Piracy is always a big issue in the software industry.  It’s a global epidemic and everyone is guilty of it.  You are too, and you know it.  That doesn’t make you evil, it just means you are as morally flexible as everyone.  So taken this as a given, as a SME developing custom software, how [...]

What happened to “don’t be evil”?  Why do you insist that people “posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services”? What [...]

There’s nothing more rewarding than programming on huge displays.  Say all you like about notebooks and pocket sized this and that, but if you really want to bed in and do some hardcore development, or graphics editing, or just a bit of browsing, whilst gaming, whilst listening to music, whilst watching videos, there’s nothing like [...]

I’ve got two or three things lined up and half written on technical subjects to finish up before they appear here (mostly surrounding good API design and how to achieve it, and myths about Exceptions in the .NET framework) but I’ve been exceptionally busy lately. I’ve been enjoying the semi-private beta of Stackoverflow, Jeff Atwood and [...]

I’ve just picked up on the fact that The Brainy Gamer blog is doing a gaming club (a-la ye old book clubs / reading circles) and the focus for the next session is Grim Fandango. http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/07/vintage-game–1.html?cid=122321778#comment-122321778 If you have time to participate, I’d really recommend it.  Not because I have any idea how it’ll go (I [...]

Cornered By Technology It’s not uncommon in enterprise software development to be tasked with integrating with a third party platform that just won’t play nicely however hard you try. These scenarios often creep up on you at the most unexpected time, be it as a requirement, or a partnership with an uncooperative or unskilled vendor [...]

It appears as though the Microsoft M.V.P’s that were called upon to advise on the technicalities of the forthcoming Entity Framework hit a little bit of a roadblock. When I say “a little bit”, it seems as though Microsoft just point blank disregarded their warnings and recommendations in regard to creating OR mappers. It’s probably [...]

The word cloud has been thrown around for years to describe the internet, but there’s a growing trend at the moment to launch services that seem to embody actual “cloud / grid computing”.  This movement to some extent is just the logical extension of the rich web applications that have gained popularity as part of [...]

There’s a very good argument for saying that the thing that makes or breaks a new programming language is actually the tools the work with and around it, rather than language features themselves.  If you ask the average programmer to guess the percentage of language features of their language of preference that they used on [...]

I commute to and from London very frequently and the trains, whilst high tech and reasonably pleasant, can lead to very long journeys (especially in times of maintenance).  Because of this frequent travelling I’m practically forced to carry a laptop around with me for the sake of my sanity.  I tend to enjoy watching DVDs, [...]