraphs long and you don’t have to quit in between. Google Reader handles the eating situation well because you can handle most of the actions using a single finger. “j” is Next, “m” is […]

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360-Degree Translation and More

June 2, 2009

It was fun reading Philipp Lensen’s list of classic movie quotes translated to Japanese and back using Google Translate. This is an example of the most important test for validating the export function in your application, which is to write an import function (and vice versa). So if you are exporting data in a specific […]

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Bing Search Engine in Action

June 1, 2009

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is out. At first glance, it looks better visually than Microsoft’s previous attempt, live.com. The organization of results with easy access to search history, related searches and businesses is well done. I also like the infinite results in Images Search (which live.com also had) and the super-clear (even if slow) […]

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