How’d I miss this? Here’s an article – Exposed — from the May 25th, 2008 edition of the New York Times Magazine about one blogger’s experiences and the lines that you can cross while writing blogging, both personally and professionally. It covers some issues to keep in mind when writing in a forum that can be accessed far and wide.
Here’s a fun little claymation video showing called Pointer Fun with Binky that explains C++ pointers “to kids”. Why can’t all programming be taught this way?
My favourite phrase of the moment, thanks to this video, is “Magic Wand of Dereferencing”.
[Found via Being Cellfish.]
The major map APIs provide a “zoom” feature that lets you zoom the map in or out if you position the cursor over the map and use your mouse’s scroll wheel. Sometimes you want this function enabled, sometimes you don’t. David Janes, over at his Code Blog provides the JavaScript code for:
I love this video, which is made up of bits from the trailer for the upcoming J.J. Abrams-produced Star Trek movie and the theme from the original Beverley Hills 90210:
It’s only natural that a J.J. Abrams movie would mesh so well with 90210. Prior to Fringe, Cloverfield, Lost and Alias, he was behind another overwrought teen drama: Felicity.
In a comment to Scott Hanselman’s blog post about how Microsoft is using “crowdsourcing” to help create localized versions of MSDN, someone wrote:
If you don’t know English, you’re not a programmer.
A provocative statement like that cries out for an article and discussion, and Scott got the ball rolling with a follow-up article titled, quite expectedly, Do You Have to Know English to be a Programmer?
While a command of the English language isn’t a prerequisite for the actual act of programming, programming languages typically use English keywords, as do many development libraries. Even some popular languages written by people whose native tongue is not English, such as Ruby (Japanese) and Lua (Brazilian Portuguese) use English keywords.
I think that English is the lingua franca of business and technology today: a language often used to communicate between people not sharing a mother tongue. Just as you could have the knack for diplomacy in the 18th century and not speak a word of French, you can have the knack for programming and not know a word of English. But it’s really, really helpful if you do.
Soon – probably in December – in addition to pointing you to interesting tech news articles and bits of geek culture, I will also be returning to writing development articles. And yes, that includes the long-on-hiatus Enumerating Enumerable series of articles cataloguing the methods in Ruby’s Enumerable module.
The past couple of months have been disruptive as all Hell, what with:
And now,
It’s been exciting and fun, but there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy one can muster to do things, which meant that the programming articles, which take a lot of work, testing and verifying, had to fall by the wayside. But they’re coming back soon.
Me and a Mountie at the Canadian Embassy
in Washington, DC in 2000,
a.k.a. the “experimenting with nutty hair colour” year.
“We hired you first and foremost for Canada,” said my boss, John Oxley, Director – Audience Marketing at Microsoft Canada, “and for Microsoft second.”
That means that while I’ll be writing a lot about Microsoft developer tools and technologies, my primary goal as Microsoft Developer Evangelist is to use my tech evangelism powers to encourage, assist, grow and cast a spotlight on the Canadian software industry. I get it; a healthy Canadian software ecosystem is good for all players, including “The Empire”.
If you’re a software developer in Canada, whether you’re writing enterprise software for a big corporation or a one-person shop operating out of your den, a full-time employee or a student in high school, or a Microsoft tech “true believer” or a hardcore Free Software/Open Source type, you are the person I’m trying to reach.
So if you’re a developer, watch this space – some meaty development articles are coming soon!
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been ten years since the release of the original Half-Life game. In honour of this event, GameSpy has published the Half-Life 10th Anniversary Interview with Valve Software’s writer –in-residence Marc Laidlaw.
If they ever decided to make a movie based on the game – probably not a good idea, since there hasn’t been a good movie based on any videogame, but I always hold out hope – I think Hugh “House M.D.” Laurie would make a great Gordon Freeman:
