ScribeFire and formatting code

Apparently ScribeFire doesn’t do C# source code formatting very well.

A Blog Word Analyzer

I was listening to an audio book on how to talk to people and make conversation. Yes, I’m somewhat socially clueless. One of the recommendations was that you should have a personal thesaurus where you substitute about 20 to 30 words of the most commonly used words in your typical conversation for something more unique or creative. For example, if I wanted to imply  “smart”, I could use “resourceful” instead.

I thought that if this principle was valid for a conversation, maybe it would be useful in the blogosphere. A hypthetical tool could crawl through blog postings of a blog constructing a statistical analysis of the words the blog writer uses, and then using a thesaurus web service to suggest alternatives.

<blogger’s block>

I started off with a post on software development that had been rolling around in my head while I was running. I wrote a paragraph or two and then hit a brick wall. Maybe its late and I’ll try again later tomorrow.

Beware the Ides of March

My blogging spell was finally broken. I blogged sporadically for the last 4 weeks or so. I had promised myself that I was going to keep this going for the whole year, and keep the flow of useless thoughts I may have, flowing through my fingers. Unfortunately, like so many things in my life, that resolution finally fell on the way side, as I wandered off the road to Blogging Nirvana…..

 

BUT……. (drum roll)

 

I AM BACK!! and I am back with a vengeance. I have resolved to pick up my blogging banner and boldly march on this adventure again. The Ides of March seemed to be the perfect day. The day Julius Caeser died, so have I  resurrected this blog (again).

 

What have been doing lately?

 

 Very Busy at work. I thought of making this as an excuse for not updating my blog, but I decided against it. That has been the best part of the past couple of weeks. Being busy lets me focus more on my own code, rather than my bosses, who seem to have talent for their subordinates insane Are all bosses like this. Been writing a lot of ATL and COM code lately and that has been a lot of fun. Have been putting in 10 and 11 hours  at work every day or so. I still remember those horrible days back in 1999 and 2000 when I was first trying to learn OLE, COM and ATL. I just did’nt get it. Six years later, its the same stuff and it so seems obvious now. It’s really hard to believe that I was THAT dumb back then that I had to read everything twice just to make sure I could at least pretend I knew what I was talking about. My opinion of myself back then has sunk a little lower.

 

LISP programming has gone slower. Working my way of Chapter 4 of ANSI Common Lisp. Will post the solutions as soon as I get through them. In addition, I’ve started learning DirectX HLSL. I think it might come in useful in some image processing work that I’m doing right now.

Pinging the Blogosphere…. Resume Writing

All th blogging that I had done for the past two months seemed a excessive, so I decided that I was going to take a little breather, and let my thoughts gather. Unfortunately, any ideas for blogging topics that I have, are either incoherent or a victim of my procrastination.

So instead, I decided that I would simply write a bunch random notes, on things I saw today. just to let everybody, I’m still alive. I’m not kicking, but I am alive.

This is a blog post by a software engineering manager, about resume writing tips to getting past that 30 second look-over. I’ve read a lot of these resume tips over the past couple of years. The last time I updated my resume was about five months ago. In about a month or so, I’ll be updating my resume (something I do every six months or so). I’m not currently looking for a new job, but updating a resume every six months or so has allowed me to take an honest appraisal of where my career has been going.

My first cut of my resume is brutally honest. It’s so brutal, that I would call it resume self-flaggellation. This would not be a resume that I would send out, but a resume that would allow me to do a very honest self-appraisal of where my career is going. Depending on how I come out of that experience, I make a decision on what I need to do. My last experience, left me somewhat ambivalent about my career. I had some mixed feelings on where I wanted to be.I could’nt make up my mind whether I was happy or not. So I re-editted my resume into something that was more likely to get a second look and I looked around half-heartedly to see what was out there. Nothing came out of it. Landed a phone screen interview, but could’nt get past it. Dissappointed, I stopped trying.

Lesson learnt? In my opinion, that ambivalence really set me up for failure from the get go. Because, I had some mixed feelings, I was’nt really aggressive enough to go after what I wanted. I was’nt even sure what I wanted. Resume tips are all right, but if you really don’t have that drive for that something different, you’re job hunt is DOA.

End of March, I’m going to update my resume again in the same way. Let’s see where how that excercise ends.

…..

Blog Posts to Note today

Coding Horror has an interesting post on how users are still stuck using JPEG (a standard that dates back to ’80s) and how we should start moving towards JPEG2000 that uses more modern algorithms and achieves better compression and image quality.

On an another note, Programming Musings has done a survey of programming languages for quantum computing. Interest in quantum computing has gone up dramatically since a Candian company called D-Wave recently announced that they had successfully built a quantum computer with a viable design.

Internet Radio

When I’m at home, I listen to a lot of Internet radio. Depending on my mood, I listen to the following radio stations.

[radio.wazee] Modern Alternative Rock

[radio.paradise] DJ-Mixed Modern & Classic Rock

[KCRW Music] Streaming innovative and eclectic music 24/7, from Los Angeles

For the past couple of days, Radio Wazee was’nt working. Apparently, the webmasters were rewamping their site. I can’t hear Radio Wazee on 128 kbps, though

New Year Resolution Two-Week Report Card

I made a New Year Resolution on New Year’s eve that I was going to update my blog every day. So far I’ve managed to keep at it, but blog fatigue is beginning to creep in. I really have to try hard to come up with a topic to write about. Sometimes its just a silly note stating the obvious, that I have nothing to say.

Anyway, I’m still going to keep at it and see how far this goes. The silver lining here is that, even though I’m frustrated that I don’t have any thing profound or witty or cool to say, I’ve kept up with a resolution I made. This is the longest I’ve gone with any new year resolution. I’m kind of proud of myself. 🙂

Rich AJAX apps in Firefox 2.0 and IE7

In my opinion, I think Yahoo has so far the best email client among the three major web-based email providers (Yahoo! Mail, GMail, and Hotmail or Windows Live! Mail). The only problem that I have with that is that there is no mechanism for organizing emails as conversations (the only way of organizing mail in GMail). About Hotmail, the less said, the better. They should change their web-based user interface for Hotmail, to the one they use for Outlook, which is very, very nice.

However, I came across an interesting senario in Yahoo. If you right click on one of your mails, the browser’s context menu appears over the context menu of the email client. There is a clash between the browser’s context menu and the context menu for the AJAX application. Perhaps context menus in AJAX apps are not the right UI element. See the picture below for an example in Firefox.

Interestingly enough, this does’nt happen with IE7. See the figure below.

 

Safari does’nt support Yahoo’s AJAX version

Writing in my journal

Apart from this blog, I also maintain hand-written journal, which I found to somewhat more personal than thumping text onto a keyboard. The look and feel of ink flowing onto creamy white paper is really wonderful to write and look at after its done. In the fall of 2003, I broke my cheap Chinese-made fountain pen. I was so angry about it, that for a time I actually refused to write in my journal.

Eventually, I relented, and I tried using pencils and then tried using ball-points and felt-tip pens. None of them really worked out for me. Writing became hard and I eventually stopped making entries. Anyway around June 2005, I found these Shaeffer pens that cost about $10 with ink cartridges used for beginners in calligraphy. I bought them and have been using them ever since (interspersed with long intervals).

This year, I made a resolution that blogging and writing in my journal is going to be a daily part of my daily routines. So tonight I looked through various websites looking for fountain pens. Some of them a really expensive,costing in the hundreds. I’m looking for something less than $50. Anyone know of any brand??